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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Did God die on the Cross? Can God die?
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stonespring
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# 15530
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Posted
The thread on God feeling or not feeling emotions got me thinking. When Christ died on the Cross, did just His human nature die or did His divine nature die too? Can anything divine die? Can God die?
What has been the standard Christian teaching on this? I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't know. I'm sure it's been discussed on the Ship before.
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Dafyd
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# 5549
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Posted
I know Patripassianism, the teaching that the Father died or that the Father suffered on the cross, is a heresy (related to modalism).
Persons can die if they have a nature with that potential. Natures can't die. Names for persons are intraconvertible. So in any statement 'Jesus did X' we can swap in 'The Second Person of the Trinity did X'. Where Jesus can do something by virtue of one nature but the other nature has no potential to do that thing, then it is proper to say 'Jesus could X', and even more proper to say 'Jesus did X as a human being/ as God, but not as God / as a human being'.
Thus it seems to me, 'Jesus died,' is fine. 'The Second Person of the Trinity,' is fine; 'The Second Person of the Trinity died as a human being but as God didn't die,' is fine, if slightly pedantic. 'God died' is not fine, as 'God' refers to all three persons collectively.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
No nature can die.
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Love wins
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Basilica
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# 16965
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Posted
This is one of the really interesting questions in scholastic theology. At the heart of Christianity are a whole host of paradoxes: the Immortal dies, the Impassible suffers, the Creator is created, the one who created time becomes subject to it, etc. We should always be careful not to attempt to iron out the paradox too far and to maintain a sense of "the great mystery of the Incarnation".
With that said, classical/scholastic theology has attempted to give an answer. One typical account is given by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, III, q46, a12.
The approach Thomas takes is derived from the definition of the Council of Chalcedon, in which the Church confessed Jesus Christ to be one person with two natures (one hypostasis with two ousiai. So we can quote Thomas:
quote:
the union of the human nature with the Divine was effected in the Person, in the hypostasis, in the suppositum, yet observing the distinction of natures; so that it is the same Person and hypostasis of the Divine and human natures, while each nature retains that which is proper to it
This is somewhat difficult language, but it is saying that human nature and the Divine nature were united in the person of Jesus Christ: they were not fused to become one nature. What belongs to the human nature still belongs to the human nature; what belongs to the divine nature still belongs to the divine nature.
quote:
And therefore, as stated above (Question 16, Article 4), the Passion is to be attributed to the suppositum of the Divine Nature, not because of the Divine Nature, which is impassible, but by reason of the human nature.
Again, difficult language. But Thomas says that the person of Jesus Christ (both human and divine) died according to the human nature, not according to the divine nature. But Jesus didn't stop being God: he remains both true God and true man; he dies in all his fullness. As the Second Council of Constantinople wrote, "everything in Christ's human nature is to be attributed to his divine person as its proper subject".
So yes, classical scholastic theology would say "God died on the Cross", but it would add "according to the human nature". In the same way, we can truly say that "God was born of a woman" and call Mary Theotokos, God-bearer; not according to the divine nature but according to the human nature.
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Enoch
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# 14322
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Posted
Because Jesus is Son of Man, when he was crucified, he died as we would. His spirit went where human spirits go on death. 'He descended into hell'.
Because Jesus is Son of God, when he descended into hell, hell could not contain him. The darkness could not comprehend him. The resurrection was both the greatest miracle and completely inevitable. 'The third day he rose again'. It is what happens if you kill the son of God.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
'God died' is not fine, as 'God' refers to all three persons collectively.
You were doing well up to this point. But "God" is a correct label / address for Christ as individual, not just for the "collective" of the Trinity. Hence it is correct, though somewhat imprecise, to say "God died". This is short for "God as human died." Whereas "God as God died" would be incorrect. As Basilica mentioned already, calling Mary "Mother of God" works on the same principle.
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
Because Jesus is Son of God, when he descended into hell, hell could not contain him. The darkness could not comprehend him. The resurrection was both the greatest miracle and completely inevitable. 'The third day he rose again'. It is what happens if you kill the son of God.
This is both false and spiritually misleading. There is no mechanistic reason for the resurrection. It was the Father's personal acceptance and affirmation of His Son's sacrifice, an exercise of Divine will not metaphysical necessity, that He was resurrected as the human being Jesus Christ. And Christ did not "descend to hell" as a prisoner, but as a conqueror. Also we are not talking about "hell, the outer darkness" anyhow. For what reason would Jesus have gone there, or worse, have had to go there? What is meant there according to tradition is actually the gathering of the just faithful from Adam and Eve to John the Baptist who could not get into heaven without Christ's resurrection opening its gates. They were waiting in the "Limbo of the Fathers", formally perhaps a part of hell if you wish, but a place of happiness and light that was "hellish" only as far as any delay of the beatific vision is "hellish".
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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Hairy Biker
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# 12086
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
No nature can die.
Isn't that what they call The Conservation of Mass?
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there [are] four important things in life: religion, love, art and science. At their best, they’re all just tools to help you find a path through the darkness. None of them really work that well, but they help.
