Scott Oliphint's Covenantal Properties: Divine Simplicity Under Attack?

Oddly enough, Dr. Scott Oliphint was the doctoral advisor for James Dolezal who did his doctoral work at Westminster Theological Seminary.  I have read the laity version of Dolezal's book on divine simplicity, and I am now reading his doctoral thesis as well.  Recently, Dr. Scott Oliphint has been charged with violating his ordination vows and taking an unconfessional view of the doctrine of God, so I went out and bought a copy of Oliphint's 2011 edition of God with Us.  This book is where Oliphint makes his controversial remarks that seem to lead in the direction of Open Theism and God's mutability.

I have been critical of the Van Tilian view that God has emotions and feelings because to reject the  proposition that the Bible contains anthropopathisms would imply that God is not immutable after all.  God cannot be subject to emotions because He has no body.  And if one rejects the doctrine of divine immutability--the doctrine that God is not a composite being composed of parts--a doctrine of complexity and finitude in regards to the doctrine of God soon follows.  The doctrine of divine simplicity means that God is all that He is.  Honestly, I had not studied this doctrine in detail prior to reading Dolezal's work.  Personally, although Dolezal is not a Clarkian in his theology or philosophy, I find Dolezal's book to be a refreshing recovery of a classical doctrine that all believers in God's sovereign grace should uphold.  I highly recommend both of Dolezal's books, and I also recommend that fellow Clarkians read them along with Oliphint's book, which has gotten him into trouble.  Unfortunately, Oliphint's book has been purchased back from Crossway by Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia because, apparently, most of the faculty there is in support of Oliphint and wishes that he was not on trial with his presbytery.

I cannot comment in-depth on the books I have mentioned, but I will be reviewing Dolezal's two books and Oliphint's book as well.  Fortunately, Oliphint's book is still available for around $10 at the Barnes and Noble website in Nook format.  I would advise you to purchase your copy before the book is taken down.  You can purchase Oliphint's book here:  God with Us: Divine Condescension and the Attributes of God.  I have only read the first three chapters, but I have some significant criticisms of the book that go beyond just what Dolezal and others are saying because I am also a student of the late Dr. Gordon H. Clark.  It seems to me that Oliphint wants to downplay the differences between Open Theism and the traditional Reformed view that God is simple and immutable.  He speaks in almost glowing terms of Open Theists like the Greg Boyd and the late Clark Pinnock, who made the change from Calvinism to Arminianism and then to Open Theism.  Part of the problem is that Westminster Seminary agrees with the theology of paradox and with John Murray's rejection of the doctrine of anthropopathisms in the Bible.  Murray said that God has feelings.  But this would imply that God in not immutable after all and that God has emotions that can be manipulated by human interaction.  (Malachi 3:6; James 1:13-17).  In fact, in a chapel sermon delivered on March 27th, 2019 at WTS, Dr. Peter Lillback defended Oliphint and even cited John Murray's defense of God's emotions:  

Westminster Shorter Catechism Question #4 asks, “What is God?” The Answer is “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” Here we see the connection and distinction between what have been well termed the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God. God in His aseity is infinite, eternal and unchangeable. Yet these properties of absolute deity inform his communicable properties, as we see in the phrase, “in his”. This phrase modifies the entire list of the seven identified communicable attributes. Clearly there are not two Gods—an absolute God and a God who relates. There is one God who has attributes uniquely His own attributes which in turn fully inform these attributes that He has given to his creation. Thus we love because God loves. But God’s love is far different from our finite, temporal and changeable love. His love is an infinite love, an eternal love, an immutable love.

This complex of attributes are more fully identified in Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter II, paragraph one that tells us that

There is but one only, living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, the rewarder of those that diligently seek Him; and withal, most just, and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.

