DID GOD DIE ON THE CROSS?

hedrick said:

It seems obvious that Athanasius intended to see Christ as a single subject. I agree that suffering (and, I'd assume, death) was a weak point. I quoted above "Rather, let people see that the Logos himself is impassible by nature and that he nevertheless has these passions predicated of him in virtue of the flesh which he took on, since they are proper to the flesh and the body itself is proper to the Savior." That sounds suspiciously like Nestorius talking about the theotokos. Perhaps you're right that it hadn't been raised as a serious issue yet.

My concept of the Incarnation is more straightforward. I see Jesus as showing us God. If he suffers, then in some sense God suffers. Our idea of God should start with Jesus, not with assumptions like impassibility. I think every action of his should be understood in both human and divine terms.

Does suffering imply that God changes, in some inappropriate way? I don't know, because I don't claim to understand the divine nature. The problem is that the Bible is willing to talk about him changing his mind and other things that imply change. Likely this isn't meant literally, but it doesn't appear to me that the Bible is as concerned about impassibility as classical theologians are. I've always assumed that time is different for God than for us, so that in some sense he sees all of history at once. But it seems that Scripture attributes something like experience to him, even if it doesn't hit him the same way it hits us.

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@hedrick , I have a conjecture which might be a solution to this conundrum, although it requires some explanation and is, I think, conceptually simple, but requires first walking through the logic of divine immutability, resulting in a post that is longer than I would have preferred, but I hope you find it enjoyable and thought provoking, although I do not expect nor would I take any offense if you disagreed. My conjecture could well be erroneous, illogical or otherwise unworkable, and scrutiny is vital.

So let me first begin by saying my point wasn’t to say that suffering and death is a weak point, but rather, that St. Athanasius is the wrong theologian to be discussing when it comes to this issue, as his work can be interpreted in a Nestorian, Chalcedonian or Oriental Orthodox manner. For example, the quote you say sounds like Nestorius to mee reads more like the hymns that the Coptic Orthodox, followers of St. Cyril, Dioscorus, and Severus, among others, sing on Christmas and Good Friday.

Much of the most revealing material can actually be found in the liturgical texts, which by the way, I have, so I can bring up some material from Nestorian, Chalcedonian (RC or EO) and Miaphysite (OO) liturgies and we could potentially use that to our mutual edification.

Now, on the subject of divine change, there are two things which I think we should consider on the subject of impassibility: Scripture does directly attest to it “God was the same yesterday, today and tomorrow,” and when we think about time, the creator of time would logically be atemporal and eternal, with no difference between a thousand or ten thousand or ten million or ten quadrillion years. God is not static; it is simply that he exists outside of time, which He created (Genesis 1:1, John 1:1-3), and also, if God did not create time, time is actually God and what we worship is merely a demiurge, and this cannot be, for the aforementioned scripture says all things were made by God, without an exception for time, which is a thing. And sentences like “there never was a time when Christ was not” reflect the atemporality or extratemporality of God. Now, this takes us to a logical reason for divine impassibility: change requires time. It cannot occur in the realm of the eternal because there are no events.

God, however, is omnipotent, and created time, and indeed omnipotence implies He could change the cosmic order to make Himself passable, but for reasons that we should not presume to guess at, that is not His will. Rather, the father begat the Logos, who then became incarnate through the Virgin Mary, was baptized, ministered to us, then died for our sins on the cross, rising from the dead on the third day, and then after a time ascending to Heaven, thus glorifying humanity, enabling our Resurrection, and our salvation by grace through faith, a living faith that produces works of healing which clean and restore the tarnished Divine Image and bring about theosis, or deification (entire sanctification, as Wesley called it), which is a scriptural doctrine itself via Psalm 82, John 10:34, et cetera.

Now, after his Ascension, what then? Obviously, Christ will return in glory to judge the living and then dead. But what about between now and then?

This is pure speculation on my part, not even what the Greek theologians call a theologoumemnon, or theological opinion, but rather a hypothetical conjecture as to the apparent mutability of a God described simultaneously as unchanging and immutable.

When Christ united himself with humanity, taking on our nature in a hypostatic union as Pope Leo and the Chalcedonians taught, or a union of natures without change, confusion or separation, as St. Cyril and the Oriental Orthodox taught, His full humanity before His resurrection, and, dare I say probably after His resurrection, would naturally be temporal. Thus, God, rather than changing the cosmic order He created to make Himself mutable, united Himself with humanity and in that manner saved us and also granted Himself, in a humble and unobtrusive way, the ability to experience events through humanity, through communicatio idiomatum.

For this model to work, Nestorianism must be rejected, because with a personal union, the human nature experiences time hypostatically but the divine nature remains unchanging, having its own hypostasis, the two connected only by a shared prosopon. This is equally true in hyper-Nestorianism, where you have two persons united by a single will (thus ironically making hyper-Nestorianism a form of Monothelitism, a Christology contrived in a failed attempt to reunify the Chalcedonians and Miaphysites, but which succeeded only in possibly causing the Maronite schism and certainly causing poor St. Maximus the Confessor to be exlinguanated, a barbaric act which led to his death six days later).

Now, interestingly, even before His resurrection and His ascension, the mere incarnation of Christ resulted, through communicatio idiomatum, in God changing as a result of human change, from the second the embryonic Lord began to grow in the womb. Thus, even if in His resurrected form, Christ, and by extension, us, will experience time in the manner of God, divine mutability would have already happened. The lynchpin is the communication of properties enabled through miaphysis or hypostatic union. Thus, when we read Scripture, which is a written icon of the Word of God, and read of God repenting of a decision (which actually literally means “to change His mind,” this being the meaning of metanoia; the additional meanings of guilt and a desire to reform are the kind of accretions to Hellenic words derived from specific contexts), or when we read of God deciding to do something, or saying regarding the sacrifice of children to Moloch (“It never occurred to me you would do such a thing!), are we not encountering the humanity of the Word, resulting from the intercommunication of divine and human properties that is a consequence of union hypostatic or natural (miaphysite)? Communicatio idiomatum is a two way street.

Since God is timeless and immortal, and Man is temporal and experiences time in a linear manner, our Lord would, under communicatio idiomatum, experience, in a manner where, thanks to omnipotence, the Word of God could, to avoid an overload of information that would damage His full, and thus, before his resurrection, frail and vincible humanity, the attributes of the communication of properties so as to perfect the hypostatic or natural union, so that our Lord would experience creation from within, either during, or I would conjecture, after, His mission on Earth, because it seems that before the Ascension, the demands of His ministry would preclude what one might conjecture His full humanity might otherwise experience as a distraction. And thus it would be both the divine and human will of the Logos to delay this until a suitable time, such as the Ascension, or perhaps in Heaven, where the entirety of existence might be perceived in a linear manner by a risen and glorified human, which our Savior remains, as well as God the Son, as one person, with one nature or hypostasis.

So, there is an answer to the conundrum of an immutable God apparently changing in the Old Testament. Jesus Christ is, as the creed says, very God of very God. As long as we accept fully the Nicene doctrine and Trinitarian theology, and reject Nestorianism and embrace Chalcedonian or Miaphysite Christology, which facilitate the communication of all properties between the divinity and humanity of the Word of God, and indeed owing to omnipotence, communicatio idiomatum could well have been regulated by God so as to perfect the Incarnation, ensuring the complete, sublime and perfected unification in nature or hypostasis true and absolute humanity and true and absolute divinity, thus enabling the communication if properties to be entirely unhindered without changing or confusing the pure divinity and pure humanity of the incarnate Lord, we can have God change because of the Incarnation of the Word, while in a most splendid mystery remaining entirely immutable, because the union of humanity and divinity did not entail, as the Coptic priest says in the Confiteor ante Communionem, change, confusion, or separation, for even “the wink of an eye.” (look for the prayer “Amen, amen, amen, I believe and confess until the last breath” on Google, or I can send it to you; the Coptic liturgy is available in myrid public domain English translations; also this prayer is very similiar to the Pre Communion Prayer of St. John Chrysostom, which a number of Antiochian, OCA and other Eastern Orthodox parishes in the US now recite in unison before the precious body and blood of our Lord are partaken of by the faithful).

It’s an interesting proposal. Unfortunately I’m unable to attach any meaning to this collection of words. I have no problem with the idea that the Logos experiences death because of union with the human, without actually ceasing to exist or the other typical things associated with death. But I don’t understand what it could mean to say that the Logos isn’t affected by the experiences of the human, because I think that is a rejection of the union.

Note I’m not asking for clarification. Your writing is just fine, and I follow what you’re saying.

