Which ... apologies for the double-post ... leads me to wonder:
. . . .
2) How those Churches/denominations which have a range of views on the issue, such as the Anglicans and, it seems, the Lutherans, hold these apparently opposing views together?
Every Christian tradition, so far as I know, tolerates a variety of views on various matters, as long as those views don’t contradict what is considered dogma (like the Creed). You yourself have noted various matters in which this is true of Orthodoxy.
My gut tells me that a divergence of views on this issue in one church body is primarily an intellectual disagreement with little practical import. I doubt much difference in behavior could be detected between someone who takes a monergistic view and someone who takes a synergistic view.
Not necessarily. You can have permanent emotions, ones that are directed at certain objects or classes of objects. Though the objects may change--may move in and out of a class, for example, by repenting--your (God's) emotion toward the two classes of people involved remains the same. (Though actually I'd expect it to be a lot more complicated than that, as individuals differ from other individuals, and each gets a fully personal response from our personal (or more than personal) God. But the change is in the individual who is the subject of God's emotion, not in God.)
God has emotions?
That implies change, and perfection cannot be altered.
Change =/= alteration. Jesus weeping doesn't change anything about Jesus. Jesus clearly displays emotions in the Gospels so I'm not sure how it could be said that God doesn't experience emotions.
The old view of passions was that they were reactions imposed on one from outside. Hence, passion from the same root as passive. The word emotion comes in when emotions are seen as states that move people. These days passionate implies someone active rather than someone who is passively at the mercy of external stimuli.
The sense in God not feeling emotions depends on how one conceptualises emotion. Earlier conceptions wouldn't have included agape under the definition of emotion, but we probably would.
(Jesus is both human and God; and feels emotions as a human regardless of whether he does as God.)
We don't see it in 'vengeful' terms. It's not 'emotional revenge' in human terms but rather divine love experienced by a sin-hardened soul. Such a soul is not going to experience the light of God's presence in a warm and conforting way but 'as a consuming fire.'
That’s the only previous mention in the thread of anything related to emotion that I could find.
In which case I'm on the same page as @Alan29 in that I don't believe that God has 'mood swings' in a human way.
God is love and that love is constant and unchanging.
Which is what I understand @Lamb Chopped to be saying. @Dafyd raises an interesting point about how emotions were viewed in the past, as external 'forces' or stimuli - whether positive or negative.
I'm going to go away and think about that and how it relates to Patristic understandings of these things. 'Mirror, signal, manoeuvre.'
We Orthodox start with scripture then the Fathers (Mothers too, I hope) then 'manouevre'.
It can take us a while to move through the gears. We ate on manual not automatic.
As our deacon's wife said during a discussion group for catechumens and recent converts last night, 'We are Ents not Hobbits ...'
Anyhow - coming back to a point @Nick Tamen raised about whether a monergist or synergist position affects how we behave.
To all intents and purposes I'm notvsure it dies, unless we veer off to extremes in either direction.
Monergists love God and love their neighbour as themselves.
Synergists love God and love their neighbour as themselves.
Both grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us.
I can envisage an extreme monergism that topples over into Anti-nominianism and a reaction against 'works' of any kind such that it neglects acts of charity and mercy.
Equally, I can envisage a kind of cheese-paring synergism that 'sweats the small stuff' and obsesses about the observance of particular rubrics or the details of rituals or doctrinal niceties to the extent that we fret that we have to dot every'i' and cross every 't' if we are to be saved.
Could we please have some definitions of what synergia and monergia are?
He means monergism and synergism
I mean that doesn't explain anything about what that means! To me "synergism" sounds like some annoying business-speak term found on LinkedIn, or what Synergy does on Jem & The Holograms.
God has emotions?
That implies change, and perfection cannot be altered.
Change =/= alteration. Jesus weeping doesn't change anything about Jesus. Jesus clearly displays emotions in the Gospels so I'm not sure how it could be said that God doesn't experience emotions.
The human nature of Jesus certainly experienced emotions. Not sure how the hypostatic union works with that.
I'm not sure how or why the issue of God having emotions or not has cropped up here.
I don't think I mentioned it. Who introduced it?
This was the spur posted by Barnabas that goaded my question
"How does Orthodoxy understand the wrath of God?
Within Protestantism there has always been the understanding that God hates sin because of what it does to the humankind he loves."
These are very human emotions that are being imputed to God.
I realise this is a tangent so feel free to ignore it.
I'm not sure how or why the issue of God having emotions or not has cropped up here.
I don't think I mentioned it. Who introduced it?
This was the spur posted by Barnabas that goaded my question
"How does Orthodoxy understand the wrath of God?
Within Protestantism there has always been the understanding that God hates sin because of what it does to the humankind he loves."
