المعاناة الإلهية – دراسة آبائية حول معاناة الله في ظل عدم قابليته للألم

by Paul L. Gavrilyuk, القمص يوحنا عطا محروس (ترجمة)

يسعى الكتاب لإعادة تفسير المفهوم التقليدي لعدم قابلية اللاهوت للألم، حيث يتحدى بشكل خاص الانتقاد الشائع الذي يوجّه إلى الآباء على أنهم قد قبلوا، دون نقد، الفكرة القائلة بأن الله لا يمكن أن يعاني بسبب تأثرهم بالفلسفة الهيلينية. يجد المؤلف ضد ما يسميه "فرضية سقوط اللاهوت في الفلسفة الهيلينية"، مشيراً إلى أن تطور الفكر الآبائي يشمل نقاط تحول جدلية لحماية مفارقة معاناة الله الطوعية والخلاصية في التجسد. وتدور مناقشة الكتاب في سياق الهرطقات المسيحية المبكرة، مثل الدوسيتية ومؤلمي الآب والآريوسية والنسطورية، والتي تعاملت جميعها بطرق مختلفة مع السؤال عما إذا كان يمكن نسب المعاناة إلى الله، وبأي معنى، وتحت أي ظروف.
يسهم الكتاب في المناقشات المعاصرة حول المعاناة الإلهية ويتناقش مع التفسيرات السائدة في اللاهوت الآبائي بخصوص مسألة عدم قابلية اللاهوت للألم. وقد كُتب العمل بطريقة سلسة ليكون سهل الفهم، مما يجعله ذا قيمة للمهتمين بالاهوت، وتاريخ الكنيسة، واللاهوت الفلسفي

Genres: Theology, Christianity, Christian, Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Church History

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Sarah (Gutierrez) Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

The traditional doctrine of God’s impassibility has fallen on hard times these days. From Jürgen Moltmann to Nicholas Wolterstorff, so many prominent theologians are embracing the view that God suffers, that as Paul Gavrilyuk notes at the beginning of his work, some have called passibilism the new orthodoxy. Often passibilism is cast as a sophisticated theological development away from the Fathers' uncritical acceptance of the Greek philosophical idea of an unemotional God. However, if Gavrilyuk’s study of patristic thought on divine impassibility does nothing else, it certainly establishes that the Fathers were thinking far more deeply and complexly about the issue than they are sometimes given credit for.

In Chapter 1, Gavrilyuk presents his case against what he calls “the Theory of Theology’s fall into Hellenistic Philosophy.” We have all heard this theory, of course--the idea that at some point early on, the Fathers let theology fall away from the purity of the Scriptures into the intellectual abstractions of Greek philosophy. But Gavrilyuk shows that pagan philosophy was divided into such schools as the Epicureans, Stoics, and middle Platonists, all holding different views on the gods’ emotions and interactions with the world. A unified Hellenistic view of impassibility which the Fathers could have accepted uncritically from Greek culture simply did not exist.

On the contrary, Gavrilyuk shows that tension over impassibility already existed within Judaism and the Old Testament Scriptures inherited by the Fathers. The Old Testament is sometimes presented as offering a very emotional picture of God--a being who becomes angry, repents, etc--but focusing on this alone does not do justice to the strand of thought which also runs through the Old Testament and Hebrew tradition, emphasizing God’s transcendence and unchangeability. In short, “the Theory of Theology’s Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy” does not do justice to either pagan philosophy or the Hebrew Scriptures; both are much more complex than the theory suggests. The Fathers were not presented with a choice between the impassible God of the philosophers and the impassioned God of the Bible; rather, they were offered an array of philosophical modes of thinking about God and a conflicted image of God in the Hebrew tradition, and given the challenge of offering their own contribution to the issue of impassibility, in light of Christian revelation.

So in Chapter 2, Gavrilyuk discusses the role impassibility played in patristic thought. He argues that impassibility functioned for them as an apophatic qualifier of divine emotions, meant primarily to prevent certain emotions unworthy of God (such as envy) from being attributed to him as they had been attributed to the pagan deities. It did not prevent other emotionally colored characteristics such as love and joy from being attributed to God, with the qualifier that a transcendent, immaterial being could not experience emotions in the same way that we do, nor could God be mastered by any emotion.

Succeeding chapters deal with the manner in which impassibility played out in doctrinal controversies of the time: Docetism, Patripassianism, Arianism, and Nestorianism. In each of these controversies, Gavrilyuk draws out the questions of (im)passibility that were at stake and the manner in which the Fathers navigated a careful course between absolute impassibility and unqualified passibilism.

Docetism, for example, as a form of Gnosticism laid extreme emphasis on impassibility arguing that since Christ was God, his participation in human life and suffering could not have been real. At the other end of the spectrum were the Patripassians, accepting that Christ’s sufferings were real and arguing in a modalist fashion that whatever was said of the Son also had to be said of the Father. Through these controversies, the orthodox Fathers developed answers that were faithful to the incarnational reality of God in the world, but also respected the real distinction of persons between the Son and the Father.

Turning to Arianism, Gavrilyuk describes five different common interpretations of Arianism, honing in on an interpretation by Richard Hanson and Maurice Wiles that puts a concern for divine suffering at the center of Arianism. The Arians accepted a strong view of impassibility in God the Father, so the argument runs, so in order to still maintain the reality of the sufferings of Christ, the divine logos, they proposed a subordinationism of the Son to the Father. On this interpretation, the Arians might be understood as engaged in the same task as the orthodox Fathers: maintaining some kind of divine transcendence and impassibility, while still allowing for passibilism in Christ, and for the soteriological value of his suffering. While agreeing with the emphasis on impassibility issues in the Arian controversy, Gavrilyuk disagrees with the Hanson-Wiles interpretation in attributing to the Arians the insight that the one who suffers for man must be more than a man. This, Gavrilyuk argues, is not distinctively Arian; what is distinctively Arian is appealing to Christ’s suffering to show his unlikeness to the Father--and here the Fathers actually show a stronger sense of divine passibility in holding that the Christ who suffers is also fully God.

The final topic is the Nestorianism controversy, and its positing of two subjects in Christ: a human subject who suffers and a divine subject who does not. Gavrilyuk argues that Cyril’s response to the Nestorians, that the Word suffered impassibly is no mere sophistry but the fruit of a profound theological reflection on the Divine Kenosis, able to hold its own with modern theologians and fully as sensitive to the value of at least a qualified passibilism that still regards God’s transcendence.

The study is a masterful work. Especially impressive was the convincing manner in which Gavrilyuk brought the major theological heresies of the third and fourth centuries together into a common theme, with a dialectical development of patristic orthodox thought on impassibility and divine suffering coming out of those controversies. Each heresy represents a particular extreme view on impassibility, to which the Fathers must provide a response that is faithful to Scripture, and which truly respects divine transcendence, Christ’s incarnation, and Christ’s status as fully God and fully man. Gavrilyuk pulls this historical analysis off with scholarship, but amazingly, without tedium.

On the other hand, Gavrilyuk’s criticism of “the Theory of Theology’s Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy,” while forceful and compelling, will probably not lay to rest all criticisms of the Fathers for falling too easily into Greek philosophical categories. While he demonstrates that there were significant variations in Greek thought on impassibility, he may not be taking adequate account of the extent to which some of those variations--Epicureanism, for example--would hardly have been live options for the Fathers. The dominant Greek influence would still have been Platonism or neo-Platonism, and this was the strand of thought that most highly emphasized divine transcendence and impassibility. Gavrilyuk’s discussion of Greek thought on impassibility is also limited to explicit ideas about divine emotions (or the lack thereof) and deals not at all with the sort of metaphysical categories and descriptions of the divine nature that have certain implications for impassibility, which might more subtly have influenced patristic thought. Is the divine nature responsive, for example--that is, can it be acted upon by an external agent? Answering this question in the negative is generally taken to be a facet of Greek philosophical principles such as that “the corporeal cannot affect the incorporeal,” and this is what stands behind divine impassibility. But Gavrilyuk does not touch on it at all.

The book could also have been much longer, and the extension would only have improved it by filling in some places where Gavrilyuk does not go into as much detail as he might have. The Arian controversy and the questions of impassibility that were involved deserved to be fleshed out at much greater length, especially since Gavrilyuk is rejecting what is probably the more common interpretation of Arianism, that is, that Arianism’s primary focus was on the question of the Son’s generation from the Father. His descriptions of five major interpretations of Arianism are an immediate clue that much more than impassibility was going on in that controversy, and it would have been helpful if he had not left us to wonder whether centering it around impassibility might not be slightly artificial.

