A God Who Feels

In our discussion of Lewis and The Problem of Pain today, the question of God’s immutability emerged. Some argued that if God is perfection, any deviation from perfection constitutes a negative change. As is the case with most matters, I would argue that God’s perfection is not as clearly cut as that. In His perfection, I believe God chooses to make Himself vulnerable. If only by the act of creating humans free, God made himself vulnerable, and with this, I think Lewis may agree.

Before I go any further, I must clarify my terms. As brilliant as the human intellect may be, I find danger in trying to explain God through a human understanding of words such as “perfection,” “emotion,” “vulnerability.” The fullness of God’s perfection is incomprehensible to an imperfect human mind. Though God interacts with His creation in ways that we may partly begin to understand, His vulnerability exists within a different framework than what we can comprehend. When I use the word vulnerable, I am meaning susceptibility to emotion, yet again, these very words extrapolate human experience upon God. Is our God truly susceptible to emotion? I find that the Biblical narrative creates a powerful image of a God Who feels. Genesis gives us a portrait of a Creator designing ex nihilo and later regretting the creation He had made on account of its depravity. Exodus and other books follow with images of a God filled with holy anger against sin and acting in righteous judgment against injustice. Job creates a picture of a God who can be compelled to answer the created from a whirlwind; Jeremiah crafts an image of a God grieved by His unfaithful bride. While pictures of a God who feels are scattered throughout the Old Testament, I think the case for a God who experiences emotion becomes most powerful in the figure of Christ. In the Gospels, we see portraits of a weeping God, One moved by compassion for the brokenness of His people, and One filled with righteous anger. We see images of a God moved by the widow’s two mites, by the gift of oil broken over His feet. If one ascribes to a consistently Trinitarian view of God, it is necessary to recognize the experience of Christ as the experience of the Godhead. If it were not so, Christ could not be fully God, and consequently, not a sacrifice perfect enough for our redemption.

Is the Godhead truly susceptible to emotion? I will not venture to definitively answer that question, but in order for God to be the God He says He is, I think it necessary for Him to feel. To me, vulnerability to pain does not make God less God; it makes Him more God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “God lets himself get pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way the only way, in which he helps us . . . the Bible directs us to God’s suffering; only the suffering God can help.”

Is suffering possible for a perfect God? The person of Jesus Christ seems to suggest that it is not only possible but necessary.