In September’s Evangelical Times, Psychiatrist Alan Thomas argues that God does have emotions. He does not believe that this contradicts the Doctrine of impassibility, that God is without passions. However, he argues against the concept of an emotionless God. Guy Davies has responded by arguing that God does not have emotions and that this would contradict the Doctrine. In a follow up article, he suggests that God does have emotions but only in Jesus God took to himself a human nature. It’s the human nature of Jesus, not his divine nature that has emotions.
Having read all three articles and had some interaction with Guy, I think that I’m more inclined to agree with Alan. However, I suspect that primarily our agreement is over how to put things. I don’t think there is actually that much, if any, of a disagreement over doctrine itself. I’ve noted before that there has been a “Neo-Classical-Theist” movement which seems to have been quick to move from disagreements over language to claim significant disagreements over doctrine, even accusing others who agree with them on the central tenants of belief of being heretics. That has been a deeply saddening trend.
There are some things that Guy rightly picks up on concerning Alan’s approach, including how he appears to define personhood. I also understand Guy’s concern about how we use the language of emotions. This is understandable given Alan’s background as a Psychiatrist. We may be tempted to go to something like the American Psychological Association for our definition of the word. In which case, we are given this adaption from the Miriam Webster dictionary:
“Emotions are conscious mental reactions (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feelings usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.”[1]
It is worth noting that whilst that particular definition suggests change in response to outside circumstances, that Miriam Webster also talks in terms of emotion as “a state of feeling”[2] and “the affective aspect of consciousness”. [3] Meanwhile, the Cambridge Dictionary says that an emotion is:
“a strong feeling such as love or anger, or strong feelings in general:”
Now, this is important because when people hear theologians say that God does not have emotions, then what they hear is that God doesn’t have love, anger, joy, etc. The risk with the word “emotions” is that it doesn’t go far enough to the heart of what it means to say this about God. We do better to call love an attribute. However, there do seem to be a group of attributes that align with what we call emotions and in that respect, I think the simplest way to refer to them collectively is under that term.
Guy is right to point us to the analogical nature of language about God and that should help us to relax a little about the language used. Of course we cannot say that God has emotions like we do and that is true of everything we say about God. Indeed, that’s why it is crucial as Alan notes to talk not in terms of God being a bit like us, loving a bit like us, getting angry like we do, being a Father like some of us are dads, that kind of thing. Rather, when we talk about love, joy, holiness, fatherhood etc then those things properly, perfectly, fully belong to him. When we are loving, happy, fathers, then as those made in his image we get to experience things that are a bit like his attributes.
This is important because if we then say that God acquired emotions in the incarnation then it will sound to many as though we are saying that The Son needed his human nature to experience those things. Yet, we don’t want to say that and I know that Guy doesn’t want to say that. It is true that in his human nature, Jesus experienced passibility, that he could suffer pain, lack, grief. Though even still, we want to be careful to distinguish our thinking about what it meant for Jesus to be a finite human being in a fallen world from any implication that there could be sinful, fleshly emotions and often that is how we experience our emotions as fluctuating in response so that we are subject to our desires and passions.
Pastorally, I think it is more useful for us to talk more about what it means for us to say that God is love and to talk about what we mean when we speak of his joy, his wrath etc.
Faithroots 
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