A critic of Gavrilyuk’s thesis that the Fathers did not uncritically accept impassibility from Hellenism might also read in the discussions of Arianism and Nestorianism an implicit admission that impassibility in the divine nature itself was never under debate between the Fathers and their various theological opponents--only the manner in which the Son shared or did not share impassibility or full divinity. And that takes us back to a creeping suspicion that there was an implicit philosophical assumption of divine impassibility, challenged only by Patripassianism, at the root of all parties’ beliefs in the third and fourth centuries.

Nevertheless, whatever complaints might be made, Paul Gavrilyuk’s study of patristic thought on the suffering of the impassible God is an insightful contribution to the subject and is highly recommended to anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the Fathers on a topic of huge theological interest today.


[This review originally submitted as final paper for Early Christian Life and Thought class on Dec 8, 2014]

[Ronni Kurtz · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're looking for a treatment of divine impossibility, I'd consider Gavrilyuk's book up there with Weinandy's. Such a great volume on a vital doctrine, especially as it relates to Christology.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of all time is Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God. Reading it, I was more deeply struck then ever with what it means for Jesus to be both fully God and fully human. I always believed in the Trinity and dual-nature of Christ, but something struck me on another level in that book. God suffers with us. The Christian God, for whatever similarities as God, is definitely unique in suffering.

The work of Moltmann is in Gavrilyuk's crosshairs as he writes this book. He writes about how it is fashionable to question the traditional view of God's impassibility by holding that God suffers. It seems to him that Moltmann's side has won, that in theological circles, God being passible is the majority view (which I can't speak to the truth of or not). Along with the view of God being passible is the story often told that Christian theology and Biblical interpretation was corrupted by Greek philosophy. I've read this one in numerous places and probably even argued it myself. Thus, Gavrilyuk's book challenged some views I've uncritically accepted.

He traces the theological development of understanding God's impassibility and suffering in the incarnation throughout the early church up to the Council of Ephesus (431 AD). First he quite easily demolishes the myth of Theology's Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy. Basically, Hellenistic philosophy was too diverse for this theory to make sense. The Stoics, Epicureans and others did not agree with one another about God so how could they corrupt Christianity? On the flip side, the Bible includes a more complex picture of God than this myth allows. Yes, God shows emotion in scripture but this is in tension with other passages where God appears impassible.

From this, he examines Docetism, Arianism and Nestorianism. All these heresies attempted to preserve God being impassible but in doing so they so separated God from humanity as to make no sense of the gospel and incarnation. He also discusses the heresies that slipped the other direction, speaking of God the Father as suffering in his nature (this is where Moltmann would be). Through all this, we see the orthodox church preserving the tension: God is impassible and chooses to take on flesh as the God-Man Jesus who does suffer. In this God is not subject to unexpected suffering like you are I, but God chooses to enter the world knowing what will happen. Yet, and there is the kicker for me, if the Father suffers in his essential nature then the incarnation was not any sort of change or condescension, for God already knew suffering through experience. The orthodox view of the impassible God becoming human and experiencing suffering preserves the tension.

A few final thoughts:

1. I guess I need to go reread Moltmann - I don't recall him speaking of the suffering of the Father and how that works. Its clear he did and while I still value his work, the classical view makes more sense.

2. The early church theologians knew what they were doing - New ideas are certainly worth thinking about, but the more I read, the more I am blown away by the realization (or at least, my belief) that these guys got it right.

3. This ties into practice - these debates played out in martyrdom, baptism and Eucharist. I'm not about to become Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, but I continue to realize that the right view of Incarnation demands a more sacramental view of these things. In other words, there is more going on at communion then just a remembrance in my head!

Overall, this book is brilliant and a must read for any interested in theology and doctrine.

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gavrilyuk's treatment here is impressive, as he seriously did his homework in "The Suffering of the Impassible God." Seriously though, as his Ph.D dissertation, this actually was his homework! His citations of the Fathers is not uncritical or sporadic, but careful, meticulous, and purposeful, as he does a seriously excellent job at knocking down what he calls "Theology's Fall Into Hellenization," which is a dreadful presupposition accepted by current scholars and theologians today without any thought.

