B. B. Warfield On Divine Passion

By Paul Helm

[Paul Helm is a Teaching Fellow at Regent College, Vancouver. He was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion, King’s College, London, from 1993 to 2000.]

The classic Christian tradition, as well as that of the Reformation, including Calvin, and that of the Westminster Confession, affirms God’s impassibility; God can be said to have feelings, such as penitence, or anger, only figuratively, as Calvin explains in this passage from the Institutes:

What, therefore, does the word ‘repentance’ mean? Surely its meaning is like that of all other modes of speaking that describe God to us in human terms. For because our weakness does not attain to his exalted state, the description of him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him to represent himself to us not as he is in himself, but as he seems to us. Although he is beyond all disturbance of mind, yet he testifies that he is angry towards sinners. Therefore whenever we hear that God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion in him but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our own human experience; because God, whenever he is exercising judgment, exhibits the appearance of one kindled and angered. So we ought not to understand anything else under the word ‘repentance’ than change of action, because men are wont by changing their action to testify that they are displeased with themselves. Therefore, since every change among men is a correction of what displeases them, but that correction arises out of repentance, then by the word ‘repentance’ is meant the fact that God changes with respect to his actions. Meanwhile neither God’s plan nor his will is reversed, nor his volition altered; but what he had from eternity foreseen, approved and decreed, he pursues in uninterrupted tenor, however sudden the variation may appear in men’s eyes.[1]

The Westminster Confession unambiguously asserts that God is “without body, parts or passions.”[2]

In thus affirming the impassibility of God, the tradition is not (of course) denying the goodness of God, and certainly not denying that that goodness is “refracted” in God’s dealings with the creation as anger or mercy (say) nor (as the quotation from Calvin makes clear) that God accommodates himself to his creation as (say) one who changes his mind, or who is surprised. What they are affirming is the immutability of God, of which his impassibility is an aspect.[3]

It is therefore something of a surprise to find that in his article “The Emotional Life of Our Lord” that stalwart upholder of confessional Calvinism, B. B. Warfield, says, “It cannot be assumed beforehand, indeed, that all the emotions attributed to Jesus in the Evangelical narratives are intended to be ascribed to his human soul.”[4] He goes on to recognize, however, that this is the common view, that it is not unnatural, and says:

In the case of a Being whose subjective life is depicted as focusing in two centers of consciousness, we may properly maintain some reserve in ascribing distinctively to one or the other of them mental activities that, so far as their nature is concerned, might properly belong to either. The embarrassment in studying the emotional life of Jesus arising from this cause, however, is more theoretical than practical. Some of the emotions attributed to him in the Evangelical narrative are, in one way or another, expressly assigned to his human soul. Some of them by their very nature assign themselves to his human soul. With reference to the remainder, just because they might equally well be assigned to the one nature or the other, it may be taken for granted that they belong to the human soul, if not exclusively, yet along with the divine Spirit; and they may therefore very properly be used to fill out the picture.[5]

Consistently with this caution, Warfield takes the evidence he cites in the body of the article to “determine the lines on which our conception of the quality of his [i.e., Jesus’] human nature must be filled out.”[6]

Warfield here, then, expresses some reserve about attributing emotion to the divine nature of Jesus Christ, though not disallowing it in principle. And he does this no doubt, not only because of the paucity of the NT evidence for this, but because he has in mind the distinctness of Christ’s human and divine natures characteristic of Chalcedonian Christology. Christ exhibited human emotion, though that emotion never overcame him, for Jesus “kept himself even in his passions in subjection to the will of the Father.”[7]

It is also somewhat surprising that in a sermon, “Imitating the Incarnation,” written about the same time as the article, we find Warfield saying this:

Men tell us that God is, by the very necessity of His nature, incapable of passion, incapable of being moved by inducements from without; that he dwells in holy calm and unchangeable blessedness, untouched by human sufferings or human sorrows for ever.. .. Let us bless our God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love. We have scriptural warrant for believing, as it has been perhaps somewhat inadequately but not misleadingly phrased, that moral heroism has a place within the sphere of the divine nature.[8]

Here there seems to be much less reserve in attributing emotion to God. Warfield goes on:

We decline once for all to subject our whole conception of God to the category of the Absolute, which, as has been truly said,” like Pharaoh’s lean kine, devours all other attributes.” Neither is this an unphilosophical procedure. As has been set forth renewedly by Andrew Seth, “we should be unfaithful to the fundamental principle of the theory of knowledge” “if we did not interpret by means of the highest category within our reach.” “We should be false to ourselves if we denied in God what we recognize as the source of dignity and worth in ourselves.” In order to escape an anthropomorphic God, we must not throw ourselves at the feet of a zoomorphic or an amorphic one.[9]

The argument is this: if God is supremely good, then it is required that we regard him as possessing features that the highest category of things that we are aware of possesses. And since the human personality, with its capacities to think and feel, in which its unique dignity and worth consist, is that highest category (higher, say, than the category of inanimate objects or of non-human animals), then we should not deny these capacities to God.

In his review of the Warfield collection The Person and Work of Christ, in which both the article and the sermon appear, John Murray recognized the strong anti-kenotic, Chalcedonian character of Warfield’s article “The Person of Christ According to the New Testament” (published in 1915) but claimed to see elements of kenoticism in the “Imitating the Incarnation” sermon. He thought that in the sermon Warfield held that Christ divested himself of his equality with God. Perhaps Murray thought that this was the only way to explain Warfield’s avowal of a passionate God. Murray goes on to claim that there is a change in Warfield’s views between the sermon, first published in 1914, and “The Person of Christ According to the New Testament.”[10]

But whether earlier or later, there is not a whiff of kenoticism about Warfield’s position, as Carl Trueman has shown.[11] Warfield affirms the classical Chalcedonian position on the natures of the person of Christ. So we cannot understand the quoted words as if Warfield is advocating a contracted, “emptied” God in incarnation; we cannot suppose that it is Warfield’s view that God, in becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ, leaves aside his impassibility and subjects himself in his divine nature to the vagaries of human emotion. In any case, in the words that we have quoted, Warfield’s emphasis is not on God condescending for the purposes of incarnation, but on the need for us to think of God possessing (no doubt to the highest degree) features that give human beings their dignity and worth.

What Dr. Trueman says about Warfield’s anti-kenoticism is underlined by the fact that as early as 1900, having stressed the naturalness of the human development of Jesus, Warfield adds:

Where danger and evil enter in, is when, in order to realize the completeness of Jesus’ humanity, we begin to attenuate, or put out of view, or even mayhap to push out of recognition his deity For though the Scriptures present Christ as all that man is, and attribute to him the predicable of humanity, they are far from representing him as only what man is, and as possessing nothing that cannot, in one way or another, be predicated of humanity Alongside of these clear declarations and rich indications of his true and complete humanity, there runs an equally pervasive attribution to him of all that belongs to deity.[12]

He then proceeds to affirm the Chalcedonian Christology that Christ is perfect in his humanity and in his deity, subsisting in one person, without conversion, without confusion, eternally and inseparably.[13] So, no kenoticism here either. Warfield affirms the dual natures of Christ in true Chalcedonian fashion. In any case, it is surely implausible to suppose that so sturdy and learned and conservative a Reformed theologian as B. B. Warfield flip-flopped on a matter so central to the faith as the person of Christ.

What are we to say, then, about the decidedly strong language of Warfield in the sermon, seemingly dismissing the standard Reformed doctrine of divine impassibility, of a God “without body, parts or passions”? The question becomes particularly vexing if his language is set against the Westminster tradition of which he was such an accomplished exponent. However, in Warfield’s published work on the Westminster Standards and their applicability to the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is no suggestion that, if these Standards needed modifying, one of the places in which such modification ought to be sought is where the Confession of Faith affirms divine immutability and impassibility.[14] Whatever we may say by way of interpreting Warfield’s language in the sermon, I don’t think we may assume that the words were intended by him to be interpreted in an un-Westminster fashion.

