How Classical Theology Counteracts Failings of Contemporary Culture

Note: From, Classical Theology for the Modern Mind (Crossway, 2026). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.

So far we have addressed the historical and ecclesiastical importance of classical theology. But what of its pastoral usefulness? We noted earlier that the therapeutic ethos of our age is not conducive to the priority that classical theology gives to the doctrine of God, nor to its somewhat abstract and alien terminology. But while we may disparage the therapeutic excesses of our day, it is very clear that the Bible itself addresses many existential and experiential issues – despair, loneliness, anxiety and many other dark elements that characterize life in a fallen world.

Suffering, Solidarity and Impassibility

In this context, aspects of classical theology do not seem at first glance to be helpful. For example, the idea that God is immutable and impassible summons up the image of a deity who does not care for his creatures and is instead cold and indifferent to them, even in their suffering. This point is made with some poignancy by Thomas Weinandy in the preface to his book Does God Suffer? There he comments that the major difficulty he faced in defending the classical theist position on impassibility was the fact of Auschwitz. The word Auschwitz is inseparable from thoughts of the intentional mass destruction of human lives. Auschwitz is also given profound theological significance by Jürgen Moltmann in his book The Crucified God, in which he quotes the famous passage from Elie Wiesel’s (1928-2016) Night where a young boy is hanged in the camp and takes a long time to die. One of the inmates forced to witness the execution cries, “Where is God?” Another inmate responds that God is there, suffering with the boy on the gallows. This gave Moltmann his cue for restructuring his understanding of God as Trinity in a manner that placed divine suffering at its center. In so doing, he was not the first to argue for a passible God – that was commonplace among theologians from the nineteenth century onward – but he did articulate the idea in a way that came to be very influential across the theological spectrum, even among evangelicals.

Divine mutability and passibility have a plausibility to them. The Bible applies language of change and suffering to God without any hint that this is awkward or complicated. And ours is a therapeutic age impatient with human suffering not simply of the horrific kind represented by Auschwitz but even of the comparatively trivial kind represented by personal discomfort. In our context, therefore, the tendency to take the biblical language of divine change and suffering literally is therefore very powerful. Ours is a day when we find encouragement in knowing that others feel for us and stand in solidarity with us in our sufferings. This longing can be at the serious level of an Auschwitz, in which having a God who has himself been brutally and wickedly slain provides comfort, or at the comparatively trivial level of people struggling with anxiety who want a God who will put his metaphorical arm around their shoulder and reassure them. In both cases, the notion of a God who knows what it is like to go through our negative experiences seems to be a most compelling and attractive idea.

Nonetheless, the great adherents of the classical doctrine of God from the early fathers to the post-Reformation Orthodox were all well aware of the biblical language of divine change and passibility. They also lived in ages marked by suffering beyond that which is typical today – given, for example, their lack of modern medicine. Yet they all rejected a literal reading of such biblical language and found it quite possible to understand it in terms consistent with their doctrine of God as simple, immutable and impassible. Clearly, orthodox pastors considered the God of the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 2, to be a pastorally kind and good God.

Suffering in Light of Classical Theology

The God of classical theism remains a pastorally useful God. This is clear from the work of J. Todd Billings, a Reformed theologian who has himself received a terminal cancer diagnosis. He has used this personal circumstance as an opportunity to weave together both the experience of pain and suffering, physical and spiritual, that illness brings, and a rich, orthodox understanding of God as impassible and immutable. Here is what he says about this great God in an article that is both personal testimony and a critique of Moltmann’s passibilism:

In the hospital, I didn’t need just solidarity in my suffering. I needed to know that God’s covenant love is so steady and powerful that, in Christ, suffering and death lose their dominion over my life. This God does not need suffering and death in order to be God; instead, in the love that accords perfectly with his covenantal promises, God becomes incarnate as the Pioneer, our Brother, the great High Priest who in his humanity is able to “sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15). This is not “a deep division in God himself.” This is steadfast, trustworthy love. [J. Todd Billings, “Undying Love,” First Things, December 1, 2014]

Billings makes it clear that when he is suffering, he does not need a God who suffers too. An analogy might be that of visiting the doctor’s office. If we receive a serious diagnosis, we are helped not so much by the physician telling us that he too suffers from the same illness but from him saying that he understands our condition and has the knowledge and the skills to treat it. So it is with God: Faced with the evils that accompany our fallen human condition in this fallen world, we need to know that God has both the ability and the intention to deal with them all and bring us safely home to himself. That sovereign power and goodness are precisely what classical Christian theology articulates and promotes.

But, one might respond, does the Bible not set forth as of vital pastoral and existential significance that God was tempted in every way as we are yet without sin? Again, Billings draws attention to this point in the above passage. It is in the person of Christ that such a statement finds its reality. And once again, this issue is dealt with in classical theology, this time in the Christology that emerged in the fifth century in the wake of the establishment of Nicene orthodoxy as normative. The statement “The second person of the Trinity suffered in his human nature” is perfectly orthodox, given that the human nature has personhood (hypostasis) only from its union with the divine. Thus, classical theology has no difficulty in affirming that Christ feels for us in our struggles and knows what it is like to be made of frail human flesh. What classical theology will not concede is that this experiential knowledge requires a God who is himself as Godsubject to these things. So God knows what it is like to suffer an unjust and agonizing death on the cross, but at no point does that require him to relinquish his deity or his sovereignty. God remained the all-powerful, unchanging God even as he hung on the cross. And we can be fully confident in our approach to him through Christ because, yes, he knows how we feel but also because he has the power to deal with our fallen condition and all its concomitants in a decisive and comprehensive manner.

I suspect that the real problem many have is not classical theology but the misapprehension of what classical theology claims when it speaks of immutability and impassibility. Those terms carry popular connotations of coldness and distance. When thinking of them, we perhaps naturally tend to imagine something akin to a hard rock or a piece of ice. But these things are inappropriate as analogies for that which the classical attributes express. In classical theology, God is not immutable because he has less life than a human being, as does a rock or an ice cube. He is immutable because he possesses life in such abundance that no further life or being can be added to him. To use Thomas Aquinas’s terminology, his existence is his essence. As the divine name states, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). The immutable, impassible God can help Billings and all who suffer and die (which is every single one of us) because he is life in absolute, infinite abundance. For him to be less than that – for him to be, for example, the God of Moltmann – may give him a specious, short-term therapeutic appeal, but in the long run, it renders him a disaster, useless where it really counts.

Carl Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies, Grove City College