Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 10:1 (NA 2025)
Article: Do We Worship An Emotional God? A Classicalist’s Review Of R.T. Mullins’s "God And Emotion"
Author: Josh Tinkham

JIRBS 10 (2025) p. 95

Do We Worship An Emotional God?
A Classicalist’s Review Of R.T. Mullins’s God And Emotion

Josh Tinkham*

*Josh Tinkham (MA, ThM) is pastor of Covenant Community Church in Newark, OH. He is also currently studying Philosophy of Religion as a PhD student at Southern Evangelical Seminary and serves as Adjunct Professor of Systematic Theology at Founders Seminary.

Mullins’s Emotional God

In his work God and Emotion, R.T. Mullins presents a Neoclassical position on the subject of God and emotions, arguing that “A passible God can enjoy a range of emotions that are consistent with God’s rational and moral nature.”1 Before delineating between the Neoclassical and Classical models of God, which have such doctrines as impassibility and simplicity at the forefront of debate, Mullins first establishes his multifaceted definition of emotions that he claims has its roots in the Stoics: “An emotion is a mental state that involves the evaluation or concern-based construal, and involves a positive or negative affect. The emotion is a manifestation of the disposition that makes up one’s cognitive basis.”2

Crucial to this definition are the two features comprising an emotion: the cognitive and the affective components.3

JIRBS 10 (2025) p. 96

Concerning an emotion’s cognitive component, Mullins writes:

Emotions involve evaluations about something in the world, and the content of that evaluation often makes one feel a particular way. What distinguishes emotions from bodily sensations is that emotions are always about something. Emotions always have some object or situation that they aim to evaluative [sic] and represent.4

In somewhat Realist terms, an emotion corresponds to reality, and the accuracy of this correspondence determines if an emotion is rational or irrational, or true or false.5 However, Mullins states that emotions are not bare perceptions or ways of construing the world; instead, “emotions are concerned-based construals that involve evaluative judgments about the objects being perceived”6 (i.e., the affective component). In other words, one’s cares, concerns, beliefs, and moral disposition will elicit particular concerns towards the object of their perception.

After establishing his multifaceted definition of emotion, Mullins articulates througho...