What then? Despite Dr. Trueman’s valiant efforts, it may seem that they are not quite sufficient to acquit Warfield of the charge of inconsistency, though they certainly acquit him of the charge of kenoticism. In Warfield’s article “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” which might be expected to throw light on his view of the issue of God’s relation to emotion, he states, “It belongs to the truth of our Lord’s humanity that he was subject to all sinless human emotions.”[15] Warfield appears (as Trueman demonstrates) to be drawing attention to Christ’s anger in order to make a point about the reality of the divine anger. But what exactly is the argument? Is it, if the incarnate God was angry (as he was), then God as God (in the “very necessity of his nature”) is angry; if the incarnate God was compassionate (as he was) then God as God is compassionate? If so, this argument is of rather doubtful validity. For we are surely unwilling to argue, if the incarnate God sat on the side of the well then God sat on the side of the well. But in fact Trueman suggests a rather different argument:

Warfield’s focus on Christ as fully incarnate, and thus as an emotional being, is so useful in the struggles for biblical orthodoxy because it takes the notion of the wrath of God and makes it a personal category, linking it to the action of a real person in space-time history.[16]

I take it that the nature of this linkage is that the anger of Christ is good evidence, even the best possible evidence, that there is anger at the heart of God. That is, Trueman is saying that Christ’s anger against human sin is evidence for the reality of divine anger against sin, not that God’s anger is in every respect like Jesus’ anger. So God in the very necessity of his nature is not “incapable of passion.” Yet even stated in this way, even this weaker understanding of what Warfield asserts may seem to be at odds with the Confession’s (and the tradition’s) teaching that God is without passions. So what are we to think?

I. Three Suggestions

I propose three suggestions. First, in critiquing the idea of a passionless God, Warfield does not appear to have the classical tradition of Calvin and the Westminster Confession in view, and so is not, at least not directly critiquing that position regarding divine impassibility. Rather he has in mind the (then fashionable) metaphysics of Absolute Idealism. As noted, he says in the sermon, “We decline once for all to subject our whole conception of God to the category of the Absolute.” He has in his sights an idealistic monism in which ultimate reality is impersonal, personality being but an aspect or fragment of a greater whole. This is the sort of position from which Andrew Seth (who later added the surname Pringle-Pattison) distanced himself (even though Seth was a sort of idealist himself).[17] This is the “Andrew Seth” to whom Warfield refers in the sermon. In 1897 in a brief review in the Presbyterian and Reformed Review, Warfield praised Seth’s defense of theism against pantheism and deism in Two Lectures on Theism, lectures delivered at Princeton University and subsequently published, as “notable lectures” and “breezy and illuminating.”[18] However, the quotations from Seth given in the sermon—”We should be unfaithful to the fundamental principle of the theory of knowledge ... if we did not interpret by means of the highest category within our reach,” and “We should be false to ourselves, if we denied in God what we recognize as the source of dignity and worth in ourselves”—are not from Two Lectures on Theism but from Seth’s earlier work, Hegelianism and Personality.[19]

So it is clear, on this interpretation of Warfield’s words, that at least in the first instance what he was warning against was identifying God with the Absolute of the Absolute Idealism of his day. Or at least of that version of the Absolute which was impersonal, totally devoid of personhood, a view that Seth himself opposed in a number of his writings with which Warfield evidently was acquainted. On this view, then, Warfield is doing no more (or less) than upholding the divine personhood. God is ultimate reality, and God is not devoid of personhood as, according to Absolute Idealism, the Absolute is. And he was using Andrew Seth as an ally.