This passage is clear that this “one only, living and true God” who is “immutable” and “most absolute” is simultaneously the same God who is “working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will”. Thus in His working with His creation and His creatures, He is “most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering abundant in goodness and truth.” He is “forgiving”, and a “rewarder” yet also “terrible in His judgments.” This “most absolute” and “immutable” divine being who is “without body, parts or passions” is nevertheless revealed as the One God who can be characterized by both emotions and actions. Thus He is characterized as “hating all sin” and One “who will by no means clear the guilty”.

We might stumble over the Confession’s statement that affirms hatred in God. Yet, Westminster’s great founding theologian insisted that this was thoroughly biblical. John Murray wrote,

p. 22 “We must, therefore, recognize that there is in God a holy hate that cannot be defined in terms of not loving or loving less. Furthermore, we may not tone down the reality or intensity of this hate by speaking of it as “anthropopathic” or by saying that it “refers not so much to the emotion as to the effect”. The case is rather, as in all virtue, that this holy hate in us is patterned after holy hate in God.”

p. 35 “. . . It is unnecessary, and it weakens the biblical concept of the wrath of God, to deprive it of its emotional and affective character . . . Wrath is the holy revulsion of God’s being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness . . . To question the reality of wrath as an “attitude of God towards us” and construe it merely as “some process or effect in the realm of objective facts” is to miss the meaning of God’s holiness as he reacts against that which is the contradiction of himself.”

John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, vol. 2, The New International Commentary on the Old and New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1968), 22, 35.

And of course, God’s love is a real act of the “most absolute” and “immutable” God who has chosen to act in history. The stalwart defender of the Westminster Standards, Charles Hodge put it this way as he spoke about the absolute God of the universe and His engagement with His creatures through prayer:

The God of the Bible, who has revealed Himself as the hearer of prayer, is not mere intelligence and power. He is love. He feels as well as thinks. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. He is full of tenderness, compassion, long-suffering, and benevolence. This is not anthropomorphism. These declarations of Scripture are not mere “regulative truths.” They reveal what God really is.

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), 699.

From:  Statement from Dr. Peter Lillback on The Doctrine of God and Westminster Theological Seminary.

The rejection of God's divine simplicity and divine immutability by Charles Hodge and John Murray does not remove the fact that these serious errors lead eventually to the Arminian and even the Open Theism error.  This is why Scott Oliphint is genuinely troubled by the arguments of the Arminians and Open Theists.  He wants to reconcile the contradictions by appealing to covenantal properties as a way to sidestep divine simplicity and God's timeless immutability.  In addition, I think that WTS has had Arminian tendencies for many decades because of the emphasis on the three points of common grace, a Thomistic emphasis on the twofold view of truth as analogical, ectypal, and archetypal.  What we are seeing now is the chickens coming home to roost.  It began with Van Til's rejection of Gordon H. Clark's view of truth as propositional, and that the Bible can be summarized in a propositional system of truth deduced from Scripture. 

The best summary of the system of doctrinal truth in the Bible is the Westminster Confession of Faith.  Because of Van Til's theology of paradox and the complete inscrutableness of God there can be no coincidence between the theology in God's mind and the theology in the Bible other than by analogy.  But if two parallel lines have no contact into infinity, it logically follows that ectypal theology knows nothing of archetypal theology and vice versa.  It is by means of Van Til's rejection of logic and propositional revelation that Oliphint has begun to turn WTS in the direction of Open Theism.  While Oliphint himself rejects Open Theism, his theology is opening the door for future generations of ministers at WTS to embrace that heretical path.  Common grace inevitably leads to accepting empiricism and general revelation as corrections on special revelation in Scripture.  You can see how Oliphint himself places general revelation on equal par with special revelation in this video:  AP213 Principles of Christian Apologetics. 

Gordon H. Clark, on the other hand, consistently held that Scripture alone is the word of God.  (2 Timothy 3:16).  Furthermore, Clark said that truth is univocal in that the Bible is directly, not indirectly, truly and verily the words of God.  If God cannot know anything we know, and we cannot know anything God knows at any single point, then it logically follows that the Bible is not God's written word but only a weak reflection of it.

