Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) on God’s Will of Decree and Will of Precept, His Love, and His Emotion

71. What do we understand, respectively, by the will of decree and the will of precept?

The will of decree is God’s free determination of all that will come to pass and how it will occur. The will of precept is the rule laid down by God for rational beings to direct their conduct accordingly.

72. What difficulty does this distinction cause?

Many things that God forbids occur, and many things that He commands do not occur. Therefore, the will of decree and the will of precept seem to directly oppose each other.

73. Can all attempts to remove this difficulty be considered successful?

a) Some have denied that the existing will has the character of a will, and they wish to degrade it to merely a prescription. One must observe, however, that in God’s prescriptions His holy nature speaks and that in fact they are founded upon a strong desire in God. More precisely, the problem here is this: How can there be two desires in God, one that wills the good and abhors the evil, and one that leaves the good unrealized and permits the evil to appear?

Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, trans. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., 4 vols. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–2014), 1:23. Clark is an example of what Vos is referring to: “It would be conducive to clarity if the term will were not applied to the precepts. Call the requirements of morality commands, precepts, or laws; and reserve the term will for the divine decree. These are two different things, and what looks like an opposition between them is not a self-contradiction.” See Gordon H. Clark, Religion, Reason, and Revelation (Hobbs, NM: The Trinity Foundation, 1995), 222–223. For a refutation of this position in earlier theologians, see John Howe on God's Will (Voluntas Beneplaciti, et Signi).

93. In what ways does God reveal His love ward His creatures?

By (a) His goodness; (b) His grace; (c) His lovingkindness; (d) His mercy or compassion; (e) His longsuffering.

94. What is God’s goodness and what is it sometimes called?

It is His love toward personal and sentient creatures in general and can also be called Amor Dei generalis, “God’s general love.”

Ibid., 28. Notice the interconnection between Vos’ idea of divine love with God’s goodness, grace, mercy, compassion, and longsuffering. All of these things are expressions of divine love for Vos, even in a general sense.

98. What is God’s lovingkindness?

The love of God insofar as it, as a special tenderness, seeks to lead the sinner to conversion. [Vos references Rom. 2:4, among other passages.]

Ibid., 29. Not only is divine love connected to goodness, grace, mercy, compassion, and longsuffering, it is God’s “special tenderness” that “seeks to lead the sinner to conversion.”

119. Is there emotion or feeling in God?

Not in the sense of an intense transitory movement of emotion, something passive, whereby the will retreats into the background (compare affectus from afficere, “to be affected”). Certainly, however, in the sense of an inner divine satisfaction that accompanies the energetic expression of His will and His power and His understanding.

Ibid., 35. Vos seems to think that there is emotion or feeling in God, but “Not in the sense of an intense transitory movement of emotion,” or “something passive,” such as is in the creature, as if His will retreats into the background so that He is passively affected by that outside of Himself.

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Robert L. Reymond’s (1932–2013) Qualification on God’s Immutability and Impassibility

Classical theists have sometimes represented God’s immutability in such a sense that they have portrayed him as being virtually frozen in timeless immobility and impassibility. They reason that any movement or feeling on his part such as anger, joy, or grief must either improve his condition or detract from it. But since neither is possible for a perfect being, he remains, to use James I. Packer’s characterization of this position, in an ‘eternally frozen pose’⁸ as immobile and impassible, that is, inaccessible  to and incapable of feelings or emotions.

But this is not the Bible’s description of God. The God of the Bible is constantly acting into and reacting to the human condition. In no sense is the God of Scripture insulated or detached from, unconcerned with, or insensitive and indifferent to the joys and miseries of fallen mankind. Everywhere the Bible depicts him both as one who registers grief and sorrow over and displeasure and wrath against man’s sin, and as one who in compassion and love has taken effective steps in Jesus Christ to reverse the misery of his elect and even the rest of mankind to a degree. Everywhere Holy Scripture portrays him as entering deeply into authentic interpersonal relations of love with his people and truly caring about them and their happiness. As W. Norris Clarke states, the biblical God is a ‘religiously available God on the personal level’.⁹

To say then that God is unchangeable or immutable must not be construed to mean that he cannot and does not act. The God of the Bible acts, indeed, acts with passion, on every page of Scripture. In other words, he is not static in his immutability; he is dynamic in his immutability. But his dynamic immutability in no way affects his ‘Goodness’. To the contrary, he would cease to be the God of Scripture if he did not will and act in the ways the Bible ascribes to him. But he always wills and acts, and Isaiah declared, in faithfulness to his decrees: ‘In perfect faithfulness,’ Isaiah sings, ‘you have done marvelous things, things planned long ago’ (25:1). Therefore, Louis Berkhof is correct, in my opinion, when he concludes:

The divine immutability should not be understood as implying immobility, as if there were no movement in God.... The Bible teaches us that God enters into manifold relations with man and, as it were, lives their lives with them. There is change round about Him, change in the relations of men to Him, but there is no change in His being, His attributes, His purpose, His motives of action, or His promises.¹⁰

Thus, as Jürgen Moltmann has most notably contended in our time,¹¹ whenever and wherever God’s impassiblity is interpreted to mean that he is impervious to human pain or incapable of empathizing with human grief we must renounce it and steadfastly distance ourselves from it.¹² For while such is descriptive of Aristotle’s concept of God as ‘thought thinking thought’ and of Buddha, it is in no sense descriptive of the God of Holy Scripture who as a God of infinite love showed his love to suffering humankind by giving his own Son up to the death of the cross.¹³ John R. W. Stott bears testimony to my point here with the following words:

In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And  in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. This is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us.... There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. ‘The cross of Christ ... is God’s ... self-justification in such a world’ as ours.¹⁴

When our Confession of Faith declares then that God is ‘without ... passions’ it means that he has no bodily passions such as the need to satisfy hunger of the desire to fulfill himself sexually. We do however affirm that God is impassible in the sense that the creature cannot inflict suffering, pain, or any sort of distress or discomfort upon God against his will. Insofar as God enters into such experiences, it is always the result of his deliberate voluntary decision. God’s experiences do not come upon him as ours come upon us. Ours come upon us often unforseen, unwilled, unchosen, and forced upon us against our wills. His are foreknown, willed, and chosen by him and are never forced upon him ab extra apart from his determination to accept them. In short, God is never the creature’s unwilling victim. Even when Jesus hung upon the cross his suffering was according to the predeterminate counsel and foreknowledge of God (Acts 2:23). And he himself said, you will recall: ‘No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This ... I received from my Father’ (John 10:18).
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8. J. I. Packer, “Theism for Our Time,” in God Who is Rich in Mercy (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986), 16.
9. W. Norris Clarke, “A New Look at the Immutability of God,” in God, Knowable and Unknowable, edited by Robert J. Roth (New York: Fordham, 1973), 44.
10. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 59.
11. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (London: SCM, 1974).
12. God’s ‘passibility’ pertains to him only at the level of his tri-personhood, not at the level of his essential deity.
13. We will say more about God’s love in the ninth address.
14. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity, 1986), 335–6.

Robert L. Reymond, ‘What is God?’—An Investigation of the Perfections of God’s Nature (Fearn, Ross-shire, UK: Mentor, 2007), 100–103.

By what they have said about his immutability, as a consequence of their understanding of God’s eternality as involving timelessness, classical theists have sometimes portrayed God as One virtually frozen in timeless immobility or inactivity (this is one example of the theological mischief which accrues to the ascription of timelessness to God). These theists correctly argue that since God is a perfect being, he is incapable of any ontological change, since any change must be either for the better or for the worse. He cannot change for the better since he is already perfect, and he cannot change for the worse since that would result in his becoming imperfect. The same holds true, it is incorrectly argued, with regard to any motion or activity on his part. Any movement must either improve his condition or detract from it. But neither is possible for a perfect Deity. Therefore, he remains in an “eternally frozen pose” (Packer’s characterization) as the impassible God. But this is not the biblical description of God. The God of Scripture is constantly acting into and reacting to the human condition. In no sense is he metaphysically insulated or detached from, unconcerned with, or insensitive or indifferent to the condition of fallen men. Everywhere he is depicted both as One who registers grief and sorrow over and displeasure and wrath against sin and its ruinous effects and as One who in compassion and love has taken effective steps in Jesus Christ to reverse the misery of men. Everywhere he is portrayed as One who can and does enter into deep, authentic interpersonal relations of love with his creatures, and as a God who truly cares for his creatures and their happiness. In sum, as W. Norris Clarke declares, God is a “‘religiously available’ Go on a personal level.”⁴¹ To say then that God is unchangeable, that is, “immutable,” must not be construed to mean that he cannot and does not act. The God of the Bible is portrayed as acting on every page of the Bible! He is not static in his immutability; he is dynamic in his immutability. But his dynamic immutability in no way affects his essential nature as God (that is, his “Godness”); to the contrary, he would cease to be the God of Scripture if he did not will and act in the ways the Bible ascribes to him. But he always wills and acts, as Isaiah declared, in faithfulness to his decrees: “In perfect faithfulness you have done marvelous things, things planned long ago” (Isa. 25:1). Berkhof correctly concludes:

The divine immutability should not be understood as implying immobility, as if there is no movement in God. . . . The Bible teaches us that God enters into manifold relations with man and, as it were, lives their life with them. There is change round about Him, change in the relations of men to Him, but there is no change in His being, His attributes, His purpose, His motives of actions, or His promises.⁴²

Thus whenever divine impassibility is interpreted to mean that God is impervious to human pain or incapable of empathizing with human grief it must be roundly denounced and rejected. When the Confession of Faith declares that God is “without . . . passions” it should be understood to mean that God has no bodily passions such as hunger or the human drive for sexual fulfillment. As A. A. Hodge writes: “we deny that the properties of matter, such as bodily parts and passions, belong to him.”⁴³

We do, however, affirm that the creature cannot inflict suffering, pain, or any sort of distress upon him against his will. In this sense God is impassible. J. I. Packer says this well:

Insofar as God enters into experience of that kind, it is by empathy for his creatures and according to his own deliberate decision, not as his creatures’ victim. . . . The thought of God as apathetos, free from all pathos, characterized always by apatheia, 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 insensitivity and indifference to the distresses of a fallen world; not inability or unwillingness to empathize with human pain and grief; but simply that God’s experiences do not come upon him as ours come upon us, for 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. In other words, he is never in reality the victim whom man makes to suffer; even the Son on his cross . . . was suffering by his and the Father’s conscious foreknowledge and choice, and those who made him suffer, however free and guilty their action, were real if unwitting tools of divine wisdom and agents of the divine plan (see Acts 2:23; 1 Pet. 1:20).⁴⁴

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41. Clarke, “A New Look at the Immutability of God,” in God, Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth (New York: Fordham, 1973), 44.
42. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 59.
43. A. A. Hodge, A Commentary on the Confession of Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1869), 73–4.
44. Packer, “Theism for Our Time,” ed. Peter T. O’Brien and David G. Peterson, God Who is Rich in Mercy (Grand Rapids, Mich. Baker, 1986), 7, 16–17.

Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, 2nd ed. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 178–179.

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R. C. Sproul on the Impassibility of God

When we speak of God’s will of disposition, we are quickly confronted with questions raised by the classic doctrine of the impassibility of God. Sometimes the impassibility of God is expressed philosophically in such a way as to describe God as being utterly incapable of feeling. In a desire to protect the immutability of God and to free Him from all passions that would be dependent upon the actions of the creature and to insure the constant and abiding state of pure and total felicity in God, the accent falls on His being feeling-less. This robs God of His personal character and reduces Him to an impersonal force or blob of cosmic energy.

This kind of impassibility makes a mockery of the Biblical revelation of the character of God. It is one thing to insure that God is not subject to mood swings by which His beatific state is disturbed or destroyed or that His passions cause perturbations in His character. However, we must not let a speculative form of impassibility strip God of His personal attributes, especially His attribute of love. We do not need to embrace either the Patripassion heresy (whereby the Father suffers in the death of Christ), or the theopaschatist heresy (whereby the divine nature of Christ suffers and dies on the cross) in order to affirm the reality of affection in God. If there is no feeling in God, there can be no affection in Him. If He has no capacity for affection, He has no capacity for love.

The Bible is filled with references to the feelings of God. Though they may represent anthropomorphic ideas and employ the language of analogy, they are certainly not meaningless. Consider the words of the psalmist:

The Lord is merciful and gracious,
Slow to anger, and abounding in mercy.
He will not always strive with us,
Nor will He keep His anger forever.
He has not dealt with us according to our sins,
Nor punished us according to our iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
So great is His mercy toward those who fear Him;
As far as the east is from the west,
So far has He removed our transgressions from us.
As a father pities his children,
So the Lord pities those who fear Him. (Ps. 103:8–13)

An analogy is used here to describe God’s pity for His people. It is likened to the pity a human father feels for his children. This does not mean there is a direct correspondence between God’s pity and man’s pity. They are not identical but are similar in some way and to some degree. If there is no analogy, then the Biblical statement is both meaningless and worthless. The message that comes through the Scriptures loud and clear is that in some way analogous to human concern and feeling, God cares for us. This truth must never be abandoned to satisfy philosophical speculation.

R. C. Sproul, Loved by God (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2001), 132–134.

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.