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This childhood experience confirmed for me that a love that does not suffer with the suffering of the beloved is not love at all. What consolation would it have been if my mother had remained aloof from my suffering? Of what help to wounded people is a God who knows nothing of pain himself? "Only the suffering God can help," Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his death cell. God helps not through supernatural miracles, but through his own wounds—his suffering with victims and sufferers.

Our Christian foreparents were right to speak of God as impassible if that means God is not emotionally unstable and cannot be manipulated by humans. But they were wrong to conclude from this that God has no passion. They were wrong to think a suffering God is an imperfect being who necessarily seeks his perfection and tries to overcome his deficiency though actions. C. S. Lewis makes a helpful distinction between "gift love" (agape) and "need love" (eros). God does not act out of need love—a love dominated by self-seeking desires. Rather, God acts out of gift love—a free, self-giving love—sharing his boundless goodness without thought of return. God's goodness means that he loves us with a completely unconditional love, involving himself with us even in our pain.

If God is devoid of passions, we would have to rewrite the Bible. The Bible eloquently affirms that God can be wounded. In Hosea, for instance, God cries out about wayward Israel: "How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? … My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath" (11:8-9, NRSV).

God suffered the pain of the broken relationship with Israel, but as the Japanese scholar Kazoh Kitamori comments: "The 'pain' of God reflects his will to love the object of his wrath." God's anger is not a childish loss of temper nor is it a frustrated love turned sour or vindictive. Rather, it is an expression of pure love that does not allow him to stand by idly in the face of unrighteousness. God's true nature is active love; wrath is God's "strange work," which opposes anything that stands between God and us. Wrath is God's love burning hot in the presence of sin, proof that he cares.

Was God present at the Cross?
If the attribute of impassibility is ascribed to God, there can be no real incarnation of God in Jesus. If God is denied suffering, then the Cross cannot be a genuine revelation of God.

The Greek idea of God obscured the fullness of God's self-revelation in Jesus. One result was that the early church fathers concluded that Jesus suffered in his humanity, not in his divinity; and they separated Jesus' humanity from his deity, thus in effect making each nature an independent person, as the Nestorian heresy does, thereby jeopardizing the unity of Christ. To say that the Son of God, as divine, is impassible is to affirm that Christ's divinity is untouched by the suffering of his humanity. Consequently there is no real Incarnation; or if there is, it is robbed of its main significance.

But God has willed that we should think of Jesus when we think about him. For God is revealed to us in the person of Jesus rather than through philosophy. Evangelicals should not be offended at the thought that the death of the crucified Christ involved not only the humanity of Jesus but also his deity.

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February 3 1997, Vol. 41, No. 2