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I know Patripassianism, the teaching that the Father died or that the Father suffered on the cross, is a heresy (related to modalism).
So I'm a heretic. I follow what I understand Moltmann to say, which is that Jesus died, but all parts of God suffered, felt the pain on the cross. God the father endured the agony of the cross.
And the body of Jesus, which was two natures in one suffered and died. So both human and divine aspects of him suffered (the division into natures is not really very Jewish, just a Western way of trying to understand his being)
Did God die? No, but God in all parts suffered the pain of physical human death. That is not the same thing.
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
Indeed. Moltmann was a wonderful revelation to me ![[Smile]](smile.gif) .
The father suffered the loss of His Son.
Also, let's follow Wesley:
quote:
Amazing love! How can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Maybe we should also say that death does not equal extinction. Death is a state of being that is not life in this world. When God died he did not cease his eternal being, he just died in time and space as experienced in this world.
[ 14. March 2014, 07:37: Message edited by: Mudfrog ]
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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Basilica
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# 16965
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I know Patripassianism, the teaching that the Father died or that the Father suffered on the cross, is a heresy (related to modalism).
So I'm a heretic. I follow what I understand Moltmann to say, which is that Jesus died, but all parts of God suffered, felt the pain on the cross. God the father endured the agony of the cross.
And the body of Jesus, which was two natures in one suffered and died. So both human and divine aspects of him suffered (the division into natures is not really very Jewish, just a Western way of trying to understand his being)
Did God die? No, but God in all parts suffered the pain of physical human death. That is not the same thing.
The big change that Moltmann makes (which differs from Patripassianism classically speaking) is to say that God suffers according to his divinity. That is to say, even without the assumption of human nature in the Incarnation, God was capable of suffering. As Mudfrog writes, Moltmann's classic formulation of this is to say that, while God the Son suffers the agony of the Cross, God the Father suffers separation from the Son.
From my point of view, Moltmann has a deficient doctrine of the Incarnation. I understand why, in a post-Auschwitz setting, he felt drawn to a theology where God suffers, but the classical doctrine of the Incarnation (as seen in the quotes I gave from Thomas Aquinas above) can already say that.
By contrast, classical Patripassianism said that whatever the Son suffered the Father also suffered. So God the Father suffered the agony of the Cross. I think your position is probably closer to this than to Moltmann's: correct me if I'm wrong.
Classically, Patripassianism was considered a faulty Trinitarian doctrine, i.e. it failed to properly distinguish the persons of the Trinity.
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Dafyd
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# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
'God died' is not fine, as 'God' refers to all three persons collectively.
But "God" is a correct label / address for Christ as individual, not just for the "collective" of the Trinity. Hence it is correct, though somewhat imprecise, to say "God died". This is short for "God as human died." Whereas "God as God died" would be incorrect. As Basilica mentioned already, calling Mary "Mother of God" works on the same principle.
You and Basilica are of course quite correct. I'd overlooked the Theotokos usage.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
Because a nature isn't alive in the first place.
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Love wins
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Crœsos
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# 238
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Posted
I've long suspected that the doctrine of the Trinity is simply a method by which Christianity generates heresies.
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[O]ne is “allowed” to recite the lawyerly formulations of the Athanasian Creed, but if you stray at all from that narrow path or attempt to say anything more — any positive statements, clarifications, analogies, applications — you’re screwed. And as that video shows, this doctrine creates so many different ways in which you can be screwed that it’s hard not to suspect this was the intention — a doctrine more useful for generating and then condemning heresies than for avoiding error.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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# 15091
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Posted
I'm certainly a heretic, because of my wicked Patripassianism.
"I only do what I see the Father do..."
("Ahem... excluding the most important salvific work, of course, as I am sure you all understand...")
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Sipech
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# 16870
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Posted
I'm with Moltmann, Mudfrog and EE on this one.
If God didn't die, but Jesus did, then by inference one is saying that Jesus wasn't God, which is the route towards ebionitism.
It would also leave the doctrine of atonement rather short of its role in soteriology.
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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# 15091
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Posted
By the way, I ought to preempt a possible objection to the idea of Jesus doing what he saw the Father do. This objection is that 'suffering' is not 'doing', being passive not active.
I would say that someone being led down a path that inevitably involves him terrible suffering by one who will not suffer the consequences of that course of action, calls into question the 'oneness' of spirit, will and purpose that these two persons are supposed to have with each other.
When God is confronted with evil, He cannot remain impassive. That would imply there is either harmony or apathy between His character and that evil. But there is conflict, which inevitably causes some form of disruption. And if that evil operates within the lives of those whom God loves, will that not cause Him pain?
Furthermore, why should suffering be limited to the physical body of Christ? Clearly the spirit can suffer. We know that the Holy Spirit can suffer (He can be 'grieved'), so why not the Father?
[ 14. March 2014, 13:32: Message edited by: EtymologicalEvangelical ]
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Basilica
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# 16965
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by TheAlethiophile:
I'm with Moltmann, Mudfrog and EE on this one.
If God didn't die, but Jesus did, then by inference one is saying that Jesus wasn't God, which is the route towards ebionitism.
