Does God the Father have a broken heart?

[Limoncello4021]

God does not change. He does not have emotions the way we think of emotions. He does have an ability to manifest Himself differently to humans as He chooses; that is, His different “faces.” St. Catherine’s book, Dialogue, has a very interesting chapter in which God tells her that He shows one person His “angry face” in order that they repent, but He shows another person His “loving face” when they are close to His heart, etc. So presumably God can show someone His heartbroken “face.”

 

[Gorgias]

The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth and He was grieved in His heart

Genesis 6:5

If you want to take that literalistically, you have to accept a number of troubling propositions:

• God isn’t omniscient: He didn’t know that man would sin, and therefore, He was surprised and sorry to have learned that man had sinned.
• God isn’t immutable: He changes (at least in emotional state). This means that He moves from less perfect to more perfect, and/or from more perfect to less perfect. Therefore, He isn’t eternally maximally perfect.
• God isn’t pure spirit: He has a heart. More to the point, He’s composite – He has parts, which means that He’s ‘made’, not eternally existing.

Are you sure you want to say that God doesn’t know all things, He isn’t maximally perfect, and He was ‘made’?

(On the other hand, you could posit that Gen 6:5 is an anthropomorphism, and you don’t have to claim any of these things about God… )

 

[Margaret_Ann]

To build on what the orange and blue posted, here’s Genesis 6: 5 et seq. and the footnote in the Douay-Rheims version:

[5] And God seeing that the wickedness of men was great on the earth, and that all the thought of their heart was bent upon evil at all times,
[6] It repented him that he had made man on the earth. And being touched inwardly with sorrow of heart, [7] He said: I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth, from man even to beasts, from the creeping thing even to the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them.

[6] “It repented him”: God, who is unchangeable, is not capable of repentance, grief, or any other passion. But these expressions are used to declare the enormity of the sins of men, which was so provoking as to determine their Creator to destroy these his creatures, whom before he had so much favoured.

 

[Doug23]

Hi all, I was googling around and saw read this:

“Scripture is quite explicit that God changes his mind in certain situations (Ex 32:14), and also quite explicit that he displays emotion, such as anger and pity (Ex 32:9). Are these genuine descriptions of God’s character or are they merely metaphorical? The Church Fathers were divided. Aquinas said they were metaphorical, but only to a certain extent. Modern theologians are also divided. The Church has made no formal judgment.”
See here

Is this true that we can believe as a Catholic in the literal sense that God changes His mind and has emotions?

 

[Gorgias]

Hi all, I was googling around and saw read this

…Is this true that we can believe as a Catholic in the literal sense that God changes His mind and has emotions?

To be fair, he also believes that the earth doesn’t rotate and is the center of the universe. So, I think I’ll stick with Aquinas and others. My experience with his theological conclusions has been “thanks but no thanks.”

Is this true that we can believe as a Catholic in the literal sense that God changes His mind and has emotions?

See my post, above, responding to orange&blue. Believing in a God who changes? That brings with it a whole host of notions that are antithetical to Catholic beliefs…

 

[goout]

We are getting into the nature of scripture which is a very large and complicated topic.
Scripture is the inspired word of God in human words. And so it is incarnational in that way.

Scripture has a fully human element that does not detract from Inspiration, so you have to allow for all of the human elements.
Imperfect understandings of nature and God.
All of the literary genres common to human expression…myth metaphor parable symbolism hyperbole rhetoric etc etc etc…
Oral tradition passed on through cultural contexts before being written down.

And still God breathes himself through that human element.

 

[Wesrock]

Hi all, I was googling around and saw read this:

“Scripture is quite explicit that God changes his mind in certain situations (Ex 32:14), and also quite explicit that he displays emotion, such as anger and pity (Ex 32:9). Are these genuine descriptions of God’s character or are they merely metaphorical? The Church Fathers were divided. Aquinas said they were metaphorical, but only to a certain extent. Modern theologians are also divided. The Church has made no formal judgment.”
See here

Is this true that we can believe as a Catholic in the literal sense that God changes His mind and has emotions?

I am not answering with absolute certainty on your specific question, but per Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, God as absolutely simple, immutable, and eternal (being without beginning, end, or succession, being in an eternal undivided now) are de fide dogmas, the questions of which were definitively answered at the Fourth Lateran Council.