These are very human emotions that are being imputed to God.
True, but they are human emotions imputed to God throughout Scripture.
The question is, are we being inappropriately anthropomorphic when we attribute emotions to God? I don't think so. Given the doctrine that human beings are made in God's image, I think it's the other way around, and the truth is we're being appropriately theomorphic--our own emotions derive from his.
I get that, and as human beings are made 'in the image of God' then yes, that would follow.
Classic Christian theology teaches that God is 'impassable' - and as emotions suggest 'change' then it is impossible for God to change.
I don't know how these things 'work' but as the Incarnation is the key to the whole thing, then 'God in Christ' was reconciling the whole world to himself and his love is expressed supremely through that.
I'm not sure we need to square this particular circle. 'Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'
I s'pose what I can say, from experience, is that I sometimes get a 'frisson' or an emotional reaction when I venerate icons, even though iconography in the Orthodox scheme of things is very 'impassive' in style. It doesn't set out to milk our emotions as it were.
At times my heart is 'strangely warmed' - to use a Wesleyan phrase - when I hear particular verses intoned or particular 'troparia' chanted - most especially during Holy Week.
I know that's my reaction, not God's as it were but if we take the synergia theme then perhaps in some small measure any loving response we may feel towards God and towards our neighbour must to some extent reflect divine love - for God is the source of all love and goodness.
For love is of God and the one who loves is born of God.
To say that God is immutable and impassable isn't to say that God is like Spock in Star Trek. But he is unknowable in his essence but knowable through his 'energies' and they are all of love.
Love can be tough love too, at times. But no, God does not have mood swings like we do.
I'm not sure how or why the issue of God having emotions or not has cropped up here.
I don't think I mentioned it. Who introduced it?
This was the spur posted by Barnabas that goaded my question
"How does Orthodoxy understand the wrath of God?
Within Protestantism there has always been the understanding that God hates sin because of what it does to the humankind he loves."
These are very human emotions that are being imputed to God.
True, but they are human emotions imputed to God throughout Scripture.
[/quote] Well, 7 day creation is in scripture too. [/quote]
I don't think @Nick Tamen is saying we need to take the anthropomorphisms in scripture literally any more than we are to take the Creation account/s literally.
I think he'd say that they are ways of saying things about God in a very 'human' way given that we are creaturely and that the only way we can talk about the Divine is through figurative language.
I'm not sure how or why the issue of God having emotions or not has cropped up here.
I don't think I mentioned it. Who introduced it?
This was the spur posted by Barnabas that goaded my question
"How does Orthodoxy understand the wrath of God?
Within Protestantism there has always been the understanding that God hates sin because of what it does to the humankind he loves."
These are very human emotions that are being imputed to God.
True, but they are human emotions imputed to God throughout Scripture.
Well, 7 day creation is in scripture too.
Yes, it is. And even though I think it is a major error to treat it literally, I take the 7-day creation narrative very seriously. I think a lot of meaning is packed into it.
Meanwhile, if you’re going to toss out imputing human emotions, like love or hate, to God, what do you do with “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son . . .”?
Or “This is my Son, my beloved”?
Or “We love because God first loved us”?
Or Amos 5:21–24?:
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
The impassability of God has a long doctrinal pedigree. I’ve always been uncomfortable with it. I think
I understand the essence/energy argument but I’m not comfortable with that either!
My admittedly human reaction to it is that it seems to make God cold and distant. In pretty sharp contrast to the scriptures @Nick Tamen quoted - and there are many others showing the same contrast. For example Jesus underlining Amos 5 in the “seven woes” of Matthew 23.
The impassability plus esence/energy arguments suggests that God somehow needs to show us specific reactions to particular bad behaviour, even though these are not a complete picture of His unchanging nature. Maybe it’s just me but I find that weird!
'Love bade me welcome but my soul drew back
Guiltie of dust and sinne ...'
And later in the same poem,
'Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?'
Heck, I'm not Reformed nor a monergist Lutheran but I agree with both that the initiative is God's.
It's a bit like when Peter was sinking and Christ reached out and drew him up from the waters. Did he reach down and drag him up by the scruff of the neck? Or did Peter reach out a hand?
God saves.
On the 'hate' thing in Amos - 'I despise your festivals' - I'd see that as a form of hyperbolic anthropomorphism - God through the prophet putting things in human terms in a way the recipients could understand.
We can only express these things using human reference points.
Ezekiel's vision is full of 'what looked like' or 'what appeared to be' qualifying statements.
When we are dealing with the ineffable we have to resort to approximations.
The impassability of God has a long doctrinal pedigree. I’ve always been uncomfortable with it. I think
I understand the essence/energy argument but I’m not comfortable with that either!
