Divine Impassability and Divine Immutability

Are two doctrines that I had mistakenly conflated with each other in some of my past posts mentioning Divine Impassability on this blog. But they are related.

Divine Impassibility is the position that God did not suffer when Jesus was on Th Cross, it doesn't deny the Divinity of Christ, but holds that it was only in His Humanity that He Suffered.  Divine Immutability is the position that God doesn't change.  They tend to go together because Suffering is often both the cause and effect of some kind of Change.

The three way dispute between Chalcedonian, Nestorian and Miaphysite Christologies from the 5th and 6th Centuries is arguably pure semantics since all three were/are Nicene Trinitarians who view Christ as both Fully Divine and Fully Human.  The Nestorians held that Christ has two Natures, Divine and Human, that are not in any way mixed.  The Miaphysite position is that Christ has One Nature that is both Divine and Human.  The Chalcedonian position is that Christ had Two Natures, Divine and Human, that are mixed in the Incarnation.  The Bible doesn't directly address any of that, but my understanding of the Biblical Metanarrative leads me to favoring the Chalcedonian position, even if there are some details of the Chalcedonian Confession I don't like.

Thing is what makes these disputes a little less semantical are the other issues tied into them.  My greatest affinity with Nestorianism is that I don't like calling Mary Theotokos.  However since the technical accuracy of the term is not my issue with it, it's really irrelevant to the actual dispute Nestorius, Cyril and others were having 15 centuries ago.

While Divine Impassability is affirmed by theologians in all three camps, it was the Nestorians for whom it was the core of their position, and they alone who accused both other camps of rejecting Divine Impassability whether they would have self identified as doing so or not.  That is why in-spite of my respect for the Ancient Church of the East and how much I prefer the Antiochene School's approach to Scripture over the Alexandrian, I have to reject Nestorian Christology.

Thing is the Nestorians were not wrong to suggest that it's rather illogical to claim Divine Impassability if you believe the Divine and Human Natures were fully United in the Incarnation.  Cyril of Alexandria's attempts to justify himself on this involved a lot of Platonist Philosophical nonsense.  And that is why I unapologetically reject Divine Impassability.

But I still oppose misrepresenting Nestorius or the Ancient Church of The East, they did and still do believe Christ was one Person/Personality.  But the Miaphysites also get misrepresented, they were NOT Monophysites.

The Fifth Ecumenical Council affirmed the Theopaschite formula in it's 10th Canon.  And yet Impassability has still been affirmed by theologians belonging to Churches that nominally uphold that Council, thanks to Augustine's influence in the West and Cyril's in the East, so that canon gets ignored.  When the Fifth Council is brought up today it's only to debate what/who it did or did not condemn, never what it affirmed.  But getting the Theopaschite Formula affirmed was the whole point of the Council at the time, Justinian thought that would be the key to mending the Chalcedonian schism.

The fact that I agree with Justinian on the Theopaschite formula doesn't change that I despise him as a Ruler.  His obsession with trying to force everyone to agree only made them dig their heels in deeper.

Another issue related to the Divine Impassability v Theopaschite debate is Patripassianism, did The Father also suffer?  I would argue He Suffered in the way any Father watching His Son Suffer would Suffer, but that is distinct from feeling the Physical pain.

Augustine of Hippo used to be a Manichean Gnostic, and the whole reason he once held a Gnostic attitude towards the God of the Old Testament was because he was uncomfortable with the idea of God being so Emotional.  It was Ambrose telling he can just allegorize away all of those verses that finally enabled Augustine to abandon Gnosticism and become "Orthodox".  To me it is Augustine being someone who doesn't want an Emotional God that is the source of everything wrong with this Theology.

While strictly speaking the word Impassibility refers to is Suffering, to some this doctrine refers to God not feeling Pleasure as well.  To me this rejecting of God being an Emotional being at all is pure Platonic/Pythagorean heresy and utterly in conflict with The Hebrew Bible and The New Testament which teaches that God Is Love as the experience of Love tends to involve both Pleasure and Pain.