Ironically, the Van Tilians accused Clark of violating the Creator/creature distinction and of prying into God's secret being.  Now we see Oliphint prying into the secret being of God and contending that God has added covenantal properties to His being, so that He can now interact with creation mutably.  Additionally, I would add that I wonder how Hodge, Murray, Van Til, and Oliphint know that God has emotions?  If the Bible is not archetypal revelation, then how do they know that God has emotions?  Are they prying into God's secret being?

I will, as time permits, try to review the three books in question in the near future.  You can purchase Dolezal's books at Amazon in either paperback or ebook format for Kindle.  The links are:  James E. Dolezal, All That Is in God:  Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Theism.  The second book is:  God without Parts:  Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness.

For a posted critique of Oliphint's book by James Dolezal see:  Objections to K. Scott Oliphint's Covenantal Properties Thesis.

Anyone who would like to see a PDF copy of the charges against K. Scott Oliphant can contact me by email and I will gladly email that to you.  My email address is cranmer1959@gmail.com.

Keith Mathison's Response to John Frame's Mutualism

"First lessons in theology, no matter how elementary, do not dare to omit the Scriptural material on omniscience, immutability, and creation. But it would be unfair to the student to leave the impression that all is elementary and easy. While it is conceit to assert that the problem [immutability and divine simplicity] here is insoluble, for no one knows enough to set limits to the implications of Scripture, it is not conceit, it is not even modesty, it is but frustrating fact to acknowledge that even the better attempts to solve this problem leave much to be desired."   -- Dr. Gordon H. Clark


I am always learning but hopefully I am arriving somewhere closer to the truth.  Pun intended.  However, in studying the doctrine of the incarnation and the trinity, it has become all the more apparent to me that the problem of God's immutability, and how that can be understood in relation to the doctrine of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, is one that has not been completely solved even by the late Dr. Gordon H. Clark.  For example, in regards to the doctrine of creation Dr. Clark rightly asked the question of how an immutable God can "begin" to create?  If God is eternally timeless, then how does that work in regards to providential time?  After all, God is eternally omniscient and never learns anything new.  If God looks into the future to learn what will happen and then adjusts His providence to accommodate for contingencies and possibilities, is the future always in flux and is God ignorant of the future?

10. Immutability and Creation.

It would not do, however, to omit from this chapter a discussion of an extremely difficult point that besets the doctrine of creation. The difficulty lies in the apparent antithesis between divine immutability and the single, once­ for­ all act of creation, from which God rested on the seventh day. The history of theology has not overlooked this difficulty, but the solutions proposed are sometimes painfully superficial. 

Augustine did his best with the problem: How can the eternal and immutable produce the temporal and changing? The famous Passage in the Confessions (XI, 10, or 12) begins with the question of the Manichaeans: "What was God doing before he created the heaven and the earth?  If he were lazy and inactive, why, they ask, why did he not remain so for the rest of time, the same as before, doing nothing? If a change occurred in God, a new volition, to create what he had not yet created, how could there be a true eternity, when a volition occurred that had not occurred previously? Indeed, the will of God is not a creature; it precedes every creature; nothing is created without the preexisting will of the creator. The will of God belongs to the very substance of God. If in the divine substance, something comes forth that did not previously exist, that substance cannot be truly called eternal. And if God has always willed the existence of the creature, why is not the creature also eternal?" (cf. City of God, XI, 4­5).

The way the Manichaeans and Augustine understood the problem results in a solution that depends on a theory of time. The first word of Genesis, "in the beginning,” indicates a moment at which creatures first began to exist. Since, now, change defines time, time itself is a creature and began in the finite past. Hence it is wrong to picture God as doing nothing for a long time and then after this time creating the world. There was no time before creation. God is eternal, not temporal. A time preceding creation would pose the question, Why did God choose one moment, rather than an earlier or later moment, in which to create? In an infinite void time, every moment would be indistinguishable from every other. No one more than any other would contain a reason for choosing that one to be the moment of creation. This irrationality therefore precludes an infinite past of empty time. Similarly there could be no infinite empty space, for the same question reappears: Why did God create the world here rather than there? 

Quoted from:  Introduction to Theology, Chapter 4, Creation, by Dr. Gordon H. Clark.  (Pp. 29-30, pdf file). This is an unpublished chapter from an unpublished systematic theology written by Clark.  Thanks to Doug Douma for posting this on his blog, A Place for Thoughts.

Clark openly said that he had not solved this apparent contradiction between God's immutability and His providence in creation:

J. Oliver Buswell, Jr., in his A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion (pp. 40, 42, 47­-48, 52­-53) solves the present problem by denying what previous theologians have called immutability. Buswell of course asserts that God is eternal, but he denies that eternity is timelessness. He objects to the idea of an eternal now, and disapproves of Augustine and Aquinas. Although he asserts that God is “unchangeable in his being,” he repudiates "a timeless mental and spiritual immobility.” He denies that God is "fully actualized," and asserts that God is (partly at least) potential; from which we must conclude that Buswell is conceiving of God as in a state of development. He says, "The implications of the doctrine that God is 'pure act,' 'fully realized', that in him there is 'no potentiality (dunamis)' are devastating."

Naturally there is no antithesis between a temporal, potential, developing God and an act of creation preceded by time.

First lessons in theology, no matter how elementary, do not dare to omit the Scriptural material on omniscience, immutability, and creation. But it would be unfair to the student to leave the impression that all is elementary and easy. While it is conceit to assert that the problem here is insoluble, for no one knows enough to set limits to the implications of Scripture, it is not conceit, it is not even modesty, it is but frustrating fact to acknowledge that even the better attempts to solve this problem leave much to be desired.  (Ibid., pp. 33-34, pdf file).

Moreover, I find it refreshing that there are at least a few defenders of old school Calvinism and classical Reformed theology out there.  Dr. Keith Mathison of Table Talk Magazine wrote the following critique of John Frame's review of James Dolezal's polemical work on divine simplicity. His observations in regards to Frame's theology of mutualism and divine immanence is a refreshing and encouraging theological tsunami that raises many valid points against assuming that all Scripture is apparently paradoxical:

Unlatched Theism: An Examination of John Frame’s Response to All That Is in God

Theologians even of the stature of the late Dr. Robert L. Reymond unwittingly introduced a form of mutualism into the doctrine of immutability when he objected to Dr. Gordon H. Clark's doctrine of divine impassibility and immutability.  The implications of Dr. James Dolezal's work for students of Dr. Gordon H. Clark are tremendously important.

I recently purchased both of James Dolezal's book on divine simplicity in Kindle format from the Amazon website and will be utilizing those books in my continuing defense of Gordon H. Clark's view of the incarnation as two persons.  Dolezal's books are available here:

God Without Parts:  Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness.

All That Is in God:  Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism.

Of course, the theological debate between the Van Tilian school of apologetics and Clarkian apologetics continues to this day.  The trouble is that when the axiom of plenary verbal inspiration and biblical inerrancy is replaced with a thomist theology of analogy the tendencies toward neo-orthodoxy and Barthianism is notable.  Even worse, when Scripture is devalued as univocal and propositional revelation, the result is the undermining of every other doctrine as well.  The classical view that Scripture is an objective revelation from God is replaced by a theory that posits a twofold view of knowledge such that man can know nothing God knows whatsoever.  But is a theory of Scripture as analogy more neo-orthodox than Reformed?  I think the answer is yes. 

If there is a twofold theology of knowledge or epistemology the implication is that man's theological systems are all anthropocentric and not essentially based in direct divine and special revelation--that would be because Scripture is not univocally identical to what God knows.  If definitions mean anything at all, it would imply that knowledge has two different meanings and Van Tilians are using both definitions in equivocating and contradictory ways.