My admittedly human reaction to it is that it seems to make God cold and distant. In pretty sharp contrast to the scriptures @Nick Tamen quoted - and there are many others showing the same contrast. For example Jesus underlining Amos 5 in the “seven woes” of Matthew 23.
The impassability plus esence/energy arguments suggests that God somehow needs to show us specific reactions to particular bad behaviour, even though these are not a complete picture of His unchanging nature. Maybe it’s just me but I find that weird!
Apologies I cross-posted with @Barnabas62 so please forgive the double-post.
Yes, I understand those objections @Barnabas62 and although this may sound glib, I'm finding since I took the plunge into Holy Tradition - another term for the 'long doctrinal pedigree' of which you speak - that it's becoming less of an issue.
The Incarnation is the key. Both/and. The human and divine.
I don't think we can 'parse' whether it was the 'human' Jesus or the Divine Logos who wept when Lazarus died or angrily turned over the tables of the money-changers. I don't know how the hypostatic union 'works'. Do any of us?
But the Chalcedonian formula of two wills - the human and divine - harmoniously combined offers us something very deep and profound.
Orthodox worship aims not to stir up the emotion in a 'fleshly' way. The intonation of prayers and readings takes some getting used to. Scripture readings aren't read in a dramatic way but in a flat tone that can sound robotic at times.
This was partly to help the sound carry in the days before microphones and partly so that people wouldn't be 'worked on' or manipulated in an 'actorly' kind of way.
It's also why the faces on icons are 'passive' - even when the Saints and martyrs depicted are being beaten or roasted alive.
It's why we don't go in for lurid Baroque or Mannerist style art in our churches.
That doesn't mean that we don't respond emotionally to things. I'm often struck by how unselfconscious some of the Eastern Europeans are. They'll weep before icons or lie face down flat on the floor without worrying what people might think.
I'm often bored in services. If I'm fasting I'll be looking forward to a cup of tea and something go eat. I'll be thinking, 'Oh no, another half hour to go ...'
At other times it flies by. There's a sense both of the immanence and immutability of Almighty God. 'Surely God is in this place. This is the very gate of Heaven.'
I'm not saying we have a monopoly on that. Far from it. Nor am I saying it's 'wrong' to sing rousing congregational hymns. I get stirred by all that. Welsh hymns in the minor key. Christmas carols. Wesleyan hymns. They all 'send me'.
But the sense that God is completely 'other', immutable, impassible, unchanging and transcendent can help us avoid extreme emotionalism.
You'll know the lovely Western hymn, 'All My Hope On God Is Founded'?
'God unknown, He alone, calls my heart to be his own.'
It may sound counter-intuitive but it's the 'fire' and warmth we Orthodox recognise as the 'golden thread' that runs through genuine spiritual experience wherever we encounter it.
I've heard several Orthodox say that Pentecostalism can provide a touching point or place of encounter between Eastern and Western expressions of Christianity.
Not because we Orthodox 'speak in tongues' or jump about but because both Pentecostalism and Orthodoxy have a kind of kinetic physicality about them and aren't all buttoned-up and coldly rational.
In the Liturgy there's a line about us offering 'rational' worship. Indeed we do but there is fire on the altar and fire in the hearts of those who 'in fear of God draw near.'
I'm not sure how or why the issue of God having emotions or not has cropped up here.
I don't think I mentioned it. Who introduced it?
This was the spur posted by Barnabas that goaded my question
"How does Orthodoxy understand the wrath of God?
Within Protestantism there has always been the understanding that God hates sin because of what it does to the humankind he loves."
These are very human emotions that are being imputed to God.
True, but they are human emotions imputed to God throughout Scripture.
Well, 7 day creation is in scripture too.
Yes, it is. And even though I think it is a major error to treat it literally, I take the 7-day creation narrative very seriously. I think a lot of meaning is packed into it.
Meanwhile, if you’re going to toss out imputing human emotions, like love or hate, to God, what do you do with “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son . . .”?
Or “This is my Son, my beloved”?
Or “We love because God first loved us”?
Or Amos 5:21–24?:
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
I sort of imagine that love is rather more than a passing emotion. I think it is (at its best) a desire for the very best for the loved one no matter what - the unconditional love of a parent for example. But anger is something that can flare up for just a minute or two.
Is it significant that the statements you quote about love are in prose and stated matter-of-factly, while the passage from Amos is framed as a poem and is much more florid in expression?
I wondered what was wrong with “consistent’? Does God have to be an unmoved Mover rather than a moved Mover? In other words when He is moved He is consistently moved? I can’t see how that makes Him less Divine. Anthropomorphism is very dodgy of course but I can’t help but feel there is something “masculine’ in the insistence on unmoved. A notion that Divine strength requires an unmoved God. A kind of granite God.
I'm no expert but as someone who 'inhabits' Tradition in Orthodox terms, it might not be a case that Tradition says you are wrong. 'Computer says "No".'
I don't think it works like that.
Tradition isn't a computer programme or rigid template.
It might be the case that you - or I - haven't yet fully understood Tradition on this particular point.
I'm not sure I said there was anything wrong with 'consistent.' Tradition asserts that God is always consistent. God is always personal too.
My point is that God is always and consistently loving, because God is Love. He doesn't have an off-day where he ceases to be so.
I don't see how that has to be seen in purely 'masculine' terms. Maternal love can be unconditional also. I think it transcends our earthly concepts of 'masculine' and 'feminine'.
I can see what you are getting at but again - please forgive me - it seems to topple into the kind of dichotomous way of thinking that characterises much 'Western' style theology.
I'll say it again. Both/and.
That's what the hypostatic union is all about. The human and the divine. The divine and the human.
At the risk of misunderstanding your position, I'd posit that if we have the concept of a 'granite' God then we have stepped back from both/and ways of thinking and adopted a binary approach. I know you aren't saying that but that's where these things can lead.
Anthropomorphism can be dodgy but not necessarily so. In some ways it's the only way we can express these things - by using a human reference point. How can it be otherwise seeing that we are human beings?
As @Alan29 insightfully points out, the Amos passage is poetic. The 'hate' thing is a poetic image.
My ex- ... a woman I was 'seeing' until early this year - observed that the only people she'd come across from 'Western' Christian backgrounds who'd become Orthodox were 'poetic' types.
I only wish that were truly the case ...
But I can see what she means. We can live with paradox, with symbols and metaphors, we can hold apparent contradictions in tension - predestination and freewill, faith and works, human and divine synergy.
I'm not saying we are the only Christians who can do that. We all do. What I am saying, at the risk of being misunderstood, is that Orthodoxy can do this because of Tradition - because we inhabit a living Tradition not a Scholastic Meccano-set proof-text Christianity.
I'm not saying that your tradition - small t - is inflexible, far from it. It's highly malleable in, I would suggest, both positive and negative ways. But, forgive me, it can have a tendency to dichotomise things that don't pose a problem to the Orthodox.
We have our own problems and difficulties, but we don't get hung up on certain preoccupations that have beset both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism over the years.
It's not that we don't understand the issues but from this side of the 'fence' some of these debates don't make a great deal of sense. Why set faith and works against one another? Why place predestination and free will in opposition?
There's an Orthodox term phronema which means the alignment of one's will, way of life, thoughts and values with the 'mind of the Church'.
It doesn't mean switching off our brains. It doesn't mean group-think. It means the gradual alignment of our will, our actions and ways of thinking with the living tradition and life of the Church.
It takes time. I didn't have a clue about the energies/essence thing. I sort of 'got it' intellectually but it's only through participating in services, in prayer and in 'working out my salvation in fear and trembling' that I'm even beginning to grasp the concept.
The same would apply if I were a Reformed Christian or a Lutheran, say. I might read Reformed or Lutheran theology but it would only be through participation in the life of those traditions themselves that I would acquire a Reformed or Lutheran 'mindset'.
I can't 'explain' how the hypostatic union works. I can't work out how God can show love - or be love without changing 'emotionally' like we humans do.
What I can do, by God's grace, is participate in the 'means' and ordinances / sacraments that God has ordained through his Church and seek to love God and my neighbour as myself.
As the old hymn puts it, 'Dearly, dearly has he loved and we must love him too/ And trust in his redeeming blood and try his works to do.'
I've heard of neo-Calvinists who don't like that last part.
Why? Because they've dichotomised everything in a Scholastic kind of way.
Enough of that already. To the Law and to the Testimony. Every man (and woman) to their tents O Israel!
OK! It’s in my nature to ask questions as they occur to me.
I think that in Protestant worship we find the connection between God’s faithfulness and His unchanging nature. Great is His Faithfulness. He does not change, His compassion does not fail. But off the top of my head I cannot recall anything which praises or exemplifies God as the Unmoved Mover.
All of us Trinitarian Christians worship One God in Three Persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit (if you excuse my traditional language).
I would no more expect there to be Protestant hymns to the 'Unmoved Mover' than I'd expect anything other than full-on Nicene-Chalcedonian expressions in Orthodox liturgical texts.
When I look at Christ I don’t try to work out where his humanity 'ends' and his God-head 'begins'.
"Oh, Christ shows compassion in this Gospel passage. That must be his human 'side'. God the 'Unmoved Mover' wouldn't care less because he's some kind of granite fixity."
No, no, a thousand times no.
What we see in Christ is the human and the Divine acting in unity.
In consistency not 'inconsistency'.
I'm not saying it's wrong to ask questions. Of course we should ask questions. But you seem to be setting up oppositions that have already been 'reconciled' through the great Creedal formularies and theologians, hymn-writers and great saints / Saints down the ages.
Setting up dichotomies that aren't necessary and don't exist other than in speculation.
You've alluded to the old hymn yourself. 'Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father / There is no shadow of turning with Thee / Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not, / As Thou hast been Thou forever shalt be.'
Nobody is arguing with that. We all agree with that if there's any semblance of orthodoxy (small o or Big O) about us.
Where's the contradictions? Where's the dichotomy?
God is eternally loving, eternally faithful. Your own hymns say so.
I really don't understand why there's an issue. God is unchanging and immutable. God is eternally loving and gracious. Where's the contradiction? Both are true at one and the same time.
Am I missing something here?
If we say God is impassible and immutable we aren't saying he's like a granite Easter Island statue.
What we are saying is that he is eternally consistent in his love and his grace.
Have you understood what I was saying differently? Have I not expressed myself clearly?
Holy Tradition is clear on this point even if I express it clumsily.
It might help, @Barnabas62 if we agree that the 'Unmoved Mover' is an Aristotelian concept that isn't part of Holy Tradition as recognised by the Orthodox Church.
I suspect that's why we may have been 'talking past each other' as you might be ascribing something to Tradition which Tradition doesn't actually teach.
Yes, God is unchangeable in 'essence' but God is always 'relational' - as John Wesley said, 'God is in Himself a sweet society.'
One God in Three Persons. Blessed Trinity.
Hence God reaching out to us sinners. Hence the Incarnation. Hence God in Christ reconciling the world to himself.
Hence the God-Man Jesus Christ laying down his life for us. Hence through the Resurrection there is 'a man in heaven', risen and glorified.
These are things into which the angels long to look.
Correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to have conflated Aristotelian concepts with the teaching of the Orthodox Church.
We'd go along with that one to an extent but would say that the Aristotelian model is unnecessarily 'wooden' and restrictive and misses out entirely on the relational aspect.
God is always personal, always relational.
Synergy. Synergy. Synergy. Syn-ER-gy.
The essence/energies thing helps resolve any apparent contradictions.
I wondered what was wrong with “consistent’? Does God have to be an unmoved Mover rather than a moved Mover? In other words when He is moved He is consistently moved? I can’t see how that makes Him less Divine. Anthropomorphism is very dodgy of course but I can’t help but feel there is something “masculine’ in the insistence on unmoved. A notion that Divine strength requires an unmoved God. A kind of granite God.
The supposed relation between masculinity and emotion has changed over the centuries - there was nothing unmasculine about weeping before the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So I don't think there's anything particularly masculine about the doctrine of God's impassibility.
As I said above, I think it depends a lot on how you conceptualise emotions. But all language about God is finding the least misleading words - a way of putting it, not very satisfactory.
Comments
My gut tells me that a divergence of views on this issue in one church body is primarily an intellectual disagreement with little practical import. I doubt much difference in behavior could be detected between someone who takes a monergistic view and someone who takes a synergistic view.
That implies change, and perfection cannot be altered.
Change =/= alteration. Jesus weeping doesn't change anything about Jesus. Jesus clearly displays emotions in the Gospels so I'm not sure how it could be said that God doesn't experience emotions.
The sense in God not feeling emotions depends on how one conceptualises emotion. Earlier conceptions wouldn't have included agape under the definition of emotion, but we probably would.
(Jesus is both human and God; and feels emotions as a human regardless of whether he does as God.)
I'm not sure how or why the issue of God having emotions or not has cropped up here.
I don't think I mentioned it. Who introduced it?
That’s the only previous mention in the thread of anything related to emotion that I could find.
In which case I'm on the same page as @Alan29 in that I don't believe that God has 'mood swings' in a human way.
God is love and that love is constant and unchanging.
Which is what I understand @Lamb Chopped to be saying. @Dafyd raises an interesting point about how emotions were viewed in the past, as external 'forces' or stimuli - whether positive or negative.
I'm going to go away and think about that and how it relates to Patristic understandings of these things. 'Mirror, signal, manoeuvre.'
We Orthodox start with scripture then the Fathers (Mothers too, I hope) then 'manouevre'.
It can take us a while to move through the gears. We ate on manual not automatic.
As our deacon's wife said during a discussion group for catechumens and recent converts last night, 'We are Ents not Hobbits ...'
Anyhow - coming back to a point @Nick Tamen raised about whether a monergist or synergist position affects how we behave.
To all intents and purposes I'm notvsure it dies, unless we veer off to extremes in either direction.
Monergists love God and love their neighbour as themselves.
Synergists love God and love their neighbour as themselves.
Both grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us.