Saying that, I don’t see attributing passible emotions to God as consistent with these dogmas.

 

[meltzerboy2]

I agree with this. However, would you say that G-d has ALL of our human emotions, including the negative ones such as envy, jealousy, disgust, despair, revenge, bitterness, and so on? Probably not. So then, are we made in G-d’s image but not entirely? We are not tiny replicas of G-d. If we were, Jesus would not need to be fully human AND fully divine, for there would be little qualitative difference.

 

[De_Maria]

Bearing this in mind is it possible to attribute emotion to an unchangeable God? Thoughts please as I find this topic puzzling.

It is quite puzzling. It doesn’t make sense if we look at it from man’s perspective.
But it makes sense, at least to me, if I try to look at it from God’s.

Matthew 16:23 He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Let’s think about God, for a moment.

God is perfect. He knows everything. It is said that He knows us better than we know ourselves. God is perfect in Himself and needs nothing. God is transcendant.

Now, those theologians you spoke of, interpret this to mean that God feels nothing.
But, what if, we should look at it as God having a perfect capacity to feel. Not only does He feel what you feel, but He can and does feel what every creature in all time has ever felt. And, therefore, when you feel sorrow, God feels it more perfectly than you. When you feel pain, He feels it more perfectly than you. Etc. etc.

These feelings don’t affect Him, though. We can see an indication of this in the Godman’s reactions when He was suffering. When He was suffering pain that would have been unbearable for any other creature, He had the presence of mind to give us 7 last sayings. He had the presence of mind to refuse wine mixed with pain killer. Scott Hahn, in the Last Supper, said:

Surely there is a connection here, but the connection seems less direct than does the primary link suggested by the Passover setting. Note how Jesus’ resolution not to drink “the fruit of the vine” seems to reappear in the scene at Golgotha right before he is crucified: “And they offered him wine mingled with myrrh; but he did not take it” (Mark 15:23). The narrative does not explain his refusal, but it probably points back to Jesus’ pledge not to drink until his Kingdom is manifested in glory. …

*“After this Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst.’” *

Jesus was thirsty long before this closing moment of his life. His words, therefore, must reflect more than a desire for a last drink of fluid. He seems to have been in full possession of himself as he realized that “all was now finished.”

I hope that makes sense.

 

[Dovekin]

When we say God is impassible or unchanging, we think of it as like a rock, something lifeless and resistent to exterior influences. God is not unchanging in that sense. Rather, God is “pure act”, constantly doing but never changing. God is completely alive, completely engaged with every bit of creation.

That is hard to imagine, but I think it is at the root of your problem here. Whatever God does, it is done constantly, throughout all time. God is always brokenhearted, angry, vengeful as well as merciful, kind and joyful. (There may be some emotions based in privation, so I cannot say God feels every emotion) When scripture says God had an emotion, it is an attempt to understand this eternal being who constantly feels the emotion. We see anger in God, we are seeing something unchanging that is always transient when we see it in others. If we transfer that transience to God, it is an anthropomorphism, but we do not understand how else to talk about the anger we see in God.

Of course it is different with Jesus. Sorrow and joy can be experienced humanly by him, even as he feels them in his divine nature as something eternal and unchanging.

 

[Doug23]

Of course it is different with Jesus. Sorrow and joy can be experienced humanly by him, even as he feels them in his divine nature as something eternal and unchanging.

This is v helpful, thanks. When you state that our Lord Jesus experiences sorrow and joy ‘humanly’, is it correct to say that His experiences of these ‘emotions’ as a divine Person (both human & divine) was only experienced after the Incarnation when He forever united Himself to His human nature?

 

[Dovekin]

This is v helpful, thanks.

You are most welcome. It helps me too, to try and understand these things, but I am never sure if I am comprehensible.

Jesus is a person, with a divine and human nature. While he assumes his humanity at a certain point in time, his divinity does not change at that moment. Makes no sense, is paradoxical, insert swear words, etc. So while he experiences emotions transiently like a human, he also experiences them like God, forever and always.

That is how I think of it. i do not know if it is right, or if it quite makes sense. Whether emotions are personal or natural is not clear to me and I would have to explore the concept more than I have.