CHAPTER II.

Prevalent Hypothesis of God’s Impassibility considered—-Supported by Great Names—-Correct when applied to Involuntary Suffering—-Incorrect when applied to Voluntary Suffering—-Argument of Bishop Pearson examined.—-Sinless Suffering if Voluntary does not imply imperfection or infirmity.

WE are met at the very threshold of our argument with the preliminary objection that the divine nature is impassible, or, in other words, that God cannot suffer. This objection, if true to its unlimited extent, is doubtless insuperable; for if the divine nature of Christ is incapable of suffering, he must necessarily have suffered in his human nature alone. We must, therefore, pause at once in our argument until we have explored the foundations of this startling objection, lest we should come, unwittingly, into collision with the awful attributes of Jehovah. The hypothesis that God is impassible is stated broadly by its advocates without restriction, qualification, or exception. It applies, therefore, as well to voluntary as to involuntary suffering by any one of the persons of the glorious Trinity.

If a dogma pertaining to the viewless attributes of the unsearchable Godhead can rest for its support on mere human authority, then the hypothesis in question is, indeed, to be regarded as impregnable. It has stretched itself over Christendom, and stood the ordeal of centuries. The Roman Catholic church has adopted it as one of her settled axioms; the venerable church of England has lent it the names of her Hooker, her Tillotson, her Pearson, her Barrow, her Beveridge, her Horne, and her Horsley; the Protestant church of France has sanctioned it by the adhesion of her eloquent Saurin; the Baptist church has added the name of her no less eloquent Hall; and the Presbyterian church has crowned it with the accumulated authority of her Owen, her Charnock, her Edwards, her Witherspoon, her Dwight, her Mason, and her Emmons. To these high intellectual dignitaries a lengthened and still lengthening list might be added from the dead and the living.

Against names so distinguished for talents, learning, and piety, it is with unaffected diffidence that we venture to raise the voice of our feeble dissent. We should scarcely have entered on the arduous undertaking, but from our firm conviction that these illustrious personages have endorsed the hypothesis without that profound attention and discrimination which has usually marked the movements of their mighty minds. None of them has, to our knowledge, fortified it by a single quotation from the Oracles of Truth, or devoted to it a single page of argument, with the solitary exception of Bishop Pearson. The brief remarks of that learned prelate will be noticed hereafter.

The other distinguished fathers, whose revered names we have recorded, have generally dismissed the hypothesis with a mere passing sentence. “God is impassible,” or some other expression, of almost equal brevity, is the only notice they have bestowed on a proposition high as heaven, and vast as infinity. So far as we may judge from their writings, they received the hypothesis as a consecrated relic of antiquity, without pausing to inquire whether its materials were celestial or earthy. It passed from their hands, bearing no marks of ever having been tested - by the touchstone of the Bible.

To the prevalent hypothesis, so far as it relates to involuntary or coerced suffering by the Being of beings to whom it is applied, we make no objection. It would be both irrational and irreverent to imagineimgine that the Omnipotent could be forced to suffer against his own volition. No hostile darts can pierce the thick “bosses of his bucklers.”—-Job 15. 26. Once, in the history of the universe, has the futile experiment been made. The malcontents of heaven, a mighty host, aspired to shake the throne of the Highest. Their catastrophe has engraved on the walls of the celestial city and on the vaults of hell a lesson lasting as eternity. God’s impassibility to coerced suffering is a plain and palpable principle of natural religion, resulting inevitably from his attributes of infinite knowledge, infinite wisdom, and infinite power.

But as we enter the sphere of voluntary suffering, the question assumes a new and very different aspect. We are, indeed, still met at the threshold with the ever-present hypothesis, “God is impassible.” But upon what authority do its adherents apply their standing axiom to the suffering of one of the persons of the Trinity, emanating from his own free volition and sovereign choice? They hold the affirmative of their hypothesis. The rules of evidence, matured and sanctioned by the wisdom of ages, devolve on them the burden of proof. To the living alone can we appeal; and from them we solemnly invoke the proof of an hypothesis gratuitously advanced, and which commingles itself with the vital elements of Christian faith. We affectionately point them to the Bible as the only true foundation of a theory seeking to limit the omnipotence of the Godhead. The Bible gives them no favourable response. From Genesis to Revelation, both inclusive, there is not, to our knowledge or belief a passage which intimates, directly or indirectly that persons of the Trinity has not physical and moral ability to suffer, if his suffering is prompted by infinite love and infinite wisdom.

Do the advocates of the hypothesis of the divine impassibility appeal to the Areopagus of human reason, that proud tribunal, to which even the heathen gods were said to have referred their controversies? We respectfully, yet confidently, meet them there. From none of the physical attributes of the Deity can human reason legitimately draw her bold inference, that one of the persons of the Trinity, to whom “all things are possible,” may not, in the plenitude of his omnipotence, become the recipient of voluntary suffering. God indeed is a Spirit; but that a spirit can suffer is fearfully demonstrated in the history of the universe.

