Doctrinal Foundations Column

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 03 (2026).

When you support the Journal, you join the team and help provide the resources at equip.org that minister to people worldwide. These resources include our ever-growing database of more than 2,500 articles and Bible Answers, as well as our free Postmodern Realities podcast.

Another way you can support our online articles is by leaving us a tip. A tip is just a small amount, like $3, $5, or $10, which is the cost of a latte, lunch out, or coffee drink. To leave a tip, click here.

Few historic doctrines meet with more modern dismay and disapprobation than the doctrine of divine impassibility, which teaches that God does not experience “passions” in the way that we do. He does not suffer. Nothing causes Him to fall into sorrow or leap for joy or cry out in pain. He cannot be moved, nor does He move Himself from one emotional state to another. Nor does He experience an increase or suffer a decrease of any of His affections. Against this, the modern person revolts. How can God know and understand us if He does not have any share in the movements of our hearts? Doesn’t the Bible overflow with descriptions of God’s feelings, His jealousy, His wrath, His indignation and compassion, His loving kindness and pity? Isn’t He moved toward mercy by our repentance, and isn’t His anger evoked by injustice and oppression? How can a person possibly read the Bible and conclude that God is an unfeeling, cold, passionless deity, unmoved by the sufferings and joys of His creatures?

Against these objections stands the consensus of the church from the patristic era to the Reformation and beyond. Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theologians, catechisms, and confessions include divine impassibility as foundational to the Christian understanding of God as He has revealed Himself both in nature and in Scripture.¹ My own tradition, Anglicanism, enshrines the doctrine in the very first Article of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion: “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.”² Within Reformed Protestantism, variations of that phrase, “without body, parts, or passions,” can be found in confessional documents as diverse as the Westminster Confession³ and the First London Baptist Confession.⁴ While the Lutheran Confessions, Roman Catholic Catechism, and Eastern Orthodox confessions do not state the doctrine of divine impassibility by name, the doctrines of divine immutability and simplicity, which they do explicitly embrace,⁵ entail divine impassibility as a necessary consequence (as will be shown below).

The Simple and Changeless God. The impassibility of God derives logically from the antecedent doctrines of divine immutability (God cannot change) and divine simplicity (God has no parts).⁶ God is said to be incapable of change because He is pure act without any passive potency. To say that God is pure act is to say that He cannot become anything more or less than He is. “God is,” for example, “love” (1 John 4:8).⁷ If there were any potential for God to gain more of the attribute of love and become more loving, then love would exist as a category beyond God and greater than God by which the love of God would be found to be either consistent or wanting. God could not, in that case, be love. He would only be loving to a greater or lesser extent. To say that He is love is to say that there is no potential for Him to be less or more loving. The same must, for the same reasons, be said for all the divine perfections (goodness, wisdom, holiness, mercy, etc.).

Divine simplicity is closely related to divine immutability. God does not have parts — not even distinct attributes or qualities that together make Him who He is. On the one hand, this means that He does not have a material body and that He is not the effect of any causal composition. On the other hand, it means that His attributes cannot be separated from His essence; indeed, His attributes are identical with His essence. In other words, God does not merely possess goodness, wisdom, power, or love as qualities distinct from who He is; rather, He is goodness, wisdom, power, and love. Thus, to say “God is love” is not the same thing as saying that “God is loving.” While both statements are true, the latter phrase, if not conditioned by the former, would introduce a distinction between God Himself (His essence) and the ways in which God acts. His love in that case would be something that He could will or not will, but He would not be love.

Now it is possible to see why divine immutability and divine simplicity require as a necessary consequence the doctrine of divine impassibility. Since God cannot become any more or less than He is (immutability), and since His essence is identical to His attributes (simplicity), He cannot be moved or even move Himself to have more or less compassion or mercy or love or wrath or jealousy or any other attribute. As Dr. Matthew Barrett puts it, “If God is impassible, then he does not merely possess love, he is love, and he is love in infinite measure. He cannot become more loving than he already is eternally. If he did, then his love would be passible, it would change, perhaps from good to better, which would imply it was not perfect to begin with.”⁸

Some have argued that God can, by an act of His own free divine will, give Himself over to be acted upon and moved by His creatures.⁹ This, they contend, preserves God’s sovereignty while providing for the give and take we see reflected in the Scriptures. The problem, however, is that for God to will Himself into any state of passive potency would, in effect, be to will Himself not to be. If He could decide not to love unless moved to love by one of His creatures, He would not be love. He would only be loving and only should He be acted upon in the way that He has willed.