It would also leave the doctrine of atonement rather short of its role in soteriology.
I'm somewhat puzzled by this. It's precisely because Jesus is God that we can say "God suffers". But I'd say that Jesus suffers according to the human nature, not the divine. I'd say that God suffers according to the human nature assumed in the Incarnation, not according to his eternal divine nature.
The question really is "is suffering proper to the divine nature?" I, along with Thomas Aquinas and most of the Christian tradition, would say "no", but obviously "yes" is a very popular answer in modern theology. In fact, I read a book a few years ago that said, "theopaschitism is the new orthodoxy"!
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Basilica
I'm somewhat puzzled by this. It's precisely because Jesus is God that we can say "God suffers". But I'd say that Jesus suffers according to the human nature, not the divine. I'd say that God suffers according to the human nature assumed in the Incarnation, not according to his eternal divine nature.
The question really is "is suffering proper to the divine nature?" I, along with Thomas Aquinas and most of the Christian tradition, would say "no", but obviously "yes" is a very popular answer in modern theology. In fact, I read a book a few years ago that said, "theopaschitism is the new orthodoxy"!
I am well aware that the history of Christian theology is littered with attempts to impose philosophical formulations on God (usually drawn from Greek philosophy), and draw conclusions, which appear to undermine all that is essential to our normal understanding of personhood and personality. Are we really permitted to do this? It may be that the biblical expressions which suggest that God feels pain, is grieved, is pleased, rejoices and weeps are mere anthropomorphisms, and therefore a concession to our limited minds, but exactly the same argument could be put concerning the philosophical formulations of scholastic theology. If our minds are finite (which of course they are), then we have no more right to call Him 'impassive' than we have to say that "He suffers"!
I think it is fair to say that when we say "God is love", we are talking about a being with personality. And since we are made in the image of God, then I think we can draw some pretty likely conclusions about the nature of God from what we know about the mechanics of personality. Impassibility is not one of them!
[ 14. March 2014, 14:42: Message edited by: EtymologicalEvangelical ]
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
I would go as far as to say that those who believe that God the Father is impassive at the cross are going further down the line of the 'cosmic child abuse' accusation, levelled by feminist/womanist theologians and their love-child Steve 'I-don't-believe-anything-anymore' Chalke, than any of their accused substitutionary atonement evangelicals.
Even those of us who believe the Son suffered the wrath of God for the sins of the world, thereby making an effective atonement, will still believe that God was in Christ and that the Father suffered Moltmann's 'loss of his Son'.
If God the Father merely stands unmoved, untouched, uninterested in the suffering of the Son, then that is indeed a callous and calculating God.
If however the Father grieves and mourns as the Son makes atonement by his substitutionary suffering and death, then we have a more rounded picture of the Godhead in the act of atonement.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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Basilica
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# 16965
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
I am well aware that the history of Christian theology is littered with attempts to impose philosophical formulations on God (usually drawn from Greek philosophy), and draw conclusions, which appear to undermine all that is essential to our normal understanding of personhood and personality. Are we really permitted to do this? It may be that the biblical expressions which suggest that God feels pain, is grieved, is pleased, rejoices and weeps are mere anthropomorphisms, and therefore a concession to our limited minds, but exactly the same argument could be put concerning the philosophical formulations of scholastic theology. If our minds are finite (which of course they are), then we have no more right to call Him 'impassive' than we have to say that "He suffers"!
Impassible, not impassive. "Impassive" implies "doesn't care"; "impassible" implies "cannot suffer".
Also, the biblical witness is hardly unequivocal on the matter. E.g. Malachi 3.6.
quote:
I think it is fair to say that when we say "God is love", we are talking about a being with personality. And since we are made in the image of God, then I think we can draw some pretty likely conclusions about the nature of God from what we know about the mechanics of personality. Impassibility is not one of them!
Ah yes, God-in-the-image-of-man. Why is personality (as understood in the twentieth-first century; quite a modern concept) to be read into God more than, say, arms?
Patristic and scholastic theology was always very clear in locating the imago Dei precisely in the intellectual nature of the human being, i.e. the ability to understand and love God, who is intellect, not body.
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
I would go as far as to say that those who believe that God the Father is impassive at the cross are going further down the line of the 'cosmic child abuse' accusation, levelled by feminist/womanist theologians and their love-child Steve 'I-don't-believe-anything-anymore' Chalke, than any of their accused substitutionary atonement evangelicals.
Unhelpful rhetoric. Also, inaccurate rhetoric.
quote:
If God the Father merely stands unmoved, untouched, uninterested in the suffering of the Son, then that is indeed a callous and calculating God.
If however the Father grieves and mourns as the Son makes atonement by his substitutionary suffering and death, then we have a more rounded picture of the Godhead in the act of atonement.
You're supposing an odd view of the doctrine of the Trinity, which basically seems to be tending towards tri-theism. Scholastic theology (e.g. Maximus the Confessor) says that there is one will (thelma) for each nature (ousia). So there are two wills in Christ (the human and the divine) but there is only one divine will. There are not three divine wills any more than there are three divine natures or indeed three divinities. So the Father and the Spirit are not uninvolved in the Incarnation, but equally they are not themselves incarnate.
