by Brandon D. Smith
Advent season raises annual theological questions about the person and work of Christ. While typically the questions are aimed at the mystery of the incarnation or perhaps the relationship between the Father and the Son before Jesus was born, reflecting on the incarnation necessarily raises other Christological questions. Did God die on the cross? is a common one worth reflecting on.
This question has been discussed for millennia and has been addressed in every era of church history. The Church Fathers addressed this issue head-on with modalists who taught the heresy of patripassianism—that the Father became incarnate and suffered on the cross—as well as Nestorians, who taught that the divine and human natures existed as two persons (the divine Logos and Jesus Christ) in one body. Martin Luther asserted that if only a man had died on the cross and not God himself, then we are lost.[1] John Calvin reasoned that only man could truly die and only God could truly overcome death, thus the necessity for Christ to be the God-man.[2] On the other side, Jürgen Moltmann took up this question at length, controversially challenging basic assumptions about the impassibility of God.[3]
Perhaps one of the most common ways modern evangelicals fall into a trap on this question is through poorly handing Jesus’s cry of dereliction in Matthew 27:46 (quoting Psalm 22:1), “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” in which the Davidic king cries out in anguish after feeling (and being) abandoned by everyone around him. The language here could imply that the Father “turned his face away” or “abandoned” Jesus, leaving Jesus alone on the cross to bear the wrath of mankind’s sin. Of course, Psalm 22 ends with “you did not hide your face from me.” This raises all sorts of questions, some of which we can address here indirectly. As a primer to what follows, I recommend reading two excellent reflections by Matthew Emerson that directly handle the cry of dereliction. For now, we will get right to the point.
Did God die on the cross? The short answer is yes. God the Son died in the person of Jesus Christ. Or, as Stephen Wellum says, “God the Son incarnate died.” Or, as Rhyne Putman prefers, "God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, experienced death in his human nature."[4] Or, God the Son died according to his human nature. These are different ways of making the same basic point.
We have to deal with the fact that Jesus is God; Jesus is both God and man; and Jesus died. This is complicated and must be dealt with without falling into the heresies that lie on all sides. So to do this, we must explain with several caveats:
1. Remember the hypostatic union. Jesus Christ is two natures in one person; fully God and fully man. Forget this and you’ll run toward multiple age-old heresies, chief among them are those mentioned above.
2. His divine nature did not die or cease to exist. God the Son in his divine nature continued to exist and to sustain the universe. One person of the Trinity could not cease to exist for any time without indicating mutability (changeability) in God’s nature. Of course, we know that God is immutable and incapable of change, so it would certainly jeopardize fundamental affirmations about the doctrine of God to assert that the cross initiated a complete three-day loss of Trinitarian relations or the death of divine nature. There was no broken Trinity.
3. Relatedly, neither God the Father nor God the Holy Spirit died on the cross. The Trinity was not all of a sudden in disarray, confused, conflated, separated, or out of order. The Father sent the Son; he did not send himself. The Holy Spirit was active in the incarnation at conception, but did not himself put on flesh. So we need to dispel any notions of other Trinitarian persons dying on the cross.
4. God the Son died according to his human nature but did not cease to exist. As with any human death, his body was separated from his soul/spirit, but his soul/spirit did not cease to exist. In his resurrection, the body and soul/spirit were rejoined, as will ours one day—if we die before he returns, our bodies will be in the ground as we await the resurrection, but we will not cease to exist because our soul/spirit will be in/not in the presence of the Lord.
Further, the immortality of the soul is well attested both in biblical language—the “perishable” body dies, but the soul/spirit is “with him in paradise today;” “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord;” “my soul will live with him;” etc. It is also well attested in the Christian tradition: Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Cyril, Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom, Augustine, etc. all teach clearly that the soul is immortal. Why would the fully God/fully man Jesus Christ be any different? He is a unique human, but he is nonetheless fully and truly human. We need to account for this when discussing the death and burial of Christ.
5. Therefore, Jesus Christ the God-man truly died, but the hypostatic union of two natures was never separated, broken, or compromised. We affirm that Jesus Christ is the God-man, never ceased to be the God-man in his birth, never ceased to be the God-man in his death and resurrection, now stands ascended in Heaven as our mediator as the God-man, and will return one day as the God-man to join our souls/spirits to our resurrected bodies; therefore, we must affirm that God the Son died that day on Golgotha, but he in no way, shape, or form ceased to exist or experienced ontological separation from the Father (or Holy Spirit).
As mentioned above, human nature doesn’t cease to exist in death; rather, the body perishes but the soul/spirit lives to God. Jesus’s human nature—like ours—still existed in his death, because the soul/spirit is immortal and thus the human nature still lives in/not in the presence of God. If Jesus’s human nature died/ceased to exist for three days, this would indicate not only a death of his soul, but also a split in his person—only half of Jesus would exist for three days while his body was in the tomb. We need to affirm, then, that the human soul/spirit of Jesus remained alive (thus, his nature did not die), but that he experienced a real human death like all of us: body in the ground, soul/spirit with the Lord. And his resurrected body, like ours one day, was raised imperishable and he now lives as the God-man who will never die again.
Yes, indeed, God came and rescued us. God the Son substituted himself for us. He didn’t send a mere messenger. He didn’t sacrifice his nature or his character or his power. Instead, he himself put his nature, character, and power on full display on the cross, a victory chariot disguised a torture device. Soli Deo gloria.
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[1] Martin Luther, On the Councils and the Church, in the Formula of Concord: Solid Declaration VIII:44 (St. Louis: Concordia, 2006) 588-89.
[2] John Calvin, Institutes, 2.7.3.
[3] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).
[4] Via personal correspondence after my original Facebook post on this subject.