The Stoics were pantheists. They equated divine providence with the physical world. So to live by God's law, you were to act "in harmony with nature." What has this to do with the impassibility of God?
Chris: It has everything to do with the extreme version of Divine impassability. Platonic thought taken to the extreme is very dangerous. Resulting in the Clock winder all transcendant God.
Where do the Stoics fit in? They didn't worship a clock winder. They worshiped the clock.
Resulting in the Clock winder all transcendent God.
That's the god of Deism. Who believes in that?
Chris: I suggest you read the different views Stoics had. There were many schools of thought. Rick asked an important question. One I admitted to not having swum into the deep end. I suggest you read the article I posted fro Paul Helm. He explains my thoughts much better than I can.
The four passions, Stoics say, are grief (lupe), fear (phobos), desire (epithumia), and pleasure (hedone). The essential flaw of these four emotions is, again, that they are irrational and lead one to act on impulse rather than reason.
Three of these passions––fear, desire, and pleasure––have acceptable counterparts that are similar inclinations but are rational (eulogos): caution, wishing, and joy. The Stoics explicitly claim that God is rational, which clearly excludes the passions from God's experience. As for the positive emotions, though I'm pretty sure the Stoics would claim they do not apply to God, they are still affirmed as positive/rational. The implication is that Christians who wish to agree with the Stoics that the passions are irrational and bad can still attribute positive emotions to God without having to concede that God is irrational.
The problem, and what strikes me as interesting, is that the Stoics describe no counterpart for grief which can be governed by reason in a person. Therefore if we want to hold to their view of the passions as bad, we would have to say God feels no grief.
This leaves the Christian who wishes to affirm Stoic views of the passions with a contradiction:
On the one hand, if we regard Jesus as the divine word (logos), we commit ourselves to the idea that God acts according to reason, and that Jesus does as well. In the case of caution, wishing, and joy, this presents no problem, as they are emotions governed by reason.
But on the other hand, the cross is the ultimate expression of the passion of grief, which implies that Christ (and therefore perhaps God) indeed can be grieved.
So the Stoic evaluation of passion clearly is inadequate from a Christian perspective; grief cannot be declared irrational if we believe the crucified Christ was also the divine logos.
However, we could still affirm with the Stoics that passion uncontrolled by reason is indeed to be avoided (and therefore should not be ascribed to God or Jesus). A necessary stipulation, however, is that we must disagree with the Stoics' judgment as to which emotional experiences in fact lack reason (and thus are "passions") and which can be governed by reason and experienced by a rational God.
Perhaps this idea that God's experience of emotion is always governed by reason (and therefore does not influence him to act irrationally or under impulse) could serve as an explanation of divine impassibility.
Classic "impassibility" language is, after all, rooted in a Stoic understanding of the passions as those things which intemperately move us. In that sense absolutely God is impassible. But taking impassibility to mean the absolute imperviousness of God to humanity doesn't seem right either...For the Greeks, suffering implied deficiency of being, weakness, subjection, instability mutability. But the cross shows us a God who suffers out of the fullness of his being because he is love. He does not suffer against his will, but willingly undertakes to suffer with and for those he loves. His suffering does not deflect him from his purpose, but accomplishes his purpose. His transcendence does not keep him aloof from the world, but as transcendent love appears in the depth of his self-sacrificing involvement in the world. Finally, if Christians know anything about God from the cross, it is that 'the weakness of God is stronger than men' (1 Cor. 1:25). The cross does not make God a helpless victim of evil, but is the secret of his power and his triumph over evil.
You ask about Diesm. Perhaps Calvinists are as guilty as Jefferson and the Constitutional writers were in regards to situating a diestic God. The Platonic and Stoic influence on the early church Fathers is implicit. Their development of God being immutable, self sufficient, imapssible and lastly static became the "orthodox" understanding. THis led to a distortion of God's nature. God appeared more and more like Aristotles unmoved mover, rather than the passionate God of orthodox faith.
Chris, this subject is very very interesting, yet deep. Very deep. Starting with Stoic/Greek thought. Platonic indoctrination, the church has made impassibility equal to immutability to their error in some cases. Augustine spearheaded this thought which remained unquestioned until the 19th century except by Luther. Anthropopathic language was only used in scripture becasue of human limitations. It is a paradox. How can God be both loving and impassible.
Anselm asked:
How art thou at once compassionate and impassible? For if thou is impassible, thou canst suffer with others, if if thouh canst suffer, thy heart cannot be wrenched out of sympathy for sinners. But this is what comapssionate means. Yet if thouh are not compassionate, where does consolation come from the sinner....
The reformers did not bring about any much change in this thought. It is in the 39 articles and the WCF ch 2. The scholastics upheld this without much discussion. But i believe it deserves another look.
