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Does God suffer? Does God weep with those who weep? Does God have emotions? If so, can we change them? Can we ever affect any change in God?

These are the sorts of questions I tried to address in my T4G session entitled Tis Mystery All, the Immortal Dies: Why the Sufferings of Christ are More Glorious Because God Does Not Suffer. Here’s the general outline (please excuse my ignorance in not being able to figure out how to make outline indentations work in WordPress):

I. Introduction: What is this talk about?

II. Defining Terms
A. Impassibility
B. Theopaschitism
C. Patripassianism

III. Passibility is the new orthodoxy
A. Many have affirmed it: Barth, Bonhoeffer, Moltmann, Stott and other evangelicals
B. Reasons for questioning impassibility.
1. Our culture prizes authenticity, which implies woundedness.
2. Suspicion of anything that sound Greco-Roman.
3. Suffering is though necessary for sincere compassion.
4. Atrocities of the twentieth century.
5. Christ, our Suffering Servant, shows us what God is like.

IV. A defense of impassibility
A. The weight of church history.
B. According to Scripture, God does not change.
C. God’s emotional life is not identical to ours.
D. What can be said of Christ cannot always be said of God.
E. Without impassibility, the incarnation does not make sense.

V. Why impassibility is good news.
A. God is not in the mess we are in.
B. And yet, he cares for us, which makes his care more meaningful.
C. God’s loves is freely given.
D. The incarnation is a demonstration of God’s choice to suffer as one of us.
E. God in Christ suffered as one of us and can sympathize with us.

You can download the whole 15 page manuscript here.

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