God and Emotions

[N/A Gone]

The question is two-fold in origin. On the one side I have my background in the theology on the openess of God. Something that I have been trying to reconcile and edify through the teaching of the church. An uncomfortable process. I worked with this issue about a year ago only to put it down for the sake of sanity and inconclusion.

It came up again as I was speaking to a credible patristics professor about our upcoming Christology class and we spoke about the trinitarian controversy before the Christological controversy where they questioned the relation of the Son to the Father. The key point of debate being whether Jesus as divine could suffer. Suffering concludes change which conflicts with a stoic understanding of divine immutability. The classic answer being that the humanity suffered and the Divinity didnt. But then in the Christological controversy we see that the question of who was/is Christ(divine or human) is how can Christ be divine and human at the same time.

The controversy moved into its first stage where the movements were the Radical unity (Homousias), the Moderate unity(Gregory of Nazianzus and other caperdocians) and the Subordinationists.

anyway, Im not going to pretend I am smart and understand church councils. But a theme was that we could now say the Divine could suffer. to love is a passionate thing, to love is to feel passion and suffering is a part of that experience. Christ in his existence shows the Divine being experiencing change and emotion. I see clear change and emotion in the old testament. (Things that some write off as anthropromorphisms, which i cant sit with) I can read through the New advent understanding of divine immutability and say the essence of the divine and who the divine is can not change, but to experience is not change unless I by into the greek stoic model of experience leading to change and being a negative. To my understanding a relational, personal God who created the world, assumed human form(Gregory) experienced human suffering(hebrews) died and continues to guide an imperfect church can and needs to experience.

ok, sorry about the babble..




How would you hold to a stoic understanding of divine immutability yet hold onto the concept of God experiencing legit emotions as cited during the christological controvery

[Theoketos]

When I get home I am going to look up Fr. Roch Keretzky's (O CIST) [i]Fundamentals of Christology[/i] where he directly deals with this question so that I can give you a full answer.

But off the top of my head, it seems that you have three choices: 1) you must either abandone the stoic understanding of divine immutability or 2) change your understanding of God's "emotions" 3) or admit that these are not contradictory oppositions (there are three other types of oppositions) so that there would not be a dialectic here.

Moreover, though Apotheon would roll his Eastern Palamasian eyes at this, if God is pure act, that is nothing potential, this "emotions" would be eternal and unchanging.

Lastly you must consider, God's emotions, that is to say his passions, even and espcially in the case of the incarnation, are not in conflict with his will in any way.

[Laudate_Dominum]

IMHO: any positive discussion of God's "emotions" is always anthropopathic. This is not merely a convenient write-off, but is rather a fact of our limited ontological and epistemological status.

Attempts at a psychological description of God are futile and absurd. All descriptions of God are imprecise and analogical or at best proximate. The Mystery of God [i]in se[/i] is inherently outside the scope of all language, rational thought and discourse.

The essence of the doctrine of God's immutability is the truth that God is neither physically nor metaphysically composite. Our minds function in such a way that we attempt to conceptualize reality in positive terms, we want to form abstractions which can adequately represent the realities in question. In the case of God's being our "knowledge" is apophatic in nature. The point of the doctrine of God's immutability is not that we attempt to form a positive concept of a being in perfect stasis; so much as it is to realize that God is beyond physics and metaphysics. God is not a piece of data to be dismantled and reduced to abstract structures and rules, but is rather the ultimate Mystery toward which we ought to approach in darkness and abandon. It is God alone who removes the veil and reveals Himself to the soul, it is not a work of our intellect.

I am not saying that it is improper to say that God loves or that God feels compassion, or that God suffers. Certainly God is a passionate God of steadfast mercy and love, but it is a mistake to project a human psychology onto God. The emotional landscape of the human mind is quite cavernous and textured. As a psychological category the term emotion is almost synonymous with flux and change. These realities as we know them are continuous with the medium of dimensionality; we cannot conceive of them apart from the flow of change and causality. The Lord God has declared, "I am the Lord, and I change not", and yet we experience God and His works in the context of our ever changing state of being.

So to the question of whether God has emotions I would answer yes and no simultaneously. Although in a sense God alone has emotions. When we say God is good, or God is love, or God is merciful, or God is compassionate; we conceive of these in terms of our experience and mode of being. Ultimately it is God alone who is good, merciful, compassionate and it is God alone who loves.

Another thing to consider is the nature of God's revelation to man. The historical narratives, prophetic texts, psalms, etc. that make up the Holy Books are not analytical presentations intended to present the mind of God in terms that can be broken down psychologically. The experiences and representations of the Scriptures are first and foremost mystical in nature. The mind of this world cannot receive the communication of God in these texts; it is the Spirit of God Himself who reveals the true meaning to the heart. As scandalous as this may sound to some, theology is relative. What I mean is that abstractions and systematic theology are altogether relative to the mystical and spiritual truths of Divine Revelation. Put another way, the experience of God and His Love is superior and prior to the crude analytic representation of these transcendent mysteries.
Theology is a lot like painting; one can attempt to capture a sunrise on canvas and may in fact do a very good job, but this will never truly capture the light, the warmth, the smell of the morning air. The representation will never be adequate or complete, and our eternal destiny lies far beyond the portrait.

As you know there are countless layers to the question at hand (the nature of time and eternity, the Christological Mystery, Trinitarian Theology, epistemology and metaepistemology, etc, etc.), and this post is nothing more than a simple preface to an adequate response. Perhaps we can have a more thorough and specific discussion somewhere else.

Cheers.