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
Jesus died on the cross.
God didn't.
I believe that Jesus was totally filled with God's Spirit, more than any human before or since. So he was the divine human, but not God.
God suffered imo - but didn't die.
(Is that modalism? If so that's OK, I've been called worse)
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Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Jesus died on the cross.
God didn't.
I believe that Jesus was totally filled with God's Spirit, more than any human before or since. So he was the divine human, but not God.
God suffered imo - but didn't die.
(Is that modalism? If so that's OK, I've been called worse)
No, it's not modalism, it's arianism or possibly adoptionism. If he's divine but not God, is he a lesser divine being?
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
So, Boogie, was He not conceived by the Holy Spirit? He was not the perichoretic hypostasis of human and divine natures and wills? It's the latter orthodoxy that's most blurring. A nature and more so a will without a person is meaningless.
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Love wins
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Basilica
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# 16965
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
No, it's not modalism, it's arianism or possibly adoptionism. If he's divine but not God, is he a lesser divine being?
Agreed, it's closest to Adoptionism.
This thread is rapidly turning into What's My Heresy?
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
Jesus died on the cross.
God didn't.
I believe that Jesus was totally filled with God's Spirit, more than any human before or since. So he was the divine human, but not God.
God suffered imo - but didn't die.
(Is that modalism? If so that's OK, I've been called worse)
No, it's not modalism, it's arianism or possibly adoptionism. If he's divine but not God, is he a lesser divine being?
No - He's a human being.
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Garden. Room. Walk
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Basilica
Impassible, not impassive. "Impassive" implies "doesn't care"; "impassible" implies "cannot suffer".
Impassive - 1) not revealing or affected by emotion; reserved. 2) calm; serene; imperturbable. 3) (rare) unconscious or insensible. (Collins)
In other words, someone who is unmoved by suffering, evil or indeed any external influence. Interestingly one of the meanings of its opposite (passive, of course) is: affected or acted upon by an external object or force.
So someone who is 'impassive' is unmoved by any external influence.
Impassible - 1) not susceptible to pain or injury. 2) impassive or unmoved. (Collins)
So both words directly relate to the subject under discussion.
Clearly someone who is impassible is also, in one of the senses of the word, impassive.
quote:
Also, the biblical witness is hardly unequivocal on the matter. E.g. Malachi 3.6.
The immutability of God has to be understood in a 'weak' sense of His character not undergoing change. If we take the extreme 'strong' sense, then clearly God cannot act at all, and therefore has to be reduced to some singularity which is far less than man. 'God' in that sense would simply be a totally inert backdrop to the universe, and certainly not a being capable of creating, relating and loving. Perhaps that's the kind of God the sophists (errm, I mean the philosophers) want?
quote:
Ah yes, God-in-the-image-of-man. Why is personality (as understood in the twentieth-first century; quite a modern concept) to be read into God more than, say, arms?
Well, if we cannot assume that God has personality, then should we assume that He (or rather It) is impersonal? But then that would be projecting impersonality onto God, and that would be highly presumptuous, wouldn't you say? In fact, could we not agree that we can say absolutely nothing about God, even that "whatever-it-is" should even be referred to as 'God'? We could just say that there could be something behind reality called "The Single Immutable Thing Behind Reality". It doesn't sound very inspiring, but at least it might satisfy the sophists.
quote:
Patristic and scholastic theology was always very clear in locating the imago Dei precisely in the intellectual nature of the human being, i.e. the ability to understand and love God, who is intellect, not body.
Intellect and body are not the only components which need to be considered. What about 'spirit'? Is that reducible to mere intellect? I don't think so.
I feel sure you are misreading the Fathers. Perhaps you would like to support your claim with some citations?
[ 14. March 2014, 18:49: Message edited by: EtymologicalEvangelical ]
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Basilica
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# 16965
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Posted
I just wrote a thorough reply to this, then closed the browser window before I submitted it. So this will have to do for now...
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by Basilica
Patristic and scholastic theology was always very clear in locating the imago Dei precisely in the intellectual nature of the human being, i.e. the ability to understand and love God, who is intellect, not body.
Intellect and body are not the only components which need to be considered. What about 'spirit'? Is that reducible to mere intellect? I don't think so.
I feel sure you are misreading the Fathers. Perhaps you would like to support your claim with some citations?
The distinction is between what is apprehensible by the senses and what is apprehensible by the intellect. The image of God lies principally in the intellectual, rational, spiritual, noetic aspect of the human being, not in the sensible, visible, fleshy bit.(NB that intellectual is not about cleverness.) This doesn't in itself imply immutability, but it does mean you can't just go around willy-nilly saying that whatever we are God is too. That is just silly.
You might look in the Cappadocian Fathers (e.g. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration on the Nativity), Augustine (it's in De Civitate Dei: I can't remember the precise reference and I can't find an English translation online), Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Divine Names 22), Maximus the Confessor, and of course Thomas Aquinas (reference given above).
