I have not been through the door of a church in almost a year. Between growing up in a lay minister’s house and attending a Christian college, this is possibly the longest time I have ever spent outside the Lord’s house. Even the fickleness of college sleep patterns and the pangs of youthful faith transitions never kept me out of a sanctuary this long. In the meantime, I have attempted to develop practices that ground me in a sense of spiritual stability. One such practice as of late has been hiking with my friend Drew every other week. Since we both attended graduate school together, the attendant conversation often turns theological. Drew has the unique ability to ask well-worn questions with a clarity and openness that prompts novel answers. Recently the conversation turned to metaphysics, specifically divine apatheia, and Drew asked a familiar question with a directness that forced me to reconsider familiar answers: “How do you square the practice of lament with impassibility?”

I was raised in Maryland, but for concision’s sake, I tell others that I grew up in Washington D.C. Anyone raised near D.C. is familiar with the liturgy of a security checkpoint. Pockets empty. Shoes off. Step into the metal detector. Check pockets again after a spare quarter is detected. From a young age, you are conditioned to think that if even children are checked surely no nefarious activity could take place there. Navigating D.C. is like driving inside of a puzzle box. Row after row of tightly packed blocks and congested traffic circles can leave you with a feeling of claustrophobia. But certain intersections in the maze give way to breathtaking vistas, monuments, gardens. Catching a glimpse of the Capitol always feels like a discovery, like cutting through a dense jungle to find hidden ruins. My father proposed to my mother on its steps. I don’t often speak highly of living near D.C. As I said, it can be an overwhelming place. But that doesn’t make it any easier to watch the trespass of the place that taught you awe.

I had a dalliance with process theism much earlier in my theological career. Its appeal to me was more spiritual than metaphysical. The sense of a God who suffered with me legitimized my tragic self-understanding and the marginal nature of process thought in the academy gave it an outsider appeal. As I grew older, however, got married, went to work, I realized the limits of co-suffering. In a long-term relationship, sometimes one of the partners must be strong enough to bear the other’s weakness and so I approached divine apatheia with a new sense of its hopefulness. But that begs the question of lament.

In an open and relational conception of God, lament can be a task undertaken alongside God, an anguished cry of what might have been, a romantic protest against unavoidable contingencies.¹ When framed by impassibility, however, lament is merely an expression of the human disposal towards suffering. Jesus’ cry of dereliction is merely the sign of his entry into our alienation from God.² For the former, lament is the band playing on as the ship goes down. For the latter, it is a play on the stage of human finitude, beautiful and moving but incomplete in its perspective. Neither of these options is spiritually satisfying. Neither the lament that subjects God to human contingency nor the lament that plays as a human epiphenomenon within metaphysical stability, frames the practice well. The lamenter longs for redemption, but redemption must speak into the lament rather than above it.

In his Systematic Theology, Robert Jenson uses three mutually conditioning images to articulate the liveliness of God’s triune life: history, drama, and conversation. The triune life is history in the sense that it is a narrative, structured by the coherence of divine origin in the Father and the divine culmination in the Spirit, which are held together in the Son. Jenson is not bashful about calling the Son the specious present that reconciles the Father’s past and the Spirit’s future.³ God’s life is a drama because God has chosen to unite divine and human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God’s identity is constituted through the integration of Jesus’ death and resurrection into the narrative of the divine life by the power of the Spirit.⁴ The resurrection is the surprising in-breaking of the divine future into the history of creation, with the result that God and creation share a future.⁵ Because God is a historical drama, God is also a conversation. Discourse is the very possibility of historical being since in mutual address new possibilities for future relationality are opened. The Son, therefore, as the Logos of the Father, is the word spoken by and to God and the Spirit is the infinite future of love that this conversation opens up.⁶

Central to Jenson’s overall theological project is a revision of metaphysics that identifies God’s historical activity with God’s very life. For Jenson, positing a distance between the immanent life of God and the events of resurrection and exodus would mean that the God we pray to and celebrate in the Eucharist is a demiurgic simulacrum. This being the thrust of his argument, Jenson predictably argues that impassibility must be rejected as it creates idolatrous space between Jesus’ historical suffering and the Trinity’s eternal placidity.⁷ I would argue, however, that the broader sweep of Jenson’s trinitarian theology opens up possibilities for a reframing of apatheia as a characteristic of pneumatological culmination. This can be argued by attending to the way that Jenson squares God’s historicity with God’s infinity. Jenson argues that the infinity of Greek metaphysics relies on an analogy of space, whereas the triune God’s is a temporal infinity.⁸ God is, therefore, not infinite due to lacking boundaries (the Greek view) but through the overcoming of all boundaries.⁹ Simply put, “God is not eternal because he lacks time, but because he takes time.”¹⁰ The Spirit is the future of both God and creation and is, therefore, the one in whom Jesus’ individual overcoming was accomplished. And because of this, the Spirit is the one in whom the inclusive eschatological overcoming will also be accomplished.

If Jenson is right about the infinity of God subsisting through Christ’s overcoming of boundaries by the power of the Spirit, then we can begin to turn the conversation back to apatheia. While Jenson is allergic to the doctrine of impassibility as a metaphysical presupposition, his conviction that God’s identity as dramatic coherence is established “not from the beginning but from the end” means that divine attributes must be considered according to the whole sweep of the triune story.¹¹ Just as God’s infinity subsists in God’s overcoming of the boundaries of death and alienation, so God’s apatheia can subsist as God’s being beyond suffering, not in the sense of immunity to it but the sense of victory over it. The life of God denies the human-divine suffering of Christ a victorious narrative role and thereby ensures that all of the sufferings and tragedies of creation are penultimate frustrations within a narrative where God and creation share a future.

If this Jenson-inflected model of apatheia is tenable, then it provides more satisfying ground for the practice of lament than either relational or classical models of theism. Prayer is our entry into the discourse that is God. And lament expresses a penultimate, but real, interval of alienation in the divine life. Despite this coherence between divine alienation and human lament, this alienation not a final tragic state, rather it subsists as an interval within that broader drama. This interval, however, is our very openness to the pneumatic surprise of the divine future. God exists as the wellspring of life because God has overcome the extremity of human alienation, and thus our expression of our own suffering is our entry point into Jesus’ suffering and thereby our openness to the surprise of Jesus’ resurrection.

The alienation I feel when I see men with guns storm the Capitol is hard to describe. When I was a child, my dad would sometimes take me to D.C. on the weekends. We would walk the National Mall and see the monuments and federal buildings. It is a complicated place, but for that child, spending time with his dad, it had a fragile sense of safety. When I saw the first pictures from the insurrection, I was not surprised. Mentally, I knew it was the logical conclusion of the last four years, stoked by cynical political opportunists. But aesthetically, emotionally, spiritually…I felt invaded. I felt like a fact of life was called into question. I know that this is not reality. The reality is, far worse things have happened in Washington, often perpetrated by the people elected to occupy its offices. But if lament truly reverberates within the life of God, then I believe the alienation I feel from my own past as I look at these images is legitimized. And so I will lament. I will lament that I cannot enjoy the memories of childhood undisturbed. And if God is the resurrected one, not one merely impervious to suffering, but one who has had victory over it, then I will hope that my lament is a cry of thirst, to taste from the hand of Christ a drop of the water that flows from the throne of the lamb. Perhaps at another time, I will find a more logically consistent or geometrically symmetrical metaphysic to ground my practice. But what I can say of this one is that, for now, it helps me pray, even when it feels too hard.

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