On the subject of Divine Immutability, it depends what you mean by it.  Malachi 3:6 is what most gets abused here as people keep quoting it while ignoring it's context.  That God keeps His Promises doesn't change, that He Is Love won't change, therefore He will NOT allow His People to be Consumed.  That Core aspect of Who God Is does not change.  It's the same with Hebrews 13:8 "Jesus Christ is the same Yesterday, Today and Forever" the context is about Grace and Jesus being a Sacrifice offered for us, it's about His essential character not some absolute declaration that nothing can ever change, as Romans 8:35 and it's context make clear.

But The Bible also refers to God Repenting (See Exodus 32:14 and Numbers 14:12-20; Jonah 3:10; Amos 7:3-9; Jeremiah 26:3), repent means to change one's mind.  And I feel the whole point of the Incarnation is that Humanity and Divinity are both permanently changed by being United in Christ.  The Hyper Immutability that is favored by Nestorius, Cyril and Augustine is again a heresy based on the Greek and Roman Churches' infatuation with Platonic and Pythagorean theology, not Scripture.

Divine Immutability doesn't begin with Plato or Pythagoras however but with Xenophanes.

There is also the matter of one of the most vital passages to defining God in all of scripture.  The famous "I Am that I am" statement, many scholars have argued a more accurate translation would be "I Am who I Am Becoming" or "I Will Be whom I Will Be", meanings that imply change even if in a paradoxical way due to God's knowing the future.  I personally have grown to like "I Am whom I Will Be", "Watashi wa watashi ga dare ni naru ka".

Update September 2022: I bought Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh's Early Arianism - a view of salvation for the purpose of research on the Arian controversy I'm doing for the sake of a possible future post.  But two things I didn't expect to learn were. 1. Arius had a fixation on Divine Impassability similar to the future Nestorians.  2. The Arians used Divine Immutability against the Nicenes by proving the changeability of The Son.  And this was kind of their greatest strength because Athanasius was unwilling to abandon Divine Immutability.

The Changeability the Arians the argued for The Son was for Improvability, which you may at first think doesn't correlate to the Changeability I am here arguing for The Godhead, but from a certain point of view it is.  God incarnating and becoming fully Human made Him a better God.  Hebrews stresses how Jesus faced all the Temptations normal humans face yet never sinned.  Not sinning is easy when you aren't even tempted, it is facing Temptation and beating it that is a true accomplishment.

The Pagan Greek Origins of Puritan Sexual Morality.

I wrote an Amazon Review for the book Plato or Paul?: The Origins of Western Homophobia by Theodore W. Jennings Jr.  [I recently learned that Jennings had passed away in 2020, may he Rest in Peace.]

I have also more recently obtained The Classical Origins of Modern Homophobia by Robert H. Allen.  I may also write an Amazon Review for it. 

I first learned about the Homophobia of Plato's The Laws however when I discovered this Website.

https://people.well.com/user/aquarius/

In it's article Plato: The Serpent in the Garden of Sexuality.  

My own past blog posts on this issue are a bit outdated now due to their references to things I've since changed my mind on, or at least now have a more informed opinion on.  Like how I had fallen into the trap of mistakenly thinking there was anything Communist or Socialist about either of Plato's proposed political systems.

Each of those three discussions of this issue have areas I disagree with.  None are as "Conservative" as I am about the origins of The Bible.  Only Jennings agrees with me that Paul is on our side, and Allen's agenda is not to exonerate The Bible of Homophobia at all, he alone of them agrees with the Homophobic reading of even the Leviticus verses.  Actually he cites a Saul Olyan that it's specifically referring to Male on Male Anal Penetration, which is close to my old position, but I now believe the "Wife's Bed" and "Abomination to Her" readings are the key to proving this is not a unilateral condemnation of any specific Sex act much less any type of relationship.

I think Jennings's theory on what Arsenokoites refers to (which is that it's essentially Rape) is probably most correct.  But I don't agree with his argument against it being in any way an allusion to the Leviticus verses, I simply think what he correctly argues Arsenkoites refers to, is what some people in Ancient Corinth and Ephesus thought those Leviticus verses were about.  His argument that Paul doesn't generally cite Leviticus to make moral arguments is irrelevant to the Vice Lists, because in those he was just using terms his audience would be familiar with, the vice lists are not themselves arguments against the behaviors listed.