Another problem with Frame's approach is that he equivocates on the doctrine of plenary inspiration by advocating an axiom that from the outset makes Scripture irrational revelation.  The problem stated is that, when Cornelius Van Til said that all Scripture is apparently contradictory, he was presupposing an axiom of irrationality as his starting point for his theology.  The result of such contradictory thinking leaves the door wide open to outright contradictions in Frame's analogical system of doing theology and apologetics.  It is just fine to affirm both Arminianism and Calvinism since the contradictions can be resolved above the anvil in heaven and there is no need to try to resolve apparent contradictions and paradoxes here on earth.

For those who have unwittingly bought into a theology of paradox and contradictions, it does not matter that the distinction between the doctrine of predestination, or the divine decree, and the doctrine of providence has not been fully solved.  According to Van Til's thinking, it is fine to embrace contradictions.  Dr. Gordon H. Clark never said that he had solved every apparent paradox in regards to the Trinity and the Incarnation.  But he at least tried to solve those problems and give some logical considerations to possible solutions.  In regards to the Trinity, for example, Clark said only that God is three in one sense and one in another sense.  But he was quick to point out that Van Til's contention that God was both one Person and three Persons is an outright contradiction and a direct rejection of classical Reformed and confessional theology.  Van Til's view in fact would require that God is four persons, not three.

In regards to the Incarnation, Clark rightly pointed out that the Definition of Chalcedon 451 A.D. said that the divine Logos did not replace the human soul of Jesus Christ, but the Definition then went on to say in so many words that Christ was not a human person.  Unfortunately, Clark died before he could finish his final book.  Though many of the Van Tilians are quick to call Clark a Nestorian for positing that Christ was both a genuine human person and the incarnation of the divine Logos, a distinct Person of the Trinity, I do not think the charge stands justified on the basis of Clark's own work.  And it is ironic that it is the Van Tilians who are advocating another departure from classical Christian theism by adopting the contradiction of immanence and transcendence as another part of their analogical system based on the axiom of irrationalism and apparent contradiction here on earth.

For another review of Dolezal's book, All That Is in God, see:  Reformation 21:  All That Is in God, by Malcom Yarnell.

Keith Mathison's review of All That Is in God is here:  Table Talk:  Book Review.

Gordon H. Clark on the Eternity and Immutability of God

In his book, The Incarnation, Dr. Gordon H. Clark has a footnote on page 63 where he lists several proof texts for the doctrine of God’s immutability and eternity.  God is essentially eternally self-existent and is subject to no passage of time.   Aseity is an important attribute or propositional definition of God.  Likewise, there is no passage or sequence of one thought to another in the mind of God.  God’s knowledge encompasses all logical propositions at the same time.  God knows the past, present and future all at once.  That’s because eternity includes past, present and future.

Interestingly, most of the time only James 1:17 and Malachi 3:6 are referenced.  But there are many other verses in the Bible which support the immutability and eternity of God.

Footnote 7 reads:

7.  On immutability consider I Samuel 15:29 where the writer says God never changes his mind:  never repents.  Psalm 102:27, “They shall be changed, but thou are the same.”  Malachi 3:6, “I am the Lord, I change not.”  Compare Romans 11:29 and Hebrews 1:10-12.  On God’s eternity consider Deuteronomy 32:40, “I live forever,” and 33:27 [Deuteronomy 33:27], “the eternal God.”  Psalm 90:2 “from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.”  Psalm 102:12, 27 “Thou O Lord shalt endure forever . . . thou art the same [immutability] and thy years shall have no end.”  Compare Isaiah 41:4, John 17:24, I Timothy 6:16, I Timothy 1:9, Revelation 4:8-10, and especially Jude 25 [Jude 1:25], “To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and forever, Amen.”