Is the inability of a person of the Trinity to suffer, when, in his benignant, and wise, and infinite discretion he elects to become a Sufferer, to be deduced from any of the moral attributes of the Deity? It is indeed a blessed truth, that God will not transcend any of the holy elements which constitute his august being. It is revealed to us that he cannot violate the awful sanctity of his truth. That he can do no other wrong, is justly to be inferred from his own Sacred Oracles. His causeless suffering might, therefore, exceed perhaps even the limits of his omnipotence. He is ever moved by that benevolence, which forms a ruling element of his nature, to elevate, to the highest practicable point, the general happiness of the universe. Of that universe he is himself the soul; the infinite, to which all creation is but the finite. His needless suffering, then, would unspeakably subtractsubstract from the totality of universal bliss, and might thus transcend the immutable limits of his moral being.

But if one of the persons of the Trinity elects voluntarily to suffer for some adequate cause; some cause deeply affecting the happiness of the universe; some cause intimately connected with the glory of those who sit upon the throne; some cause sanctioned in the conclave of the Highest; some cause worthy to move a God: dare human reason interpose her puny veto against the mighty resolution? Would reasoning pride scale the highest heavens, and, standing at the entrance of the divine pavilion, proclaim, in the hearing of astonished cherubim and seraphim, that Omnipotence lacks physical or moral ability to become the willing recipient of suffering, prompted by its own ineffable love, and sanctioned by its own unerring wisdom?

God is not mere Intellect. He has a heart as well as understanding; he has volitions, desires, sympathies, emotions. “God is love.” To sinful passions his bosom is, indeed, inaccessible; but it overflows to infinitude with all those holy sensibilities which he breathed into innocent man with the breath of life. How can reason contemplate such a Being, and yet, without scriptural authority, deny to him the capacity of suffering, even from his own free and almighty choice? Perhaps it might be laid down as a self-evident truism, that the capacity to suffer necessarily results from the capacity to enjoy. The ability of a person of the Trinity to become the voluntary recipient of short-lived suffering may, for aught that speculative pride can urge to the contrary, have been, in the history of eternity, an element not less conducive than his omnipotence, to the prosperity of the universe and the glory of the Godhead.

On the abstract question of the capacity of the divine nature to suffer of its own free volition, we would not, for ourselves, have ventured gratuitously to speculate. Upon a theme so lofty and so holy, we should have chosen to preserve a profound and reverent silence. But when we find it, as we suppose, recorded in the Sacred Oracles, that the second person of the Godhead actually suffered for the redemption of our fallen race; when our credence to that august truth is interdicted by the hypothesis, “God is impassible,” with a voice of power heard, and echoed, and reverberated along the track of ages; when that hypothesis, to retain its own claim to infallibility, must change into figures of speech some of the plainest declarations of Holy Writ, it becomes the right and the duty even of a private Christian to explore respectfully, yet fearlessly, the foundations of a dogma deeply fortified, it is true, in human authority, and hallowed by the lapse of hoary-headed Time, yet scarcely claiming to repose itself on the basis of Revelation.

That the Son of God should have suffered in his divine nature for the redemption of man is not more startling to human reason than the stupendous fact of his incarnation. If, at the time of the first manifestation of divinity in the flesh, the angel of the Lord, instead of announcing the event to the humble shepherds of Bethlehem, had appeared in the midst of an assemblage of Athenian philosophers, made up from the schools of Zeno, Aristotle, and Epicurus, proclaiming to them the “good tidings of great joy,” and benignly expounding the spirituality, the ethereal nature, and all the infinite attributes of him who had formed the worlds and was now cradled in a manger, the incarnation of such a being for the remission of mortal sins must have seemed “unto the Greeks foolishness.” The heavenly envoy would have been held “to be a setter forth of strange gods.”—-Acts, 17. 18. Philosophic incredulity would have treated as a fable of mythology the mysterious message of grace. Peripatetic subtilty might boldly have sought to scan the spiritual anatomy of the revealed God, and dared to pronounce its vain decree, that the holy enigma of his incarnation was a physical or moral impossibility. Yet, if there is demonstration on earth, or truth in heaven, the Son of God, the second person of the glorious Trinity, did, in very fact, become incarnate for the redemption of man.

We have promised to notice the brief argument of Bishop Pearson on the divine impassibility. That we may be sure to do him justice, we give the substantial parts of his remarks in his own words. He says:

“The divine nature is of infinite and eternal happiness, never to be disturbed by the least degree of infelicity, and therefore subject to no sense of misery. Wherefore, while we profess that the Son of God did suffer for us, we must so far explain our assertion as to deny that the divine nature of our Saviour suffered; for, seeing the divine nature of the Son is common to the Father and the Spirit, if that had been the subject of his passion, then must the Father and the Spirit have suffered. Wherefore, as we ascribe the passion to the Son alone, so must we attribute it to that nature which is his alone, that is, the human. And then neither the Father nor the Spirit appears to suffer, because neither the Father nor the Spirit, but the Son alone, is man, and so capable of suffering. Whereas, then, the humanity of Christ consisted of a soul and body, these were the proper subject of his passion; nor could he suffer anything but in both, or either of these two.”