It is at this point that we find, at least in part, the answer to some of the representative objections I listed above in my first paragraph. Far from positing a cold, aloof, and unfeeling deity removed from the pain and suffering of His creatures, the doctrine of impassibility teaches that because God is simple and pure act, He loves with a love that is beyond measurement or comprehension by finite creatures.¹⁰ Nothing outside of God, no act of hostility or wickedness by His human creatures, can ever diminish it. No act of obedience or faith can add to it. For the Christian, who has been made a son or daughter of God through faith in His Son Jesus Christ, divine impassibility provides inestimable comfort. Since God has purposed to love and save you, there is nothing you can possibly do that would cause Him to love you less and nothing you can do that could possibly add to the infinite, unchanging, perfect love with which He loves you. This is why the apostle Paul can write with such confidence, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).

God’s Impassibility and the Bible. So far, I’ve limited the argument for divine impassibility to an appeal to church tradition and reasoning from the principles of classical theism. But can the doctrine be grounded in the Scriptures? The answer is an unequivocal yes. The same passages that establish the doctrines of immutability and simplicity also, necessarily, provide the biblical foundation for divine impassibility. We might begin with the divine name which God revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, “I Am that I Am” (Exodus 3:14). God does not say, “I will become what I will be” or “I Am becoming what I Am,” but “I Am that I Am.” The present tense¹¹ implies that God is an eternal, unchanging being who is not subject to any other cause for any aspect of His being.¹² The apostle John’s declaration that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8) is predicated on this truth.

In Numbers 23:19 we read, “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” Some might object that these words come from the mouth of the double-minded seer Balaam, but in the context of the passage Balaam is being made by the Holy Spirit to bless Israel despite himself and, likewise, to say true things about God to his patron Balak who would rather not hear either. Here God differentiates Himself from human beings in two ways. First, He does not lie. As Jesus, God the Son, said to His apostles on the night before His crucifixion, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). God the Son is truth and therefore, unlike His human creatures, He cannot lie.¹³ Second, God does not change His mind. As human beings, we change our minds because we learn new information or because we feel differently from one moment to the next or because we are too tired or discouraged to do what we originally set out to do. In the context of relationships, it is not uncommon that having felt deep affection for a person, a man or a woman might begin to feel differently and then change their mind about that person. But that God does not change His mind tells us that He is not subject to any of these deficiencies. He never learns new information (omniscience). His feelings do not wax or wane. He never grows weary or discouraged, and nothing that a person does can determine God’s affections one way or the other. All of this is consistent with an impassible God and inconsistent with a passible one.

The same can be said with regard to God’s declaration through His prophet Malachi, “I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed” (Malachi 3:6). Here God reveals that His faithfulness to His people does not change because He does not change. He is immutable. If He were changeable, then the descendants of Jacob would have reason to wonder whether their unfaithfulness might result in their being utterly forsaken. But that God is not just acting faithfully, but that He is faithful and does not change, means that they can trust His promises and rest in His fidelity.

In Psalm 102, the psalmist writes, “Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end” (vv. 25–27). Here again the psalmist finds hope in God who remains eternally the same while everything else perishes and changes. That there is no potential for God to become something different than He is can rightly be said of only an unchanging, impassible God.

