Summary of Chapter 16: Divine Immutability and Impassibility, from White’s book, The Trinity

Divine Immutability & Impassibility

White says that these doctrines are the foundation of a critical soteriological teaching. How so?

Theological claim: “The very premise of Christian theology is that God’s nature and very identity are revealed truly to us in his action” (297).

Behind this theological claim is an essential ontological claim: God can be loving in an enduring way only because he is eternally unchanged in his perfection as one who loves: “God is love” (1 John 4:16). It is because God in his nature is free from mutability and suffering that he is capable of saving us from suffering and death (“agere sequitur esse: action follows upon being” (SCG, I, c. 43)). Therefore, the doctrines safeguard the mystery of our salvation.

The Chalcedonian doctrine of the suffering of Christ teaches the following:

  • In Christ, it is God who suffers and God who is crucified.
  • This suffering is that of the person of the Son. It is truly God the Son who suffers.
  • The Son, in virtue of his human nature, suffers in his human body and soul, in his spiritual and sensate faculties as man.
  • The Son, in virtue of His divine nature, does not suffer, but remains impassible, in which he is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

“The Trinity is immutable and impassible, not because God is indifferent to creatures, incapable of knowing and loving them, or incapable of relating to them personally. Rather, the contrary is the case: God is so perfectly present and personal, as only God can be in his infinite perfection, that God is able to give without receiving, to know intimately all that we are without learning from us, and to love in his infinite goodness without self-amelioration. Even when one of the Trinity suffers and dies as a human being, in agony, and thus really suffers personally, the divine nature of that person remains impassible, transcendent in its splendor and perfection. This is important for metaphysical reasons, related to the confession of the one God and the transcendence of the Trinity as the Creator who gives all things being, without receiving its being from them (thus excluding alterations of the divine nature incurred through passible suffering). However, it is also important for soteriological reasons. God expresses God’s identification and solidarity with us by suffering in agony as one who is truly human. But, because of his eternal and unchanging power of love, God can also act even from within his suffering to effectively redeem the world and overcome our suffering. If Jesus is not God in his crucifixion, then he cannot save us, and it is only by a genuine theology of the divine nature that we can have some understanding of what it means to say that Jesus is God. Consequently, a genuine theology of the divine nature is essential to any authentic theology of the Cross, one that confesses not only that Jesus is the only savior of all human beings, but that also confesses that he is so precisely because he is truly God and truly human” (675).