[Code fix -Gwai]
[ 14. March 2014, 19:39: Message edited by: Gwai ]
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Enoch
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# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
This is both false and spiritually misleading. There is no mechanistic reason for the resurrection. It was the Father's personal acceptance and affirmation of His Son's sacrifice, an exercise of Divine will not metaphysical necessity, that He was resurrected as the human being Jesus Christ. And Christ did not "descend to hell" as a prisoner, but as a conqueror. Also we are not talking about "hell, the outer darkness" anyhow. For what reason would Jesus have gone there, or worse, have had to go there? What is meant there according to tradition is actually the gathering of the just faithful from Adam and Eve to John the Baptist who could not get into heaven without Christ's resurrection opening its gates. They were waiting in the "Limbo of the Fathers", formally perhaps a part of hell if you wish, but a place of happiness and light that was "hellish" only as far as any delay of the beatific vision is "hellish".
IngoB I feel obliged to reply to this, even if to say no more than that you seem to have misunderstood what I was saying, and to be approaching this whole subject in a very binary way, which I don't think takes us far enough.
Three other comments on the thread as it's been running generally:-
The first is that the revelation has to prevail over our reasoning. If we say that God as he has revealed himself in Jesus and in the Scriptures is impassable or impassive, then we have to live with that. On the other hand, if God is revealed in a way which makes it very difficult to argue that he does not feel, then we cannot say that he is either impassable or impassive just to fit how we think doctrine ought to be, or what a truly holy god ought to be like.
We have to try to describe God as he is, rather than speculate about him.
The second is that if this means God is too difficult for us to understand, or there are things that we don't like, such as his wrath, then we have to accept it and live with it. We can't redesign God to suit ourselves. That's creating our own personal invisible idol. God is bigger and more real than we are.
The third is that one can say that Jesus is not fully God, or even that is he was just a model human being. Over the centuries many people have said that. Many people say that today. Jesus may even be easier to understand that way. However, that is not orthodox Christianity with either a large 'O' or a small one, and does not fit how he described himself.
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Brexit wrexit - Sir Graham Watson
Posts: 7610 | From: Bristol UK(was European Green Capital 2015, now Ljubljana) | Registered: Nov 2008
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The Scrumpmeister
Ship’s Taverner
# 5638
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
And the body of Jesus, which was two natures in one suffered and died. So both human and divine aspects of him suffered
Can a physical body belong to the divine nature, which is incorporeal, invisible, and uncircumscribable? It is only in taking on the human nature that the Second Person of the Trinity became flesh, visible, and able to be identified with a particular time and place in creation.
This is why the holy images depict Christ as touching his humanity and not his divinity, and why such images are permissible only in light of the Incarnation.
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If Christ is not fully human, humankind is not fully saved. - St John of Saint-Denis
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Dafyd
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# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by Basilica
Impassible, not impassive. "Impassive" implies "doesn't care"; "impassible" implies "cannot suffer".
Impassive - 1) not revealing or affected by emotion; reserved. 2) calm; serene; imperturbable. 3) (rare) unconscious or insensible. (Collins)
Impassible - 1) not susceptible to pain or injury. 2) impassive or unmoved. (Collins)
So both words directly relate to the subject under discussion.
Clearly someone who is impassible is also, in one of the senses of the word, impassive.
Where two meanings of a word in a dictionary are separated by numbers, that means that they're separate meanings. You can't claim that if 'impassible' can sometimes be used to mean 'impassive' it therefore always does.
quote:
If we take the extreme 'strong' sense, then clearly God cannot act at all, and therefore has to be reduced to some singularity which is far less than man. 'God' in that sense would simply be a totally inert backdrop to the universe, and certainly not a being capable of creating, relating and loving.
To worship anything less than the backdrop of the universe is idolatry. That's the difference between classical Abrahamic religion and, say, a god who is merely Nobodaddy/ Urizen. Urizen is a figure of great power, but he exists within a space-time continuum for which he is not responsible, and therefore his claims to authority are usurpation. Urizen ultimately as a merely personal being is just one more person with rights and responsibilities; the mere fact that he has greater supernatural power and wisdom than Caesar does not make him any more worthy of worship than Caesar is. To worship either is to alienate myself from myself. Only God who is closer to me than I am to myself may be worshipped.
God is the creator of time. Therefore God cannot be within time. God's creative act is not successive, but all at once in the fullness of eternity. (Note that those last words do not correspond positively to anything we can imagine or comprehend.) Or as the scholastics put it, God is pure activity.
To say that God is less than human therefore is somewhat as if an ant were to conclude that humans are deficient in obedience to the hive mind and therefore less than ant.
quote:
Well, if we cannot assume that God has personality, then should we assume that He (or rather It) is impersonal?
This assumes that the choices are personal as we understand it or impersonal. The classical Christian tradition is that we call God personal only because our language and our comprehension have no way of grasping a mode of existence that is infinitely further from impersonality than we are. By comparison with God personhood as we understand it and an impersonal rock are pretty much of a muchness.
quote:
In fact, could we not agree that we can say absolutely nothing about God, even that "whatever-it-is" should even be referred to as 'God'?
It is central to the Christian tradition to assert that our only true knowledge of God is in the cloud of unknowing. All our speech about God is simply an attempt to point into the cloud of unknowing.
