It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Moltmann's dismissal of the axiom of divine impassibility for his theological project. In fact the way he develops his doctrine of God, beginning with The Crucified God, the impassibilist alternative, or more generally the God of ‘classical theism’, is the juxtaposition to Moltmann's evolving project. His trinitarianism, his christology, even his pneumatology, rest on the way he characterises past conceptualities, and his narration of the matter attempts to set up his account as a more feasible and faithful representation of who God is and how he relates to his creation.

Is Moltmann's depiction of the God of ‘classical theism’ accurate? Is his dismissal of divine impassibility justified? What consequences and/or possibilities exist for his theological project once he establishes the problematic as being a choice between passibilist and impassibilist alternatives? These are some of the questions which will guide the subsequent sections of this article. What should become clear is that Moltmann's historical and theological assessment of divine impassibility is a caricature which helps him move on with his own proposals, ones that create significant problems of their own for the theological task.

Detailing a straw-man

When Moltmann begins to consider the doctrine of God in The Crucified God and subsequently in The Trinity and the Kingdom, it is surprising how often one finds Moltmann attacking the notion of God's apatheia. What kind of threat would an ancient notion such as God's impassibility pose to a contemporary theology? Why, of all the characteristics usually associated with the tradition of Hellenistic metaphysical discourse (including immutability, aseity, omniscience, omnipotence, etc.), would Moltmann choose to highlight impassibility as the straw-man for his doctrine of God? One suspects that a number of factors are at work, including deeply personal ones,Footnote ¹ but the matter is perhaps best understood when one considers a very basic claim which is at the forefront of Moltmann's theological project, namely that the question of God and the question of suffering are intimately linked, perhaps one and the same.Footnote ² Such a move not only reflects the mood of the times in our post-Holocaust context, but it also shows the degree to which suffering has gained a foothold, perhaps a non-negotiable space, in theological reflection.

Naturally, the theme of suffering has not always retained such an exalted position, for the ancients were able to speak quite favourably of divine impassibility as an attribute to be expected of divinity. Ignatius of Antioch, despite his time and place as an apostolic father who could not benefit from the achievements of the conciliar age, explicitly made use of (im)passibilist language in a dialectical fashion, stating in effect that impassibility could mark the Son's condition both prior to the incarnation and after the resurrection, while his humiliation certainly admitted of suffering.Footnote ³ In Ignatius one finds the beginnings of a trajectory of appropriation which was characteristic of some of the more influential voices within the history of Christian thought. When one surveys the historical Christian witness, one can see that divine impassibility was a tenet held by both East and West throughout the first five centuries of emerging orthodoxy and beyond.

Moderns, however, have bypassed the details of this usage through a sweeping narration which begins with the incontrovertible fact that divine impassibility is a technical phrase associated with Hellenistic discourse. Because of its metaphysical origins, divine impassibility is caricatured as a heretical importation of an alien discourse into Christian theological reflection. This view is a generalisation promulgated throughout academe today, and its widespread acceptance has propelled Paul L. Gavrilyuk to entitle it: the ‘Theory of Theology's Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy’.Footnote ⁴ Essentially, the theory states that early Christian theology, in appropriating Hellenistic categories, gave up important features of the biblical witness; the field was co-opted into accepting various understandings as they existed within the culture at large, including the notion of immutability and its subcategory of impassibility. Contrary to the God of Israel who ‘laments’ and ‘repents’ and to the God-man Jesus Christ who suffered and died, this narration assesses that the fathers could only have maintained divine impassibility because their God was Aristotle's Unmoved Mover and not the God of Christian belief.

As widespread as this narrative has been employed, a more formal investigation of the church fathers reveals some important and easily overlooked details. Perhaps the greatest irony in the divine (im)passibility debates is that both orthodox and heretic alike assumed impassibility to be viable within theological discourse.Footnote ⁵ During the agonistic climate of some of the more important controversies in the history of Christianity, divine impassibility itself was not so much questioned as assumed;Footnote ⁶ however, its scope and application were the determining factors for its subsequent usage within the faith, and in this feature the patristic testimony shows a prevalent tendency to negotiate both impassibility and passibility in ways which would best preserve the logic and significance of God's relationship to the world. The church fathers therefore did not blindly adopt divine impassibility but rather qualified it significantly in order that the truth of God's transcendence could be maintained, even at those moments in which God's immanence in Jesus Christ was at stake.

