Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine by Roberto Sirvent

by Roberto Sirvent

Arguments in favor of divine impassibility take many forms, one of which is moral. This argument views emotional risk, vulnerability, suffering, and self-love as obstacles to moral perfection. In Embracing Human and Divine, Roberto Sirvent challenges these mistaken assumptions about moral judgment. Through an analysis of Hebrew thought and modern philosophical accounts of love, justice, and emotion, Sirvent reveals a fundamental incompatibility between divine impassibility and the Imitation of God ethic (imitatio Dei). Sirvent shows that a God who is not emotionally vulnerable is a God unworthy of our imitation. But in what sense can we call divine impassibility immoral? To be sure, God's moral nature teaches humans what it means to live virtuously. But can human understandings of morality teach us something about God's moral character? If true, how should we go about judging God's moral character? Isn't it presumptuous to do so? After all, if we are going to challenge divine impassibility on moral grounds, what reason do we have to assume that God is bound to our standards of morality? Embracing Human and Divine addresses these questions and many others. In the process, Sirvent argues for the importance of thinking morally about theology, inviting scholars in the fields of philosophical theology and Christian ethics to place their theological commitments under close moral scrutiny, and to consider how these commitments reflect and shape our understanding of the good life.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Steve Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really important book that establishes with clarity and power that divine impassibility - the belief that God does not suffer in particular nor feel responsively in general - is an immoral doctrine.

Sirvent builds his argument on the significant doctrine of imitatio dei, the idea that people have a calling to morally imitate God. Implicit in this doctrine is that the Divine and humans share a moral standard, different in degree at times but not in kind, and that God is worthy of imitating. Given our modern understandings of the relationality, emotion, and vulnerability inherent in love, Sirvent demonstrates that God can't be truly loving if God doesn't relate responsively with God's creation.

Based on contemporary understandings of love and relationship, portrayals of God in the Hebrew scriptures, and a commitment to the God revealed in Christ, Sirvent persuasively demonstrates that God is moved by humanity, that God has self-interest and vulnerability and feelings in God's love, and that this image of God invites us toward vulnerable, engaged love with God and others as well.

[Dori Sabourin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using extensive research, Roberto Sirvent argues that an impassibile God is a God not worth imitating, and presents reasons why a God wth passibity, or imitatio Dei is worth imitating. This book for me was very challenging as there is a plenitude of terms and vocabulary that I had to look up. Though I am glad that I read it.