The Apathetic God Exploring The Contemporary Relevance Of Divine Impassibility

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 109-169

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Daniel Castelo, Te Apathetic God: Exploring the Contemporary Relevance of Divine Impas- sibility (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Paternoster, 2009). xvi + 156 pp. $20.00, paper.

Debates regarding the divine response to human suﬀering have pushed contemporary theo- logians to question the doctrine of divine impassibility as being too inﬂuenced by Greek metaphysics in order to argue for a passionate God who co-suﬀers with humanity. Daniel Castelo, whose background is Church of God (Cleveland), is concerned that these debates have become imbalanced by modernist presuppositions. He argues that both divine passi- bility and impassibility must be maintained in order to oﬀer a biblically faithful and logi- cally coherent understanding of God. On the one hand, divine impassibility needs to be upheld in order to maintain the epistemological distance between God and the world, to dislocate contemporary theological discussions from their modernist biases when appropri- ating critical dogmatic articulations of Christology and the Trinity, and to oﬀer a divine alternative to contemporary responses to world crises. On the other hand, arguments for the passibility of God are suggestive in unpacking divine love, to aﬃrm that God too suﬀers alongside the world, and to point to the cross as in some way representative of the eternal, divine life.

In keeping to his Wesleyan Pentecostal roots, Castelo looks to the development of impas- sibility in the patristic tradition in order to argue that the Fathers were acutely aware of suﬀering, and oﬀered a position on an impassible God to give comfort in a reality beyond our suﬀering. Castelo then addresses the theology of Jürgen Moltmann as inﬂuential on, and representative of, divine pathos. Te next chapter considers the doctrine in relation to Christ as God made ﬂesh to suﬀer the way of the cross. Te ﬁnal chapter explores the appli- cation of impassibility to the life of Christian discipleship, speciﬁcally suﬀering as a conse- quence of sin.

Te strength of Castelo’s work is his handling of Christian tradition, especially the patris- tic Fathers. He rightly argues that modern theologians use the Fathers as a “straw man” to claim that classical theism is unduly accommodating to Platonic philosophy. Te Fathers were more nuanced in their theology. Impassibility was a way to distinguish the Christian God from the arbitrary actions of the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons. Te Chris- tian notion of impassibility only makes sense if it is seen as “divine impassibility in action.” Tus Irenaeus disputes the Gnostic notion of impassible light to argue that impassibility is understood in relation to Christological action “as the incomprehensible being made com- prehensible, the impassible becoming capable of suﬀering” (53). Similarly Tertullian opposes Patripassianism by arguing that anthropomorphisms of pathetic speech are really theomorphisms, that is, God’s qualiﬁcation of human speech in which the soul with its passions is created in the likeness of God, whose pathos is not of like kind since God is ultimate. Surprisingly, Castelo lays part of the blame for modern discussions of passibility on Luther, whose theology of the cross looks to the incarnate Son as the representation of the Father. Luther was, of course, suspicious of philosophical engagements in which a the- ology of glory minimized the scandal of the cross in lieu of human achievement. Certainly, Protestant theologians since have looked to Luther’s theology of the cross as axiomatic in their theistic and Christological articulations.

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 109-169

Castelo is uneasy with the underlying premise of contemporary articulations of divine passibility, which asserts that suﬀering, historically associated with human sin and ﬁnitude, is taken up into God thereby making suﬀering a fundamental category that modiﬁes the doctrine of God. Both Hegel and Whitehead are culprits in the modern theological shift so that the current view is that change or process is inherent within God. Moltmann’s reinter- pretation of the divine is linked to a “quasi-Hegelian” dialectic and to the Whiteheadian axiom of God as “fellow-suﬀerer,” despite of the fact that Castelo admits in a footnote (83n62) that Moltmann’s use of the language of process should not imply more than a superﬁcial relationship. Yet Castelo is concerned that Moltmann has articulated a divine ontology in which God is in a state of “becoming” in relation to the world so that the his- tory of God takes up into itself world history, though this must be distinguished from process theology in which God’s history is collapsed into world history. Despite the fact that God’s becomingness can be found in Barth’s theology and can be maintained in dis- tinction from process theology (e.g., Colin Gunton, Becoming and Being [SCM, 2001]), Castelo misconstrues Moltmann’s Trinitarian theology on this point: in Moltmann’s Te Coming of God, the intra-Trinitarian movement (perichoresis) of divine persons invites the community of creation to participate in koinonia through the economy of extra-Trinitarian revelation cast in the eschatological context of the coming of God. God cannot be con- ceived as static, but as dynamic in Trinitarian movement. Castelo carries the debate into a discussion of the incarnation, juxtaposing once again the Fathers with Moltmann in order to excavate misunderstandings on both sides, especially in relation to the event of the cross. However, Castelo highlights the resurrection as the Christological locale of “passionate impassibility,” so that the mystery of God in Christ, the God-man, maintains the distinc- tion between God and humanity.

Castelo’s challenge to current discourses on divine passibility urges the academy to reas- sess the patristic Fathers. Tis is by far Castelo’s strength. Despite nuances in his arguments, Castelo’s use of Moltmann as representative of modern theology is somewhat problematic. Moltmann’s theology has to be understood within his context of post-war protest atheism and post-nuclear political critique of discourses in hegemony, and not the religious plural- ism of the ancient world. I suspect the issue for Castelo is the implications divine passibility has for Pentecostal theology when combined with a strong emphasis on pneumatological immanence. Te risk is collapsing divine transcendence into world process and history and the fallout this will have for the future of Pentecostal theology. Nevertheless, the value of Castelo’s work is his eﬀort to maintain the sovereign, mystery of God by envisioning God as an impassible co-suﬀerer without collapsing God into the world.

Reviewed by Peter Althouse

Associate Professor of Teology Southeastern University, Lakeland, Florida [email protected]

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