One of the issues with current debates about impassibility and also immutability (that God does not change) is that we are trying to understand how the infinite, eternal God can relate to finite human-beings. One aspect of this is to do with how we can know God through the language we use about him. We have previously seen that language can either be univocal where a term means exactly the same thing in reference to God and humanity, equivocal where there is no connection between the uses of the term or analogical where there isn’t exact overlap but there is a relationship. It is the latter type, analogy by which we speak about God.
Another challenge concerns how we as time bound creatures relate to the eternal God. Remember that “eternal” does not just mean that God lives for ever and ever. He is not subject to time itself, his life is not spread out thinly, he has all of his existence at once. God is timeless.
Some ways of describing his eternal nature as meaning he is “outside of time”, which I would argue are different to saying that he is transcendent over time give the impression that there is no connecting point between this God and his creatures who are in time. In fact, confusing over God’s immutability and impassibility are underlying root causes for Deism which results in a distant unknowable impersonal divinity. Such a view is perhaps closer to Gnosticism and atheism than it is to the Christian view of God.
I want to suggest that when Scripture uses “change” language to describe God, when it talks about him grieving, relenting and repenting that one of the things it does is show us that the timeless God can meet us in time, that he can know us and we him.
In terms of God’s affections, we want to insist that he does not change. He does not change his mind or will, he does not repent, relent or grieve in that he doesn’t make a decision at one point and regret it. Rather, he has all of his experience at once and eternally so that he is always love, joy, holy etc. This means that God’s sadness and anger at evil is his settled, eternal will. It is more than an emotion because it is not something temporary.
However, we experience those settled and eternal affections as change, not because God has moved or changed but because we have in time so that our experience of him is different.
Faithroots 