The denial of Divine Impassibility among evangelicals is a “direct importation into Christianity from the philosophy of the post-Cartesian period, with its reluctance to conceive of God as truly infinite & as essentially of a different order from His creatures.” 1/5
If God is finite, then it is indeed true that compassion must involve passibility; it is only for an infinite being that compassion and impassibility are compatible. 2/5
The Bible teaches plainly that God enters into the most intimate details of the life of all His creatures, that He rejoices in our happiness & sympathizes with our sorrows, that He is glorified by our good acts & grieved by our sins...3/5
..the intensity with which our actions as personal beings affect Him is infinitely greater than that with which they affect our fellow human beings, for God, as our Creator & Preserver, is present to us more closely than we are present to ourselves...4/5
...and even this is infinitely surpassed by the Beatitude which God enjoys in the interior fullness of His own Divine life, which it therefore can neither augment nor diminish” E.L Mascall 5/5