Gordon H. Clark, The Incarnation, (Jefferson:  Trinity Foundation, 1988), p. 63.

R. L. Dabney, Systematic Theology, and Knowing God

The southern presbyterian, R. L. Dabney, wrote a Reformed systematic theology.  Nineteenth century Calvinism had already become infected with the semi-Arminianism of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck.  Dabney was also an infralapsarian and thought that God was not absolutely immutable.  I say that because Dabney was inconsistent on the anthropopathisms in Scripture.  

If God does not literally have a physical body or body parts, why is it so difficult for Calvinists to see that God literally does not have emotions either?  If God can be "moved" by emotions, then God is not immutable.  That's simple enough logic.  God has no succession of thoughts in His mind.  He perceives and understands all of creation and all the temporal succession of time from beginning to end all at one time.  God literally is not mutuable or susceptible to change whatsoever.  

As Gordon H. Clark rightly asked, why do those who have no problem with anthropomorphisms have a problem accepting the anthropopathisms in Scripture?  This is difficult to understand given that Scripture is logically consistent.  (Listen to Clark's MP3 lecture, How Does Man Know God?).

See also, J. Ligon Duncan III on God's immutability and anthropopathisms here:  Does God Have Emotions or Feelings?

Click here to see Dabney's systematic theology:  R. L. Dabney

Does God Have Emotions or Feelings?

In this day and time the compromises of so-called "Reformed" scholars are many.  Recently I was searching online to find a consensus opinion among Evangelical Calvinists.  I was surprised to find someone no less popular in Presbyterian circles than Ligon Duncan promoting the heresy of patripassianism and giving explicit approval of the theology of Jurgen Moltmann, a known liberal.  (See:  J. Ligon Duncan III,  "Divine Impassibility and Passibility in Nineteenth-Century Confessional Theologians", Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, pp. 6, 15).  Of course, Evangelicals do not wish to be labeled as fundamentalists so they rush to endorse the latest fad in liberal theology--so long as it does not explicitly or obviously contradict one of the "essentials" of the Christian faith. Duncan admits that the confessional view and the view of  more classical Calvinists is opposed to any idea of change, mutability or emotions in God:

Chapter two of  the Confession represents a comprehensive revision and expansion of the first of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1562-3), the initial sentence of which reads:

'There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom and goodness; the Maker, and the preserver of all things both visible and invisible.'

Hence, the crucial phrase 'without body, parts, or passions' was directly borrowed by the Assembly of Divines from the earlier document and resituated in a longer list of attributes. Older commentators on the Thirty-Nine Articles uniformly argued that this phrase meant that God was without emotions and incapable of suffering.  (Duncan, p. 1).  [The reference to the Thirty-Nine Articles is from Article I].

What is particularly striking here is that Duncan must go to the 19th century to prove his  view that God changes according to some aspect of feeling in God's being.  What is even more amazing is that anyone who dares to assert that the Bible is univocally and propositionally God's fully inspired, infallible and inerrant word is "prying into the secret being of God", while these speculators and promoters of contradiction and paradox get to tell the rest of us what God "feels".

Since all truth is God's truth there is some value in examining the theological reflections and higher criticism of the liberals and the neo-orthodox theologians.  However, the rationalism of the liberals, according to the Van Tilians, is an attempt to pry into the secret being of God.  On the other hand, the neo-orthodox have no obligation to logic or reason or even the law of contradiction.  Unfortunately, Cornelius Van Til and his followers rejected logic in regards to doing theology and called it "rationalism."  As you can see, Ligon Duncan takes great pains in his article to show that "nineteenth-century confessional Presbyterian theologians" argue in line with the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion that God is immutable and without passions.  But he also goes to great pains to show that they conceded that God must have feelings of some sort.  Some of his quotes are extensive.