Secondly here is a suggestion that requires a rather stricter interpretation of Warfield’s words. In the language of the sermon Warfield is affirming that in the very necessity of his nature God is capable of passion, of being moved by inducements from without. “Let us bless God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love.” We know from John 3:16 that God loves. Note that Warfield says that God loves, but he does not say, in a parallel way, that God feels. Rather, he implies that God can feel, that he is capable “of being moved by inducements from without.” Moral heroism has a place “within the sphere of the divine nature.” Why this difference of wording? Perhaps because it reflects a distinction in Warfield’s thinking about God as between God as he is essentially, and God as he acts. He is essentially love, and so does love, of necessity. But (according to Warfield’s language) he is capable of being moved by inducements from without (in incarnation, perhaps?). The God-man is someone who feels, who is capable of being moved by inducements from without, as Warfield believes that we see in the stories of Christ in the Temple and Christ at the tomb of Lazarus to which Warfield refers in his article “The Emotional Life of Our Lord” and which he so movingly celebrates there. This view of Warfield would preserve the Trueman interpretation, but at the expense (maybe) of being an interpretation that is too strict and wiredrawn for the words of a sermon to bear.

Thirdly, we may adopt a strict though not extra strict interpretation of his words. If the interpretation just given is too wiredrawn, then here is another. Warfield’s words may be taken as strongly decretal in character. God as God is moved by inducements from without, he delights in them or abhors them, but these inducements (Warfield might have us remember) are themselves present in accordance with God’s decree. They are “without,” and so not a part of God’s essential nature, but they nevertheless are not “over against” God in the onto-logical sense that they have their origin in something other than the decree of God (e.g., in a creaturely libertarian choice, or in some metaphysical dualism), or in the epistemic sense that when they occur they surprise God, who then reacts to them in one of a variety of passionate ways.

II. “Passion At The Heart Of God”

Whatever the value of these arguments, Warfield’s words invite us to think about what a commitment to divine impassibility involves. There are at least two approaches to thinking about divine impassibility. One is the immutability approach, thinking of impassibility as an aspect of immutability. On this view God cannot be changed, in particular he cannot be changed from without. And there is the narrower question that impassibility seems to raise, the question of whether God is capable of feeling.[20] It is this narrower question we shall have in mind in what follows.

Although God is simple, without parts, without division, there is nevertheless a complexity in the mind of God, but this complexity does not depend on something other than him. The classical Christian tradition readily recognizes this. God knows many things and we may think of God’s “feelings” as simply his attitudes to what he knows. What he knows—the details of everything that comes to pass—is present to the divine mind, even though that mind is itself simple, without parts or divisions, immutable and impassible. What could be more complex than the universe, with its unparalleled variety? God knows that complexity. God the Father takes pleasure, no doubt, in the goodness of the various aspects of the creation, and in the incarnation, being well pleased with his beloved Son. And we find in Scripture that among the many things that God knows that he has delight in are a just weight (Prov 11:1), the upright in their way (Prov 11:20), those that deal truly (Prov 12:22), and the prayer of the upright (Prov 15:8); among those things which he has ordained which he hates are a proud look (Prov 6:17), Esau (Mal 1:3), and all workers of iniquity (Ps 5:5).

How are we to understand these attitudes of God? I suggest that it is improper to model these strongly on human feelings, to think of these as we think of human passions or emotions. Although undoubtedly as God has accommodated himself to our human condition in the way that he represents himself as passionate, God cannot really have passions because of the implication, in the use of the word “passion,” that the one who is passionate is overtaken or derailed or blinded by the passion. The passion is an irrational response. That much is surely clear.

