Can God Suffer ?
Da. MOZLEY'S book grew out of a task assigned to him during the meetings of the Archbishops' Doctrinal Commission in
1024. It is an historical review of a doctrine stated, of course, in the First Article, which has become of late years an almost fiercely controversial question.
We are glad, incidentally, to learn that Dr. Mozley's labours have obtained for him a doctorate in divinity at Cambridge, for, while to his wealth of collected evidence he does not add his own beliefs, his work fills up an almost unbelievable gap in theology. The Christological controversies of the early centuries were, Of course, again and again concerned with the problem of Divine Impassibility ; yet, of monographs avowedly devoted to the question, there arc but two, the third century De passibili et impassibili Dee by Gregory Thaumat- urgus, and, twenty-five years ago, Dr. Randle's The Blessed God : Impassibility. No German work, it would seem, throws light on the subject, and in English an article by Principal Franks in the .Eneyelopaedia of Religion and Ethics is all that the student. has to go upon for the history of the doctrine.
It is not so far-away a matter as one might-imagine. Time and again in late years we have seen language employed in current devotional theology which would carry with 'it the emphatic assertion that since God loves, or indeed is Love, God must experience the suffering of -His creatures in some shape or form: The bent of mystical thought, too, has been
towards finding the Cross, with all that it implies, at the centre of the Absolute Existence. And mystical or ecstatic expressions have a way of filtering down into customary religious language. Yet the problem remains, for ever, pro- bably, baffling to human intelligence. If God loves, He miners ; but God is also Perfection, and suffering implies something of loss, of limitation, of dereliction. The best intro- duction to the study of the problem is a clear tracing out of the subtle and untiring thought, far more penetrating and practical than an impatient modern age realizes, which was concentrated on the doctrine in past ages, particularly by the Greek Fathers, and then to examine the present-day reactions against the patristic conclusions and their implications. The work could not have done more concisely and acutely than in the volume before us.
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