On June 13, Ms. Masako U. Hayashi, a PhD candidate at Tokyo Metropolitan University, delivered a presentation on "Between Divine Suffering and Impassibility: The Theological Dispute Between Kitamori and Noro in Japan's Theology" at the Asian Practical Theology International Conference 2025.
Held online from June 13 to 14, the Asian Practical Theology International Conference 2025 was under the theme "Intersection of Trauma and Practical Theology in Asia."
Her presentation examined how war trauma, cultural aesthetics, and ethical responsibility shaped a fundamental theological disagreement about whether God can suffer.
Hayashi framed the dispute around a profound question: Can God suffer? And if so, how? She outlined two opposing positions that emerged in post-war Japanese theology. The theology of divine suffering argues that pain exists within God's own being, while the doctrine of divine impassibility maintains that God cannot suffer because God is perfect, immutable, and transcendent. Hayashi emphasized that this represents more than a metaphysical contrast—it constitutes a test of how theology responds to trauma and loss.
The presentation began with a historical context for divine impassibility. Hayashi explained that classical Christian tradition, from the Church Fathers to Thomas Aquinas, viewed God's inability to suffer not as emotional reactivity but as a sign of eternal and unchanging love. While modern theologians like Jürgen Moltmann challenged this view by equating impassibility with indifference, recent voices such as Thomas Weinandy have clarified that divine impassibility means God's love is immutable, not unfeeling.
Hayashi then examined Kazoh Kitamori, a Japanese Lutheran theologian whose influential work Theology of the Pain of God was published in 1946. Deeply shaped by Martin Luther's "Theology of the Cross", Kitamori responded to Japan's post-war trauma by developing a theology of divine pain. He viewed this pain as emerging from the clash between God's love and wrath, with his theological imagination also influenced by Japanese cultural aesthetics, particularly the Bushido code and its ethos of loyal suffering.
The central schema of Kitamori's theology, according to Hayashi, involves divine love and divine wrath colliding within God's being to produce pain. This is not metaphorical but represents internal self-negation where divine love triumphs without erasing wrath. Building on Romans, where God's righteousness includes both wrath and mercy, Kitamori saw this paradox as generating divine pain. However, Hayashi noted that his theology draws heavily on Bushido ethics, raising concerns about whether this represents theology or cultural projection.
Hayashi contrasted this with Yoshio Noro, a Methodist-oriented theologian and pastor in the United Church of Christ in Japan. Like Kitamori, Noro experienced war trauma directly—he was drafted into the Japanese army, wounded, and underwent surgery without anesthesia. His theology emerged from this trauma, but after the war, he studied at Drew University and Union Theological Seminary, where he encountered Edwin Lewis, a strong defender of divine impassibility who took suffering seriously.
Noro's core insight, Hayashi explained, was that affirming divine impassibility concerns the reliability of God's love in the face of real suffering, not divine indifference. A suffering God might mirror human agony, but a God not undone by suffering can offer genuine hope. Noro expressed deep unease with Kitamori's concept of a divided God torn between love and wrath, believing this undermines divine personhood and risks projecting human psychological conflict onto God's nature. For Noro, pain should be understood as relational suffering—emerging in the encounter between God and humanity, not within the divine self.
Hayashi observed a clear shift in Noro's later theology. Influenced by Edwin Lewis's "Creator and the Adversary" framework, Noro's God became a suffering creator who resists evil forces. This represents suffering as faithful resistance to external evil rather than internal contradiction, unlike Kitamori's self-negation within God. The cross becomes not God's inner pain but God's confrontation with sin, grounded in divine fidelity.
Hayashi summarized the key contrasts: For Kitamori, pain's source is internal conflict within God; for Noro, it is relational, emerging from God's response to human evil. Culturally, Kitamori draws on Bushido aesthetics, while Noro's theology is grounded in war trauma and ethical realism. Regarding God's nature, Kitamori presents a torn, self-conflicted God, while Noro offers a consistent, personal God without internal rupture.
In her conclusion, Hayashi identified three key insights from exploring this theological tension in modern Japanese theology. First, contextual theology holds transformative potential but carries risks of cultural absorption. Second, Kitamori and Noro exemplify distinct trajectories—one pursuing cultural resonance, the other insisting on doctrinal fidelity. Most importantly, theology's responsibility extends beyond reflecting culture to balancing cultural engagement with doctrinal integrity. Noro's work demonstrates that not all contextualizations are faithful, and theological imagination must remain accountable to doctrinal truth, especially when speaking from history's wounds.