The issue isn’t limited to suffering. If impassibility prevents God from being affected, because that would be change, it would apply to any experience. I don’t understand what a hypostatic union could mean if the Logos isn’t affected by anything that the human does or experiences. I don’t think the communication of attributes helps. That is a consequence of the fact that both natures are one person, so both natures are involved in everything. But saying that the Logos isn’t affected seems like it denies the basis of the communication of attributes, because it cuts off the communication.

We don’t require that the two natures are affected in the same way by things. I agree that God has to be outside our normal time. There are reasons based on physics that seem to make that clear. But there has to be some equivalent of experience, or I think you’re denying both the reality that we’re made in God’s image and that Jesus shows us God.

hedrick said:

But I don’t understand what it could mean to say that the Logos isn’t affected by the experiences of the human, because I think that is a rejection of the union.

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And just to be clear, I am not saying that; you are entirely correct in asserting that the Logos is not affected by the human experience, and this would violate the three ancient criteria, reffairmed by Pope Benedict XVI, or Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as he was then known in his role as head of the Comgregation for the Doctrine of Faith, and the bishops of the Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox communion, when they over the course of the 1990s concluded each other did have a vaid Eucharist, in that it would introduce separation and violate communicatio idiomatum. Indeed, I think that to say that the Logos was unaffected by the human experience of Jesus Christ would require rejection of Chalcedonian hypostatic union or Ephesian/OO natural union, as it would require the Logos to have at least two completely different hypostases. Two hypostases means no communicatio idiomatum, because the human nature and the divine nature are now separate, and we have Nestorianism, full-on and straight-up as they say.

This in fact is why I object to Nestorianism, because I could not say as a Nestorian that, to quote the dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary, Fr. John Behr, that God died in order to show us what it means to be human. Fr. John attributes all the major Christological heresies to the difficulty in accepting this true dogmatic axiom, and also summarizes my own Christological position (which is basically his, albeit with perhaps even greater care for Chalcedonian-Miaphysite-Assyrian reconciliation), in this very good lecture he delivered in Canada early in the prior decade:

hedrick said:

Note I’m not asking for clarification. Your writing is just fine, and I follow what you’re saying.

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I don’t think so, if you thought I was saying the Divine Logos is not affected by the actions of the human Christ; this idea I reject entirely, and in suggesting that God experienced change because of the mutability of the humanity of Christ, I was making a statement that depends on communicatio idiomatum.

What is more, the other remarks you made suggest that either I misspoke so as to give the impression of Nestorianism, or that you misinterpreted what I was saying.

And to be clear, what I was saying is that it is a hypothetical possibility that the apparent mutability of God in the Old Testament, when we know that the Divine Nature is impassable, is that this mutability applies to the person of the Word from His humanity, because the incarnate Word is either one person with a united theandric nature from a human nature and a divine nature united without change, confusion or separation, which is the miaphysite Christology of St. Cyril, St. Severus, and the Oriental Orthodox, or else the a human nature and a divine nature united in one hypostasis, without change, confusion or separation, thus in both cases making the person of our Savior Jesus Christ the Incarnate Logos fully God and fully man, perfectly united, so that the communication of properties between the divinity and humanity is possible and necessary.

And for the same reason we can assert that God was born, crucified for us, and rose again, we can say the Son of Man performed miracles and perfected our fallen human nature.

I extrapolate hypothetically that because we can say that, because of the communication of properties enabled through Orthodox Christology, whether Chalcedonian or Miaphysite, at any point in the Old Testament where God appears to be mutable or passable, we are seeing, as a result of communicatio idiomatum, the Word of God reacting as one person, with either one theandric nature or a human and divine nature united in one hypostasis, as a result of the communication of the properties of mutability from humanity to divinity.

So, when at the death of Lazarus, Jesus wept, God wept and Man wept. My hypothesis is that when the Word of God says “I could not have imagined you could do such a thing,” the human emotions of shock and horror are imparted through the concurrent human and divine wills, into the divinity or divine nature with which the humanity of Christ is naturally or hypostatically linked without change, confusion or separation. My whole point is that you cannot say the Logos is not affected by the experiences of the man Jesus, because that is Nestorianism, it destroys communicatio idiomatum, and the union of God and Man and the communication of properties is what glorifies our fallen humanity, allowing us the hope of life everlasting through sacraments which convey true grace, such as Baptism, because of our Lord, God and Savior in effect ordaining them (in this respect the low church Protestant term ordinance is not entirely wrong, but the Orthodox term for the sacraments as mysteries is probably the most correct, owing to their nature which to mortal minds seems paradoxical or in some cases is misinterpreted either as merely symbolic, for example, by Zwingli, or as some kind of ritual magic, as in certain heretical schismatic sects of “folk Catholics” one encounters in Latin America, or even in the case of an Episcopalian music director I knew who ought to have known the absurdity of calling the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer ritual magic, but like so many Christians these days, was poorly catechized.

