Three Books about God

Three books about God have found themselves amongst my reading recently.

God is Impassible and Impassioned – Toward a theology of divine emotion – Rob Lister (IVP 2012).

Lister takes us helpfully through the arguments surrounding whether, and if so how, God ‘feels’ and ‘suffers’. His thesis is that God is impassible in the sense that he cannot be manipulated, overwhelmed, or surprised by an emotional interaction that he does not desire or have or allow to happen. This is not at all the same as saying that he is devoid of emotion (how could that be so when we have a God in Scripture who is angry, delights, loves and grieves?) nor is it the equivalent of saying that God is not affected by his creatures. On the contrary, says Lister, God is also impassioned, that is, perfectly vibrant in his affections, and he may be affected by his creatures, but as God, he is so because he wills to be so affected.

Lister outlines the historical context from the patristic authors onwards, looking at contemporary evangelical authors who reject impassibility - often because it is widely thought to be in conflict with God’s love and relationality, two modern pre-occupations - and then moves on to construct a biblical and theological model (summarised above).

Lister develops this a bit more: God’s passion transcends ours both in an ontological sense (who He is) and in an ethical sense (what he promises and does). The former (God’s ‘ontologically transcendent passion’) is what we term impassibility; the latter (God’s ‘ethically transcendent passion’) we may call his impassionedness. Passion now becomes the dominant factor, virtually equivalent to a description of God in emotional terms. Only now, in terms of God’s being, this translates as the quality of not being vulnerable to outside influences, while in terms of God’s actions and promises, it become his burning, vibrant affection.

One cannot help feeling that ‘passible’ in ‘impassible’ and ‘passion’ in ‘impassioned’ are used in different senses – the former from the original meaning of the word in Latin, that is, something that one suffers, while the latter is a strong (in God’s case perfect) affection. So how helpful it is to use it in these two ways, to call God ‘impassible ‘ and ‘impassioned’, or say that God’s ‘ontologically transcendent passion’ is his ‘impassibility’ is questionable. I know what Lister is saying, and his thesis is very helpful, but perhaps the vocabulary is not.

One other unsatisfactory part of the book is that in 284 pages only 20 are given to the incarnation and the atonement in a ‘Concluding Christological Reflection’. God’s revelation in Christ and the cross deserves more attention than this in a book on this subject.

But this is an excellent book, very full of useful discussion and Bible exposition, and is highly recommended for getting to grips with this important and difficult subject.


God’s Greater Glory – The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith - Bruce Ware (Crossway 2004)

In 'God’s Lesser Glory' Bruce Ware carried out a good demolition job on Open Theism. In this later (but now quite old!) volume he constructs a far better picture of God’s providential care of his creation. He has excellent material on God’s transcendence and immanence, the Creator–creature distinction, divine sovereignty and human freedom, and ‘concurrence’ – what he calls God working through creation.

The weakest part in my view is his section on ‘Calvinist middle knowledge’ which he constructs in an attempt to avoid God being charged with being the author of sin – in other words it is a kind of apologetic. His view of God’s government of good acts is that the government of the human will is direct, for God is the author of good and there is no conflict. But there is a difference in God’s government of evil. If we take the view that we are free when we act according to our strongest inclination, then if God, knowing how an agent will act in given circumstances, so ordains events that an agent will choose to do evil, then we cannot say that evil is done by God or due to the factors in the situation, but by the sinful nature of the agent acting freely.

This does not seem to be very effective apologetically, because is a God who prepares an evil act in all but final execution, any better morally than a God who actually moves the human will up to and including the very act (as Phil 2:12,13 seems to suggest God controls us; as also Genesis 50:20 suggests)? Give a bad man a gun knowing he will kill someone with it, or a naughty child a firework knowing he will put it through someone’s letter box – but then say ‘It wasn’t me guv’. Are you off the hook?

Of course the precise way God governs evil and good are different, but this is surely the place for a robust application of the doctrine of concurrence (which Ware discusses elsewhere), and to say with Calvin in commenting on ‘the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord’ (Prov 21:1) that ‘in general the will not less than external works are [sic] governed by the determination of God’.

So I was not persuaded by Ware’s argument here. But overall it is a very helpful book and I enjoyed it.

Simply God - Recovering the Classical Trinity - Peter Sanlon (IVP 2014).

Peter Sanlon is a rising star in the Reformed Anglican firmament, vicar of St Mark’s, Tunbridge Wells (sorry, Royal Tunbridge Wells), and a fine young theologian.

This book is primarily reminding us of the wonder of God’s ‘simplicity’, which Sanlon calls the basic grammar of language about God, ‘the engine in the car of a healthy theology’. God’s simplicity is the doctrine that he is one, not composed of parts, and that ‘he is what he has’. All God’s attributes are co-extensive with God himself. God does not ‘have’ attributes such as patience, truthfulness, love and knowledge; he is patience, truthfulness, love and knowledge, and all perfectly. God is love, not loving; in love he gives nothing less than himself.

Sanlon works the theme of simplicity through in relation to God’s eternity and omniscience, omnipotence and goodness, immutability and impassibility.

The second part of the book looks at God’s relationality and threeness, but the burden of the book is to remind us of the importance of the oneness and especially the simplicity and unity of God, perhaps redressing a Trinitarian overload in evangelical theology in recent years. The Creator–creature distinction is emphasised, as is the classical ‘perfect being’ theology of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and others, and the importance of remembering that language about God is always analogical rather than univocal (i.e. words cannot mean exactly the same thing when used of God as they do when used of us – he is a different order of being – but true communication is possible – hence analogy.)

Sanlon ends with a stimulating chapter applying his thesis to the areas of entertainment, religious freedoms, work and ministry, mission and church.

Every chapter concludes with a meditation and prayer.

This really is a great book.

I have enjoyed reading all these, and benefitted greatly from them. Do not let the fact that I have been critical in parts make you think that these are not good books – the overall quality is high. Ware and Lister are more overtly biblical in their treatment, Sanlon possibly more obviously philosophical and theological, really because of the nature of the subject; his final authority is evidently Scripture and where appropriate he cites it freely.

There is no greater subject for reflection than our great God, and although I did not set out to read these books with any single plan in mind, their different yet complementary theses have refreshed my mind, expanded my knowledge and spurred me to worship. Thank you to the authors!