www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology An Emotional God

Hi Everyone, I was thinking tonite on how Our Lord loves mankind. Then I began to wonder ... does God (three persons) have emotions? Our Lord expressed emotions when he assumed a human nature. But, do the emotions we attribute to God evidence of our inability to accurately discribe God (three persons).

Yes, I know we say God is love so that would mean that the experience of God is expressed as love. But could the discriptions in scripture of God being angry, vengeful, etc. be our way of understanding him in our human way.

I'm sure y'all know the answer to this ... I don't.

Loretta

Dear Loretta,

You certainly do have the answer.

We can't understand God as a Giraffe would or as a Sea Bass would. If we understand Him at all, it would be as a human would.

In Christ,
Andrew

Loretta:

Each of us carris the answer within. We are made in the image and likeness of God. This means that we contain imperfectly what God has (except, of course, divinity). Our emotions are imperfect reflections of God's totality of love. What we have done is actually nicely summed up in a line from the play Inherit the Wind which is about the Scopes Monkey Trial. At one point in the trial one of the attorneys says: "God create man in His own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor." That is, we have anthropomorphized God by attributing to Him certain human characteristics (such as changing His mind, becoming angry, being mollified, having a right hand, and so on). This is an attempt to understand God -- but is limited to what we as humans can know.

Edward, deacon and sinner

Dear Loretta,

I came running when I heard you mention "being emotional"

We know that God does not change.

God does experience what we do through our emotions.

Christ, Who is God Incarnate, wept over Jerusalem. He wept over Lazarus. He did become angry. He felt sorry for people etc.

In short, the Incarnation demonstrated to us that God indeed loves us boundlessly and wants only the best for us.

The only God we Christians know is the God-made-Man hanging in His badly wounded Body on a Cross two thousand years ago, but with Arms outstretched, drawing everyone to Himself . . .

Alex

Dear Loretta,

There are lots of answers to your question posted in this thread. Some point out that it is how we come to know and experience God that leads us to say that God is an emotional God. Alex is right when he points out that God doesn't change. Yet, I've wondered if there is not more to emotions and their spiritual value and place in God's scheme of things.

It seems to me that, because we understand God to be unchangeable, we must not simply understand God to be a static God. In some philosophies and theologies, it is said that God is Pure Act. That's really an interesting dichotomy to me, never changing yet Pure Act.

Always Being, Always Loving, Always Challenging, Faithful, Always Acting, is just as true as never changing. Our human emotions are, it seems to me, a pale reflection of the Acting God, Always Loving, etc. But they are a reflection - an icon - of Him as he is. This must be so because He created from nothing all of us and everything that is. He does not give what He does not have.

He has it all. But, he has it as He has it, not as we understand it to be in him.

Your question is a great one. Thank you for asking it. It suggests the spiritual value of emotions.

Alex is right about looking in the right places for love, the cross and the body hanging on it are gift for us slow learners. The answer to the question is there.

Please pray for me and all of us here that He Who Is grants us the grace to look for love in the right places. May He grant us also to find it.

I hope that this makes sense.

Steve

Thank you Andrew, Edward, Alex, and Steve for your most inspired answers. Things are clearer now.

Loretta