God Will Wipe Every Tear: Divine Passibility and the Prospects of Heavenly Blissfulness

Abstract

A significant challenge for the doctrine of divine passibility (i.e., the teaching that God sometimes suffers) is ensuring that there will be human blissfulness in heaven – where blissfulness refers to the life that is not merely happy but characterized by tremendous joy and unhampered by suffering of any kind. The challenge is based upon the idea that, since human blissfulness can only come via intimate connection with the divine life, human blissfulness is only possible if and when God experiences bliss. Yet if human blissfulness depends upon divine blissfulness, then, assuming that a passible God would forever grieve the loss of those who are damned, a passible God cannot offer the glorified saints blissfulness should other rational creatures be eternally separated from him. The implication is earth shaking for adherents to divine passability: it threatens to leave unfulfilled the deep longings of the human heart and undermine biblical optimism concerning the age to come, where ‘God will wipe away every tear’ (Rev. 21:4). In this article, three responses to this challenge are first surveyed and rejected, then a fourth response is defended. In the fourth response it is argued that certain emotional norms concerning what a perfectly virtuous agent would experience suggest that a passible God, who always expresses emotions in the most virtuous ways, would not forever suffer on account of the damned. Consequently, there is good reason to affirm that a passible God can provide the heavenly saints with blissfulness, and thus that the noted challenge can be overcome.