And it grieved God at his heart that he had ever made man.
– Genesis 6:6
Jesus wept.
– John 11:35
He who would see clearly, must do so through his tears.
– Hugo Grotius
On Open Theism
“Impassibility” is a doctrine in Christian theology which diminishes or even rejects the idea that God can experience emotion. The word “passion” comes from the same word, and when we speak of the “passion of Christ,” we are recognizing that Christ “felt” something physically and emotionally during His human existence on Earth, especially at the time of His Crucifixion.
The word appears in our Bibles in Acts 1:3 which specifically refers to Christ’s sufferings and death at His Crucifixion as “his passion.”
However, while historic Christianity recognizes the “passibility” of Christ in His humanity, it tends to reject “passibility” in the Deity.
Isaac Newton and his contemporaries have been frequently faulted by Evangelicals for introducing “Deism” as a religious persuasion. Usually, Deism is a label assigned to a “faith” based upon reason, and not on the Bible. Deists do not necessarily reject the Bible, but rather choose to make their decisions based upon science or logical inferences. Deists are not atheists; they believe in a “Higher Power” or “Cosmic Intelligence”; they just do not believe the Bible has any divine or binding power.
The fault does not lie with Newton, however. Deism was more the work of men like Thomas Paine and the German Higher Critics. Newton believed in Divine Providence; he believed the biblical record. Whatever might be said about his physics and the universe as a “wound-up clock,” the bottom line is that he believed that the “laws” of gravity and motion could only be sustained by a supernatural power. He may not have been an adherent of creedal orthodoxy, but he did believe in nature as an abiding manifestation of Divine power. The universe is not autonomous, not even temporarily so.
He was more “Ebionite” and “Semitic” in his biblical interpretations. Secretly rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity as it was traditionally understood, his view of the deity of Christ was more of what we would call today, “Open Theism.”
In general “Open Theism” is a relatively new label assigned to a view which diminishes Divine Foreknowledge, insists upon real moral agency in the human will, and emphasizes the value of the Atonement in its “moral influence” as opposed to a “superstitious” fetish about the physical blood of Christ. In this scheme, it is possible for God to seem surprised and to change His mind.
[There are some unorthodox traditions, such as Mormonism, which try to don the “open theistic” label. However, they are polytheists and are not defenders of the Ecumenical Creeds. True Open Theists still try to embrace the Creeds of historic Christianity. For Mormons, God is always a “becoming” God who is ignorant of His own potentials. That is not what is under discussion here.]
A straw man for hyper-Calvinists, they equate it with “liberal” theology and give no quarter to anyone who deviates from their Confessions. In a form of “word-olatry“ it is not enough to teach from the language of Scripture, as for example from our texts cited above. Their “confessions” control how we interpret Scripture, and thus, become equally divine in their constellation of canonicity. This is what we call “dogma” when human tradition is exalted to equal Scripture.
The Rise of Relational Theology
Newton was a contemporary of Hugo Grotius (Observations, p. 21) and would have been familiar with his “Governmental Theory of the Atonement.” To the world, Grotius is considered the father of international law, but his understanding of the law of nations was first formed by his understanding of God’s moral government.
A more familiar defender of the Governmental View is 19th Century American theologian, Albert Barnes. Best known for his popular commentaries on the Bible, he also wrote a book defending the Governmental Theory of the Atonement (republished by Bethany House circa. 1980). It is through Barnes that most American churchmen came to know the doctrine as one which essentially avoided two extreme views: 1) the humanistic Socinian View (which reduced the value of Christ’s death to that of a mere martyr), then on the other hand, 2) the prevailing church dogma of a mystical value to Christ’s sufferings as a satisfaction of retributive justice.
Barnes, as did Grotius, argued the value of Christ’s Atonement was one which satisfied the demands of public justice by substituting the sufferings of Christ for the sufferings required by retributive justice upon the world for its sin. There was no mystical quantifying of sin and its punishments, with equal values to satisfy an abstract pecuniary obligation. The Atonement had value because it was the sacrificial death of the lawgiver as a vindication of the character of God and His moral government.
Newton’s lengthy discourses on the role of Divine government in his Observations were written with Grotius’ relational values in mind. Grotius and Newton were “relational theologians” with the rule of law (whether human or divine) as the mediator among men. God was not a capricious despot dispensing justice upon a whim. He was ruled by law and so must mankind:
A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason. Hugo Grotius, Goodreads, Internet Source
And on the matter of Open Theism, there is no better quip than this:
Even God cannot make two times two not make four. Ibid
While Grotius was concerned about the impact of church dogma on the administration of justice, Newton was concerned with its impact on understanding science, Bible prophecy and the role of Divine Providence in human history:
The Beasts and Elders [of Revelation] therefore represent the primitive Christians of all nations; and the worship of these Christians in their Churches is here represented under the form of worshipping God and the Lamb in the Temple: God for his benefaction in creating all things, and the Lamb for his benefaction in redeeming us with his blood . . .
Observations on Daniel and the Apocalypse, Anodos Edition, p. 82
Newton’s lexicon of prophetic language, however, does not embrace a mystical or magical view of the blood of Christ, but rather that the
sacrifice of beasts [is put] for the slaughtering and conquering of kingdoms, p. 7
In Newton’s scheme, the “kingdom” of the House of David was symbolically “slaughtered” in Christ’s Crucifixion but restored at His resurrection, as says Methodius when he provides commentary on James’ ecumenical ruling in Acts 15:
For the term “resurrection” is not applied to that which has not fallen, but to that which has fallen and rises again; as when the prophet says, “I will also raise up again the tabernacle of David which has fallen down.” (Amos 9:11)
Methodius, Ante-Nicene Fathers, v. 6, p. 367
After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David…
James in Acts 15:16
Eternal salvation is extended to all mankind who enter this new Ark of safety of a new Covenant with a new mediator. The new Ark is the reconstituted “tabernacle of David” or the new Messianic Kingdom of the Desposyni.
Cosmic Personalism
20th Century Christian apologists (Cornelius Van Til, C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, et al) argued that the philosophical process of excluding a “personal” God from first-cause metaphysics results in the dehumanizing of man. Man can rise no higher than his view of God, and if God is some impersonal, unfeeling deity who cannot be known, then men will treat each other without empathy.
What then do we mean by “cosmic personalism”?
Usually in a colloquial sense, “personalism” is associated with the ability to experience and manifest emotion. Sometimes we associate personalism with a genuine moral freedom and the ability to choose between an array of options.
In contrast “impersonalism” is identified with the machine, automaton, or other artifice which mimics personhood, but is really an unthinking, unfeeling, non-autonomous entity which has no consciousness or ability to interact with other beings of a higher level of existence.
Attempts to describe “God” and His infinite attributes often leave us with inadequate analogies. In modern times, philosophers and Christian apologists have resorted to references to machines, robots, or computers to describe these attributes. These analogies ultimately fail and create distortions in their logical inferences.
Historically, the Church defined deity by unique attributes such as omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and eternal, self-dependent existence. The Trinity was defined by relational titles: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Incarnation was one which tried to avoid the pagan view of half-god, half-man hybrid beings by describing Christ as fully God and fully man: one person uniting two natures.
Calvinist theology argued for an impassible Deity to further remove Christianity from the capricious deities of Greek, Roman, and Nordic mythologies. Unfortunately, it unwittingly became the very foundation of Deism which used Newtonian physics as its justification. For the Calvinist, God does not really “feel” emotions; they are anthropomorphisms. For the Deist, the universe is a “wound-up clock” left to operate autonomously with an absent and disinterested Creator – seemingly the logical result of this Calvinistic view. It must not be forgotten that Isaac Newton was educated at Cambridge during the heyday of Puritan Calvinism. The execution of Servetus by Calvin in Geneva for denying the Trinity was within the living memory of Newton and his contemporaries. It should not surprise us that Newton never took a stand on theological questions during his lifetime and why his associate, William Whiston, scarcely escaped a heresy trial at Cambridge with his life.
But as I said, Newton has been shown to be more an Open Theist than a Deist, a view which is reinforced by his Observations. A true Deist would not have any interest at all in the prophecies of the Bible.
Newton believed in Divine Providence: that the universe and human history are guided by an unseen Divine activity which produce the results we see in nature and in human nature. But unlike the Calvinists, he had a Semitic view of the Divine nature: God could feel and react to the secondary causation of human choices. How God could choreograph human history – the summation of the choices of free moral agents – and yet achieve the results predicted in Scripture: that was the stuff which inspired awe in Newton’s world view.
In one sense, the use of “anthropomorphisms” are limited analogies. That God “repented that he had ever made man” is a Semitism which isolates an imperative in human history: God anticipating and reacting to a crisis in his creation.
We must remember what purpose our “emotions” or “feelings” serve. They are a positive/negative feedback loop to aid finite creatures in forming a system of values which conform to reality. We experience this feedback sequentially while God experiences it all at once and has so for all of eternity. What this should mean is that God experiences these emotions but differently than does His creation.
For example, He does not experience humor as C.S. Lewis defined it, “as the sudden perception of an incongruity.” There is nothing “sudden” for God, nor is there anything “incongruous” because He sees the outcome of all possibilities and has already anticipated each with the appropriate response.
We see this in our reactions to an old, worn-out joke. Many years ago I light-heartedly jested with the grocery clerk who was late in her pregnancy: “Looks like you swallowed a watermelon”; to which she retorted: “I hear that one every day.” For me, it was a funny quip; for her, it was a boring, predictable, even annoying jest.
God experiences joy, sadness, and all human emotions, not precipitously (as it might be for humans), but as part of an eternal feedback loop which constitutes the infinity of His personhood. Does this make God impersonal? Or does it rather make Him “transpersonal”?
The anthropomorphism of a “grieving” God is not answered by the doctrine of impassibility. It is answered by the Incarnation. God is not a closed-circuit computer somewhere in the sky, but a being who fully comprehends the human condition because He created it and provides for its redemption in the new creation of “the Word made flesh.” We cannot “break God’s heart” for He is complete within Himself. The work of the Incarnation and Atonement is as much a demonstration of how God deals with grief, as it was in sparing Noah “who found grace in the eyes of the LORD.”
“Grief,” as with any other emotion, need not be a thing which becomes a finality, the unrecoverable “sudden stop.” It becomes the next stepping stone in human action as we participate with God in the dynamic movement of life.
— JWS, 5/4/25