R. L. Dabney, for example, goes to great lengths to establish the impassibility of God before he makes what can only be considered a contradictory assertion:

Is all this so anthropopathic as not even to mean that God's active principles here have an objective?  Why not let the Scriptures mean what they so plainly strive to declare?  But some seem so afraid of recognizing in God any susceptibility of a passive nature that they virtually set Scripture aside, and paint a God whose whole activities of intelligence and will are so exclusively from himself that even the relation of objective occasion to him is made unreal, and no other is allowed than a species of coincidence or preestablished harmony.  (Quoted by Duncan, p. 10).

Interestingly it is only after the doctrines of Abraham  Kuyper and Herman Bavinck had popularized the doctrines of "common grace" and the "free offer of the gospel" that we find any significant compromises of the doctrine of God's absolute independence from his creation.  Ironically, these same proponents of anthropopathisms have accused those who are strictly confessional on this issue of "rationalism" and "prying into God's secret being".  I wonder how they "know" that God has feelings?  Dabney does not prove his assertion from Scripture.  Instead he appeals to what can only be called an emotivist and ad hominem argument.  After all, anyone who agrees with the confession must be motivated by "fear" rather than the propositional truth statements of Scripture or the Westminster Confession or the Anglican Articles of Religion.

Phil Johnson, the Calvinistic Baptist, concurs.  He likewise says that God is impassible but then takes it all back because God is not an "iceberg".  (See:  God Without Mood Swings:  Recovering the Doctrine of Divine Impassibility).  Johnson's favorite method of argument is ad hominem since anyone who would dare to stand on the plain teaching of the Confession or the Anglican Articles is obviously a "hyper-Calvinist".  Would it not be possible to have genuine disagreement based on theology and propositional truth claims made by the Scriptures and by the Reformed symbols?  I guess not.

Calvin himself was unequivocal about the doctrine of impassibility, by the way:

13. What then is meant by the term repentance? The very same that is meant by the other forms of expression, by which God is described to us humanly. Because our weakness cannot reach his height, any description which we receive of him must be lowered to our capacity in order to be intelligible. And the mode of lowering is to represent him not as he really is, but as we conceive of him. Though he is incapable of every feeling of perturbation, he declares that he is angry with the wicked. Wherefore, as when we hear that God is angry, we ought not to imagine that there is any emotion in him, but ought rather to consider the mode of speech accommodated to our sense, God appearing to us like one inflamed and irritated whenever he exercises Judgment, so we ought not to imagine any thing more under the term repentance than a change of action, men being wont to testify their dissatisfaction by such a change. Hence, because every change whatever among men is intended as a correction of what displeases, and the correction proceeds from repentance, the same term applied to God simply means that his procedure is changed. In the meantime, there is no inversion of his counsel or will, no change of his affection. What from eternity he had foreseen, approved, decreed, he prosecutes with unvarying uniformity, how sudden soever to the eye of man the variation may seem to be.  (Institutes I, xvii, 13–14).

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 1997).

The proponents of a reading of Calvin that indicates that God "desires" the salvation of the reprobate is misplaced.  Nowhere does Calvin ever say such a thing.  In fact, God never changes.  He has determined his decrees before the creation of the universe.  Although Calvin does say that the preaching of God's word and gospel is a general call to all, he never once says that God desires to save the reprobate.  Calvin, rather, says that God wants to save "all mankind".   We know that God does call the elect from every nation, class, gender, socio-economic status and other classifications of people.  But this is not the same as saying that God literally desires the salvation of every individual without exception.  That would be a blatant contradiction.

Furthermore, most of these proponents of emotions in God appeal to the incarnation as a proof that God has feelings.  They also assert, like Duncan above, that God literally "suffers" on the cross in some sense.  But these are the same people who insist that we cannot "pry into the secret things" of God.  (Deuteronomy 29:29).  Since the confessions uphold that God is without body parts or passions one finds it hard to believe that these modern revisionists would attack those who believe the plain teaching of Scripture and the Confessions as "rationalists" and "hyper-Calvinists".