It is in these formularies that we find our Church’s authoritative expression of her doctrine and liturgy. It is these formularies to which all clergy vow to be faithful at their ordination. These blog posts are written with the conviction that the formularies are our friends – they are Biblical, they are Catholic and Reformed, and they are full of wisdom and insight for ministry today. To become more ‘Anglican’, then, is not somehow to abandon or retreat from the gospel, but is precisely to draw closer to the gospel’s riches and its depths.
A God without passion?
For this first post, we begin where the 39 Articles begin – with God himself. Article 1 opens with this statement: ‘There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.’
It’s perhaps only at the very end of that sentence that eyebrows might be raised. How can God be held not to have passions? Isn’t the God revealed to us in Holy Scripture a passionate God – grieved by man’s sinfulness, moved to pity by Israel’s afflictions, intimately involved in the affairs of his people? Isn’t the cross the definitive statement of God’s passion, God’s suffering, for us and for our salvation?
We certainly live in a passionate age. We’re constantly obsessed with how we’re feeling, with how others are feeling. Television interviewers will routinely kick off with the question: ‘how do you feel about that?’ We tend to make depth of feeling the key criterion of ethical virtue or moral approbation. But we should always be on our guard that in thinking about God, we don’t simply project upwards our own human concerns or standards. For then God becomes merely a figment of our own ideals and fantasies, a bigger Me in the sky, an idol who cannot save.
God is not just a bigger Me. The Bible repeatedly reminds us that the divine character is utterly different from our own. God is Creator, and all else is created (Gen. 1.1, Rev. 4.11). We are often unhappy, he exists in blessedness (Rom. 1.25, cf. Rom. 9.5, Mk. 14.61); we are limited in perspective, he knows ‘the end from the beginning’ (Isaiah 46.9-10); our plans often come to naught, his purposes are never thwarted (Job 42.2); we are beholden to decay and corruption, he is far above the ravages of time (Psalm 102.25-27, Hebrews 13.8); our love is intermittent and feeble, his love is steadfast, and endures forever (Lamentations 3.21-23).
Most significantly of all, God does not change (Malachi 3.6). In him ‘there is no variation or shadow due to change’ (James 1.17). That is why we can trust in his promises, and rest in his faithfulness.
Now if God is unchanging, he cannot undergo a shift from one state to another. He cannot be ‘angry’ one minute, and ‘joyful’ the next – even the idea of a succession of moments in God makes no sense if he is above and outside of time, as its Creator and Lord. And passions – as the Article describes them – are precisely those things that are stirred up in us, that ebb and flow, that blow hot and cold. More than that, passions are things that take us over, that are in control of us. But God is always subject, and never object – he is always sovereign, he is never under the sway of someone or something else.
Rather, God constantly exercises the fullness of his eternal being, expressing with unimpeded vigour the ineffable perfection of his love. He is powerful to save precisely because, unlike us, he is neither susceptible to the fluctuations of emotional states, nor the victim of passions that overwhelm him. His love towards us is his disposition to communicate his goodness, a disposition revealed fully in the incarnation of his Son. Here the Son takes to himself a human nature, and makes it his own. And he lovingly redeems man’s suffering, by lovingly suffering as man.
Let’s finish by applying all this to the parish. When a parishioner, a friend, a family member, faces hardship, suffering or pain – how does Article 1 help?
It helps by directing us not to a God who is the victim of passions, a God who is limited to wringing his hands in feeble commiseration; but rather to a God who is eternal, unchanging, and whose promises are sure. It directs us to a God who will bring the final victory over evil, and wipe away every tear from our eyes, and bring to pass a world where there shall be no ‘mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore’ (Rev. 21.4). It directs us to a God whose love is unfailing in its fullness, whose presence is unwavering in its intimacy, and who offers to a broken world the gift of eternal life, and the sure promise that suffering and death and all former things shall soon pass away, as the shadows flee at daybreak.