Hm.
This, I’m sorry, comes across to me as

Yes, God is cold and unfeeling, but Jesus isn’t.
Jesus is just like us and has gone back to heaven and he shares our humanity up there.

But God doesn’t.

I don’t see how that helps! I think quite a bit of the problem is the cold language being used. Impassible sounds too much like impassive.

I don’t think a God who is unmoved by us would have bothered to engineer our salvation.

I don’t think Jesus has any more love and compassion and understanding of us than the Father does. God is full of steadfast love and mercy [and justice and wrath at our sin].

I don’t think the value of having Jesus in heaven now is that he is passible whereas God is impassible.

I think it is that Jesus is both Man and God.

Because Jesus lived among us, shared our humanity and suffered and was tempted as we are, we know that God understands our pain and suffering. But because God is infinite and knows and sees all, he has always known these things.

Wouldn’t the interpenetration of Father, Son and Spirit mean that all persons of the trinity know our frailty?

But Jesus is uniquely our human [and divine] representative.

Hi David,

It’s obvious that Kevin deYoung’s article which Sandy kindly linked in the ‘theological frameworks’ thread has resolved most of these issues for you.  But, since they’ve been raised, I thought it would be good to engage with them anyway.

I don’t think a God who is unmoved by us would have bothered to engineer our salvation.

God might be unmoved by us, in the sense that he doesn’t feel pain when he sees us in pain. We do, and so, even when we don’t love somebody we will still often step up and try and stop their pain.  We’ll comfort a crying baby or child, we’ll risk our lives to rescue somone trapped.  That’s all good, nothing to be ashamed of.  But part of why we do it is an internal pressure on us that arises involuntarily and that can only be met by helping the person in need.  Helping them, in a sense, helps ourselves.

God’s love is nothing like that.  He doesn’t get anything out of his deep, passionate concern for our wellbeing.  It’s not about him needing to stop our pain because it hurts him.  It’s about him caring about us and caring about what happens to us simply and purely for our sakes. 

I don’t think Jesus has any more love and compassion and understanding of us than the Father does. God is full of steadfast love and mercy [and justice and wrath at our sin].

Absolutely agree.  And impassibility is intended to uphold this in the strongest possible way, as strange as it can seem to us when we find the concept of ‘passions’ difficult to get our heads around.

Because Jesus lived among us, shared our humanity and suffered and was tempted as we are, we know that God understands our pain and suffering. But because God is infinite and knows and sees all, he has always known these things.

And, in that sense, we always knew God has known these things.  God has always perfectly understood his creatures better than we have.

But is the point of Hebrews that the Son became flesh and blood to reveal something that is always true anyway?  Or is it showing that he really has become just like us, and our Mediator is ‘one of us’ - our brother.

Is the Incarnation a game changer, or simply the revelation of something that is true anyway?

Wouldn’t the interpenetration of Father, Son and Spirit mean that all persons of the trinity know our frailty?

Here again, Kevin deYoung’s article is great.  But as a brief answer - if we say that the Son sympathises with our weaknesses because he is flesh and blood and so therefore the Father and Spirit do too then we also say:

It’s a bit like the issue with me a Tony on another thread - everything true of Christ’s humanity now becomes shared around the Godhead.  Any distinction between divine and human is, more or less, extinguished.

That’s not a good result.  But the concerns that push people towards a passible God begin to push us in that direction.