Moltmann basically maintains the general contours of the argument associated with the ‘Theory of Theology's Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy’. In speaking of the ‘theistic concept of God’ Moltmann can state, ‘Christian theology has adopted this concept of God from philosophical theology down to the present day’, and this conceptuality, when applied to Christ's death on the cross, required the cross to be ‘evacuated’ of deity since ‘by definition God cannot suffer and die’.Footnote ⁷ Moltmann believes the early church's promulgation of the two-natures doctrine of Christ was also a means of negotiating the demands of a philosophically tenable conceptuality and the historical account of Christ's via dolorosa. This attempt is theologically deleterious in Moltmann's opinion since it allowed for people to attribute suffering and death only to the human nature while associating impassibility and immutability with the divine nature.

One of the major faults of the ‘Theory of Theology's Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy’ is that it assumes a uniform ‘fall’ when in fact most of the church fathers negotiated (rather than capitulated to) the prevalent metaphysical tendencies of their times. Moltmann acknowledges these qualifications all too casually when he remarks that ‘only a long history of use in Judaism and Christianity changed the word [apatheia] and provided it with another context of meanings’.Footnote ⁸ He is most generous when he states that ‘God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is “apathetic”.’Footnote ⁹ Despite these moments of judiciousness Moltmann continues the trajectory of the ‘Theory’ because it is a convenient way to establish his own proposals. These reservations aside, Moltmann assumes an erroneous account of divine impassibility's place within Christian theology because it allows him to offer a more compelling account (by today's standards) of God's relationship to suffering.

This groundwork propels Moltmann to proceed in a rather simplistic fashion by offerings sets of what he believes to be mutually exclusive alternatives: the ‘theistic concept of God’ or the God of ‘suffering love’, the ‘old philosophical concept of God’ or ‘the Trinity’, ‘philosophical theology’ or ‘Christian theology’, in short theologia gloriae or theologia crucis. Moltmann's reasoning is that, if one's basis is a God who is pure causality and so immovable, immutable, impassible, and the like, logically one has to exclude suffering from his very being.Footnote ¹⁰ These alternatives and their apparent conclusions rest on a questionable ground of definitional differences which presumes that the words in question have fixed semantic signification when in fact terminological clarity is largely absent in (im)passibilist discussions.Footnote ¹¹ Usually, when one raises terminological differences as a pivotal argument within these debates, the move represents a ‘convenient polemical starting point for the subsequent elaboration of a passibilist position’.Footnote ¹² Moltmann fits this characterisation fairly accurately, especially in his formal and constructive proposals, all the while missing an opportunity to engage the fathers in their own setting and to analyse their usage and the negotiations which they made with their philosophical and cultural context at large.Footnote ¹³

For Moltmann, paradoxical language will not do. Something akin to Cyril's notion of the Son ‘suffering impassibly’ is simply untenable because it is ‘contradictory’ and so precludes a ‘consistent’ doctrine of God from the onset.Footnote ¹⁴ The apophatic tradition is also unhelpful since Moltmann believes nothing of positive value can come from the negation of the negative.Footnote ¹⁵ What Moltmann elects for himself by dismissing these alternatives is an account of God and the world which creates precisely the kind of problems espousers of impassibility in the past have tried to avoid. Essentially, Moltmann fails to advance the status of the issue because he has dismissed key features of the long-standing conversation as it has taken shape thus far.

Trinitarianism as gateway to mythologisation

In interrelating the mystery of suffering with the mystery of God, Moltmann makes a critical move, one which influences the rest of his theological agenda, for the kind of interaction depicted by Moltmann is one in which the irrefutable and self-evident value of suffering determines and constitutes his subsequent doctrine of God. In short, for Moltmann the doctrine of God is an extension of the theodicy question because the latter is open and non-resolvable this side of the eschaton.Footnote ¹⁶ This basic operational premise is what allows him to consider the ‘revolutionary’ possibility of what the cross of Jesus may mean for God and not simply what God has done via the cross of Jesus.Footnote ¹⁷ Moltmann further proposes that human history essentially becomes God's history and that God assumes into his very life the ‘godforsaken’ nature of his creation in an act of ‘solidarity’.Footnote ¹⁸

