Does God Feel Pain?
“Does God feel our pain?”
This was the question I asked my husband over our dinner of deliciously fried chicken and gourmet mac n’ cheese. It was Valentine’s Day, purportedly the most romantic day of the year. We had been able to procure tickets to see the musical Hamilton at the last minute, and as a result, we were eating not at a candlelit Italian bistro, but a popular local joint serving Southern-style cuisine. The food was great even if the atmosphere was not exactly perfect, but I barely registered any of it, because my mind was in complete turmoil.
You see, it was not just Valentine’s Day. It was the day before I was to set to receive some news that could have serious ramifications. I did not discuss it publicly then and do not intend to do so now, but suffice it to say I was very much on edge, wondering what the rest of my life would involve. Questions of life, death, and eternity were at the forefront of my mind, and none greater than this one: “Does God feel our pain?”
I knew the answer to this question on an academic level. After all, when I hadn’t been dealing with those difficult circumstances over the previous two years, I had been researching theology proper, particularly as it relates to divine immutability and impassibility. The topic was interesting from an intellectual standpoint, but I assure you on that evening it had also become very emotional. I was not looking for an academic answer but a pastoral one.
What I believed then, I tell you now—the answer to this question of what God is like has enormous ramifications not only for how he can comfort us during the trials of this life, but how he can deliver us in the next.
OUR DEFINITIONS VS. GOD’S DEFINITIONS
Well, does God feel our pain? The most natural response of American, evangelical Christians today would likely be, “Yes, of course, he does.” In fact, I’m fairly certain that the majority of Christians of all stripes would want to affirm that God feels our pain. After all, it seems entirely scriptural. “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings,” God told Moses (Exodus 3:7). The prophet Isaiah said of God’s relationship with the nation of Israel, “In all their affliction He was afflicted, And the angel of His presence saved them…” (Isaiah 63:9) And of course, the examples of Christ’s sufferings are numerous.
Nevertheless, an academic answer to the question from the perspective of classical Christian theism begins with the word “no.” No, the eternal God is not like human beings in the sense of having a physical body, experiencing changes of state, or being acted upon by others. No, he does not have passions like we do, here using an older sense of the term:
“The state of being acted upon or affected by something external, especially something alien to one’s nature or one’s customary behavior.”
He cannot feel physical pain because he does not have a physical body, and he cannot be caused pain by others emotionally in the sense of failing to anticipate something or being surprised by it. The eternal God anticipates and knows all.
This likely sounds very odd to the uninitiated person. After all, we usually view God from our perspective rather than considering him alone in eternity. Practically everything we know about God results from his relationships with creatures and his actions in time. Speaking about him apart from time is a necessarily difficult proposition. Understanding someone who does not proceed through different states of being or moments of time goes against the programming of our brains. Perhaps we do not even realize that most of the scripture speaks from our perspective, the better to help us understand God’s revelation of himself.
One of the best modern considerations of God’s impassibility is Thomas Weinandy’s Does God Suffer? He summarized key points from that book in an article for the journal First Things. “From the dawn of the Patristic period Christian theology has held as axiomatic that God is impassible—that is, He does not undergo emotional changes of state, and so cannot suffer,” Weinandy wrote. “Toward the end of the nineteenth century a sea change began to occur within Christian theology such that at present many, if not most, Christian theologians hold as axiomatic that God is passible, that He does undergo emotional changes of states, and so can suffer.”
Without a doubt, Weinandy is correct in his assessment of our current historical moment. Modern theologians have seen God’s ability to empathize with us, particularly in our pain, as more important than his sovereign otherness when it comes to comforting the suffering individual. An assortment of mental shifts likely helped precipitate this change, such as the rise of the therapeutic mindset and new methods of interpreting scripture. The modern world has become less and less interested in a God who is not fully empathetic. (Notice that I said empathetic, not sympathetic.) It is a common tendency today for many Christians to hold up the love of God as his defining attribute. Linked with that is often a sense that God must be empathetic. He must allow himself to change in response to us. He must feel what we are feeling.
Another related aspect of modern Western culture is the rise of experience as the ultimate form of validation. Have you ever had a conversation with someone and they uttered something like, “You can’t understand, because you haven’t felt what I’m feeling”? How about this: “You can’t understand, because you’re not a [fill in the blank] like me.” This often turns into, “You don’t have a right to speak on the subject, because you haven’t experienced [fill in the blank] yourself.” What is really happening in these cases is a complete dismissal of sympathy in favor of empathy. Remember, empathy occurs when you feel compassion for a person because you have been through the same thing as them, whereas sympathy is compassion you feel regardless of whether you have been through the same thing.
Let’s transfer this to God now. If God has never experienced a heart attack, can he comfort those who have a heart attack? If he has never experienced an anxiety disorder, can he be the rock that sufferers of anxiety disorders need? Some might say “no.” Only an alcoholic can truly give another alcoholic the help they require. Only a member of a group facing discrimination can properly aid another member of that group in distress. Therefore, if God does not literally feel pain in some manner, he is not worth appealing to in times of crisis. He is not the kind of comforter who can help us through life’s ups and downs. So long, sympathy. Empathy is the only true form of love.
THE DIFFERENCE THE INCARNATION MAKES
While I do not accept the kind of logic I have just described, being built as it is upon a particular cultural understanding of love that is perhaps no more valid than any other devised by man, I must stress that there is more to this story. After all, the very thing that makes the Christian God unique is that he became incarnate as a man. Yes, the incarnate Christ suffered even as we suffer. He felt pain, hunger, and thirst. He was troubled in spirit, laboring under a great psychological and spiritual burden. He sought out the friendship of others. He took the time to recover, both bodily and spiritually. Not only that, but he was tempted to evil. He knew what it was to war against the devil in human flesh.
Life has forced me to learn the hard lesson of what it is to suffer in the flesh. I have seen it in the withering away of my grandmother’s body, watching her slowly lose the ability to talk, to eat, to move, and finally to breathe. I have experienced how quickly my own capabilities can be compromised by the cold rush of terror that courses through my veins, and everything becomes a whir of doubt. I have fallen into an emotional abyss of apparently infinite depth, where things beyond understanding dwell in the darkness and a person learns who they truly are. There are deeper levels to that darkness that I have not seen, for God pulled me out: others have been forced to drink from that cup, but not me. Not yet.
The truly amazing thing about Jesus Christ is that he drank that cup. He underwent that baptism of suffering. Our suffering is now united with his, and to know him—indeed, to know God—is to know something of that pain. This was the longing of the Apostle Paul: “…that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:10-11) But what is the connection between the humanity and divinity of Christ?
The incarnation has always presented a difficulty regarding how we should refer to the attributes or works of God. Each time Good Friday rolls around, one can find a debate among Christians on social media over whether it is correct to say, “God died on the cross.” The theological answer according to a classical, orthodox understanding of the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures is, “Yes and no, depending on how you mean it.” I believe that the incarnation puts us in a similar position concerning the question of whether or not God feels pain. The correct answer is, “In his eternal essence, no, but in the incarnate Son, yes.”
The incarnation changes how we think about God because the second Person of the Trinity has experienced the pains and struggles of humanity in his person. Having said that, there is a danger in talking this way without the proper clarity of definitions. The Person of Christ has two natures: divine and human. It is a standard feature of Reformed Christology to state that each nature does only what is proper to itself, or has only those attributes which are proper to itself. The definition of the Council of Chalcedon says that Jesus is:
“…one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ…”
The Incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity did not change the divine essence such that it became subject to changing passions. The divine essence, shared by all three Persons of the Trinity, is not subject to pain and suffering, even as it is not subject to any kind of change, even given the reality of the Incarnation. However, because Christ suffered in his human nature and that suffering remains rightly attributed to the person of the Son, we can say in one sense that God does feel our pain. He does empathize with us. This surely has some effect on how we think about divine impassibility without compromising the classical understanding of the concept.
I was very struck a few years ago when, in a Bible study at my local church, a woman explained the anger she felt at God after her child died. She described praying to him bitterly, “You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child!” Then she explained how she was immediately struck with a sense of shame when she realized that yes, God the Father did know what that was like.
Now, we could perhaps quibble with some aspects of this woman’s statement. After all, the death of Christ came as no surprise to God the Father. He also knew that his Son would be resurrected in three days. Additionally, the eternal God did not suffer from this experience in the same manner that we suffer—changeably, non-sovereignly, etc.
Even so, I could not get this idea out of my head: our God is a God who watched his Son die. Did he fail to foresee it? No. Was it one state of being in a succession? No. And yet, he watched his Son die. I believe we must affirm all those things together, even if they boggle our minds. The incarnation changes how we think about God, even though it creates no change in his eternal nature.
WHY WE AFFIRM DIVINE EMOTION BUT NOT PASSIONS
While proponents of classical theism state that God does not feel our pain in the sense of undergoing suffering, they fully acknowledge that he does care about it. Here we must understand the difference between passions and emotions. Some think the classical view of God as impassible means that he has no emotions, but if love is an emotion, then God certainly is emotional. Likewise, if wrath is an emotion, he is certainly emotional.
The problem is that we tend to think of emotions as things that wax and wane, moving from one stage to the next. It is difficult or even impossible for us to imagine what emotion would be like for a being who does not move through a succession of moments or respond to new information, but I think we do a disservice to the biblical portrait of God if we suggest that he is not emotional or does not care about things. That is not what divine impassibility means.
Remember the difference between sympathy and empathy, and tell me this: if a friend calls to tell me that her husband has died in a car crash, is it possible for me to care about that even if I have never lost my husband in a car crash? Is it possible for me to be sympathetic even though I am not empathetic? Can my sorrow over this event be just as real as that of the bereaved wife? I believe the answer to all of those questions is “yes,” so why should we assume that God can’t really care about us or have sympathy for us if he has not experienced every one of our pains himself? If God’s knowledge is perfect and exhaustive, then surely he has a sense of what is going on in our hearts. He can provide comfort in our time of need.