Turning to the New Testament, of primary importance are the “I Am” statements that Jesus makes most prominently (but not exclusively) in John’s Gospel regarding His own nature and character. Particularly significant are several passages in which Jesus uses “I am” but excludes a predicate. Instead of saying, “I am the light,“ for example, He simply says, “I am.” In John 8:58, instead of saying, “I was before Abraham,” Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I am.” The present tense “I am” refers to His existence in the past but in a way that indicates that He has not changed over time. He is before Abraham who He is in the present. Jesus refers to Himself in John 8:58 as a timeless or eternal person. He does the same in John 8:24, 28, 13:19, and 18:5-6.¹⁴ These “I am” statements without predicates deepen our understanding of Jesus’ famous seven “I am” statements with predicates. “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). “I am the door” (John 10:7). “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11). “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). “I am the true vine” (John 15:1). In these declarations, Jesus purposefully refers to Himself in a way that would, for readers of the Septuagint, recall the divine name YHWH revealed to Moses, “I Am that I Am” (Exodus 3:14).¹⁵ Setting aside for the moment the question of Christ’s two natures united in one person as true God and true man, all of these statements predicated as they are on the divine name ground the attribute Jesus reveals about Himself (light, life, truth, etc.) in His eternal, unchanging, and, for that reason, impassible divine nature.

In the book of Acts, the apostle Paul preaching to Athenian philosophers at the Areopagus says, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24–25). Here the apostle differentiates the true and living God from the false gods of the Athenians by pointing to God’s independence or aseity (self-existence). In contrast to the gods¹⁶ of the Greek pantheon, God does not depend on human beings or anything outside of Himself for any aspect of His being or existence. He gives “life and breath and everything” to human beings, while human beings cannot give Him anything, nor does He need anything from them. The Greek “gods” are anything but unchanging or independent or needless. They are moody and temperamental, quickly moved from one emotional state to another by human actions. If God were passible, Paul’s contrast would not work, since God would need humans to actualize His compassion or love or mercy or wrath. But God is not served by human hands. As Dr. James Dolezal points out, “If he [God] were to derive any aspect of his life or existence from the creature, then the apostle’s strong contrast between God the creator, on the one hand, and the created gods of the Athenians, on the other, would be dissolved.”¹⁷

Rounding out this sampling of passages (much more could be said), we come to James’ epistle in which he writes, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). The reason James adds, “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change,” is to drive home the point that every good and perfect gift is necessarily from the God who is good and perfect. He doesn’t merely behave well and do good things and act with perfection on occasion, as if these were attributes divorced from His essence. His attributes are His essence. He is good and perfect, and therefore every good and perfect thing is, by necessity, from Him. This is a beautiful expression of divine simplicity and, therefore, also an expression of divine impassibility.

What About All of Those Passages in Which God’s Emotions Seem to Change?

Against all of this, those who argue that God is passible to one degree or another bring to bear a number of biblical passages that seem at first glance to flatly contradict the passages already cited. In Genesis 6:6, God regrets that He made man and is grieved in His heart. In Genesis 18:22–33, Abraham appears to bargain with God and change God’s mind with regard to sparing Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the righteous dwelling there. In Exodus 32:14, in the aftermath of the Golden Calf, God relents of His apparent determination to destroy them. In 2 Kings 20:1–6, Hezekiah, having been told by the prophet Isaiah that he will die, prays to God for mercy, and God, seemingly, changes His mind. In Hosea 11:8–9, God seems to overflow with emotion, “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my burning anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not a man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” It seems that His passion for Israel has overcome His jealous wrath. He has, apparently, changed His mind. And in Ephesians 4:30, the apostle Paul seems to say that our actions can grieve the Holy Spirit. Throughout both the Old and New Testaments, God seems to react emotionally to human behavior. He appears to change His mind. His anger is evoked and then quenched, alongside His jealousy. He is full of compassion and mercy one moment and judgment and wrath the next. What are we to make of this?

