God the Trinity is passionate and emotional. We are made in the image of God for the experience of passion and emotions. [View all]

[The Great Open Dance]

The doctrine of the social Trinity embeds feelings and emotions within God.

Passionate people have lives of meaning and purpose. They are vital. Oddly, traditional Christian theology has declared God, the Source of Life, to be dispassionate—beyond passion, beyond emotion, beyond feeling. As the Actor who is never acted upon, God cannot be affected or influenced. God transcends our complex, interacting world, which produces so many passions. Therefore, God is dispassionate.

This questionable theological move is worsened by our contemporary use of the word “emotional,” which is usually used in a pejorative sense: “Oh, he’s so emotional.” Using the adjective “emotional” as a shorthand for “emotionally dysregulated” makes the only good option to be unemotional.

In its technical language, Christian theology has declared God to be, not unemotional, but impassible: unaffected by the events within creation, beyond the influence of human activity, hence incapable of any humanlike emotional response. The concept of impassibility derives from the categories of Greek and Roman philosophy and never had any basis in the Bible. It also rejects the great blessings of spiritual existence, such as the hope and joy that accompany love. Therefore, we reject this classical attribute of God and propose instead that God is very, very passible.

Interpersonal relations within God, coupled with God’s openness to creation, generate a complex of feelings and emotions within the divine. God does not just feel; God feels absolutely. Moreover, negative emotions such as fear cannot diminish the divine capacity for feeling because God is love, and perfect love casts out all fear (1 John 4:18). Hence, the feelings and emotions offered to us by the universe are holy. They are not to be overcome; they are to be celebrated.

God is love, and love is openness.

Indeed, increasing openness to feelings and emotions is part of our theosis, or divinization. God feels, and God feels absolutely. But God also feels perfectly. That is, God’s emotions are always appropriate to the situation. We human beings, on the other hand, may have unhelpful responses to certain situations. We may feel a tinge of celebration at the suffering of a friend because we are aware of our own suffering but doubt the reality of others’, and their obvious suffering reassures us within our hidden suffering. We may feel envy at the success of a friend due to deep-seated doubts about the value of our own contribution. Insecure and desiring prestige, we may seek power over rather than service of. We may seek to move up the hierarchy of value rather than celebrate our God-given equality.

When these feelings arise, they are grounded in a sense of separation that God abhors. But God is empty of any excluding, occluding self. All separation is illusion and God, as all-knowing, is not deluded. As a result of God’s perfect wisdom God feels perfectly, which is to love perfectly. In other words, God feels what should be felt as deeply as it can be felt.

Within God there is no capacity for celebrating another’s pain or envying another’s success, because God is perfect. “Perfect” does not mean unchanging, but changing perfectly.

This concept of God transforms our interpretation of human life. Now, the source of every human affect (our deepest emotions) is the divine affection. And for every sacred affect there is a sacred season, a time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to dance and a time to mourn (Ecclesiastes 3:1–8).

Our experience of Jesus as the Son of God affirms these sentiments. If God doesn’t feel anything, if God is impassible (as Christian theology has so often asserted), then why does Jesus the Child of God feel so much? A detached God would be incarnated as an aloof automaton, but Jesus was an emotional prophet. A self-sufficient God would be incarnated as a reclusive hermit, but Jesus was social, passionate, and vital.

For the Parent, for the Child, for the Spirit, and by way of consequence, for all beings, to live vividly we must love dangerously. Love risks life, and God as love lures the universe into this risk, into the fullness of being.

When God chose to be love, God chose to be time.

My parents raised me in a moderate, mainstream church outside Richmond, Virginia. At Tuckahoe Presbyterian, almost everybody accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution, no one expected Jesus to come back next week, and nobody talked about other religions going to hell. The community was loving, not controlling.

Yet one teaching bothered me. In conversations, prayers, hymns, and sermons, I learned that God resided in eternity, but humans resided in time. I wasn’t exactly sure what eternity was, but I could tell that it was other than time, and it was better than time. Fortunately, I was reassured that one day, after I died, I would be in eternity with God and everybody else I loved who had died before me.