We can however know what aspects of created things mean that they could not be God. Thus most of the classical attributes of God are actually negative statements of what is ruled out as God.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Enoch
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# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
... It is central to the Christian tradition to assert that our only true knowledge of God is in the cloud of unknowing. All our speech about God is simply an attempt to point into the cloud of unknowing. ...
Are you sure you can say that 'only' with conviction? What about Col 1:15 speaking of course of Jesus?
quote:
He is the image of the invisible God.
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Brexit wrexit - Sir Graham Watson
Posts: 7610 | From: Bristol UK(was European Green Capital 2015, now Ljubljana) | Registered: Nov 2008
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
It seems pretty evident that people suffer and die, and that God doesn't. You can stick nails into a person, and you can't into a god. Gods being spirit and all. Doesn't seem too much to really debate.
There are some pretty weird ideas that God wanted Jesus to die. I don't think that's true. I just think it was inevitable because Jesus said and did disruptive things, he being a shitdisturber and all. People killed the man because he really pissed them off. Then God is alleged to have taken the bad of that killing and to have transformed it into something else that is good. God does stuff like that. It's a hopeful story that really bad things like being tortured to death by being crucified can be turned into something good. Many of us wish other bad things were turned into good things.
Or at least this was the explanation I heard one Sunday at Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan some 20 years ago from a very nice kokom when we stopped at the church when travelling by canoe. (Kokom - sort means grandmother in Cree, but extends this: also a respected elder who is kind of like a mother figure to many, and also seems to reflect her offering to others of hospitality.)
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
\_(ツ)_/
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
It seems pretty evident that people suffer and die, and that God doesn't. You can stick nails into a person, and you can't into a god. Gods being spirit and all. Doesn't seem too much to really debate.
There are some pretty weird ideas that God wanted Jesus to die. I don't think that's true. I just think it was inevitable because Jesus said and did disruptive things, he being a shitdisturber and all. People killed the man because he really pissed them off. Then God is alleged to have taken the bad of that killing and to have transformed it into something else that is good. God does stuff like that. It's a hopeful story that really bad things like being tortured to death by being crucified can be turned into something good. Many of us wish other bad things were turned into good things.
Or at least this was the explanation I heard one Sunday at Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan some 20 years ago from a very nice kokom when we stopped at the church when travelling by canoe. (Kokom - sort means grandmother in Cree, but extends this: also a respected elder who is kind of like a mother figure to many, and also seems to reflect her offering to others of hospitality.)
It's a nice thought but it's not the Scriptural view. Jesus' death was necessary for the atonement. It wasn't the unfortunate result of his activities that God made good. Yes of course there were human factors and the whole thing was engineered by self-serving people, but the death of Christ was eternally planned and purposed.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 8237 | From: North Yorkshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2004
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
Basilica, ALL of those characteristics are human. I'm bumbling here, because nothing works, we all are. Bumbling. That's how it works. We try and take Jesus-God anakataphatically apart and it REALLY just doesn't work.
I keep having a projected sense of God Zenning at us, with us, in us, to us, from us. Yeah, I'm turning in to in inchoate old hippy: I value structure, but it's ALL just arbitrary, liturgical, lines in the sand where we give up.
What are the givens? The utterly kataphatic, stripped down givens? From which to apophatically construct? Ineffable God suffused, fused with, emerged in a human being from conception. But NOT in person? A nature, with a will - where do we get that idea from? - but no personhood was a hypostasis (one of two) of a person? A sub-Binity? A binity of everything except persons in a NEW person?
Where does the WILL of God come from in Jesus? He only spoke of His own, personal will. Or is that the will that is a perichoresis of human and divine wills? ANOTHER binity of hypostases?
It's a mystery isn't it? We will NEVER know.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
Of course, Jesus would have died whether he'd been killed or not. But he knew that the cross (or more likely a stoning) was inevitable because of the things he was doing. 1000s of people were crucified for far lesser things.
The thing which made Jesus death different was the resurrection - not the cross.
I agree with no prophet -
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
It seems pretty evident that people suffer and die, and that God doesn't. You can stick nails into a person, and you can't into a god. Gods being spirit and all.
God is Spirit.
Jesus was filled with God - the perfect human. I believe that God hurts when anyone is cruelly treated, and especially so Jesus as he was so good and never cruel or unkind to a soul.
Death doesn't worry God imo - he built death into the universe. It is important and necessary for life. It's human cruelty which goes against God's Spirit.
[ 15. March 2014, 07:58: Message edited by: Boogie ]
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
... It is central to the Christian tradition to assert that our only true knowledge of God is in the cloud of unknowing. All our speech about God is simply an attempt to point into the cloud of unknowing. ...
Are you sure you can say that 'only' with conviction? What about Col 1:15 speaking of course of Jesus?
quote:
He is the image of the invisible God.