My introduction to Reformed theology was quickly followed by a series of difficulties. I spent most of 2017 suffering from an illness that defied diagnosis. Both chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia were considered. Without a doubt, whatever I had was accompanied by severe depression. Even as my physical symptoms started to wane in early 2018, my depression seemed to grow worse. I suffered from the greatest spiritual crisis of my life to date. I cannot tell you how lost I felt during that time—how utterly hopeless.
I improved somewhat by 2019, only to be hit by a new plague, once again of the medical variety. One by one, various relatives were diagnosed with life-threatening conditions. We had been blessed with good health for so long, but all at once we seemed to become the target of a dreadful curse. All of this brought me up to that moment in the restaurant, sitting across from my husband, wondering what on earth to make of it all. I asked him that question: “Does God feel our pain?” I was calling upon all the theological resources I had garnered in a short amount of time, hoping that they would help me to survive the storm.
In those hours, I needed God to be impassible, but why? Why was I different from so many who prefer a God who changes even as we change? Because my study of scripture had taught me to consider not only that single moment of emotion, but the entirety of history and beyond. It taught me to value what mattered most: not a God who is like me, but one who is not like me.
What is the alternative? If God is not impassible—that is, if he is subject to a shifting tide of emotion or even fails to anticipate certain events—then can he be the God we need in our distress?
I have asked myself that question or a variation of it many times in my life. When I first began to suffer from an anxiety disorder at age eighteen, I felt as if I was caught up in a storm, drifting at sea, about to be pulled down by the undertow. In those moments, I looked to God as my rock: the one thing that would not move. I clung to the promises in his Word.
If God is subject to a change of mood in response to every whim of human emotion or action of our sinful hearts then I fear that his promises are in doubt and he is not a rock on which we can rely. His promises depend upon his immutability and impassibility, as he declared in the Old Testament.
“For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed” (Malachi 3:6).
A God who is subject to change, even of emotion, is not fully in control. That, my friends, is a terrifying possibility. If God has promised deliverance in the future, but he doesn’t know what is going to happen in the future, how can you trust that promise? If God has sworn he will always love us, but his feelings are subject to change based on our behavior, how can we be certain that love will endure? We will be forced to accept watered-down promises conditional upon the actions of human beings. Do we really want a God like that?
Regardless of what we want, we do not have a God like that. The more I have suffered in my life, the more I have longed for a God who is sovereign over my suffering. Only that kind of God can save me. Yes, a God who is in control of everything forces us to wrestle with the problem of evil, but only a God who controls everything gives us hope that evil can be defeated.
In scripture, we see a God who is sorrowful over the affliction of his people, jealous for their worship, and joyful over their return to him. This is not a cold-hearted, unfeeling God, and I must state again that such an unfeeling God is not what classical theism teaches: it is a caricature that has been forced upon classical theism.
Jesus Christ did reveal to us something of the Father when he loved his own until the very end (John 13:1) and laid down his life for them. (John 10:15) He showed us the Father when he said of Jerusalem, “How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it!” (Luke 13:34)
Does that mean that the human aspects of Christ, such as limitations of presence or capability, are reflective of the eternal God? No. Does that mean that since Jesus grew suddenly angry at the money changers in the Temple, the eternal God can grow suddenly angry, as the most literal reading of certain Old Testament passages might suggest? No. Why not? Because the human Christ passed through a succession of moments, and the eternal God does not: he possesses the fullness of life and perfection all at once. That necessarily requires us to think differently about the emotions of the divine essence, and there are some things we will never fully comprehend.
What we can know for certain is that God cares for us deeply. He is with us in our sorrows to aid us, sympathize with us, and comfort us. Otherwise, the Apostle Peter would not have instructed us to be “casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:7) This is not some kind of imaginary casting or caring. That is not what impassibility means. The nature of our God allows him to be there for us in a greater way than if he was more similar to human beings. Consider these words of the Psalmist:
“Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
Even there Your hand will lead me,
And Your right hand will lay hold of me.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will overwhelm me,
And the light around me will be night,’
Even the darkness is not dark to You,
And the night is as bright as the day.
Darkness and light are alike to You.” (Psalm 139:7-12)
If God is not omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, these words of comfort cannot be true. What about the vision of the future given to us in the book of Revelation, which promises us that God will ultimately triumph over the forces of evil? If God did not have perfect foresight—if he was, in fact, moving through one moment at a time, waiting like all of us to see what happens next—he could never have granted us the assurance of that prophecy. It is only because God does not change that the Apostle Paul could proclaim:
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38)
The news I received the day after I asked my husband that original question was indeed painful, even as much of the past few years has been painful in various ways. I am sure there will be more pain in the future, and when it hits me, I will want to know that God understands. I will place my hope in the ultimate deliverance he provides. What I will not want is a God who is just like me, for if I do not possess the resources to conquer certain obstacles and endure various forms of suffering, then I need the help of someone who is free from those limitations. I need a God who is thoroughly in control.
Divine impassibility is our guarantee of the unchanging, absolutely assured love of God for us. What we do not understand may infuriate us at times, but the alternative—a God who can be completely comprehended by a finite mind—is not to be desired. This is why the doctrine of impassibility has come to mean a great deal to me as a woman, a wife, a soon-to-be-mother, and a human being.
