But if we turn instead to the theological proclamation of the Christian tradition, we find at its very centre the history of Christ’s passion. The gospel tells us about the sufferings and death of Christ. …But how is God himself involved in the history of Christ’s passion? How can Christian faith understand Christ’s passion as being the revelation of God, if the deity cannot suffer? Does God simply allow Christ to suffer for us? Or does God himself suffer in Christ on our behalf?
Christian theology acquired Greek philosophy’s ways of thinking in the Hellenistic world; and since that time most theologians have simultaneously maintained the passion of Christ, God’s Son, and the deity’s essential incapacity for suffering – even though it was at the price of having to talk paradoxically about ‘the sufferings of the God who can’ t suffer’. But in doing this they have simply added together Greek philosophy’s ‘apathy’ axiom and the central statements of the gospel. The contradiction remains – and remains unsatisfactory.
Right down to the present day the ‘apathy’ axiom has left a deep impress on the basic concept of the doctrine of God ... Does this not mean that Christian theology has failed to develop a consistent Christian concept of God? And that instead it has adopted the metaphysical tradition of Greek philosophy, which it understood as ‘natural theology’ and saw as its own foundation.
Christian theology is essentially compelled to perceive God himself in the passion of Christ, and to discover the passion of Christ in God. Numerous attempts have been made to mediate between apathy and passion in a christological sense, in order to preserve the apathetic axiom; but – if we are to understand the suffering of Christ as the suffering of the passionate God - it would seem more consistent if we ceased to make the axiom of God’s apathy our starting point, and started instead from the axiom of God’s passion.
Why did the theology of the patristic period cling to the apathy axiom, although Christian devotion adored the crucified Christ as God, and the Christian proclamation was quite capable of talking about “God’s suffering’? There were two reasons. 1. It was his essential incapacity for suffering that distinguished God from man and other non-divine beings, all of whom are alike subjected to suffering, as well as to transience an death. 2. If God gives man salvation by giving him a share in his eternal life, then this salvation also confers immortality, non-transience, and hence impassibility too. Apathy is therefore the essence of the divine nature and the purest manifestation of human salvation in fellowship with God.
The logical limitation of this line of argument is that it only perceives a single alternative: either essential incapacity for suffering, or a fateful subjection to suffering. But there is a third form of suffering: active suffering – the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.
Quoted from The Trinity and the Kingdom, pp. 21-23