James 2:26 defines death as simply separation of body and spirit(or soul forget which).

1 Timothy 2:5
There is only one God, and there is only one way that people can reach God. That way is through Christ Jesus, who as a man

Only the Man Jesus died in the sense described.

We know, after he died, that

1 Peter 3:19
And by the Spirit he went and preached to the spirits in prison.

The Liturgist said:

for the aforementioned scripture says all things were made by God, without an exception for time, which is a thing

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I wonder what concept of "thing" allows to speak of time as a thing. Things are placed in space and time, but space and time are not things, they are no entities, but rather a sort of "quality" (in the philosophical sense).

In physics, time is the forth dimension, but it is different from the 3 dimensions of space, which is reflected in the formula for calculating distance in spacetime: The Pythagorean formula d=x²+y²+z² is extended to d=x²+y²+z²-ct², and this means that from a given reference point ("here and now") you can divide spacetime into three regions: absolute past, which may have an influence to here and now, absolute future, which may be influenced by here and now, and absolute elsewhere, which may be considered as (relative) past or future depending on coordinates.

If we try to apply such a description to God, He is on one hand the cause of everything, which would put Him in the absolute past of the whole universe, but he also knows everything, which would place Him in the absolute future. This "paradox" is possible, of course, because He is not in our spacetime, but eternal.

As to God being "immutable", we should be careful to how we conceive this. God is not static, and we have examples in the Bible that God changed His will (e.g. spared Nineveh after the people repented). So "immutable does not exclude some change or "experience" by God.

Generally speaking, we can not expect the Bible to answer any question we are able to formulate, and the eternal world is so different from ours that it seems better to leave some issues in the unknown, rather than going beyond Scripture.

Strictly speaking, even Nicene goes beyond Scripture in systematizing statements that are scattered through the Bible without any system. This I consider a necessary evil: evil because it goes beyond Scripture, necessary because such systematization was the only way to answer heresies as Arianism.

helmut said:

I wonder what concept of "thing" allows to speak of time as a thing. Things are placed in space and time, but space and time are not things, they are no entities, but rather a sort of "quality" (in the philosophical sense).

In physics, time is the forth dimension, but it is different from the 3 dimensions of space, which is reflected in the formula for calculating distance in spacetime: The Pythagorean formula d=x²+y²+z² is extended to d=x²+y²+z²-ct², and this means that from a given reference point ("here and now") you can divide spacetime into three regions: absolute past, which may have an influence to here and now, absolute future, which may be influenced by here and now, and absolute elsewhere, which may be considered as (relative) past or future depending on coordinates.

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You’re forgetting general and special relativity. Mass produces gravity, gravity bends spacetime; this causes time dilation, which the film Interstellar does a mediocre but barely acceptable job of demonstrating, before the protagonist falls into a black hole without turning into spaghetti. Also as one accelerates towards the speed of light, which is finite, and could also be considered the speed of causality, ones mass increases, so an object that accelerated to the speed of light would become infinitely massive. Mass can be converted to energy, and Energy, for that matter, we think can be converted to mass.

Because of relativity, and quantum mechanics, space, time, energy, mass and gravity can all be understood as related, indeed, gravitational waves were recently detected, and since c is the absolute maximum speed, a light wave can be thought of in a temporal way.

At any event, the physics are irrelevant; space and time are subjects, nouns, and the language of John 1 concerning creation could be written as by the Word of God (the only begotten son of the Father, always existing), all other words acquired meaning.

If we try to apply such a description to God, He is on one hand the cause of everything, which would put Him in the absolute past of the whole universe, but he also knows everything, which would place Him in the absolute future. This "paradox" is possible, of course, because He is not in our spacetime, but eternal.

As to God being "immutable", we should be careful to how we conceive this. God is not static, and we have examples in the Bible that God changed His will (e.g. spared Nineveh after the people repented). So "immutable does not exclude some change or "experience" by God.