As appealing as this programme sounds, it is significantly problematic on a number of theological points. If one asks what the cross means for God, then logically one must alter or pass on a notion of the immanent Trinity as classically conceived.Footnote ¹⁹ If human history becomes God's history, then in some sense God ‘needs’ the world. If God assumes the ‘godforsaken’ nature of the world, then essentially ‘God is against God’ at the moment of the crucifixion.Footnote ²⁰ Moltmann maintains all these arguments to the detriment of his project's viability. In abandoning a notion of the immanent Trinity, a move justified by Moltmann since one cannot consider who God is in himself since this act would be sheer speculation, he fails to safeguard God's transcendence prior to the incarnation, thereby paving the way for a ‘panentheism’ which creates a number of concerns, including the status of God's identity apart from the world.Footnote ²¹ Moltmann feels that in a sense God needs the world because of the implicit dependency included in a notion of ‘suffering love’.Footnote ²² And finally, Moltmann wishes to speak of God's absorbing the contradiction of Jesus' suffering,Footnote ²³ a move that runs counter to his explicit renunciation of ‘paradoxical language’ and his preference for a ‘consistent’ doctrine of God.

Perhaps the difficulties surrounding Moltmann's project are best represented when he speaks of the cry of dereliction. For Moltmann these words represent the contradiction of godforsakenness, and in this regard, Jesus echoes all similar cries that went before and have gone after in which individuals too felt abandoned by God. Once again, a generalised notion of suffering trumps Moltmann's doctrine of God: ‘All Christian theology and all Christian life is basically an answer to the question which Jesus asked as he died.’Footnote ²⁴ Moltmann can make this brash suggestion since he fails to integrate at this moment an isolated point he makes elsewhere regarding how suffering can be distinguished on the basis of voluntary and involuntary kinds;Footnote ²⁵ rather than employing this insight, Moltmann wishes to push Jesus' experience at Golgotha as one of victimisation because that is the only way he sees that Jesus can identify himself with other victims, thereby exculpating God from the most formidable critiques of the protest atheist.Footnote ²⁶ One sees Moltmann emphasising the Father as ‘delivering up’ the Son for precisely this effect, a move Moltmann later had to qualify significantly in light of the criticism directed to him by others.Footnote ²⁷

In short, Moltmann finds himself advocating a form of theopaschitism since he has entirely dismissed the possibility of an impassibilist alternative. He takes great pains, however, to distinguish his theopaschitism from patripassianism since the latter carries the stigma of heretical overtones. According to Moltmann, the Father suffers along with the Son but differently in the form of ‘grief’ or ‘sympathy’.Footnote ²⁸ This ‘trinitarian solution’ is itself a misnomer because it operates on the basis of an implicit duality between the Father and the SonFootnote ²⁹ as well as offers little of theological value by suggesting a form of sympathy attributable to the Father.Footnote ³⁰ Not only does this sound like the kind of trinitarian reflection Moltmann decries (i.e. one that delves into the mysteries of the godhead rather than maintaining itself within the economy of divine revelation) but also adds paltry little to notions of redemption and reconciliation which Moltmann all too often de-emphasises and puts to the side in his doctrine of God.

Moltmann's ‘revolution in the concept of God’ turns out to be another work of mythologisation, a detail noted by von Balthasar.Footnote ³¹ In making such a strong link between the cross and the Trinity, stating in Kantian terms that the ‘perception of the trinitarian concept of God is the cross of Jesus’ and ‘the theological concept for the perception of the crucified Christ is the doctrine of the Trinity’,Footnote ³² Moltmann ultimately offers a doctrine of God that is untenable because it is more tragic than biblical. When extensively engaged in conjunction with the Trinity, the identity of the crucified one is questionable in Moltmann's work, and the identity of the Trinity itself appears in disarray, a condition contrary to the ancient principle of opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa.

The misguided quest for consistency

Moltmann's project would have benefited from a patristic construal of divine impassibility in that a certain chastening of theological language would have characterised his project from the very beginning. As John Webster remarks, ‘My fear is that Moltmann has not registered sufficiently that he is making some extraordinarily bold moves by applying to God terms such as “suffering”, “history” or “experience”. It is difficult to escape the impression that Moltmann finds talk of God fundamentally unproblematic.’Footnote ³³ The harmonic quality that divine impassibility could have had when combined with Moltmann's project would have been significant, for Moltmann would have had to be more careful in the ‘free metaphorical constructivism’ which characterises his work.Footnote ³⁴ Divine impassibility would have compelled Moltmann to see more thoroughly how problematic theological language can be (especially across eras and changing philosophical tendencies).