What was most engaging for me was his work showing the development of Stoic, Epicurean, and Platonic thought vis-à-vis Impassibility, and how not only was there no consensus (a ridiculous claim), but Impassibility wasn't even in the minds of these philosophical schools of thought concerning God at all. That the stoic idea of απάθεια as it concerned the human subject was equivocated by proponents of the "Fall" (Harneck, Moltmann, etc), cannot be stressed enough. The Stoic idea of God, which there was no consensus for, ranged from a passable panentheistic God of the universe, to the all consuming ever-changing fire. The Middle-Platonic Highest God was so transcendent it was beyond analogical language: impassibility was irrelevant to Him. The Epicurean gods were the ancient gods of Homer and were anthropomorphic, sharing in the pleasure of humans, although they were often times depersonalized as forces: a sharp contrast to the Loving, Caring God of the Scriptures.

His chapter on Cyril and Nestorus was extremely helpful, and excellent at dismissing church history tropes and misunderstandings (Alexandria vs. Antioch). He concludes that impassibility for the Fathers is qualified, and held in tension with Christs passibility, made possible by His appropriation and assumption of full humanity by emptying Himself (κενώσις) willingly to take up true flesh thereby reconstituting (αναστοίχειν) in himself human existence to suffer and die so that we might be restored to God. It is precisely this tension, that the Impassible suffered, that must be held in light of the mystery and paradox of the Incarnation.

While both Docetists, Arians, and Nestorians all tried to uphold God's impassibility in juxtaposition to the Incarnation by either claiming the impassible Christ didn't really suffer in real flesh, Christ wasn't truly the High Impassibile God but merely a created passible emmination, or that the Impassible Christ was not the same subject as the passibile human Jesus, it nevertheless is the Council of Χαλκήδον (451 A.D.), Cyrilian christology, that brilliantly upholds this tension and mystery of the Incarnation. That the λόγος assumed all things human, and suffered and died as one undivided subject with two complete, indivisible, undivided, united, and holistic wills and natures. It is in this way that enabled us to speak of Christ truly suffering...nay, of a God who suffers for us, so that through Christ's Redemptive Work, we may return to Him.

-b

[Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mi s-a părut una dintre cele mai cuceritoare cărți de teologie. Am început să înțeleg mai bine problema primelor Sinoade Ecumenice și a multor erezii pe care le-au generat de-a lungul timpului oamenii.

Văzusem un videoclip, acum ceva timp, cu o fetiță care citea pasajul de la Luca, unde se spune că Mântuitorul „creștea și se întărea cu duhul”. Fetița înteba: dacă era Dumenezeu, de ce trebuia să crească și să „se umple de înțelepciune”, doar era Dumnezeu?

Răspunde Sfântul Chiril:

„El care era mai presus de toatî creați a trăit în starea noastră; Cel nevăzut S-a făcut văzut prin trup; El, Care ese din ceruri și din înalt, a fost în asemănarea lucrurilor pământești; Cel nematerial a putut fi atins; El, Care este liber în propria fire, a venit sub chipul unui rob; El, Care binecuvântează toată creația, a fost blestemat; El, Care este toată dreptatea, a fost socotit împreună cu cei fără de lege; viața însăși a venit sub infățișarea morții. El, Care ca Dumnezeu este atotdesăvârșit, Se supune creșterii trupești; Cel Necorporal are mădulare care înaintează la maturitatea omenității; El primește învățătură, El Care este Însuși toată înțelepciunea. Și ce spunem noi despre aceasta? Priviți-L prin aceste lucruri pe Cel care era în chipul Tatălui făcut precum noi; Cel Bogat în sărăcie; Cel Înalt în smerenie; despre El s-a zis că a primit, El Care este plinătatea ca Dumnezeu. Atât de deplin S-a deșertat pe Sine Dumnezeu-Cuvântul!”

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work describing the Fathers view of God's impassibility, which comes to a head with the incarnation. He effectively counters the thesis of, as he calls it, the fall of theology into Hellenistic philosophy and demonstrates that the Fathers held to a qualified divine impassibility, showing in turn that modern passibilists are in fact fighting a straw man. Essential reading for theology proper.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very important for those who think that Theology Proper is an overflow of "Greek Philosophy." First, as Gavrilyuk points out, one cannot merely assert that an idea is influenced by "Greek Philosophy" as many of the Greek Philosophers had mutually exclusive philosophies, especially regarding impassibility. There are many Christians out there that think that these classical conceptions of God leave us with a Stoic God, that is unapproachable and impersonal. This book does an excellent job of showing how Christianity has attempted to hold in tension the Creator and the creature, while at the same time holding a theology that does not make God unapproachable or impersonal, but a God who speaks to the mind as well as the heart. I highly recommend this book to students in seminary looking for a better understanding of what it means to hold to a Christian Philosophy.

