God is Impassible - Meaning?

God is impassible. So say many of the creeds and confessions of Christendom.  But is this a Biblical doctrine or merely a relic of ancient speculative philosophy?

God's impassibility encompasses God's unchangeableness and his freedom from emotional impulses.  It's a function of his immutability and his aseity.  It's meant to extol his rationality, independence, and stability.  

Yet many modern Christian thinkers reject the doctrine.  They believe it at odds with the suffering and emotionally involved God of the New Testament.  If God suffers no emotion and is incapable of intrinsic relations to creatures, we seem to have a picture of God incompatible with the Bible's depiction.  It does seem, at first blush, that the doctrine of impassibility implies a Stoic sort of God, one that is untouched by the human plight--directly at odds with the depiction of Jesus in the New Testament.

But, as suggested by the philosopher Paul Helm, there's a way to hold together both the Bible's rich depiction of God as well as the doctrine of impassibility.  This is to hold to God's being eternally impassioned.  God is eternally and immutably *loving.*  He's eternally and immutably sympathetic.  He's eternally emotional and impassioned; but never capable of being overcome with moodiness or fits that depend upon circumstances.

I think something like this explains the incarnation of Jesus as a very real, concrete, emotional person while yet being God--because God matched his eternal passion to a perfect representation of that passion in Jesus.