Clete said:
Your objection to my claim that God died was based on your presumption that death meant that one ceases to exist or is extinguished. If that's what it meant to die, I would understand and agree with your objection but it isn't. Death is merely a separation. Physical death is separation of your spirit from your body. Spiritual death is separation from God.
And what is death to God, who is a spirit, Clete? This is the point you are missing. As I said in my previous post, you were not clear that you were talking about the incarnation, in your posts you were talking about God. Now, since God is a spirit (John 4:24), and if spiritual death is as you say a separation from God, what then does it means for God to die? Surely it cannot mean separation from himself, for that is an obvious contradiction. God, being a spirit also has no composition or parts, so we cannot talk about his "vital functions" ceasing or anything resembling that. The only intelligible way a spirit can die (not merely being separated from God which is the state of the damned, but to really die) is to cease to exist, to vanish into nothingness. For God it would be that he would no longer be, the very opposite of who he claims he is (I AM).
How then would Jesus' physical death as a human male fix the physical and spiritual death of all mankind?
The spiritual death of Adam pertains to a severed relationship of him and the rest of mankind with God, hence why we are born all alienated from God and in need of his grace. The spiritual death could only be restored through obedience, hence spiritual death in so far as is understood by it a separation from God is actually contrary to the work of redemption for it is the very thing he came to fix.
Well aren't we all damned before we get saved? You're a Catholic and so I know you believe in original sin and all that but even if children are not born in sin, which is what I believe, that is only because Jesus died on the cross, right? Can you point out a person that you know of who wasn't spiritually dead before his having put his faith in Christ for salvation?
I am not sure what you mean with this question, for I was talking about Christ being spiritually dead, which is impossible. But as far as us goes, yes we all are spiritually death until we receive the grace of God.
The could you explain what you think it means for God the Father to have forsaken Jesus? (Matthew 27:46)
It does not says God the Father, it just says God, Lord Jesus is very careful about the words he uses. This is a very important distinction. This is said to fulfill a Messianic prophecy, it is the same saying found in the Psalm:
"O God my God, look upon me: why hast thou forsaken me?" (Psalm 21:1) . This chapter is heavy on the fulfillment of several prophesies, this is the context on which things are happening in this chapter. The Psalm 21 closely matches many of the events that take place in the life of Christ, which we see in Matthew 27:
"O God my God, look upon me: why hast thou forsaken me?" (Psalm 21:1)
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46)
"He hoped in the Lord, let him deliver him: let him save him, seeing he delighteth in him." (Psalm 21:8)
"He trusted in God; let him now deliver him if he will have him; for he said: I am the Son of God." (Matthew 27:43)
"The council of the malignant hath besieged me. They have dug my hands and feet." (Psalm 21:17)
A clear parallel with his crucifixion and the trial before the council.
"They parted my garments amongst them; and upon my vesture they cast lots." (Psalm 21:19)
"They divided my garments among them; and upon my vesture they cast lots." (Matthew 27:35)
Now, since Christ is God, then certainly the verse cannot mean that he was forsaken by God, for that is like he being forsaken by himself, which is contradictory. Nor can it mean that he doubted God, for that too would be contradictory, and even if possible, it would amount to a lack of faith which would itself be a sin, but we know that Christ did not sin (Hebrews 4:15, 2 Corinthians 5:21). So, it is clear then both by the context in which the verse is found, by the text of the verse itself and by the very nature of Christ that this is a fulfillment of prophecy and that it does not implies any separation neither from God nor from the Father.
This seems to me like pure conjecture. I understand that this is what you believe but I've shown Biblically that Jesus DESCENDED to the place of the righteous dead (i.e. Abraham's Bosom or Paradise).
I'll ask you the same questions that I ask Lee. What is Abraham's Bosom? And what is Paul talking about in the following passage..
Ephesians 4:8 Therefore He says:
“ When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive,
And gave gifts to men.”
9 (Now this, “He ascended”—what does it mean but that He also first descended into the lower parts of the earth? 10 He who descended is also the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.)
Nobody is denying that Lord Jesus descended into Hell, so why are you telling me that you have shown
"Biblically that Jesus DESCENDED" into Hell? At death his soul was separated from his body and descended into Hell during the three days he was dead (Matthew 12:40). The verses you quoted must be read within the context of the Gospel, the moment at which Lord Jesus descended into Hell was during the three days that his body was at the tomb, while his soul was separated from his body. It was neither before nor after that. Thus it is why it is said that
"...neither was he left in hell, neither did his flesh see corruption." (Acts 2:31). His soul descended into Hell, his body did not, it remained at the tomb. For him to go to Abraham's Bosom, he had to die first, like all humans and then, his soul went there to release the just (Matthew 27:52-53).
Again, this seems to me to be pure conjecture. The text does not say that he had not yet ascended bodily to the Father but simply the HE had not ascended to His Father. Your addition of "bodily" is only your theology being read into the text, isn't it?
