Is the quality of impassibility attributable to God?

The quality of impassibility (the absence of passion), which has long been a quality attributed to God, is in serious jeopardy of being lost today. Open theists Arminians especially scoff at the idea of impassibility, and even many from a Calvinistic persuasion (e.g., Grudem and Erickson) have discarded this attribute of God as unsustainable. This is because of a conflation of passion with emotion, the latter which God clearly has. This is not the historic understanding of divine impassibility. By affirming divine impassibility, we affirm not that that God has no feeling but that no creature can independently inflict any emotional distress upon God so that he is moved inevitably to an action that he would otherwise not have performed. As W. G. T. Shedd notes,

God cannot be wrought upon, and impressed, by the universe of matter and mind which he has created from nothing. Creatures are passively related to each other, and are made to be affected by the other creatures; but the Creator is self-subsistent and independent of creation, so that he is not passively correlated to anything external to himself…. Even when God is complacent towards a creature’s holiness, and displacent toward a creature’s sin, this is not the same as a passive impression upon a sensuous organism, from an outward sensible object, eliciting temporarily a sensation that previously was unfelt. Sin and holiness are not substances; and God’s love and wrath are self-moved and unceasing energies of the Divine nature. He is voluntarily and eternally complacent towards good, and displacent toward evil.

In view of the preceding, “passions” arise out of learning, sensing, adapting, and reacting activities of finite persons, specifically, those who lack omniscience. With this understanding, God is properly understood to be impassive, but he is not emotionless.