"Passibility" means the capacity or ability for feeling. It would include things that have to do with emotion or affection. In the Christian doctrine, what is connected to passibility is the idea of suffering. Human beings live in a fallen world and we suffer. Life is uncertain here and we are reactionary in our emotions. For example, if you buy a brand new car, you are happy in that moment and experience a certain emotion. But if you crash that car as you drive it off of the car lot, you now have a different emotion because your circumstances have changed. This is passibility.

Impassibility is a negation word. It negates passibility.

Theologians have talked about the impassibility of God connected with His immutability: God does not change. We creatures always change, but our Creator does not. However, there is a conundrum. Even though God is immutable, scripture also reveals things to us about the emotional or affectionate side of God. God is love and has joy. How do you consider both?

The best way for us to understand this is to see the difference between creatures and the One who has created all creatures. God is not moved by circumstances like we are. Nothing takes Him by surprised. The comfort is that although God has revealed Himself as an emotional being, His emotions are not subject to circumstances, but are always in their perfection. What a comforting thought!

Well, before we do that, maybe we should think about the word passable or passability. That word has the idea or the connotation of the capacity or the ability for feeling. It would also include things that have to do with emotion or affection. And primarily in Christian doctrine, what's connected to passability is the idea of suffering. That human beings, we certainly live in a fallen world and we suffer, we have emotions, we have different things that we experience that jade our experience in life.

And you know life is uncertain here. Many different scenarios and circumstances can happen and so we're reactionary as it were in our emotions. So for example if we go down to the car lot and we buy a brand new car we're happy in that moment and we have a certain emotion that we experience but then say 15 minutes later you're driving down the road and you crash the car into a tree, now there's certainly a different emotion that's taking place in that moment because your circumstance has changed. So that's somewhat of a passability, the ability to feel, the ability to have emotions. So if we add em, the beginning of the word as we started out, if we speak of impassibility, that's a negation word.

It negates passibility. So theologians have talked about the impassibility of God in the sense that it hinges upon another attribute of God, which would be His immutability. And so when we speak of the immutability of God, we're talking about the fact that God doesn't change. Creatures, we are creatures, and so we are mutable. We're always changing.

That's the difference between our being, which is derived from God's being. And so scripture speaks of the immutability of God. And so we have a bit of a dilemma or a conundrum because when you go to the scriptures, what you find is that even though God is immutable, scripture also reveals things to us about the emotional side of God or the affectionate side of God. So scripture teaches us that God is love, that there's joy, as it were, even in the Godhead. So the question is, how do you square that?

How do you square impassibility, or the emotions of God, with the immutability of God? How do you look at impassibility and immutability together? If you say that God has emotions, how can you speak of the impassibility of God? So it's a bit of a dilemma, a bit of a conundrum. And it's a deep thing.

Theologians have wrestled with that for a long time. And I think the best way for us to understand it, and the reason that theologians would say and speak of the impassibility of God is because they're protecting or they're upholding the immutability of God. So how do we square that? How do we think about it? I think the best way to think of it is to see the difference between creatures and the one who has created all creatures.

So God doesn't change, we change. God, the comfort of this doctrine of the impassibility of God is that God is not moved by circumstances like we are. Nothing takes God by surprise. God isn't one moment having one emotion that is then changed by some circumstance like we are. That's certainly a mark of creatureliness that we change in our emotions given the circumstance that comes upon us.

So the comfort is that although we uphold the truth that God has revealed himself as an emotional being, his emotions are not subject to circumstance. They're always in their perfection. They're always in their infinitude as it were. God's emotion is always the perfect emotion for the given scenario. From our perspective, it's always perfect.

And what a comforting thing to think that we have a God that does not change. Although we change, God does not. God is our rock. God is our fortress. You