Even as a child I found this teaching confusing, and it made me feel a little resentful toward God. If God loves us, and if God is in eternity, and if eternity is better than time, then why did God put us in time? I felt like God sent us from the palace out to the woodshed before we’d even done anything wrong. Sure, the woodshed is better than the woods, but why aren’t we in the palace with God? God’s creation of the universe, and placement of creatures therein, seemed inhospitable.

I wish that I could blame my childhood dismay on an undeveloped feeling for language. But in English, “eternity” is too often associated with “timelessness.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines eternity as “in expressed or implied opposition to time,” “existence with reference to which the relation of succession has no application,” or most simply, “timelessness.” It provides an example from an 1853 theological essay: “Eternity, in relation to God, has nothing to do with time or duration.” The Oxford English Dictionary even explicitly associates “eternity” with the afterlife: “Opposed to ‘time’ in its restricted sense of duration measured by the succession of physical phenomena. Hence, the condition into which the soul enters at death; the future life.” It then provides an example from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternitie.”

As an adult I still believe that contrasting God in eternity with humankind in time is harmful, so harmful that we should reject the definition of eternity as timelessness. If we are on earth and God is in heaven, then God is elsewhere. And if we are in time and God is in a timeless “eternity,” then God is elsewhen. Too often, traditional theology worships a God twice removed—not in our place, and not in our time.

Yet, given our knowledge of God as God has revealed Godself to us, such separation is not God’s mode of operating. The God of the universe who enters the universe as a person—Jesus, who clothes divinity in matter, who locates divinity in space, who moves divinity through time—that is not the type of God who would reside in a more privileged state than creation. A distant God would not choose incarnation.

To participate in relationship is to participate in time.

God incarnates in Christ to relate to us more intimately. To relate to one another is to both cause and effect one another. Without this change there is no relatedness, and without relatedness there is no personhood. Hence, when we assert that God is loving relationality, we are also asserting that God is internally timeful, since persons can interact only through time.

Relatedness and time are as inseparable as two sides of the same coin. Hence, when God chose to be love, God chose to be time. In this view, God is not being itself; God is becoming itself.

But asserting that God is timeful does not imply that God exists within the history of this universe, within our own space-time, as it were. God is present to us here and now, but God is not limited to our here and now. As noted earlier, since Einstein’s theory of general relativity, we have lost belief in absolute time. Multiple different times characterize our universe—gravity and velocity both dilate time—so time here may be quite different from time there. How fast would time proceed for God, and which time would be God’s?

Instead, in asserting that God is timeful we are asserting that change characterizes God’s internal life, which is an interpersonal life. God is related, within God’s self and to our selves and to our universe. The medium of relationship is time. Hence, God is timeful.

For a relationship to be real, it must be open—open to the free action of the other, open to the risk that vulnerability entails, and open to the future that no one person controls. It must be open to change, hence open to time.

Openness renders God timeful, but being timeful does not render God fickle. God remains everlastingly characterized by ḥesed—loving kindness or covenant faithfulness. God’s character never changes, but God’s character expresses itself in various ways due to the changes that occur within time. Confronted with injustice, ḥesed expresses itself as anger. Confronted with justice, ḥesed expresses itself as approval. Confronted with moral evil, ḥesed expresses itself as condemnation. Confronted with contrition, ḥesed expresses itself as mercy.

We are made in the image of God to relate to one another faithfully through time, which is to relate to one another lovingly through time. Through the fulfillment of this image we can render time kairos. Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time as graced. Eternity is not other than time. Eternity is time rendered holy. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 58-61)

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For further reading, please see:

Cobb Jr., John B and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster, 1976.

Hartshorne, Charles. “The Dipolar Conception of Deity.” The Review of Metaphysics 21, no. 2 (1967) 273–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20124563.

Oord, Thomas Jay. Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being. Idaho: SacraSage, 2022.

Rice, Richard. “Trinity, Temporality, and Open Theism.” Philosophia 35 (2007) 321–28.

Thatamanil, John. The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006.
Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985.