I can envisage an extreme monergism that topples over into Anti-nominianism and a reaction against 'works' of any kind such that it neglects acts of charity and mercy.
Equally, I can envisage a kind of cheese-paring synergism that 'sweats the small stuff' and obsesses about the observance of particular rubrics or the details of rituals or doctrinal niceties to the extent that we fret that we have to dot every'i' and cross every 't' if we are to be saved.
Both extremes are to be avoided.
Or this!
https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?is=cNsLAJn-dZDdIw5o
The human nature of Jesus certainly experienced emotions. Not sure how the hypostatic union works with that.
This was the spur posted by Barnabas that goaded my question
"How does Orthodoxy understand the wrath of God?
Within Protestantism there has always been the understanding that God hates sin because of what it does to the humankind he loves."
These are very human emotions that are being imputed to God.
I realise this is a tangent so feel free to ignore it.
Classic Christian theology teaches that God is 'impassable' - and as emotions suggest 'change' then it is impossible for God to change.
I don't know how these things 'work' but as the Incarnation is the key to the whole thing, then 'God in Christ' was reconciling the whole world to himself and his love is expressed supremely through that.
I'm not sure we need to square this particular circle. 'Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'
I s'pose what I can say, from experience, is that I sometimes get a 'frisson' or an emotional reaction when I venerate icons, even though iconography in the Orthodox scheme of things is very 'impassive' in style. It doesn't set out to milk our emotions as it were.
At times my heart is 'strangely warmed' - to use a Wesleyan phrase - when I hear particular verses intoned or particular 'troparia' chanted - most especially during Holy Week.
I know that's my reaction, not God's as it were but if we take the synergia theme then perhaps in some small measure any loving response we may feel towards God and towards our neighbour must to some extent reflect divine love - for God is the source of all love and goodness.
For love is of God and the one who loves is born of God.
To say that God is immutable and impassable isn't to say that God is like Spock in Star Trek. But he is unknowable in his essence but knowable through his 'energies' and they are all of love.
Love can be tough love too, at times. But no, God does not have mood swings like we do.
Well, 7 day creation is in scripture too.
I don't think @Nick Tamen is saying we need to take the anthropomorphisms in scripture literally any more than we are to take the Creation account/s literally.
I think he'd say that they are ways of saying things about God in a very 'human' way given that we are creaturely and that the only way we can talk about the Divine is through figurative language.
But he can correct me if I am wrong.
Meanwhile, if you’re going to toss out imputing human emotions, like love or hate, to God, what do you do with “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son . . .”?
Or “This is my Son, my beloved”?
Or “We love because God first loved us”?
Or Amos 5:21–24?:
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
I understand the essence/energy argument but I’m not comfortable with that either!
My admittedly human reaction to it is that it seems to make God cold and distant. In pretty sharp contrast to the scriptures @Nick Tamen quoted - and there are many others showing the same contrast. For example Jesus underlining Amos 5 in the “seven woes” of Matthew 23.
The impassability plus esence/energy arguments suggests that God somehow needs to show us specific reactions to particular bad behaviour, even though these are not a complete picture of His unchanging nature. Maybe it’s just me but I find that weird!
'We love because he first loved us.'
Or as George Herbert put it:
'Love bade me welcome but my soul drew back
Guiltie of dust and sinne ...'
And later in the same poem,
'Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?'
Heck, I'm not Reformed nor a monergist Lutheran but I agree with both that the initiative is God's.
It's a bit like when Peter was sinking and Christ reached out and drew him up from the waters. Did he reach down and drag him up by the scruff of the neck? Or did Peter reach out a hand?
God saves.
On the 'hate' thing in Amos - 'I despise your festivals' - I'd see that as a form of hyperbolic anthropomorphism - God through the prophet putting things in human terms in a way the recipients could understand.
We can only express these things using human reference points.
Ezekiel's vision is full of 'what looked like' or 'what appeared to be' qualifying statements.
When we are dealing with the ineffable we have to resort to approximations.
Apologies I cross-posted with @Barnabas62 so please forgive the double-post.
Yes, I understand those objections @Barnabas62 and although this may sound glib, I'm finding since I took the plunge into Holy Tradition - another term for the 'long doctrinal pedigree' of which you speak - that it's becoming less of an issue.
The Incarnation is the key. Both/and. The human and divine.
I don't think we can 'parse' whether it was the 'human' Jesus or the Divine Logos who wept when Lazarus died or angrily turned over the tables of the money-changers. I don't know how the hypostatic union 'works'. Do any of us?
But the Chalcedonian formula of two wills - the human and divine - harmoniously combined offers us something very deep and profound.
Orthodox worship aims not to stir up the emotion in a 'fleshly' way. The intonation of prayers and readings takes some getting used to. Scripture readings aren't read in a dramatic way but in a flat tone that can sound robotic at times.