It is important to note that the vast majority of the passages that those who object to impassibility cite are either in the context of a historical narrative, part of the retelling of an event like the flood or the Golden Calf, or they are found in the context of a prophetic appeal or diatribe calling for renewed faith and repentance (Hosea 11, cited above, is a prime example). They do not, as a general rule, feature God declaring a timeless truth about His character or essence. They feature God acting in history or speaking into a given historical circumstance. This distinction is comparable to the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive texts. The Bible records God commanding the Israelites not to murder or commit adultery in Exodus 20 (prescriptive). But the Bible also records King David committing adultery with Bathsheba and murdering Uriah in 2 Samuel 11 (descriptive). For the sake of interpretation and application, one should not take the description of David’s actions in 2 Samuel as if they undermine the prescriptions in Exodus 20. The author of 2 Samuel expects that his readers will recognize that David has sinned by disobeying God’s law. In a similar sense, when God says through Malachi, “I do not change” (Malachi 3:6), we should hold that to be a true revelation of God’s actual nature. When in historical narrative passages or prophetic appeal, God appears to change His mind or to be moved one way or the other by the actions of His creatures, those passages should not be interpreted or applied as if they undermine or contradict what God has revealed elsewhere about His nature and character. They should rather be set into the same category as those texts wherein human physical attributes are ascribed to God.¹⁸ They are true revelations of God’s love and desire for human repentance, but we should not, as has often been said, think that when Moses sings that God divided the Red Sea with a blast of His nostrils (Exodus 15:8), that this means God has a very large nose.¹⁹ These are anthropomorphisms, expressions intended to help finite human beings with material bodies and ever-changing passions relate to an infinite impassible God who loves them and so speaks to them about Himself in terms they can comprehend. When it is said that a sinner repents and God relents, it is not God who has moved. He is mercy and ever-merciful. The sinner has changed, but God has remained as He eternally is, merciful to the penitent but just toward those who refuse His mercy.

What Does Athens Have to Do with Jerusalem? Another objection comes from those who argue that the categories of classical theism from which the notions of immutability, simplicity, and impassibility are drawn are not biblical categories but categories of Greek, specifically Aristotelian, thought. What, they ask with Tertullian, does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?²⁰ The real question, as Dolezal points out, is whether or not the categories are true and consistent with Scripture.²¹ Christians have always borrowed from non-Christian philosophers and philosophies. The apostle Paul quotes at least two Greek poets/philosophers, Epimenides of Crete and Aratus of Soli, in his aforementioned sermon to the Areopagites in Athens (Acts 17:28). Augustine of Hippo famously baptized Plato’s eternal ideas by recategorizing them as realities existing in the mind of God.²² There are some secular ideas that are antithetical to the Christian faith — nihilism and deconstructionism come to mind — but since all truth is God’s truth, Christians should expect to find good and true and beautiful things outside of the boundaries of the church. Some Platonic and Aristotelian thought is incompatible with biblical Christianity, but some can and has been profitably embraced using Scripture to cull out the impurities, a process, as Dolezal reminds us, that Augustine referred to as, “plundering the Egyptians.”²³ I believe it has been amply demonstrated both in this brief article and over the course of Christian theological history that the Aristotelian principles that have been incorporated into classical theism are fully compatible with biblical revelation.

The Passible Jesus and the Incarnate Impassible God. The final objection, although it might more properly be categorized as a mystery, is how to reconcile the impassibility of God with His incarnation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who is both truly God and truly Man. Jesus was born, grew, wept, slept, suffered and died. And speaking of Jesus’ suffering, Paul even declares that God shed His own blood, exhorting the Ephesian elders to “care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). How do we understand the passibility of Jesus who is God if God is impassible? This question vexed the church for many long years of conflict and division. Finally, in AD 451 at the Fourth Ecumenical Council, the church arrived at a solution both biblically sound and logically satisfying, while retaining its mystery. The Incarnation did not effect a change in the essence or being of God. God the Son took on human nature without commingling the two distinct natures (human and divine) or reducing either one in any way in what has been called the hypostatic union. Jesus is one person. Within His personhood two full and true natures are joined, “inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.”²⁴

The Faithful, Impassible God Upon Whom We Rely. The doctrine of divine impassibility, while misunderstood as positing a static, almost deistic God, emotionally removed and distant from His creation, actually presents God as He reveals Himself in the Scriptures, the pure source and measure of active justice, love, mercy, compassion, judgment, and grace. His love for His people and faithfulness to them does not depend on their love and faithfulness. He is not reactive and unpredictable, but true and trustworthy. Without the doctrine of impassibility, Christians are left with an undependable god who may change his mind about forgiveness or decide to let himself be overcome by wrath and forget mercy. His goodness might wane, his word might fail, his mercies come to an end. But Jesus Christ, thanks be to God, who makes the Father known, is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

The Reverend Matthew M. Kennedy (MDiv, VTS) is the rector of The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, New York, and Canon for Preaching in the Anglican Diocese of the Living Word.

