How are we to make sense of how Scripture speaks of the apparent emotions of God, such as “repenting” that he had ever made man, being “jealous” of Israel, “angered” by sin, or “sympathising” with our pain?
In this course, students will grapple with these divine emotions (more traditionally called “divine passions”) under the guidance of Church Fathers such as Augustine and Origen, and scholastics such as Anselm and Thomas. We will also pay careful attention to the actual statements of holy Scripture, learning to establish its different readings in the context of competing texts (i.e., different Bible translations) and traditions (e.g., Jewish versus Christian). Students will consider distinctions such as God regretting versus him relenting, different definitions of anger in the Latin scholastic and Greek patristic traditions, differences between the Hebrew concept of mercy or sympathy and the Latin, and more.
Our aim will be twofold: first, to thoroughly familiarize ourselves with the various possible interpretations and their inflections; and second, to achieve the overarching principles of interpretation found throughout the “classical” tradition–the whole of which, from Philo to Thomas and beyond, is forced to render all these as various kinds of metaphor in light of the doctrine of “divine impassibility.”