This was partly to help the sound carry in the days before microphones and partly so that people wouldn't be 'worked on' or manipulated in an 'actorly' kind of way.
It's also why the faces on icons are 'passive' - even when the Saints and martyrs depicted are being beaten or roasted alive.
It's why we don't go in for lurid Baroque or Mannerist style art in our churches.
That doesn't mean that we don't respond emotionally to things. I'm often struck by how unselfconscious some of the Eastern Europeans are. They'll weep before icons or lie face down flat on the floor without worrying what people might think.
I'm often bored in services. If I'm fasting I'll be looking forward to a cup of tea and something go eat. I'll be thinking, 'Oh no, another half hour to go ...'
At other times it flies by. There's a sense both of the immanence and immutability of Almighty God. 'Surely God is in this place. This is the very gate of Heaven.'
I'm not saying we have a monopoly on that. Far from it. Nor am I saying it's 'wrong' to sing rousing congregational hymns. I get stirred by all that. Welsh hymns in the minor key. Christmas carols. Wesleyan hymns. They all 'send me'.
But the sense that God is completely 'other', immutable, impassible, unchanging and transcendent can help us avoid extreme emotionalism.
You'll know the lovely Western hymn, 'All My Hope On God Is Founded'?
'God unknown, He alone, calls my heart to be his own.'
It may sound counter-intuitive but it's the 'fire' and warmth we Orthodox recognise as the 'golden thread' that runs through genuine spiritual experience wherever we encounter it.
I've heard several Orthodox say that Pentecostalism can provide a touching point or place of encounter between Eastern and Western expressions of Christianity.
Not because we Orthodox 'speak in tongues' or jump about but because both Pentecostalism and Orthodoxy have a kind of kinetic physicality about them and aren't all buttoned-up and coldly rational.
In the Liturgy there's a line about us offering 'rational' worship. Indeed we do but there is fire on the altar and fire in the hearts of those who 'in fear of God draw near.'
I sort of imagine that love is rather more than a passing emotion. I think it is (at its best) a desire for the very best for the loved one no matter what - the unconditional love of a parent for example. But anger is something that can flare up for just a minute or two.
Is it significant that the statements you quote about love are in prose and stated matter-of-factly, while the passage from Amos is framed as a poem and is much more florid in expression?
Lovely post, much appreciated.
I wondered what was wrong with “consistent’? Does God have to be an unmoved Mover rather than a moved Mover? In other words when He is moved He is consistently moved? I can’t see how that makes Him less Divine. Anthropomorphism is very dodgy of course but I can’t help but feel there is something “masculine’ in the insistence on unmoved. A notion that Divine strength requires an unmoved God. A kind of granite God.
I appreciate Tradition says I’m wrong.
I don't think it works like that.
Tradition isn't a computer programme or rigid template.
It might be the case that you - or I - haven't yet fully understood Tradition on this particular point.
I'm not sure I said there was anything wrong with 'consistent.' Tradition asserts that God is always consistent. God is always personal too.
My point is that God is always and consistently loving, because God is Love. He doesn't have an off-day where he ceases to be so.
I don't see how that has to be seen in purely 'masculine' terms. Maternal love can be unconditional also. I think it transcends our earthly concepts of 'masculine' and 'feminine'.
I can see what you are getting at but again - please forgive me - it seems to topple into the kind of dichotomous way of thinking that characterises much 'Western' style theology.
I'll say it again. Both/and.
That's what the hypostatic union is all about. The human and the divine. The divine and the human.
At the risk of misunderstanding your position, I'd posit that if we have the concept of a 'granite' God then we have stepped back from both/and ways of thinking and adopted a binary approach. I know you aren't saying that but that's where these things can lead.
Anthropomorphism can be dodgy but not necessarily so. In some ways it's the only way we can express these things - by using a human reference point. How can it be otherwise seeing that we are human beings?
As @Alan29 insightfully points out, the Amos passage is poetic. The 'hate' thing is a poetic image.
My ex- ... a woman I was 'seeing' until early this year - observed that the only people she'd come across from 'Western' Christian backgrounds who'd become Orthodox were 'poetic' types.
I only wish that were truly the case ...
But I can see what she means. We can live with paradox, with symbols and metaphors, we can hold apparent contradictions in tension - predestination and freewill, faith and works, human and divine synergy.
I'm not saying we are the only Christians who can do that. We all do. What I am saying, at the risk of being misunderstood, is that Orthodoxy can do this because of Tradition - because we inhabit a living Tradition not a Scholastic Meccano-set proof-text Christianity.
I'm not saying that your tradition - small t - is inflexible, far from it. It's highly malleable in, I would suggest, both positive and negative ways. But, forgive me, it can have a tendency to dichotomise things that don't pose a problem to the Orthodox.