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The doctrine of divine impassability does not say that God is static, but dynamic; he is living, the source of life, and indeed eternal life.

Generally speaking, we can not expect the Bible to answer any question we are able to formulate, and the eternal world is so different from ours that it seems better to leave some issues in the unknown, rather than going beyond Scripture.

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Anyone who expects the Bible to answer any question does not understand its purpose. Holy Scripture was not written to tell me the history and technical specifications of the London Underground or the Paris Metro, nor does it contain a timetable for Eurostar and connecting TGV services for that happy day when this pandemic ends and I can return to London.

Strictly speaking, even Nicene goes beyond Scripture in systematizing statements that are scattered through the Bible without any system.

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That’s not really accurate. What the Creed does, what the Fathers did at the Council of Nicea and Constantinople, is they cited from the Apostolic faith, which for much of Christendom including the first and third Christian nations, Armenia and Ethiopia, at the time was still oral, as Armenian bibles and a Ge’ez New Testament were being translated, and for Aramaic Christians, which represented the third largest language group after Greek, the largest, and Latin, the second largest, the Syriac Peshitta, the definitive Aramaic Bible, was not yet complete; there were others, but much of Syriac Christendom was having to rely on the Diatessaron, a “Gospel Harmony” compiled by Tatian, who later in his life became the leader of a heretical Gnostic sect. Everything else was largely oral. Syriac Christians represented, even at the time of Nicea, the largest Christian group in terms of geographic distribution.

Also at Nicea, even for the Greeks and Latins, there was no canon. In fact the New Testament canon was compiled years after Nicea, by Athanasius, who led the council against Arius.

Yet almost all the bishops, except for 5 who left, and 1 who signed but whined about it (Eusebius of Caesarea), they agreed based on the Apostolic faith that produced Scripture, that our Lord was of one essence with the Father. That he was begotten, not made. Thus, the heresy of Arius was refuted, but the handful of Arian sympathizing bishops wormed their way into the court of Emperor Constantine: Eusebius of Nicomedia baptized him on his deathbed, and thus gained influence over his heir Constantius, and thus the Arian Empire persecuted Christians until the reign of Valens, and there were minor incidents of persecution even under Theodosius I, the first Christian Emperor since Constantine, who wanted to give a church in Milan to the Arians because he felt threatened by Arian Gothic tribes (a legitimate concern as Rome wound up being sacked and ruled by Goths before the Franks took over). This event was prevented by St. Ambrose and his faithful sealing themselves in the church and keeping vigil until the threat passed. It was at that event that Ambrose introduced antiphonal singing “in the manner of the Greeks, lest the people perish in soulless monotony” (the church of Rome continued to monotonically chant Low Mass until some time in the tenth century, when the current custom of quietly or silently reading or whispering the prayers began, but Ambrosian chant, in its origins in that basillica, predated Gregorian chant by 200 years, and I myself prefer Ambrosian chant to both Gregorian and Byzantine).

This I consider a necessary evil: evil because it goes beyond Scripture, necessary because such systematization was the only way to answer heresies as Arianism.

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That makes no sense because there was no Scripture as we now possess it for the council to go beyond. There was the Gospel, which the council knew orally and also from written gospels, some of which were later deemed spurious, or in some cases from the defective Diatessaron, the Gospel harmony by Tatian, who became Gnostic. As soon as the Peshitta was finished later in the fourth century, Syriac bishops travelled from parish to parish supplying it, and making sure the Diatessaron was destroyed, because they knew the Peshitta contained a more accurate Gospel, since it had the four Gospels most widely recognized as authoritative in their original form, and not blended together by a man who later rejected the Christian faith in favor of starting his own Gnostic cult.

Surely the evil was committed by Arius, who tried to exploit the situation where a complete manuscript of the Bible was among the most valuable posessions of any parish church (during the Diocletian persecution, Roman persecutors would offer to spare the lives of clerfy and churchwardens who turned over the holy books of the church, which included the Gospel Book, the Epistles, the Psalter, and the rest of the Old Testament, and various liturgical service books, books of canon law and books of church order, and catechtical and theological works, like the epistles of Clement and Ignatius and the heresiological writing of Irenaeus.