NOTES

1. James E. Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” in Divine Impassibility: Four Views of God’s Emotions and Suffering, ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill (IVP Academic, 2019), 13, Kindle.
2. “Article I: Of Faith in the Holy Trinity,” in “Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion,” The Book of Common Prayer (2019) (Anglican House Publishers, 2019), 772.
3. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 2, sec. 1, accessed July 29, 2026, https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/westminster-confession-faith.
4. The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith in Modern English, chap. 2, para. 1, accessed July 29, 2026, https://founders.org/library-book/1689-confession/.
5. The Augsburg Confession, art. I, at The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod, accessed July 29, 2026, https://www.lcms.org/about/beliefs/lutheran-confessions. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paras. 1, 202, and 212, accessed July 29, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P2.HTM and https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P16.HTM. The Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church (Peter Mogila, 1642), Questions 8, 12, 13, and 17, accessed July 29, 2026, https://maksimologija.org/mogila-orthodox-confession/.
6. I’m following Dr. James Dolezal’s articulation of this point in Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 15–17, 23–27.
7. Dr. Matthew Barrett uses this illustration here: Matthew Barrett, “The Immutability and Impassibility of God,” The Gospel Coalition, accessed July 20, 2026, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/immutability-impassibility-god/. Scripture passages quoted by the author are from the ESV.
8. Barrett, “Immutability and Impassibility of God.”
9. Most famously here: Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Fortress Press, 1993). But see also Oord et al. in Divine Impassibility, ed. Matz and Thornhill.
10. Dolezal discusses this here: Reformed Forum, “Divine Impassibility,” YouTube video, 1:02:45, July 13, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlvmHtGnSck.
11. Most English translations (including the ESV) use the present tense construction taken from the Septuagint. The Masoretic text (the earliest manuscript dates to the 9th century AD) might be translated “I will be who I will be,” carrying more of an emphasis on God’s independence or aseity (which also implies His immutability, see the citation in note 12). But the Septuagint reflects the understanding of the Hebrew text by Hebrew speaking Jewish interpreters before the first century. See also note 15.
12. Charles J. Rennie, “Is Impassibility Really Biblical?,” Credo Magazine 9, no. 1 (March 27, 2019), https://credomag.com/article/is-impassibility-really-biblical/.
13. See also 1 Samuel 15:29, “And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret.”
14. The English Standard Version translates these verses, “I am he,” but the Greek is simply ἐγώ εἰμι (egō eimi) or “I am.”
15. The Greek version of the Old Testament is most frequently cited by New Testament authors. Jesus uses the first two Greek words, ἐγώ εἰμι (egō eimi), of the Septuagint’s rendering of God’s self-revelation in Exodus 3:14 (ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν / egō eimi ho ōn; literally, “I am the One who is”). As noted, the Hebrew text (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה / ʾehyeh ʾăšer ʾehyeh), traditionally rendered “I Am that I Am,” could also be translated more dynamically as “I will be who I will be,” which leans more toward a statement of divine independence or aseity. However, John, importantly, quotes Jesus alluding to the Septuagint’s rendering, which implies divine immutability, assuring us that the Greek rendering truly captures what God meant when He revealed His name to Moses — and that Jesus is, in fact, the One who is.
16. Paul would say the “gods” are really demons. See 1 Corinthians 10:20.
17. Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 21.
18. Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 34.
19.  I believe I heard this first from one of Dr. R. C. Sproul’s lectures.
20. Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics, trans. Peter Holmes, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), 246, quoted in R. Scott Clark, “What Tertullian Really Said About Jerusalem and Athens,” The Heidelblog, November 9, 2024, https://heidelblog.net/2024/11/what-tertullian-really-said-about-jerusalem-and-athens/.
21. Reformed Forum, “Divine Impassibility.”
22. Reformed Forum, “Divine Impassibility.”
23. Reformed Forum, “Divine Impassibility.” See Augustine of Hippo, De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), bk. 2, chap. 40, §§ 60–61, English translation at https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/mel/auggoldegypt.html.
24. “The Chalcedonian Creed” (Council of Chalcedon, 451), Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed July 29, 2026, https://www.ccel.org/creeds/chalcedonian-creed.html.