What divine impassibility invites is nothing short of an apophatic counter-testimony to theological constructivism. As Frans Jozef van Beeck remarks, ‘Far from denying God's tenderness and care . . . apatheia serves to give Christian theology the latitude to profess it, and profess it as God's very own in regard to the world and humanity. In this way apatheia helps convey the asymmetry at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian conception of the mysterious relationship between a truly transcendent God and creation.’Footnote ³⁵ Moltmann, on the contrary, derides the apophatic tradition, thereby excluding his project from enjoying the gifts of a venerated theological methodology.

Not only does Moltmann's evaluation of apophaticism depend upon a rushed and unfair consideration, but it also suggests the limits of Moltmann's own method. At the heart of the matter, Moltmann cannot entertain an aesthetic quality to Christian truth claims. In Moltmann's self-proclaimed efforts to be offering a ‘consistent’ view of God, something is missed that defies the apparently desirable characteristic of ‘consistency’. It seems that a casualty of Moltmann's method is the unfathomable mystery that is God. Divine impassibility, by its sheer lack of conformity to today's terminological preferences within God-talk, reminds those who would venture the theological task that it is also a journey which defies humanity's impulse to understand, to explain, in short to master. To term the theological task as one seeking ‘consistency’ is to belie the self-avowal of human capacities to ‘comprehend’, a danger that is especially marked when one attempts to consider the theodicy issue.

Additionally, one senses that Moltmann's methodological starting point for his doctrine of God, namely the cross of Christ, is in itself an inadequate ‘foundation’ for the theological enterprise. Although Moltmann is right to observe that the history of the cross's interpretation has been awry in the ways it has been cast to underwrite the abuse of others, one wonders if Moltmann has improved the matter that much more by granting the cross a ‘mythological’ quality through its fashioning as a starting point for a ‘different kind’ of metaphysics. If Moltmann had located the crucifixion within a narrative of God's history with his people, he could have portrayed the cross as one other instance of God's steadfastness and fidelity to the covenant, attributes which are related to the patristic warrants for maintaining divine impassibility. For the uniqueness that the cross of Christ must elicit for the theological task, it is a concept no more noteworthy than the incarnation or resurrection. In fact, when many of the church fathers spoke of the work of Christ, the tripartite formula of incarnation, humiliation and resurrection maintained both a pious and narrative logic, one that depicted God's work within the economy as an exitus-reditus scheme which affirmed God's prevenience and sovereignty in light of the condition of his fallen creation.Footnote ³⁶

The last point is worth pursuing, for the logic of divine impassibility beckons an account of the value of passio as they relate to God and to human beings. At one point Moltmann is willing to concede that agape was not in the same terminological framework as pathos for the early church,Footnote ³⁷ but his most pressing argument for the dismissal of divine impassibility is the incongruence he believes it has with God's love. In other words, Moltmann is not sufficiently clear with the value he attributes to human passio, and what differences may exist between human passio and a category one could tentatively label divine passio. As with his free metaphorical constructivism, Moltmann demonstrates terminological ambiguity at a moment that creates additional conceptual difficulties.Footnote ³⁸

Had this difference been assessed, the subsequent move of giving an account of humanity's alienation from God would have also been important. Moltmann's terminological ambiguity is a result of his unwillingness to consider the fall in a way that can then renarrate the nature of suffering and its related notion of sin. Moltmann wants to stray from acknowledging the relationship between sin and suffering because of past abuses, but this avoidance comes at what price? Does a missing theological rationale for suffering not complicate the way one narrates God's response to it? With Moltmann's repeated moves of granting an unquestionable dignity to the sufferer, one cannot help but believe, as some of Moltmann's detractors have,Footnote ³⁹ that he naturalises suffering as part of the human, and so creation's, condition.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such a move not only preserves the sufferer's dignity but it also allows Moltmann to keep the theodicy question open and to brush aside hamartiological considerations through God's ‘absorption’ of suffering.Footnote ⁴¹ Without considering these themes, redemption becomes a moot point, and the contribution that divine impassibility could make to a doctrine of God, one which suggests not simply a transcendence but a moral one,Footnote ⁴² is missed.