Rethinking Divine Impassibility after Robert W. Jenson
Project period
01.01.2024-31.12.2026
Supervisors
Professor emeritus Knut Alfsvåg, VID Specialized University
Associate professor Ragnar Misje Bergem, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society
About the project
The concept of divine impassibility, or apatheia, suggests that God transcends the category of passions and has been prevalent throughout the history of theology. Thus, ascribing impassibility to God is a way of denying that God has any imperfections characteristic of created existence. In many contemporary theologians, divine impassibility has come under heavy scrutiny. It has been argued that it instead entails a God who is static, indifferent, and irreconcilable with the “dynamic” picture of God of the Bible. This project investigates the problem of impassibility through an investigation of and dialogue with the American Lutheran theologian Robert W. Jenson. Jenson ambitiously reconsiders the traditional concept of God’s impassibility and timelessness by suggesting that temporal contingency is not an ontological defect. This allows him to say that God can be identified by and with the historically contingent events of the biblical narrative. Thus, according to Jenson’s system, the understanding of impassibility must be reconsidered from this perspective. Does divine impassibility truly entail a God who is indifferent and thus irreconcilable with the biblical picture of God? In this thesis I suggest a way forward by articulating divine impassibility in a way that challenges the critique, by suggesting that the concept must be understood as a properly apophatic concept without implying the proposed positive corollary that God is indifferent.
Background
Master in theology and religious studies, VID, 2021