However, it is at this point, I suggest, that we take some care, for a person may speak with full control of himself, yet in an impassioned way; and the control he exercises maybe the direct result of his passion. To talk of a scientist’s passion for truth, or a judge’s for justice, may be a way of speaking of the strength of these commitments. In some cases human passion distracts and impairs the reason, while in other cases it intensifies the engagement of the reason. Because of such the impassioned person may think and speak and act with greater care than otherwise. For example, a person maybe so passionate about truth telling that he takes extreme care to speak the truth himself. A detective may be so passionate about solving a crime that he is utterly careful and scrupulous about assembling and weighing the evidence. If God in himself is to be said to be passionate, then this is how it must be with him. We must think of him as essentially impassioned, full of feeling, utterly engaged in the most clear-eyed way possible. In other words, we must not define passion in terms of irrationality, as a misunderstanding or miscalculation of good and evil, as Stoicism is inclined to do.[21]

Can we understand this impassioned life of God a little more? If God is impassioned about something, then he is maximally engaged in ensuring the coming to pass of that thing, and in the effects of that coming to pass on beings other than himself. His being is suffused with this commitment. It is likely that such an understanding of God’s commitment to his creation will not be of much comfort to the current advocates of a “suffering God,” for they readily model the life of God on the life of passionate human beings. But if God is passionate in this sense of being utterly engaged then he is impassioned in the works of creation and redemption in a way and to a degree that completely transcends the vagaries of human passion; impassioned in his regard for truth and goodness. So perhaps we would be nearer the truth if we thought of God not as “having passions” or as a “suffering God” but as being utterly impassioned in all that he does.

If God is full of feeling then does he have feelings? We may, influenced by our touchy-feely culture, think that the answer is obvious. Of course he has. But here again some caution is called for. For we use the term “feeling” to cover not merely mental states, feelings of sympathy or compassion, or of betrayal or alienation, but also feeling arising from changes in our bodies, or even the fact of being embodied. We feel tired, we have aches and pains, scratches and itches, sexual pleasure, we feel cold and heat, the wind and the rain. Is this how it is with God? Clearly not. Furthermore, our mental states, our feelings or emotions, are frequently the result of selfishness and ignorance. If in saying that God feels, or even that God has emotions, we are simply (and carefully) speaking of God’s impassioned attitudes of delighting in, and hating, and loving in the manner sketched above, then clearly the answer must be no: God’s passion is in no way spasmodic, nor does it impair his mind but rather enhances it. But not otherwise.

But what of the incarnation? For many, anxieties about divine impassibility are at their highest in the case of Jesus. They say: Jesus is God, and Jesus suffered, therefore God suffered. The conclusion seems inescapable. But if so, then, as we have seen, it is equally valid to say: Jesus sat on the side of the well, Jesus is God, therefore God sat on the side of the well. Are we not at such points as these faced with the mystery of the incarnation, of the union of the human nature with the person of the Son of God? But must we not say, to avoid absurdity, something such as this: Jesus Christ, being God incarnate, the Mediator, sat on the side of the well, and suffered for our salvation?

How are we to understand the emotional life of our Lord? Are episodes in the life of our Lord—his reaction to the Temple moneychangers, or to the death of Lazarus, for example—cases of God’s emotion made flesh? In a way they are, but not (as Chalcedonian orthodoxy reminds us) in any way that involves the transmutation of the divine emotion into something else. It is God expressing his impassioned love (along with much else that he expresses) in the person of the Son in his assumed human nature. So the emotional life of our Lord is what you get when the second person of the impassioned and impassible God is embodied in human nature. It is an inevitable expression of the divine character in a way conditioned by the necessities of being united to what is human and so localized in time and space.

When Jesus was angry then—no doubt—this is expressive of God’s impassioned anger. Are the instances of “is angry” in ‘Jesus is angry” and “God is angry” univocal? Jesus’ anger occurred at particular times—the death of Lazarus, the cleansing of the Temple; it had a beginning and an end. No doubt the welling up of such anger made Jesus’ heart race. It is human anger in sinless expression. Is God’s anger like that? It would be rash to conclude that it is. It is rather like the different ways in which a French horn and a cello sound out middle C; their sounds have the same value, but they sound somewhat different. The predicates ‘Jesus is angry,” “ God is angry” express emotion that has moral parity. It is sinless anger, necessarily so, but its human expression is conditioned in a way in which the unincarnate divine reality cannot be.

