26 DAVID A. BOSWORTH Israel. Israel’s infidelity turns YHWH’s love to anger, and YHWH punishes Israel. The claim that God’s love and anger give rise to God’s pain was developed by the Japanese theologian K. Kitamori with extensive reference to Jeremiah 5. Although he did not discuss divine weep- ing, he devotes considerable attention to Jer 31,20, which reflects an emotional dynamic at work in the texts of weeping: “Is Ephraim not my precious son, the child in whom I delight? Even though I continue to speak against him, yet I remember him still. Therefore my belly roars for him, I must show him compassion” 6. This text explicitly identifies the community as YHWH’s son whom YHWH both loves and punishes. This combination of love and anger is painful. As I will show below, YHWH’s weeping derives from YHWH’s love for Israel and YHWH’s punishment of Israel. Thus, Ki- tamori’s analysis appears coherent with the portrait of YHWH in Je- remiah. Kitamori’s work participates in a much larger theological trend in which the traditional “impassibility” (apatheia) of God gives way to the pathos of God. Christian tradition affirms the apa- theia of the divine, meaning that God can not be affected by some- thing else or suffer in the broad sense, including experiencing emotion (pathos). Since the late nineteenth century, many theolo- gians have argued that God does suffer and experience emotions 7. The language of YHWH weeping in Jeremiah may or may not con- tribute to this broader discussion, but the impassibility of God, I argue, has already led many scholars to misread several passages in Jeremiah and continue a long tradition of identifying Jeremiah as “the weeping prophet” rather than seeing that the tears in Jere- K. KITAMORI, Theology of the Pain of God (trans. M. E. BRATCHER) 5 (Richmond, VA 1965). KITAMORI (Theology of the Pain of God) refers to this verse at the be- 6 ginning of his book and frequently thereafter. He also devotes an appendix to discussion of Jer 31,20 and Isa 63,15 (151-167). For the state of the question as of the mid-1980s, see R. BAUKMAN, 7 “‘Only the Suffering God Can Help’: Divine Passibility in Modern Theo- logy”, Themelios 9.3 (1984) 6-12; R. GOETZ, “The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy”, Christian Century 103 (1986) 385-389; H. URS VON BALTHASAR, Theo-Drama, Vol. 5: The Last Act (trans. G. HARRISON) (San Francisco, CA 1998). For more recent discussion, see D. CASTELO, “Contin- ued Grappling: The Divine Impassibility Debates Today”, International Jour- nal of Systematic Theology 12 (2010) 364-372. © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati