The Trinity and Trauma Recovery, Divine Impassibility, and the Work of the Spirit
God of All Comfort Review: Scott Harrower’s work offers a thoughtful trinitarian response to trauma, suffering, and Christian hope. In God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World, theologian Scott Harrower explores how Christian doctrine can address the reality of trauma and suffering. Drawing from Scripture, especially Matthew’s Gospel, Harrower argues that God ministers to survivors through the incarnate Son and the indwelling Spirit. This review examines his trinitarian approach to trauma recovery, the role of divine impassibility, and the movement from horror to hope that lies at the heart of the Christian gospel. It is helpful support for the Identity: Recovering God’s Image theme of this counseling and recovery ministry.
Scripture as a Guide Out of Horror
Scott Harrower offers a representative example of work that seeks to integrate trauma recovery with a trinitarian framework. His project draws on the full scope of Christian Scripture to support those who have experienced what he calls “horrors.” He appeals to the Trinity to argue that God has access to two distinct forms of empathy toward sufferers—one through the incarnation of the Son and the other through the indwelling of the Spirit.[1] Behind this claim lies a deeper conviction—that God is a deeply personal and living God who exists in harmonious communion within himself and desires living communion with his creatures. As Harrower puts it, “the tripersonal nature of God and his qualities is the basis of the person-centric shalom he created.”[2] Yet this shalom is shattered by traumatic events, which carry both psychological and cosmic consequences that can render life meaningless for the survivor.[3]
The Living God and Human Healing
The good news, as Harrower acknowledges, is that God has acted decisively in Christ and the Spirit to transform human beings. This project adds that he does so by his own impassible will. In practice, however, Harrower’s therapeutic emphasis rests on the truth of Scripture. He treats the Bible as a set of inspired texts and stories through which God meets people in their own perspectives and draws them into personal fellowship with himself. In this way, the person is changed while God remains impassibly the same.[4]
The heart of Harrower’s project lies in a healing movement created by two contrasting readings of Matthew’s Gospel. Across both readings, the impassible nature of God is quietly reinforced—the reader is moved, healed, and changed, while the God of Scripture remains the same.
A Horror-Attuned Reading of Matthew
The first reading is deliberately horror–attuned. It approaches the text with a paranoid and skeptical posture that expects to find violence—and it does. Harrower warns that this kind of reading can easily turn every passage into a mirror of the reader’s own trauma. Central and hopeful elements of the gospel story, such as the resurrection, must be suppressed or downplayed for this approach to work. Yet for all its limitations, Harrower notes that even this horror–attuned reading can be surprisingly sensitive. It successfully uncovers a real reservoir of darkness and aberration in Matthew’s Gospel that belongs to the text itself. When read through the lens of trauma, Matthew becomes the story of an almost unimaginable reversal in which despair turns into hope.[5]
Blessing, Faith, and the Confession of Peter
This insight runs deep. A gospel is largely a pre-resurrection story told from a post-resurrection perspective. Its literary structure, therefore, arises from the Father, Son, and Spirit persuading the disciples to believe in Jesus against all odds. To read a gospel rightly is to read it as a guide out of horror. As Harrower turns to what he calls a “blessed reading” of Matthew, he traces how God leads the disciples to faith. The turning point comes in Peter’s confession and Jesus’ response (Matt 16:17). The three key phrases in that exchange reveal a clear movement away from a trauma–shaped orientation and toward blessing—God is the living God who desires relationship with us, Peter is blessed rather than cursed or abandoned, and he was not led to this truth by “flesh and blood” alone. Divine power opens a way out of trauma where none seemed possible. To read Matthew rightly, then, is not merely to arrive at the correct interpretation of the text, but to be led through it—by the impassible Spirit—out of a traumatized way of seeing life and God, and into the truth.[6]
[1] Harrower, God of All Comfort, 1.
[2] Harrower, God of All Comfort, 172.
[3] Harrower, God of All Comfort, 27–28.
[4] Harrower, God of All Comfort, 111–17.
[5] Harrower, God of All Comfort, 169.
[6] Fred Sanders and Chris Gibson, review of God of all Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World, by Scott Harrower, SFSC 1 (2020): 134–36.