III. Conclusion

We began this article by noting Warfield’s reserve in attributing the accounts of Jesus’ emotions given to us in the Gospels to his divine nature, and we noted how he restricts the value of the evidence that he reviews to determining the lines on which our conception of the quality of Jesus’ human nature must be filled out. But it may be that we can now see a way in which an impassible God can be passionate.

Even if Warfield does not have impassionedness in our sense in mind, nevertheless his words pretty well agree with it. Perhaps we need a new word, or a new family of words, to express the constancy and fullness of God’s emotional life, his feelings.[22] But perhaps more than this, we need to allow ourselves the time to rethink our way back into the older way of thinking about God. Part of this process will involve resisting the pattern of thought that says, either God is simple and impassible, uncaring and unfeeling, or he is an all-too-human God who reacts with human-like passion to what he learns about his creation. There is a “third way”: to recall God’s settled attitudes to what he has ordained to come to pass, the varied ways in which the fullness and goodness of God are refracted in the varied life of his creation, and to see this fullness and goodness supremely refracted in the incarnation, under the all-too-familiar conditions of time and space.

Notes

1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; LCC; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:227 (1.17.13).
2. Westminster Confession of Faith, 2.1.
3. For this point, see Richard A. Muller, The Divine Essence and Attributes (vol. 3 of Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 308.
4. B. B. Warfield, “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” first published in 1912, is reprinted in Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ (ed. S. G. Craig; Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1950), 94. It may be thought that Warfield is making a methodological point rather than a theological point here, saying that in approaching the text of the NT nothing can be ruled out a priori. This may be so. But in view of what follows it is unlikely to be so.
5. Warfield, “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” 95–96.
6. Ibid., 96.
7. Ibid., 142.
8. B. B. Warfield, “Imitating the Incarnation,” in The Saviour of the World (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914), 261.
9. Ibid., 262.
10. John Murray, review of B. B. Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ in Life; Sermons; Reviews (vol. 3 of Collected Writings of John Murray; ed. Iain H. Murray; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982), 360.
11. Carl Trueman, “The Glory of Christ: B. B. Warfield on Jesus of Nazareth,” in The Wages of Spin (Fearn, U.K.: Mentor, 2004), 110–18.
12. Warfield, The Human Development of Jesus, in Benjamin B. Warfield: Selected Shorter Writings (ed. John E. Meeter; 2 vols.; Nutley N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1970–1973), 1:158–66. Note that in 1907 Warfield published The Lord of Glory: A Study of the Designations of Our Lord in the New Testament with Especial Reference to His Deity (London: Hodder & Stoughton). And in “The Twentieth-Century Christ” (1914) he offers a sustained and trenchant critique of kenoticism in all its forms (Warfield, Christology and Criticism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1929]).
13. Warfield, “The Human Development of Jesus,” 165.
14. In his article The Confession of Faith as Revised in 1903 (reprinted in vol. 2 of Selected Shorter Writings), Warfield claimed (approvingly) that no doctrines of the Confession had been modified in the revision (396–400).
15. Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ, 93.
16. Trueman, The Glory of Christ, 123 (emphasis added).
17. Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (1856–1931) was a Scottish philosopher who was professor of philosophy at University College, Cardiff (1883–1887), and then professor of logic and metaphysics at St. Andrews (1887–1891) and at Edinburgh (1891–1919). He added the surname “Pringle-Pattison” in 1898 to meet the conditions of a bequest of his friend and distant relative, Mrs. Pringle-Pattison. (The bequest was “The Haining,” a 5,000-acre estate.) (On this and on much else on the idealism of the period and its relation to Christianity see Alan P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995], 84). Among Pringle-Pattison’s writings were Hegelianism and Personality (1887), Man’s Place in the Cosmos (1897), Two Lectures on Theism (1897), The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy (1917), The Idea of Immortality (1922), and Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (1930). He was part of the movement of Scottish philosophy away from Hume and Reid towards continental Idealism. More prominent members of the movement in Scotland were John and Edward Caird and J. H. Stirling Their English counterparts included F. H. Bradley and B. Bosanquet.