[Jacob Aitken]

Write a review...Gavrilyuk is rebutting the claim that the early church simply adopted Hellenistic views regarding God and impassibility (if and to what degree does God suffer). In his opening chapter Gavrilyuk demonstrates that the early church could not have adopted the prevailing Hellenistic view on divine (im)passibility because the Hellenists themselves differed greatly on what they meant by the term.



This static "Greek" view of God is contrasted with the wildly anthopomorphic version of the God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures. Theology and the Fathers adopted the Hellenistic view of God instead of the Biblical view. While this view is standard liberal German theology, one can't help but notice similar remarks coming out of some biblical theological circles (including one publication ministry going by the initials "BH").



The problem with this view is not simply that the Greek views contradicted one another, as noted above (meaning there is no overarching "Hellenistic" view of Divine Impassibility), but also that the "wildly Hebraic Scriptures" contained passages that appear to be contradictory per divine impassibility on first reading (contrast Jonah with the verse that says "I, the Lord God, do not change" and "does not repent").



Obviously, we see that the category of "divine impassibility" cannot be used as a blanket category. What does divine impassibility mean? It is usually taken to mean that the divine nature (or sometimes a divine person--heretics often confuse person and nature) does not suffer in one sense and/or any sense. On a more broad level it could mean that the divine nature/person does not engage in anthropomorphisms.



The early Christological heresies held to a strict form of divine impassibility. The heretics understood that Christ was either divine and/or participated in the divine nature; therefore, Christ couldn't have really suffered on the cross (Docetism), been of the same divine nature as the Father (Arianism), or had a real participation in humanity's suffering (Nestorianism).



Docetism and the Sufferings of the Martyrs



The ancient world was scandalized by the idea that men would worship a suffering god. If Christ were divine, he was not so during the Crucifixion, so the Docetists reasoned. The church met this attack on several fronts. They responded to Gnosticism arguing that creation was God and that God used material means for our salvation. Hence, it was not shameful for God to participate in human birth and death, if that were to restore us to incorruptibility (88). Still, at this point in the Christian narrative, it was not entirely clear how the divine nature participated in the Cross (89). There were pointers: The Son, not the Father, suffered. Thus, the Church reasoned that the divine nature did not suffer "nakedly" but through the Son. It was not always clear, though, how this went about.



Arianism



Gavrilyuk surveys a number of different interpretations of "Arianism" (104-114). Despite the nuances of Arianism, and acknowledging the basic textbook definition (which is essentially correct), Arius had a desire to protect the transcendence of God, and more pointedly, to remove him from any hint of suffering or change (129-130). It is quite likely the Arians agreed that the Son suffered. In fact, Gavrilyuk frames the debate this way: the passible Son was inferior in essence to the impassible Father. He was generated and subject to suffering (130). Arius did not want to affirm a God who suffered in Christ, but that God did not suffer in Christ or apart from Christ (131). The key issue, then, is divine impassibility.



But for the orthodox divine impassibility functioned a different way: it was a negative characteristic that did not preclude God from acting in the world (132). Divine impassibility functioned as a sign of the Logos' full divinity (similar to how Divine Simplicity functions), but this attribute did not imply that the Logos acted apart from Christ (133). The Logos was involved in human sufferings but the divine nature was not diminished by them.



The last point is a major point that functions as a lens for viewing the Christological controversies. We go back to the role of apophatic qualifiers. Terms like "Divine Simplicity" and "Divine Impassibility" are not meant to be taken in an absolute and unqualified sense. With regard to the latter, it does not mean that the divine nature forever and always remains "untouched" (and passibilist theologians are often unclear as to how suffering affects the divine nature), but that the divine nature/divine person is not overwhelmed by them. Divine impassibility, as Gavrilyuk makes clear throughout the book, does not mean that God never suffers or has human emotions. It means that God is not overwhelmed by suffering nor is he subject to improper human pathe.



Nestorianism



Gavrilyuk (rightly) draws upon John McGuckin's work on St Cyril. What was Nestorius' goal? Gavrilyuk clears away a lot of the debris left by modern scholarship on Nestorius (including the nonsense that he didn't believe the theology attributed to him). Nestorius and Theodore took proper pious responses concerning transcendence and impassibility, and brought them to a bizarre consistency. We can summarize many of their goals this way:

The divine action in the Incarnation did not bring God qualitatively closer to creation in any way (142).

Christ's two natures must be seen as a conjunction, not a union (and represent the separation between created and creator. Note the eerie similarity to Calvinism on this point. Calvinists say the union of the two natures, particularly the way the natures share with one another, is merely a verbal predicatio and not a real union--cf Richard Muller, A Theological Dictionary of Greek and Latin Terms, 74).

Therefore, the man assumed and the God who did the assuming must be thought of separately. As Gavrilyuk maintains, "It was impossible [on Theodore's gloss] for the divinity to participate any way in the sufferings of the humanity" (Gavrilyuk, 143).



Admitteldy, St Cyril responded to Nestorius using often paradoxical categories. According to our modern sensibilities, this isn't playing fair. It seems as though we are holding Nestorius to logical consistency but are allowing Cyril to deal from the bottom of the deck. Even so, Cyril can (and Gavrilyuk does not stress this point all that much) run a deconstruction on Nestorius's system. Since Nestorius denies that the Divine Logos is the subject of all Incarnate acts, but rather sees God merely indwelling a man, Nestorius's system is identical in principle to Arius'. Neither of them allow the Logos BOTH fully divine status AND fully human experiences. What's the difference, on Nestorius' gloss, between God indwelling the holy saints and God indwelling Christ? Simply a matter of degree, not kind. This is simply respectable Arianism.



Cyril, and through him the Church, responds that God the word did not suffer nakedly, but since in the Incarnation something new happened for ontology, real human experiences* can be predicated of Christ (who is the Divine Logos) (156).



The key to the union (henosis) lies in the emptying (kenosis). What happened when the Logos emptied himself? Nestorius said that the emptying of the Logos was simply the conjunction of the human nature to the divine (Gavrilyuk, 158; again, this could easily be taken from half a dozen Reformed systematic theology texts). For Cyril, however, it was God's descent to the limits of humanity and allowing these limits to have dominion over him.



The rest of a Cyrillian analysis can be found in Farrell or McGuckin.



Conclusion



Gavrilyuk is not using the word "dialectic" in a Hegelian sense. He is simply showing the process of how the Church sharpened its vision concerning who Christ is. Each debate focused the issue more intensely. Some questions were left unanswered after Cyril, like the two wills of Christ.



Gavrilyuk does a fine job outlining his thesis and keeping the historical scope under control. The actual text of the book runs for 180 pages. The narrative is always tight and Gavrilyuk rarely pursues tangents. On the other hand, one feels that Gavrilyuk could have examined the historical controversies in slightly more detail, but that is a minor complaint.



*Obviously, real human experiences do not include sin and vice. This is a major point for Christology and Anthropology, and one that Gavrilyuk does not draw out. If Christ assumed a real human nature with real human experiences, it is a given that sin and vice are not natural to the human state. If sin and vice are not natural to the human state, it follows they are not part of human nature. If so, then they must be located somewhere else. The East says they are located in the act of the willing (see St John Chrysostom's Commentary on Romans 5:12).

[Adriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like this book for a few reasons. First because it is truly a masterpiece of a scholarly work. The information is detailed and persuasive.
Second, I really enjoyed all the chapters: his critic of the Theory of Theology’s fall into Hellenistic Philosophy, his overview of the Fathers on impassibility, and his discussion of the some heresies of the early church that shade even more light on this actually critical and tricky topic.

Now, having said that, concerning the father's use of impassability as an apophatic qualifier, I am not well read enough to know whether is analysis was correct or not. I want to be careful about this because nowadays many people want to ascribe emotions to God in a way that would make Him change from a state of being to another and make Him "take part" with creation by entering time and space. The doctrine of God's unchangeableness (immutability) is in jeopardy and so the topic of impassability, irremediably connected to it, must be dealt with with care.

In any case, it seems possible to me to see impassibility for the Fathers uniquely has an apophatic qualifier and yet understand that some of the things they write about God that sounds as if God changes is written not out of a belief that God actually changes, but either in light of the Son's incarnation, or just out of an appropriation of the biblical language about God changing... from our perspective: the accommodating God.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb! Paul focuses on how the mistaken notions of impassibility led to the development of three major Christological heresies: Docetism, Arianism, and Nestorianism.

