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Paul Gavrilyuk. The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 210 pp. $99.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.
In this entry to the promising series Oxford Early Christian Studies Paul Gavrilyuk sets out to "debunk the Fall Theory once and for ever" (p. 179). He notes four points constitutive of this "Theory of Theology's Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy": first, "divine impassibility is an attribute of God in Greek and Hellenistic philosophy; second, divine impassibility was adopted by the early Fathers uncritically from the philosophers; divine impassibility does not leave room for any sound account of divine emotions and divine involvement in history as attested in the Bible; third, divine impassibility is incompatible with the revelation of the suffering God in Jesus Christ; finally, the latter fact was recognized by a minority group of theologians who affirmed that God is passible" (p. 176).
Gavrilyuk dismantles each aspect of the widely-accepted...