ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the suggestion that there seems to be no reason why even a God who is regarded as being impassible may not freely change in response to human prayer because such a transaction expresses the personal relationship between God and human beings. The controversy over the impassibility of God first arose in the context of early Church arguments about the nature of the godhead and the unity of the person of Christ. In many modern writers the concept of divine impassibility has virtually been eliminated as being incompatible with God's self-revelation in Christ. One of the first to teach so-called 'patripassian' doctrines, namely that it was the Father who suffered and underwent Christ's other human experiences, was Noetus of Smyrna. The content of the doctrine of the Trinity is the real cross of Christ himself. The form of the crucified Christ is the Trinity'.