Arius exploited the potential lack of knowledge of the Gospel in his congregation, because even a middle class Alexandrian Greek could not afford a manuscript of the Bible, to teach them a lie unsupported by Scripture, but the bishops at Nicea, because of their knowledge of the Gospel, understood the argument Athanasius made as to why Arius was teaching a different Gospel, and anathematized him as commanded by Paul in the epistle to the Galatians. The creed was introduced as a tool to teach against Arianism and Gnosticism, and was expanded at Constantinople in 381 to address additional heresies like Apollinarianism and Pneumatomachianism.

The Apostles Creed by the way is believed to date from the third century, and was part of the early Roman baptismal liturgy. One can confess it and still be an Arian, as it was written to exclude Gnostics, Docetics, Marcionists and others who denied that our Lord was the son of the God of Israel, and a human being. The Athanasian Creed was almost certainly not written by Athanasius, and was probably not intended to be a Creed, but a catechetical homily and a hymn. Te Deum Laudamus, the ancient hymn sung at Morning Prayer by Anglicans, and Ho Monogenes, an ancient hymn written by Severus of Antioch and used promimently in the Eastern, Syriac, Armenian and Coptic churches, are both creedal hymns, and the Eastern Orthodox sing the Nicene Creed much of the time.

The Liturgist said:

You’re forgetting general and special relativity.

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No, I used special relativity. I just did not want to go into details, which are rather off-topic. I concentrated on a point that has to do with the nature of time, and then went to the theme "God and time".

The Liturgist said:

At any event, the physics are irrelevant; space and time are subjects, nouns

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So are redness, position, or quality. Are they all "things"?

The Liturgist said:

The doctrine of divine impassability does not say that God is static, but dynamic; he is living, the source of life, and indeed eternal life.

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What I said was, that this "living" includes experience, nd change of mind, so we cannot take these possibilities as contradiction to immutality. Is "impassability" th right term to describe this?

The Liturgist said:

In fact the New Testament canon was compiled years after Nicea, by Athanasius, who led the council against Arius.

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There have been decisions what constitutes the canon. The Marcion controversy settled the questions which Gospels are authoritative (the diatessaron is a special case, it was made out of these four Gospels), and others issues like Acts and Pauline epistles. Though some questions were not settled at the time of Nicaea, there was a canon (with fuzzy limits).

The first notions of Scripture beyond the OT can be seen in the NT, when Luke is cited as Scripture (1Tim 5:18 -> Lk 10:7) and all Pauline letters mentioned as Scripture (2Pt 3:16). The Church had Scripture of the New Covenant, there was only no agreement about the precise extant (and regarding to Revelation, this was even so in the 16th century).

The Liturgist said:

Surely the evil was committed by Arius

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I already said his teaching was heresy.

The Liturgist said:

Arius exploited the potential lack of knowledge of the Gospel in his congregation,

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I don't think he purportedly went away from the truth, but rather think he fell into an error.

sercti said:

Need I say no more?

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Yes. I mentioned Biblical verses that show that Jesus is YHWH, so a verse that cites a word from YHWH is no evidence against that.

EDIT: It seems that this post survived the "clean-up", it refers to deleted postings. And it is almost (to say the least) off-topic.

helmut said:

No, I used special relativity. I just did not want to go into details, which are rather off-topic. I concentrated on a point that has to do with the nature of time, and then went to the theme "God and time".

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Ok, I didnt quite follow.

So are redness, position, or quality. Are they all "things"?

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Yes, insofar as they are attributes, and I have no qualms saying that God created all attributes (evil is not an attribute, but rather resistance to divine will, and thus an uncreated and untreatable destructive action, although linguistically we use it as an attribute).

What I said was, that this "living" includes experience, nd change of mind, so we cannot take these possibilities as contradiction to immutality. Is "impassability" th right term to describe this?

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Yes.

There have been decisions what constitutes the canon. The Marcion controversy settled the questions which Gospels are authoritative (the diatessaron is a special case, it was made out of these four Gospels), and others issues like Acts and Pauline epistles.

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Actually that’s not really correct. Marcion was the first to propose a canon, but his canon was rejected, and increasingly a consensus formed around the four gospels, but some Catholic-Orthodox Nicene churches are known to have had copies of The Gospel of Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter, which were removed by bishops, and the Syriax church did not benefit from having access to the four gospels in their original form in an easy to understand dialect until the fourth centurt (Peshitta literally means “simple”).

Though some questions were not settled at the time of Nicaea, there was a canon (with fuzzy limits).

