Wesley, Impassibility, and the Articles of Religion
The Evolution of Article I
In 1784, American Methodists met in Baltimore to formally establish the Methodist Episcopal Church. The conference adopted 25 Articles of Religion as one of its doctrinal foundations. John Wesley adapted these articles for use in the United States from the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England. The first of these articles, as adopted by the American church, began:
“There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible.”
In classical terms, the article affirms God’s aseity, eternity, incorporeality, and simplicity.
The American church made one slight change in the article Wesley sent to them. Wesley’s version followed the 1662 Book of Common Prayer exactly:
“There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.”
The Americans omitted the word “passions” which relates to the sometimes contentious and confusing doctrine of divine impassibility. The doctrine, in various forms, dates to the early Church Fathers.
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward I, was the author of the Anglican version. Cranmer was also the author of the first English Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer initially proposed 42 Articles of Religion in 1552, the first of which began:
"There is but one living and true God, and he is everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; and the maker and preserver of all things both visible and invisible.”
Cranmer’s source was the Augsburg Confession, the first article of which uses the same words in the same order to describe God:
“eternal, without body, without parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, the Maker and Preserver of all things, visible and invisible.”
Philip Melanchthon composed the Augsburg Confession in 1530 to defend the Lutheran reformation to the Holy Roman Emperor. Cranmer admired Melanchthon and attempted to lure him to a chair of theology in England.
Under Mary’s reign, Cranmer was burned to death in Oxford in 1556. The 39 Articles were revised and published in the Book of Common Prayer during Elizabeth’s reign as part of the so-called “Elizabethan Settlement”. The first article remained essentially as Cranmer had written it.
There is no record of why Cranmer chose to add the word “passions” to the model he adapted. Overall, however, the original Articles of Religion have a decidedly Reformed (or Calvinist) perspective. Today’s most vocal defenders of impassibility (in one form or another) are in the Reformed theological camp. To me, most Reformed arguments for impassibility lead back to irresistible grace and salvation by eternal decree.
Wesley's Qualified Impassibility
Wesley’s edition of the Articles of Religion omitted all the articles related to the Calvinist emphasis on predestination, effectual calling, irresistible grace, limited atonement and so forth. Wesley was an Arminian, not a Calvinist. He could appreciate many aspects of Reformed theology, but not those related to these matters.
Still Wesley retained the word “passions” in the first article. We find that word again in one of Wesley’s later sermons, “On the Unity of the Divine Being” (1789). The sermon begins by listing the many attributes of God. Echoing the first Article of Religion, Wesley wrote:
“This God is a Spirit; not having such a body, such parts or passions, as men have.”
The qualification “as men have” is the key to understanding what Wesley meant by “passions”. It is not that God does not have any affections or passionate feelings. It is simply that God’s affections are not like human emotions. There is a qualitative difference.
Unlike Reformed theologians, Wesley does not offer a dense philosophical treatise on divine ontology built on a tower of therefores. He makes a practical observation. In important respects, God is different than we are.
What Impassibility Might Mean
Over the years, theologians have described impassibility in many ways that make sense to me:
- God does not suffer human pain or experience emotions as we do because God is incorporeal. Our experiences are embodied in human flesh, inseparably tied to brain function and the nervous system. All our thoughts, emotions and feelings are biochemical in nature.
- God does not have human emotions that are destructive in the world – rage, jealousy, lust, and so forth. God is not like the petty, tyrannical gods of Greek and Roman myth who wreak havoc in both the human and divine realms.
- God does not have emotions that are destructive of himself – despair, loneliness, emotional suffering unto death or diminishment. Suffering does not threaten him as it does us. To think that suffering does not threaten humans is a naïve thought that can only be entertained by those who are not suffering. To think that suffering threatens God is to misunderstand God.
- God is not driven by flights of irrational, inconsistent, or unpredictable emotions as human beings are. We are too often at the mercy of emotions which are beyond our control. God’s holy love is constant and never failing. We can trust God and depend upon his word.
- God is not driven by neediness as we human beings are. There is no lack or emptiness that God is trying to fill in his dealings with us. We are often blind to how our own neediness drives our actions, but this is not an issue for God. He does not need anything from us and we cannot emotionally manipulate him. He created our world and enters it in a purely voluntary way that we human beings can only begin to understand.
- God is not surprised by events. He cannot be thrown off kilter by unforeseen occurrences and does not need to worry about what might happen. God is never anxious or in a panic. God will bring his eternal purposes to pass.
- God cannot be injured by his creation. Free of fear for his own well-being, God can act in loving freedom.
- Humans experience emotions sequentially, one (or a few) at a time. When a child does something wrong, hurtful or destructive - but when confronted says, "I'm sorry" - parents can go from shock to fear to anger to relief to affection in a short time. For humans, however, the angry mental state is not the same as the affection mental state. God, in his perfections, is not bound by human limitations. God can perfectly and simultaneously live in joy, affection, mercy, compassion, indignation and all other divine dispositions toward millions of human beings without necessarily changing his mental state (which is a biochemical process in humans, anyway).
- Suffering is not one of God’s eternal or essential attributes. Before the world came to be, God existed in the perfect love of the holy trinity. The triune God does not suffer in himself, apart from his voluntary condescension to us. The incarnation and the crucifixion did not take place primarily to demonstrate that God suffers with us, but to defeat sin, death, and the devil. The crucifixion and resurrection of the incarnate God will ultimately deliver creation from the suffering which now holds it in captivity. Redeemed humanity will live in the blessed presence of the Almighty.
- God’s inner life is qualitatively different than anything human beings can experience or imagine due to the ontological difference between God and his creation and the distortions sin creates in human perceptions. All the Biblical language about God’s emotions are, to some extent, analogies or metaphors. It impossible to speak directly about the God who transcends the cosmos.
Other theologians have argued that God can have no emotions or affections at all. They offer some very fancy philosophical thinking about God’s unchangeable or immutable nature that attempt to penetrate the veil separating the cosmos from eternity. Wesley would likely object to their arguments. He was very comfortable talking about God’s affections. That makes sense when you remember that Wesley’s primary theological emphasis was on God’s love and mercy.
Echoes of Westminster
Interestingly, Wesley’s affirmation in The Unity of the Divine Being also draws on the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) (1647).
“There is but one only, living, and true God: who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute,"
Similarly, in The Unity of the Divine Being, Wesley begins with an affirmation that God is Spirit and then follows Article I and the WCF in affirming that God has no body, parts or passions. Later in the sermon, Wesley explicitly alludes to the Westminster Catechism, a document which Wesley republished for his society without its Calvinistic paragraphs.
Both the Confession of Faith and the Catechism had been prepared by the Westminster Assembly to bring the Church of England more in line with Scottish Presbyterianism and the church’s Puritan faction in the during the bloody English Civil Wars. For a brief time, during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the WCF replaced the 39 Articles as the church’s doctrinal statement. These doctrinal statements, by the way, had teeth. Dissent brought civil penalties, sometimes severe. When the monarchy returned and restored the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, the Puritan faction was effectively expelled from the Church of England. I wonder how Wesley’s partial acceptance of Puritan thought played among his Church of England contemporaries.
* Randy Maddox, Responsible Grace (1994), in his paragraphs on "God's Natural Attributes" (pp. 51-52 & footnotes), identified the American church as the party responsible for the change in Article I. He points to Henry Wheeler, History and Exposition of the Twenty-Five Articles of Religion of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1908), as the source of the idea that the revised article more closely resembled the Augsburg Confession, from which Article I had been drawn.
