The Apathetic God

Book excerpt: This work seeks to create a via media between the tradition of divine impassibility and the contemporary preference for divine possibility within formal theological reflection. Rather than dismissing divine impassibility as a Hellenized and antiquated notion, the author seeks to reconfigure how this axiom functioned for the early church as a way to complement and deepen the present tendency toward divine possibility. At stake in these discussions is not only the coherence of God-talk across time but also what Christians take to be their guiding vision of God's character and action in the world, a vision that inevitably determines the shape of Christian discipleship.