We have our own problems and difficulties, but we don't get hung up on certain preoccupations that have beset both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism over the years.
It's not that we don't understand the issues but from this side of the 'fence' some of these debates don't make a great deal of sense. Why set faith and works against one another? Why place predestination and free will in opposition?
There's an Orthodox term phronema which means the alignment of one's will, way of life, thoughts and values with the 'mind of the Church'.
It doesn't mean switching off our brains. It doesn't mean group-think. It means the gradual alignment of our will, our actions and ways of thinking with the living tradition and life of the Church.
It takes time. I didn't have a clue about the energies/essence thing. I sort of 'got it' intellectually but it's only through participating in services, in prayer and in 'working out my salvation in fear and trembling' that I'm even beginning to grasp the concept.
The same would apply if I were a Reformed Christian or a Lutheran, say. I might read Reformed or Lutheran theology but it would only be through participation in the life of those traditions themselves that I would acquire a Reformed or Lutheran 'mindset'.
I can't 'explain' how the hypostatic union works. I can't work out how God can show love - or be love without changing 'emotionally' like we humans do.
What I can do, by God's grace, is participate in the 'means' and ordinances / sacraments that God has ordained through his Church and seek to love God and my neighbour as myself.
As the old hymn puts it, 'Dearly, dearly has he loved and we must love him too/ And trust in his redeeming blood and try his works to do.'
I've heard of neo-Calvinists who don't like that last part.
Why? Because they've dichotomised everything in a Scholastic kind of way.
Enough of that already. To the Law and to the Testimony. Every man (and woman) to their tents O Israel!
I think that in Protestant worship we find the connection between God’s faithfulness and His unchanging nature. Great is His Faithfulness. He does not change, His compassion does not fail. But off the top of my head I cannot recall anything which praises or exemplifies God as the Unmoved Mover.
Maybe we just don’t do it?
I would no more expect there to be Protestant hymns to the 'Unmoved Mover' than I'd expect anything other than full-on Nicene-Chalcedonian expressions in Orthodox liturgical texts.
When I look at Christ I don’t try to work out where his humanity 'ends' and his God-head 'begins'.
"Oh, Christ shows compassion in this Gospel passage. That must be his human 'side'. God the 'Unmoved Mover' wouldn't care less because he's some kind of granite fixity."
No, no, a thousand times no.
What we see in Christ is the human and the Divine acting in unity.
In consistency not 'inconsistency'.
I'm not saying it's wrong to ask questions. Of course we should ask questions. But you seem to be setting up oppositions that have already been 'reconciled' through the great Creedal formularies and theologians, hymn-writers and great saints / Saints down the ages.
Setting up dichotomies that aren't necessary and don't exist other than in speculation.
You've alluded to the old hymn yourself. 'Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father / There is no shadow of turning with Thee / Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not, / As Thou hast been Thou forever shalt be.'
Nobody is arguing with that. We all agree with that if there's any semblance of orthodoxy (small o or Big O) about us.
Where's the contradictions? Where's the dichotomy?
God is eternally loving, eternally faithful. Your own hymns say so.
I really don't understand why there's an issue. God is unchanging and immutable. God is eternally loving and gracious. Where's the contradiction? Both are true at one and the same time.
Am I missing something here?
If we say God is impassible and immutable we aren't saying he's like a granite Easter Island statue.
What we are saying is that he is eternally consistent in his love and his grace.
Have you understood what I was saying differently? Have I not expressed myself clearly?
Holy Tradition is clear on this point even if I express it clumsily.
No contradiction. No dichotomy. God is love.
I suspect that's why we may have been 'talking past each other' as you might be ascribing something to Tradition which Tradition doesn't actually teach.
Yes, God is unchangeable in 'essence' but God is always 'relational' - as John Wesley said, 'God is in Himself a sweet society.'
One God in Three Persons. Blessed Trinity.
Hence God reaching out to us sinners. Hence the Incarnation. Hence God in Christ reconciling the world to himself.
Hence the God-Man Jesus Christ laying down his life for us. Hence through the Resurrection there is 'a man in heaven', risen and glorified.
These are things into which the angels long to look.
Correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to have conflated Aristotelian concepts with the teaching of the Orthodox Church.
We'd go along with that one to an extent but would say that the Aristotelian model is unnecessarily 'wooden' and restrictive and misses out entirely on the relational aspect.
God is always personal, always relational.
Synergy. Synergy. Synergy. Syn-ER-gy.
The essence/energies thing helps resolve any apparent contradictions.
As I said above, I think it depends a lot on how you conceptualise emotions. But all language about God is finding the least misleading words - a way of putting it, not very satisfactory.