NO, NOT EXACTLY.

Does God Suffer?
Thomas G. Weinandy
University of Notre Dame Press,
$22.95, 312 pp.

Anathema for centuries, the claim that God suffers is commonplace in many contemporary theologies. A God impassive in the face of the human suffering witnessed in the twentieth century, impassive in the face of the Holocaust, seems, with Camus, to be an "eternal bystander," unmoved by human suffering and so incapable of sympathy and love. Even worse, such a God appears complicit in human suffering, since he observes it without passion and is not moved to intervene. A God who does not suffer seems to be a God who is not passionately involved with the world.

Thomas Weinandy certainly agrees that a God impervious to human suffering is not worthy of respect. He goes beyond traditional claims that God's sorrow and grief are merely metaphorical, affirming they are true and actual. But if God is not impassive in the face of human suffering, God does remain, nevertheless, "impassible," in the classical sense that the divine nature is not subject to change or loss and God is not subject to suffering arising from such change or loss. God's sorrow and grief, though real and not merely metaphorical, do not arise from divine suffering; rather, they manifest and express the fullness of God's unchanging, "completely altruistic, all-consuming, and perfect love for his creatures." Weinandy further claims that if, to the contrary, God's sorrow and grief were expressions of suffering in God, their reality would be diminished, not increased. Key here is the distinction between creature and Creator. A passible God is no different from a creature. As Creator, God is not a creature but the one on whom all creatures depend, and as such God's involvement with creatures is both more intimate and more significant than that of any creature. Since God is incapable of loss or gain, God has no possibility of self-interest either in creating or in any relations with creatures. As Creator, therefore, God's actions toward creatures are not undertaken in order to ease God's suffering or to guard against the possibility of divine loss, and thus only belief in God as impassible Creator is belief in a God of perfectly altruistic love. For Weinandy, "only an impassible God, and not a passible God, is truly and fully personal, absolutely and utterly loving."

Incarnate in Christ, however, God not only truly sorrows, but also truly suffers. Weinandy is at his best in his discussion of the classical notion of the "exchange of properties" (communicatio idiomatum), that is, the predicating of divine and human attributes to one and the same person, the Son incarnate. "It is truly the Son of God who truly is man and so suffers truly as man." But this means that the suffering that God experiences is our suffering, not a special divine version of it occurring in the divine nature. God actually experiences something new and knows first hand--as one of us mortals--suffering and anguish within a fallen world. To attribute suffering instead to the divine nature is actually to make God more remote from us. Those advocating a passible God, Weinandy claims, have "locked suffering within God's divine nature, [and] in so doing, locked God out of human suffering." Further, if the suffering of God in Christ affected God's divine nature it would mean that it was someone other than the eternal impassible Creator who was experiencing human suffering. Weinandy comments, "Strange as it may seem, but not paradoxically, one must maintain the unchangeable impassibility of the Son of God as God in order to guarantee that it is actually the divine Son of God, one in being with the Father, who truly suffers as man, that is, that it is truly God who knows now from experience what human suffering is." This is the central truth of the communicatio idiomatum, the suffering of the Impassible.

Weinandy is at once genuinely traditional and genuinely creative, an admirable balance increasingly rare in contemporary theology. In many ways the book could serve simply as an introduction to classical Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, creatively explained and developed in the light of contemporary questions. Ultimately Weinandy seems concerned not so much with banning all talk of God's suffering as with cautioning against the loss of a whole theological vocabulary--of natures and persons, substance and essence--that permits the precise distinctions required for a full portrayal of the mystery of the Incarnation. The Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of the Word of God are God's answer to the problem of evil, and so a properly precise portrayal of the Incarnation--not the attribution of suffering to the divine nature--is the appropriate Christian defense against the charge that God is an eternal bystander. In Christ, God truly enters into radical historical solidarity with human suffering. "This is what humankind is crying out to hear, not that God experiences, in a divine manner, our anguish and suffering...but that he actually experienced and knew first hand, as one of us--as man--human anguish and suffering within a sinful and depraved world."

Weinandy worries that contemporary theologians are losing their taste for the "scandal" of the Incarnation as the "culmination and summit of biblical revelation." Displacing the suffering of God from the incarnate person of the Son to the divine nature seems to make that suffering more uniformly accessible since it elides a belief in Christ or connection to the church, Christ's body. Weinandy presses us here: Are we really ready to give up the claim that God truly and uniquely experiences human suffering as a real, particular human being and so in true solidarity with us? Some would call this a myth; Weinandy reminds us rather that it is a mystery, susceptible of precise expression if not explanation. It is the ahistorical suffering of the divine nature which is actually the stuff of myth.

Still, following the lead of John Paul II, Weinandy could better balance assertions of the uniqueness of Christian revelation with reminders that God's covenant with Israel is irrevocable. Otherwise, claims that Christians, through baptism, experience "the true spiritual circumcision," and that Christians differ from non-Christians "not simply in degree but in kind" will confirm the fears of anyone espousing the passibility of divine nature. They will worry that all the precise language about the Incarnation is simply a way of narrowing down the relevance of divine suffering to Christians, a way of reasserting a triumphalist anti-Judaism which, if it did not itself generate the Holocaust, at least prepared the attitude toward the Jews that made such a horror thinkable. Weinandy's book is such a compelling treatment of central Christian doctrines that one is eager to see his thesis formulated in a way that presents no temptation to those who might be inclined to repeat the sins of the anti-Jewish past.

John C. Cavadini is chair of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame.