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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010
If God as actus purus, as pure activity, is the God of abstract philosophy; so, on the other hand, Christ, the God of the Christians, is the passio pura, pure suffering – the highest metaphysical thought, the être suprême of the heart.
As goes impassibility, so goes the ability for language to name something other than a mere human creature. For what is at stake in the doctrine of impassibility is nothing less than the possibility that we can speak of God in such a way that this speech is something other than speaking about ourselves.
At the beginning of this work we examined ways of moving from biblical representations to theological conceptualizations. We encountered there the Scylla and Charybdis of theology's search for understanding. We fall back into myth (and mythologizing) when we treat God as a being or agent on the same level as other beings and agents – as a creature writ large, as it were. Conversely, we lose the category of divine action altogether when, by demythologizing, we refuse all thought of God actually speaking and doing things in space-time. We lose the theo of theodrama in the one case, the drama in the other.
In Part II we described the God–world relation in terms of triune communicative action. Though God communicates his goodness to creation in a general sense, we have focused on the biblical mythos (viz., the theodramatic story line), where the main interest lies in God's verbal communication to human beings.
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