Frozen in a Perfect Pose? Quotes from J. I. Packer on the Doctrine of God

Monergism.com has several lectures by J .I. Packer available on the subject of the attributes of God. Last night at work I listened to the lecture on immutability and impassibility on my mp3 player. He used an interesting expression and said that we should not think of God as “frozen in a perfect pose.” It’s possible to push those doctrines so far that God seems more like a distant and cold metaphysical iceberg, rather than personal.

Packer elsewhere wrote:

Exit Mystification
In retooling traditional theism for today, we need, secondly, to purge elements of mystification. By “mystification” I mean the idea that some biblical statements about God mislead as they stand, and ought to be explained away. A problem arises from a recurring tendency in orthodox theism to press the legitimate and necessary distinction between what God is in himself and what Scripture says about his relation to us.

To be specific, sometimes God is said to change his mind and to make new decisions as he reacts to human doings. Orthodox theists have insisted that God did not really change his mind, since God is impassible and never a “victim” of his creation. As writes Louis Berkhof, representative of this view, “the change is not in God, but in man and man’s relations to God.”

But to say that is to say that some things that Scripture affirms about God do not mean what they seem to mean, and do mean what they do not seem to mean. That provokes the question: How can these statements be part of the revelation of God when they actually misrepresent and so conceal God? In other words, how may we explain these statements about God’s grief and repentance without seeming to explain them away?

Surely we must accept Barth’s insistence that at every point in his self disclosure God reveals what he essentially is, with no gestures that mystify. And surely we must reject as intolerable any suggestion that God in reality is different at any point from what Scripture makes him appear to be. Scripture was not written to mystify, and therefore we need to ask how we can dispel the contrary impression that the time-honored, orthodox line of explanation leaves.

Three things seem to be called for as means to this end.

First, we need exegetical restraint in handling Scripture’s anthropomorphisms (phrases using human figures to describe God). Anthropomorphism is characteristic of the entire biblical presentation of God. This is so not because God bears man’s image, but because man bears God’s, and hence is capable of understanding God’s testimony to the reasons for his actions. The anthropomorphisms are there to show us why God acted as he did in the biblical story, and how therefore he might act towards us in our own personal stories. But nothing that is said about God’s negative or positive reactions to his creatures is meant to put us in a position where we can tell what it feels like to be God. Our interpretation of the Bible must recognize this.

Second, we need to guard against misunderstanding of God’s changelessness. True to Scripture, this must not be understood as a beautiful pose, eternally frozen, but as the Creator’s moral constancy, his unwavering faithfulness and dependability. God’s changelessness is not a matter of intrinsic immobility, but of moral consistency. God is always in action. He enters into the lives of his creatures. There is change around him and change in the relations of men to him. But, to use the words of Louis Berkhof, “there is no change in his being, his attributes, his purpose, his motives of action, or his promises.” When one conceives of God’s immutability in this biblical way, as a moral quality that is expressed whenever God changes his way of dealing with people for moral reasons, the biblical reference to such change will cease to mystify.

Third, we also need to rethink God’s impassibility. This conception of God represents no single biblical term, but was introduced into Christian theology in the second century. What was it supposed to mean? The historical answer is: Not impassivity, unconcern, and impersonal detachment in face of the creation. Not inability or unwillingness to empathize with human pain and grief, either. It means simply that God’s experiences do not come upon him as ours come upon us. His are foreknown, willed, and chosen by himself, and are not involuntary surprises forced on him from outside, apart from his own decision, in the way that ours regularly are.

This understanding was hinted at earlier, but it is spelled out here because it is so important, and so often missed. Let us be clear: A totally impassive God would be a horror, and not the God of Calvary at all. He might belong in Islam; he has no place in Christianity. If, therefore, we can learn to think of the chosenness of God’s grief and pain as the essence of his impassibility, so-called, we will do well.

J. I. Packer, “What Do You Mean When You Say ‘God’?,” in Pointing to the Pasturelands: Reflections on Evangelicalism, Doctrine, & Culture, Best of Christianity Today (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), 151–53. “The pendulum still swings between Thomist and Barthian extremes, and shows no sign of coming to rest.” Packer, “What Do You Mean When You Say ‘God’,” 148. This material originated from J. I. Packer, “What Do You Mean When You Say ‘God’?,” Christianity Today 30.13 (1986): 27–31. For the same content expanded, see J. I. Packer, “Theism for Our Time,” in God Who is Rich in Mercy: Essays Presented to Dr. D. B. Knox, ed. Peter T. O’Brien and David G. Peterson (Homebush West NSW, AU: Anzea Publishers, 1986), 1–23.

Third, God’s feelings are not beyond his control, as ours often are. Theologians express this by saying that God is impassible. They mean not that he is impassive and unfeeling but that what he feels, like what he does, is a matter of his own deliberate, voluntary choice and is included in the unity of his infinite being. God is never our victim in the sense that we make him suffer where he had not first chosen to suffer. Scriptures expressing the reality of God’s emotions (joy, sorrow, anger, delight, love, hate, etc.) abound, however, and it is a great mistake to forget that God feels—though in a way of necessity that transcends a finite being’s experience of emotion.

J. I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1993), 29.