Not at all, it is actually what a carefully reading of the Scriptures lead one to. There was no separation of the Father and the Son, there is no Scriptural evidence to support that idea. Lord Jesus affirms plainly throughout the Scriptures his intimate union with the Father and even equates himself with him:
"I and the Father are one" (John 10:30).
"Do you not believe, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak to you, I speak not of myself. But the Father who abideth in me, he doth the works. Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?" (John 14:10-11).
"All things are delivered to me by my Father. And no one knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal him." (Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22).
From the the beginning (John 1:1-2) to his baptism (Matthew 3:17) to his death (Luke 23:46) at all times the Son was united to God, and since the Father is God, he was likewise united to the Father. You cannot posit a separation of the Son from the Father (or the Holy Ghost or God) without compromising the integrity of Christ's divinity and the Blessed Trinity.
WHAT?
Do you have ANY Scripture to back such an idea up? God the Father descending into Hell? Isn't that a bit of a stretch just to keep your Augustinian theology intact? Jesus, God the Son, is the one who died, not the Father and not the Holy Spirit. There is no Biblical support for any other position.
Well Clete, according to John 5:19:
"...the Son cannot do any thing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner."
Very simple, the Son cannot descend into Hell until he sees the Father doing it so that he does it as well. The Son descended into Hell to preach, to release the dead by loosing the sorrows of Hell (Acts 2:24, 1 Peter 3:19), in short to do things, which as the verses above show he cannot do unless the Father does them. The Father and the Son are one in the most intimate way. This verse is also very important for it shows that while God is a Trinity of Persons, he has only one will, not three and thus the three persons act in unity (see also Genesis 1:26, John 1:3).
I am not sure why you mention St. Augustine. Do you think he made up the idea of the three persons acting in unity or of them being one in essence and thus inseparable? You think that he "corrupted" the gospel with "greek philosophy"? Hopefully that is not what you think because going long before he was even born we find that this is precisely what the earliest Christians believed. Here are some examples:
St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, A.D. 180: "For God did not stand in need of these [beings], in order to the accomplishing of what He had Himself determined with Himself beforehand should be done, as if He did not possess His own hands. For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things"
Tertullian, Against Praxeas, A.D. 213: "Bear always in mind that this is the rule of faith which I profess; by it I testify that the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit are inseparable from each other, and so will you know in what sense this is said. Now, observe, my assertion is that the Father is one, and the Son one, and the Spirit one, and that They are distinct from Each Other. This statement is taken in a wrong sense by every uneducated as well as every perversely disposed person, as if it predicated a diversity, in such a sense as to imply a separation among the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit."
Dionysius, A.D. 260, fragment in Athanasius' Nicene Definition: "I may reasonably turn to those who divide and cut to pieces and destroy that most sacred doctrine of the Church of God, the Divine Monarchy, making it as it were three powers and partitive subsistences and god-heads three [...] Sabellius [...] blasphemously says that the Son is the Father, and the Father the Son, but they in some sort preach three Gods, as dividing the sacred Monad into three subsistences foreign to each other and utterly separate."
The earliest heresies such as the one of Sabellius mentioned in the last quote, who was excommunicated in A.D. 220 as well as the Gnostic sects as lead by the likes of Marcion who proposed a separation in the godhead or some other form of distinction besides the persons were opposed on all fronts in the early Church as being contrary to sound doctrine. St. Augustine didn't make anything up nor did he corrupt anything, he simply followed and like all his predecessors before him, gave fuller expression to the teaching of The Church, not by inventing some new doctrine but by making it more explicit and clearer. Something that became necessary as more heresies emerged.
That is precisely what Jesus Himself says...
Revelation 1:18 I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death.
Yes, he died a human dead in the fullest sense. The divine nature did not nor could it have died.
Yeah! That's the gospel Evoken! Your entire spiritual life is dependent upon the death of God!
The Gospel of Clete, perhaps, but not the one we find in Scripture.
Meaning that God the Son suffered separation from the Father, not that He was destroyed or that He ceased to exist.
Scripture and reason exclude absolutely the notion of the Son being in any way separated from the Father. In addition to what has been said above, also consider:
"Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see corruption." (Acts 2:27). Why do you think that is if not because he is united with the Father and because he is the same God as Fathers? Again, at death he gave up his spirit to the Father, no separation occurs at any time.
I don't care anything about the Nicene Creed. The Bible teaches me that God the Son died for my sin and that's what you're up against.
The only thing I am up against is your own arbitrary opinion which you equate (quite erroneously) with the real sense of Scripture. You are proud of quoting Luther, I wonder if you are aware that he would be dismayed by some of the things you are saying about God? If there is anyone who is up against anything here it is you and that is against almost 2,000 years of Christian history and tradition and also against the very Scriptures. For you to pompously claim that you don't care anything about the Nicene Creed, a creed that even the most liberal of Christians agree with only shows how drowned you are in delusions of grandeur. I noticed that in other posts you were calling Pentecostals heretics, I am lead to ask, in what grounds do you call them heretics, when you have set yourself outside the bounds of even the most liberal forms of Christianity? I suggest you look yourself in the mirror first before condemning others.