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No, there were rather a multitude of proposed canons, although they were not called that; interestingly enough the first use of the word canon to refer to a list of scriptural books was in 1746.

The first notions of Scripture beyond the OT can be seen in the NT, when Luke is cited as Scripture (1Tim 5:18 -> Lk 10:7) and all Pauline letters mentioned as Scripture (2Pt 3:16). The Church had Scripture of the New Covenant, there was only no agreement about the precise extant (and regarding to Revelation, this was even so in the 16th century).

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Some of the church had everything we now use. Other churches were not so lucky. It was not until the end of the fifth century that we see the emergence of a true canon.

I already said his teaching was heresy.


I don't think he purportedly went away from the truth, but rather think he fell into an error.

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That is entirely possible. I tend to regard Arius as evil, yet actually on reflection it seems just as likely he was self-deluded.

The Liturgist said:

Actually that’s not really correct. Marcion was the first to propose a canon, but his canon was rejected, and increasingly a consensus formed around the four gospels

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That was about AD 200.

The Liturgist said:

but some Catholic-Orthodox Nicene churches are known to have had copies of The Gospel of Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter, which were removed by bishops

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What time do you speak about? AFAIK this was settled wll before Nicea.

The Liturgist said:

, and the Syriax church did not benefit from having access to the four gospels in their original form in an easy to understand dialect until the fourth centurt (Peshitta literally means “simple”).

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I already said the diatessaron was a special case.

The Liturgist said:

No, there were rather a multitude of proposed canons, although they were not called that; interestingly enough the first use of the word canon to refer to a list of scriptural books was in 1746.

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They were rather similar, see The Development of the Canon of the New Testament - Cross Reference Table: Writings and Authorities

This is what I described as a canon with fuzzy boundaries: There were books that were universally accepted, books that were disputed, and books that were universally rejected. In the 4th century, the latter second group became (almost) empty. This process was well under way in the time of Nicea, but finished only about half a century later.

Carl Emerson said:

Hi there,

How comfortable are we with this suggestion?

Is this a case of applying human reason to the mysteries of God and coming out with an invalid answer?

Your thoughts very much appreciated.

Do some churches insist on believing this?

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God, in the person of the incarnate Son, suffered in the flesh.

alllivesmatter said:

Sorry, I misunderstood the question.
God couldn't but Jesus could.
No church that I know of believes that God died on the cross.

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Yes I didn't realise this was something widely taught in churches?

WrappedUpinHisLove3 said:

Yes I didn't realise this was something widely taught in churches?

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It's considered basic Christian Theology 101.

The problem tends to arise because there is a lot of confusion these days over basic Christian theology.

Jesus, God the Son, suffered and died.

We can't say "only the humanity suffered" because it wasn't a nature in an abstract sense that suffered, or as though Jesus the man were other than, separate from, God the Son. The one undivided Person--Jesus Christ, God the Son, the Word--suffered and died on the cross.

Thus God the Son suffered. Even though He is eternal God and as God cannot suffer or die; He became man, and very much can suffer and die as a man.

When we say God died on the cross, we mean Jesus Christ, God the Son, died on the cross; and that He died as a man. God was conceived as a man, God was born as a man, God walked among us as a man, God suffered, died, was buried, rose again, ascended as a man. He is both God and man, without any separation or division between His Divinity and humanity, so that He is a single Person.

So that on the cross, a man died. But that man is truly God, so God died.

God, who cannot die, died.

This is why Scripture says that we as the Church have been purchased with the blood of God.

"Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood." - Acts of the Apostles 20:28

-CryptoLutheran

ViaCrucis said:

God, who cannot die, died.

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Exactly. There is much heresy about that, that did not happen

ewq1938 said:

Which is obviously contradictory and wrong.

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God did that which was impossible.

Only the man died but God did not.

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Once again you divide the person of Jesus into two.

There was a separation of the two at death with one dying and one not dying. At the resurrection the two were re-united again but this time without any mortality.

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There was a seperation of Jesus' human soul from His human body. There was never a seperation of His divinity from His humanity.

ewq1938 said:

It's mainly something you will find in various Orthodox denominations based on vary archaic decisions of men far in the past but it is less and less something taught. I believe the modern understanding is the correct one and is most supported by scripture.

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The vast majority of christians believe that God died. It is the minority who repeat the errors of past heresies.