Yes. I think so. Jesus is God projected into human existence. So we can say that when God became human God looked like Jesus and not like Henry VIII. But we don't know from that what God looks like in God's self. Our imaginations can't abstract away the human nature to see the divine nature in itself. It's as in Plato's cave, we know that Jesus is the shadow on the wall, but we don't know what is casting the shadow. Or as mathematically we know that this stack of blocks is the three dimensional model of the six dimensional solid, yet we still can't imagine the six dimensional solid in itself. By love may God be comprehended; by thought never.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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EtymologicalEvangelical
Shipmate
# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Croesos
I've long suspected that the doctrine of the Trinity is simply a method by which Christianity generates heresies.
quote:
[O]ne is “allowed” to recite the lawyerly formulations of the Athanasian Creed, but if you stray at all from that narrow path or attempt to say anything more — any positive statements, clarifications, analogies, applications — you’re screwed. And as that video shows, this doctrine creates so many different ways in which you can be screwed that it’s hard not to suspect this was the intention — a doctrine more useful for generating and then condemning heresies than for avoiding error.
I never thought I would sympathise with one of Croesos' posts (on a theology / philosophy thread).
The tortured, nit-picking history of Trinitarianism seems to miss the whole point of the Trinity, which is simply that "God is love" and love can only operate in community. Yes, there are a few other inferences we can make, but that's about the sum of it, really.
But I agree, this doctrine seems to be designed to generate heresies, as well as provide us with the opportunity to show off our lexicon of technical and abstruse '-isms'.
Common sense will tell any reasonable person that a father suffers when his child suffers. It's a no-brainer. But apparently Greek philosophy knows better and seems to delight in condescending to tell us ignorant mortals that the normal operation of love is just a crude anthropomorphism unworthy of the "Great It Behind Reality (Whatever It is)" (of course, laughably failing to see the herd of elephants in the room, namely that they, by the standards of their own thinking, have no more right to draw their conclusions about God than anyone else, unless they think they are somehow more than merely human!).
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Truman White
Shipmate
# 17290
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Posted
Just remind me, in the context of this discussion what do we mean by "die"?
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Cease to be.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Common sense will tell any reasonable person that a father suffers when his child suffers.
Let's put it like this. If someone is suffering they deserve sympathy and compassion, yes?
If the child suffers they deserve sympathy and compassion, yes? So if the father suffers when the child suffers, does the father deserves sympathy and compassion? Yes, the father suffers, someone who deserves sympathy and compassion, therefore the father deserves some of the sympathy and compassion going round.
If your child is suffering, then you're suffering, so you deserve a piece of the suffering and compassion pie. We can't give all the sympathy and compassion to EtymologicalEvangelical's child when we should be noticing how EtymologicalEvangelical is also suffering.
It is not so with God. God does not need our sympathy and compassion when other people suffer. All our sympathy and compassion go to the other people. All God's love goes to the other people. God does not need consoling. God's love is absolutely and entirely focussed on the other people to the extent that there is no question of God suffering as well.
A mortal father might wonder how he can go without his child. There is something self-regarding in that. There is nothing self-regarding in God. So there is no room for suffering in God's love for other people.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
It seems pretty evident that people suffer and die, and that God doesn't. You can stick nails into a person, and you can't into a god. Gods being spirit and all. Doesn't seem too much to really debate.
There are some pretty weird ideas that God wanted Jesus to die. I don't think that's true. I just think it was inevitable because Jesus said and did disruptive things, he being a shitdisturber and all. People killed the man because he really pissed them off. Then God is alleged to have taken the bad of that killing and to have transformed it into something else that is good. God does stuff like that. It's a hopeful story that really bad things like being tortured to death by being crucified can be turned into something good. Many of us wish other bad things were turned into good things.
Or at least this was the explanation I heard one Sunday at Stanley Mission, Saskatchewan some 20 years ago from a very nice kokom when we stopped at the church when travelling by canoe. (Kokom - sort means grandmother in Cree, but extends this: also a respected elder who is kind of like a mother figure to many, and also seems to reflect her offering to others of hospitality.)
It's a nice thought but it's not the Scriptural view. Jesus' death was necessary for the atonement. It wasn't the unfortunate result of his activities that God made good. Yes of course there were human factors and the whole thing was engineered by self-serving people, but the death of Christ was eternally planned and purposed.
Then God is the guilty of being an accessory to the killing right? That it was inevitable that Jesus would be killed has nothing to do with it being eternally planned. Scripture being a starting point and requiring reading in context. The NT has lots of allegorical connections to the sacrificial life of the OT that are probably not quite true or simply self serving to provide the pedegree of ancient so important in the Roman world. If God did engineer and ordain prior to Jesus' birth that he was going to be involved in his killing, then I would reject God as evil.
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
\_(ツ)_/
Posts: 11498 | From: Treaty 6 territory in the nonexistant Province of Buffalo, Canada ↄ⃝' | Registered: Mar 2010
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Truman White
Shipmate
# 17290
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Posted
@ No Prophet. In response to your If God did engineer and ordain prior to Jesus' birth that he was going to be involved in his killing, then I would reject God as evil. here's a thought for you.
At what point does act that causes harm cease to be "evil" because it results in a greater good?
[ 15. March 2014, 14:02: Message edited by: Truman White ]
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Mudfrog
Shipmate
# 8116
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Cease to be.