I think Jennings's break down of Romans 1 is useful. but I still mainly side with Colby Martin's take on that in his Unclobber series.  Which is that Romans 1:18-32 is a rhetorical rant, that he's laying out the worldview the Epistle as a whole is written against, paraphrasing passages from Wisdom of Solomon and adding in Philo's usage of the "Para Phusis" concept introduced in The Laws, in order to spend the rest of the Epistle refuting that world view, in Romans 11 what God does is Para Phusis clearly rejecting the idea that being Para Phusis is immoral.

And Allen's cynical readings of The Bible lead to similar issues with extra-Biblical Church writers as well.  Clement of Alexandria was the first Christian to bring this "Para Phusis" Sexual Morality into the Church.  The crime of "corrupting youth" in works like the Didache is not Homosexuality or anything Sexual, just as it wasn't when Athens executed Socrates for that crime.  I likewise feel Allen is being unfair to both Justin Martyr and Tertullian.

The reason why I didn't put Plato in the title of this post is because Allen argues Pythagorean Philosophy and it's Dualism is the ultimate origin of this problem.  He argues Authentic Plato may have been at least partially influenced by Pythagoreanism, but also argues that The Laws as we have it is not an authentic work of Plato but a forgery produced and transmitted primarily by Pythagoreans.  And I think he might be correct on that.  Here is a YouTube video expressing similar ideas about the origins of Laws and how to interpret The Republic.

But still Authentic Plato or not the development of Platonic Schools of Philosophy was influenced by The Laws on these issues and others, which in turn influenced Roman Stoicism, Neopythagoreanism, Hellenistic Judaism, Gnosticism, The Alexandrian School of Christianity, and Neo-Platonism, which also all influenced each other in late Antiquity culminating in John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo.  Allen also documents how across the board Pagan Roman Society was Homophobic having been influenced by Southern Italian Pythagoreanism long before they even came into contact with the Eastern Mediterranean.

However another theory on the perceived inconsistencies between The Laws and the seemingly more positive Sexual attitudes expressed in works like Symposium is that Plato changed over the course of his life, perhaps partly from Pythagorean influence.  The Laws is considered the very last book he wrote and Symposium one of the earliest.

But going back to more indisputably authentic Plato, the title character of Timaeus (who's still around during Critias) is inferred to be a Pythagorean in the text of that dialogue.  So what Timaeus says can reasonably be presumed to be at least what Plato thought the Pythagoreans believed.  And it's from Timaeus we get what's considered the Platonic Creation Myth including the The Demiurge.  What's up for debate is how much the author wants us to take the title character and his ideas seriously.

The Website I linked to up top also has interesting stuff on the "Born Eunuch" issue and other subjects.  But it's article The Historic Origins of Church Condemnation of Homosexuality I don't recommend.  I have found no other sources claiming Eusebius of Nicomedia was ever referred to as a Eunuch.  meanwhile the pro Nicene Emperor Constans was a known Homosexual, before Theodosius I it was the Arian Emperors who were far more oppressive to those who disagreed with them.  [Update: So the Eunuch he's talking isn't the Bishop of Nicomedia who died in 341 but a different Eusebius mentioned in Athanasius's History of The Arians during the "Papacy" of Liberius.  Still I feel it's wrong to say the Arian controversy is why The Church embraced this Pythagorean sexual morality.  There were clearly Homosexuals and Platonists on both sides, Arian theology wouldn't be possible without the Timaeus based distinction between the Demiurge and the Monad, though making that distinction arguably begins with Numenius of Apamea in the 2nd Century.]

It's not just Homophobia, condemning all Sex Outside Marriage has the same roots in The Laws attributed to Plato.  As well as the idea that Sex is only for Reproduction which 1 Corinthians 7 explicitly contradicts.  What's almost Prophetic about it is how it talks about using Religion to condition society to react to Same Sex love the same way they do Incest.  These people were never fully able to get the Greeks to believe such things about their Native gods, but once many Greeks started worshiping the God of Abraham without a proper understanding of Bronze Age Semitic culture, that was when this long term scheme to lie about God's attitude towards Sex was able to take off.