“Far be it, therefore, from us to think that the Deity, which is immutable, could suffer; which only hath immortality, could die. The conjunction with humanity could put no imperfection upon the divinity, nor can that infinite nature, by any external acquisitionacqisition, be any way changed in its intrinsical and essential perfections. If the bright rays of the sun are thought to insinuate into the most noisome bodies without any pollution of themselves, how can that spiritual essence contract the least infirmity by any union with humanity? We must neither harbour so low an estimation of the divine nature as to conceive it capable of any diminution, nor so mean esteem of the essence of the Word as to imagine it subject to the sufferings of the flesh he took, nor yet so groundless an estimation of the great mystery of the incarnation as to make the properties of one nature mix in confusion with another.”²²Peterson on the Creed, p. 311, 312, and 313.

It will be perceived that Bishop Pearson’s first ground of argument is, that the divine nature of the Son of God being common to the Father and the Holy Spirit, if the Son suffered in his divine nature, then the Father and the Spirit must have suffered. It is an inflexible rule in the science of logic than if an argument proves too much, it proves nothing. Its proving too much is an infallible sign that it is intrinsically and radically erroneous. The whole argument is condemned. Now the fatal disease of the argument under consideration is, that it proves too much. It touches even the holy incarnation itself. Test the argument, by applying it to the incarnation instead of the suffering of the Son. The argument, thus applied, would stand thus: The divine nature of the Son is common to the Father and the Spirit. If, therefore, the divine nature of the Son had become incarnate, then must the Father and Spirit have become incarnate also. But we learn from the Bible that neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit became incarnate. The argument, if it proves anything, would, therefore, prove that the incarnation of the blessed Son was but a fiction. Thus the corner-stone of our faith would be removed from its place. Samson pulled down the temple of the Philistines. The learned and pious prelate would unwittingly demolish, if his lever was indeed the resistless lever of truth, that holy temple “not made with hands,” whose glorious walls are founded on the incarnation of the Son of God, and cemented by his most precious blood.

Peterson on the Creed, p. 311, 312, and 313.

The second ground of argument adopted by Bishop Pearson is, that the imputation of possibility to the divine nature would imply its “imperfection” and “infirmity.” This would indeed be true, if it sought to expose the divine nature to involuntary or coerced suffering. But the supposition that one of the persons of the Trinity can suffer voluntarily, and for an adequate cause, argues no “imperfection” or “infirmity” in the divine nature; on the contrary, it relieves the divine nature from the “imperfection” and “infirmity” which the hypothesis of our opponents would cast upon it. Their hypothesis says that neither of the persons of the Trinity can in any case suffer. He cannot suffer even from his own spontaneous choice and free volition. He cannot suffer, however strongly infinite wisdom and infinite love might urge his suffering. If the universe was threatened with ruin, he could not suffer to save it, for his suffering would be interdicted by the fixed and unbending laws of his being. And would not such an incapacity to suffer imply “imperfection” and “infirmity” in the divine nature? It is our opponents, then, and not we, who would attach to the divine nature this “imperfection” and “infirmity.” It is they, and not we, who would thus hamper Omnipotence by fetters made in the forges of earth.

The supposition that the imputation of voluntary possibility to the divine nature would imply its “perfection” and “infirmity” rests not on the eternal granite of the Bible. If its living advocates claim for it a foundation there, let them point to the sustaining verse or chapter. If they rely for its sole support on human argument, we would remind them, in all respect and kindness, that reason in its speculations on the unrevealed attributes of the Godhead, but

“Leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.”

It is true that suffering, when predicated of fallen man, implies “imperfection” and “infirmity;” because in him it is the progeny of transgression, personal or ancestral. Man suffers because man has sinned. Sin is a compound of imperfections and infirmities; and the character of the parent descends to the unhappy offspring. Hence has originated the supposition, so deeply and widely rooted, that suffering implies “imperfection” and “infirmity.”

But no such implication can attach to the vicarious suffering of a sinless being. Should Gabriel become the recipient of voluntary pangs for some object of benevolent and high import, approved and commended by the Sacred Three, would reason, in all her arrogance, presume to draw, and record as an axiom in her faith, the bold conclusion that the magnanimous endurance implied “imperfection” and, “infirmity” in the angelic nature? Would not the devoted act of celestial piety afford a new development of the holiness and elevation of heaven’s ministering spirits, and exalt to a higher point our affectionate admiration of him who, perhaps more immediately than his fellows, stands “in the presence of God?” That innocence pure as that of the angels has capacity to suffer, is demonstrated by the sinless wailings heard from Gethsemane and from Calvary.