He first tackles the idea that the Church Fathers just unquestionably accepted pagan Hellenistic philosophy. He shows that 1. There was no definitive Hellenistic consensus and 2. The Fathers used aspects of philosophical language but never became pagan or Hellenistic.

Paul then shows that the Fathers thought of Divine Impassibility as an apophatic qualifier. It wasn't that God lacked pathos entirely, it's that he wasn't controlled by them. One interesting point was that the LXX actually strips some pathos away from God in the Greek translation.

The book then examines the three major heresies and shows that their fundamental error lies in an unrestricted impassibility.

Paul also briefly argues against the idea that the Father suffered.

Overall, a must read book for those who want a critical contemporary defense of the Orthodox view of Divine Impassibility and the suffering of Christ. "The Impassible suffered."

[Chandler Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Word who is above suffering in his own nature suffered by appropriating human nature and obtained victory over suffering.”

Paul Gavrilyuk’s book is a dense read, but it is a crucial work in the fields of patristic studies and theology proper. I read this for my thesis research on divine impassibility, and one of the most important arguments that the author makes is the biblical nature of the impassibility doctrine, and the lack of a coherent account of the impassibility concept in Hellenistic thought. Through this argumentation, Gavrilyuk rules out the exclusively Hellenistic origin of the impassibility doctrine. The author also gives a fair reading and analysis of Nestorius and other heretics from the patristic period as he explains these writers’ thoughts on the notion of God’s suffering. I rank this book with Weinandy’s book on impassibility as the two best works on the subject.

[Jacob May · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dialectic structure of the book is brilliant, and Gavrilyuk’s nuance throughout ensuring that the reader doesn’t fall prey to the simplistic categories that can easily plague this topic was invaluable. One glaring weakness concerning his secondary thesis against the Theory of Theology’s Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy is the lack of pre-Christian Second Temple Jewish sources on divine impassibility. Gavrilyuk successfully troubled the relationship between Christian and Hellenistic sources, but without a comparison to Jewish sources, how can one make the determination whether Christianity “fell” or not?

[Jonathan Tomes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gavrilyuk buries the "Theology's Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy" thesis. The Orthodox did not uncritically appropriate a supposed Hellenistic doctrine. There was no such consensus. Instead, the church fathers wrestled with divine transcendence and divine action in creation. Gavrilyuk's historical analysis reveals that both the heretics and the Orthodox made use of this doctrine in polemics. The heretics made use of this idea in an absolute and unqualified sense, whereas the Orthodox in a qualified sense. For the Orthodox, "Impassibility" was an apophatic qualifier and it does what apophatic qualifiers do. Impassibility is negative theology. It demonstrates that in God there are no unworthy emotions. Divinity is "pure act" and not "becoming." God is not influenced by external created forces. In affirming this doctrine, the church fathers continued to ascribe emotion -- and even death -- to God. This dialectic ("the suffering of the impassible God") moved the Christological formulation forward, through controversies, and on to Chalcedon.

[Jaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great historical study of the term "impassibility" in the Patristic period.
"I have argued in this book that the church's rejection of the major christological heresies followed a series of dialectic turns, all taken to safeguard an account of divine involvement worthy of God." p. 172
Using "worthy of" or "appropriate", Gavriluk shows how emotions can be attributed to God. I think this works with the idea of "metaphor" from Greek thought, that transforms anthropomorphisms into theological understanding of God.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thesis: Harnack view that orthodoxy’s fall into Greek philosophy produced impossibility doctrine is historically untenable. Greek philosophy had no principle of impassibility, and Orthodoxy used impassibility as a correlate of passibility to balance the tension inherent in the Incarnation. Very good corrective to the view of competing schools in Alexandria and Antioch, or the view that Orthodoxy was a hybrid between Greek Philosophy and the anthropomorphic world of the Bible. Very good on the dialectal development from Docetism to Arianism to Nestorianism. Chapter 6 on Cyril's famous dictum about impassible suffering is excellent. Cyril brought impassible God together with suffering through appropriation. My question is what possibility in God enabled the passible appropriation of human suffering. He needs an ontology of will or event rather than substance to answer that question. It was not available to Cyril.