Here is another Article I found about Pythagorean Sexual Morality.  And here is one on Pythagoras and Celibacy.

And it's not just the Sexual Morality of The Laws either.  Some people accuse Plato of being Proto-Fascist just based on The Republic, but The Laws is even more indistinguishable from the actual definition of Fascism.  Allen argued that the Pythagorean movement was tied to Totalitarianism already even before Plato's time.  Meanwhile the Calvinist view of Election which derives from Augustine's Gnostic Predestinationism lends itself well to the in-group vs out-group mentality.

Connecting this Sexual Morality to Platonism is useful because of how many other Unbiblical Ideas to enter Christianity are also tied to Plato's both direct and indirect influence on Greco-Roman Church Writers, including ideas opposed by many Conservative Evangelicals today.  So maybe a good way to open some minds is to show how these Sexual attitudes are tied to other doctrines they don't like.

Not all Platonic Ideas to enter the Church became part of Mainstream Christian thought.  Gnosticism and Marcionism were condemned as Heretical, as well as the Pre-Existence of Souls doctrine often associated with Origen, and Arianism which was also influenced by the Theology of Timaeus.  Still those ideas are related to things that did become mainstream.  Most casual Christians do have a fairly Platonic Understanding of the Immortality of the Soul simply minus the Reincarnation and Pre-Existence (Pope Benedict XII's Benedictus Deus in 1336 basically canonized the After Life depicted in Gorgias for the Western Church.), which in turn helps lead to Full Preterism and Amillenialism and any other Eschatology that denies a Literal Bodily Resurrection. 

Divine Impassability and Divine Immutability which I plan on making a separate post on are also tied to Platonic understandings of The Divine.  And a section in Gorgias definitely influenced the Traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of Hell and The Lake of Fire.

Evangelicals who don't like how more mainline dominations have been rejecting taking The Old Testament literally should know that not only is that a Platonic influence but the Allegorists are open about that.  In Brad Jersak's seminar on the subject he brags about how the Early Church Fathers decided to take the same approach to the Hebrew Bible that Plato and other Philosophers took to Homer and Hesiod.  He leaves out how the Antiochene School rejected that idea and were hyper-literalists.

Even Plato wasn't wrong on everything, he correctly concluded that the Earth was Round.  And that is why the most openly anti-Plato Christians on YouTube right now are the Flat Earthers.  So someone should explain to them how their Puritan Sexual morality has the same Platonic roots.  Still these Flat Earthers are unwittingly Pythagorean themselves with their Dome Cosmology resulting in a hard separation between the Divine and Earthly realms, and Rob Skiba even entertaining the view that we didn't have physical bodies before The Fall which is outright Gnostic.

One Pythagorean idea that was only ever accepted among some of the Full Blown Gnostics was Reincarnation, that one was especially impossible to make fit into The Bible.  But I do feel those who on Eschatology argue John The Baptist was the return of Elijah promised by Malachi's final verse are trying to plant a seed for it.

Over the course of the 2nd through 6th centuries Greco-Roman Christians increasingly took on Platonic Influences but in different ways.  Some seemed to be taking the Dialogue structure more so then any Metaphysics.  However when I look at Athenagoras of Athens who came a little before even Clement, it seems like the Sexual Morality of Laws was one of the first aspects of Platonism Christians embraced.  Maybe it's because even early on Paul's use of Para Phusis was easy to misunderstand.  Or maybe it's because this Minority religion mistakenly felt they should be rebelling agaisnt the Morals of mainstream Greek Society which it so happened was also what the Pythagoreans were doing.

Some similarities between Neoplatonism and Hellenic Judeo-Christians are the former being influenced by the latter, Numenius of Apamea definitely studied Jewish Platonists like Philo, and Ammonius Saccas was raised a Christian but then left the faith before becoming a teacher of Plotinus.  The puritanical Sexual Morality however definitely began with the Pagans not the Christians as this post has shown.