Paper: The Impassibility of God and God's Covenant Love

Many years ago, I had sought the ministry while I was in the United States. I had joined the OPC and had applied for licensure in my presbtery. There are a couple of exams one has to pass, then one has to submit one exegetical paper and one theological paper. After all these have been completed and approved by the committee, one has to go before the presbytery, preach a sermon, then come before the presbytery for an oral examination. After the presbyters are satisfied with the answers to their questions, they would vote on whether to sustain the licensure. If the vote passes, the candidate is now licensed to preach the Gospel.

In 2014 to 2015, I had gone through the procedure. As one of the two papers have to be original, I wrote an original theological paper and completed it in 2014. In the providence of God, I chose to write on what was at that time considered non-controversial and relatively straight-forward - the impassibility of God. The papar was unanimously approved and my licensure sustained with no dissenting vote. Did I change my view since then, or did something else change? Well, I decided to read through the paper again in 2022, and I agreed with all of it, save that now I embrace the concept of "energies" whereas before I was agnostic of its utility (which is not the same as rejecting it).

Until now, this paper has only been seen by the presbyters of the Presbytery of Southern California of the OPC. It is now available for all to read now on my website here, and on Academia.edu here. Entitled The Impassibility of God and God's Covenant Love, this paper marks the starting point of my current stance on the doctrine of God as it pertains to issues of contemporary interests. An excerpt:

The doctrine of the impassibility of God (i.e. that God has “no passions”) has fallen on hard times. While it was the majority position of the early, medieval and Reformation era church, it has since in the modern era come under attack. This assault upon impassibility increased greatly with Jürgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God, which utilized insights from Japanese theologian Kazoh Kitamori to put forward a “post-Auschwitz” idea of a God who suffers with us.

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