Impassible passibility

For the church fathers, God’s impassibility was substantial. It mean “that God is the One Nature, simple and uncompounded, that cannot morph, so to say, into some other substance or disintegrate into some more basic elements,” and this involved “freedom from ‘passion,’ in the sense of being overwhelmed by emotions caused or motivated by something external to the self. God is not like Zeus, who gets jealous and spiteful when Hera takes another lover!” (Paul Hinlicky, Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity , 162-3).

Yet according to Hinlicky they interpreted impassibility in a moral direction. To be impassible means that God is “incapable of being diverted or overborne by forces and passions such as commonly hold sway in the creation and among mankind” (163, quoting GL Prestige, God in Patristic Thought ).

Hence the impassible God is the “self-caused or self-motivated creator” and is “full of ‘passion’ in the sense of self-motivated, creative, value-bestowing love.” Thus, Hinlicky argues following Jenson’s lead, the ontological axiom of impassibility is revised and transformed by the gospel.