Moreover, the heart of the Christian kerygma is that the Son of God became man and lived an authentic human life. Within that human life the Son’s death on the cross stands as the consummate event. From the Incarnation and the cross theologians argue for God’s passibility on three interconnected levels. First, it is because God has always suffered with those he loved that he sent his Son into the world. The cross then expresses fully God’s eternal divine nature, and thus is the paradigm of a suffering God. Second, while the Christian christological tradition has always upheld the truth that the Son of God suffered as man, though not as God, contemporary theologians find such a distinction illogical and therefore unacceptable. If the Son of God actually became man, then he not only suffered as man but such suffering must have washed into his very divinity as well. Third, the Son, on the cross, did not then merely experience the abandonment of the Father as man but equally as God. Moreover, such abandonment simultaneously pertains to the Father’s own experience. The Father suffered the loss of his Son. Thus the suffering cry of dereliction was a cry being experienced within the very depths of God’s passible nature.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 20:47:40 +0000
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