That's not a definition of death.
We know Jesus died but he did not cease to be.
God may not have been killed at Calvary but he experienced death.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
Posts: 8237 | From: North Yorkshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2004
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Truman White:
@ No Prophet. In response to your If God did engineer and ordain prior to Jesus' birth that he was going to be involved in his killing, then I would reject God as evil. here's a thought for you.
At what point does act that causes harm cease to be "evil" because it results in a greater good?
Isn't that the principle of 'double effect". I don't buy it. The idea of doing a great evil because it causes a greater good. Though I suppose Joshua's conquering genocide is biblical.
Nope, I think God transforms and doesn't interfere. We can well predict Jesus' demise, but not God setting him up for it. In free will Jesus knew the risks and took them. Otherwise he isn't human. The possibilities were death (probably the highest probability outcome) but mechanism could have been something other than a cross, like maybe stoning. The "stretch out my hands" and tree imagery is probably nice poetical retelling.
Another possibility is not dying and Jesus dies of old age. If that had happened, God would have made something out of that as well. We'd have a different Christianity for certain, without crosses, imagery of blood and absence of ideas of God requiring sacrifice, original sin.
I am unwilling to ascribe to the people involved, roles like actors in a play, where they have limited free will. What would we make of Abraham if he had sacrificed his son? You can say it didn't happen, but it certainly could have. I would say Abraham was a terrible father.
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
\_(ツ)_/
Posts: 11498 | From: Treaty 6 territory in the nonexistant Province of Buffalo, Canada ↄ⃝' | Registered: Mar 2010
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
Isn't that the principle of 'double effect". I don't buy it. The idea of doing a great evil because it causes a greater good. Though I suppose Joshua's conquering genocide is biblical.
Double effect is not doing a great evil because it causes a greater good. It's doing a greater good with an evil as a side effect.
Basically there are things that I intend to do, and then there are things I do without intending. e.g. I walk along the street intending to go to the shops. As I walk, I make my shadow fall on my neighbour's roses as I walk past, to take a trivial example. I know that's going to happen if I think about it, but it doesn't play any part in my reason for walking along the road. The doctrine of double effect is that if the evil caused by something doesn't play any positive part in my reasons for doing something it may be morally ok to do that something, if the reasons for doing it outweigh the evil. But I can't treat any effects of the evil as reasons for doing it.
What all that has to do with the cross I am not sure.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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mdijon
Shipmate
# 8520
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Truman White:
Just remind me, in the context of this discussion what do we mean by "die"?
Not pining. Passed on. No more. Has ceased to be. Expired and gone to meet his maker. A stiff. Bereft of life, rests in peace. Pushing up the daisies. Metabolic processes are now history. Off the twig. Kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.
An ex-parrot.
Parrot? Sorry, don't know how that slipped in.
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mdijon nojidm uoɿıqɯ ɯqıɿou
ɯqıɿou uoɿıqɯ nojidm mdijon
Posts: 12277 | From: UK | Registered: Sep 2004
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Jesus ceased to be. Just like all humans at death.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Basilica
Shipmate
# 16965
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by Croesos
I've long suspected that the doctrine of the Trinity is simply a method by which Christianity generates heresies.
quote:
[O]ne is “allowed” to recite the lawyerly formulations of the Athanasian Creed, but if you stray at all from that narrow path or attempt to say anything more — any positive statements, clarifications, analogies, applications — you’re screwed. And as that video shows, this doctrine creates so many different ways in which you can be screwed that it’s hard not to suspect this was the intention — a doctrine more useful for generating and then condemning heresies than for avoiding error.
I never thought I would sympathise with one of Croesos' posts (on a theology / philosophy thread).
The tortured, nit-picking history of Trinitarianism seems to miss the whole point of the Trinity, which is simply that "God is love" and love can only operate in community. Yes, there are a few other inferences we can make, but that's about the sum of it, really.
But I agree, this doctrine seems to be designed to generate heresies, as well as provide us with the opportunity to show off our lexicon of technical and abstruse '-isms'.
Well, that's not historically the point of Trinitarianism, which is the means of making sense of our affirmation that the Son is God and yet is not the Father, and that the Spirit is God and yet is neither the Father nor the Son.
The whole living-in-community thing is a good way to preach about it on Trinity Sunday, but it's not wholly accurate. And we should be very careful about mapping the Trinity (ultimately incomprehensible) onto our social relationships à la Miroslav Volf.
quote:
Common sense will tell any reasonable person that a father suffers when his child suffers. It's a no-brainer. But apparently Greek philosophy knows better and seems to delight in condescending to tell us ignorant mortals that the normal operation of love is just a crude anthropomorphism unworthy of the "Great It Behind Reality (Whatever It is)" (of course, laughably failing to see the herd of elephants in the room, namely that they, by the standards of their own thinking, have no more right to draw their conclusions about God than anyone else, unless they think they are somehow more than merely human!).
Common sense would also tell you that fathers are male and therefore have penises. Presumably you'd ascribe those properties to God the Father as well?
Your characterisations of scholastic theology are wildly inaccurate. "The Great It Beyond Reality": what utter tripe!
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