timmopussycat
Puritan Board Junior
Tim, I was going to save you some time by posting some links, but you were faster than I was. In any case, here are some things you might find of interest.
Mr. Winzer reviews John Murray
One previous discussion on this topic
Another previous discussion on this topic
This post may also prove helpful
Look at those threads: also look at the quotes I posted from Dr. Muller on this thread. Your post to me shows that you didn't actually appreciate the force of what was quoted on there - or at least you didn't take it into account in your reply.
In addition, your description of God is sadly lacking - He is generally happy, but not so much that He can't have transitory emotions? I rather hope you don't quite understand what you're saying there: it boils down to this, that though God may have a cheerful temperament, He is subject nonetheless to mood swings.
These previous threads show that the board administration has come to a definite position on the confession's teaching with regard to divine emotions and the confessional doctrines of immutability and impassibility. Promotion of error on this point is not going to be tolerated.
Reuben, of the other threads you cite, the Murray review did not open for me and at least one of the previous discussions appears to come to the position I outline below. As you will see I suspect much of this present thread is due to individuals talking past each other by interpreting words such as "emotivity" as they understood it, rather than noticiing how the writers using it had qualified the terms.
I had read your citations from Muller but did not want to comment on them, as I have reason to suspect that I need to study more than the excerpts you cited, since none of them attempt to give the reasons why the Reformers arrived at their conclusion i.e. why that conclusion followed from particular Biblical texts something I assume Muller gives in his footnotes which would have taken you too long to type up. Since PRRD is not immediately available to me, I wanted to withhold comment and even more so once I discovered that Dr. Bob cited him in an earler thread (which I discovere before you included it in your post)as writing the following (citation please Dr. Bob?):
Since a passion has its foundation or origin ad extra [without] and its terminus ad intra [within], it cannot be predicated of God and, in fact, fails to correspond in its dynamic with the way that God knows. An affection or virtue, by way of contrast, has its foundation or source ad intra and terminates ad extra, corresponding with the pattern of operation of the divine communicable attributes and, in particular, with the manner of the divine knowing. This understanding of affections and passions corresponds, moreover, with the etymology of the terms: an af- or ad-fectio from adficio, to exert an influence on something—in other words, an influence directed toward, not a result from, something; whereas passio, from patior, is a suffering or enduring of something—it can refer to an occurrence or a phenomenon and even to a disease.
This is not too far removed from the Muller excerpt from p. 553 which Reuben earlier supplied:
Nor, indeed, has the basic doctrinal assumption shifted: life the Reformers, the orthodox assume that God has affectiones that characterize his relationship to the world and that some analogy can be drawn between these "divine affections" and the affections that belong to human willing — with the major qualification that, unlike human affections, the divine affections do not indicate essential change in God and that they are permanent rather than transient dispositions.
Notice that Muller distinguishes between rejecting passions originating ad extra as experienced by God and His affections which originate ad intra and terminate ad extra. It appears that Muller views these affections as a biblically accurate description of God's capacity for feeling. To put what I think Dr. Bob and Dr. Packer are saying and what I am definitely saying into Muller's language, God's experience of feelings are self chosen "affections" and not passions originating ad extra.
With that clarified, is there anything in Scripture that renders this view of God's affections either unscriptural or unconfessional? If not then what is this fuss about?
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