18. The Presbyterian and Reformed Review 8 (1897): 592.
19. The full quotation is as follows: Moreover, the admission of a real self-consciousness in God seems demanded of us if we are not to be unfaithful to the fundamental principle of the theory of knowledge—interpretation by means of the highest category within our reach. The self-conscious life is that highest, and we should be false to ourselves, if we denied in God what we recognize as the source of dignity and worth in ourselves. Only, as was said in a previous lecture, though we must be anthropomorphic, our anthropomorphism must be critical. Just as we do not read our full selves into life of lower forms, so—or rather much more so—must we avoid transferring to God all the features of our own self-consciousness. God may, nay must, be infinitely more—we are at least certain that He cannot be less—than we know ourselves to be” (Hegelianism and Personality [Second Series of Balfour Lectures; 2d ed.; Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1893], 235). One might be forgiven for thinking that the extracts given by Warfield in his sermon were not fully representative of Seth’s view. Nevertheless, the quotation used by Warfield accords well with Sell’s account of Pringle-Pattison’s modest variety of idealism and the importance of epistemology in it.
20. The modern connotations of “impassibility” do not help support the doctrine of divine impassibility. However, it is well to bear in mind that impassibility must be distinguished from impassivity and not confused with impassability Furthermore, while we tend to focus on those emotions that are turbulent there are also what David Hume referred to as the “calm passions.” “What is commonly, in a popular sense, called reason, and is so much recommended in moral discourses, is nothing but a general and a calm passion, which takes a comprehensive and a distant view of its object, and actuates the will, without exciting any sensible emotion” (A Dissertation on the Passions [1758], Section 5).
21. Sometimes it is held that Stoicism became a part of Christian orthodoxy regarding human emotion. For instance, some say that St. Augustine thought that the Christian’s duty was the cultivation of a Stoic-like freedom from emotion, a human apatheia. But that this is not Augustine’s view can be seen, to give an example, in what he says in his 60th Tractate on St. John’s Gospel. He is considering John’s words that Jesus was troubled in spirit (John 13:21): “Away with the reasons of philosophers, who assert that a wise man is not affected by mental perturbations. God hath made foolish the wisdom of this world; and the Lord knoweth the thoughts of men, that they are vain. It is plain that the mind of the Christian may be troubled, not by misery, but by pity: he may fear lest men should be lost to Christ; he may sorrow when one is being lost; he may have ardent desire to gain men to Christ; he may be filled with joy when such is being done; he may have fear of falling away himself from Christ; he may sorrow over his own estrangement from Christ; he may be earnestly desirous of reigning with Christ; and he maybe rejoicing in the hope that such fellowship with Christ will be his lot. These are certainly four of what they call perturbations—fear and sorrow, love and gladness. And Christian minds may have sufficient cause to feel them, and evidence their dissent from the error of Stoic philosophers, and all resembling them: who indeed, just as they esteem truth to be vanity, regard also insensibility as soundness; not knowing that a man’s mind, like the limbs of his body, is only the more hopelessly diseased when it has lost even the feeling of pain” (Tractates on the Gospel of John, LX, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church [ed. Philip Schaff; 1888; repr., Peabody Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994], 7:309–10).
22. I once suggested the term of art “the motion” (“The Impossibility of Divine Passibility,” in The Power and Weakness of God [ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron; Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1990], but obviously it has not caught on!

Thanks to the Librarian of Union Theological College, Belfast, Stephen Gregory, and to Brian Douglas, for help with books.