If there is something I don't care about it is the personal interpretation of the Scriptures of some random individual (there are over 40,000 personal interpretations and raising), specially when it goes against what has been believed and defended even to the death in the history of Christianity down to the earliest Christians.
This is speculation at best. The fact is that the Bible does not explain the Trinity to us. There is a sense in which God is One, and another sense in which God is three distinct persons. How that works, we are not told in Scripture. My position is simply that in whatever respect God the Son is distinct from God the Father, He was separated from Him for three days. It is not my position that Jesus ceased being God the Son.
How is it speculation? Either God is one in three persons or he is three separate gods. Scripture and Reason, remember? Your claim that the Son was separated from the Father is not in the Scriptures and is in fact precluded by what is clearly stated in them. How was the Son separated from the Father for three days anyway? Did God become two for a while and then became one again? This makes no sense. Again, if the Son is separated (keep apart or divide; remove or sever from association) from the Father, then it simply cannot be maintained that there are not three gods but one. Some things may not be explicitly taught in Scripture but they are there implicitly, that is, the facts from which we can draw the conclusion are clearly there. In such a way is that the doctrine of the Trinity (among others) is found in the Scriptures.
But it was precisely because of His divine nature that made that redemption possible.
God being omnipotent could have redeemed man in any way. The incarnation while the most appropriate means for the redemption of man, was not absolutely necessary as a means to redeem man. Otherwise the redemption would lose it's gratuitousness, mercifulness and lovingness as it would be simply something God was cohered to do. Now since God, who is infinite demanded full atonement for the offense committed to him, then a sacrifice of infinite value was needed, which only a divine person can provide. This is the reason for the union of Christ's human nature with the divine nature in the person of the Son. It makes Lord Jesus not only fully human and fully God but gives his human nature the infinite value needed for the full atonement by virtue of it's union with the divine nature.
You don't know this either Evoken! Are you going to tell me that you know enough about the nature of humanity and the exact nature of the incarnation to be able to say with certainty that humanity is fundamentally incompatible with the divine? Were we not created in His image for the purpose of being in the direct presence of God Himself? You simply have no basis whatsoever for making such an assertion.
Who said that human nature is incompatible with the divine? I believe that we receive grace and become partakers of the divine nature through the Sacraments and also that we become Holy by it. So of course our nature is compatible with the divine!
That doesn't means however that the incarnation took place either by a transformation of the human nature into the divine nature, an absorption of the human nature into the divine or a fusion between the two natures resulting on a third nature. All three of these ideas were advanced by proponents of Monophysitism, a heresy that was condemned very early, and for good reason, for their teaching ended up destroying the integrity of Christ's human nature in such a way that he could not be said to be fully human, but something else. It also lead to another problem in that if the divine nature became flesh, then not only the Son but also the Father and the Holy Ghost became flesh as there is but one divine nature which all three of them share. Unless, of course, one would like to propose three separate natures, one for each person, which would again lead into Tritheism.
Neither is the idea that Jesus had two natures Biblical in the first place. Jesus was and is God become man.
Make up your mind, First you deny that Lord Jesus has two natures and say he is God become man and then below you say that
"Jesus was fully human and fully God.". So which one is it?
Jesus was fully human and fully God. There is no contradiction there Evoken. It is your theology that teaches you otherwise, not the Bible.
Where did I said that there was a contradiction? It is you who is denying that Lord Jesus has two natures, yet you affirm he has two natures (how else do you understand fully human and fully God, since both things refer to natures?) and argue with me as if I were denying it.
This is nothing but theologians making things more complicated than they need to be. The Bible says that the Logos of God, God the Son, became a man. It's no more complicated than that.
Well if Clete says it, that makes it so, no? In the every Scriptures things are more complicated than that. Simply saying that God the Son became man explains nothing, the very statement raises a plethora of questions that scream for answers. It is true that sometimes people tend to make things more complicated than they need to be and thus are lead to erroneous conclusions. But it also true that some people ignore the complexities of a given subject and adopt a naive approach to it that leads to equally erroneous conclusions.
What makes a person who they are Evoken? Is it not their soul/spirit? It isn't their physical body! I will survive my physical death with my memories and personality intact. My body influences who I am but does not define me as a person. It is my heart, my soul/spirit that defines who I am.
Of course, the body is not what makes a person but the soul/spirit, hence there is another reason why the divine and human natures did not need to be fused together. That the soul/spirit is what makes a person is precisely why it is said that the person of the Son incarnated. It is why it is said that the union took place not in the nature but in the person. and yes, as you say, you (the person) survive your physical death with your memories and personality intact, so too did the person of the Son when the human nature died at the cross, ergo the divine nature did not die.
Evo
