The objection
If Father and Son possess the same deity, the Father would also have to suffer. But if the Son is forsaken by the Father, their unity seems to break apart at the cross.
1. Only the Son has assumed human nature
Shared deity does not mean that every personal relationship and every human experience belongs to all three persons. The Father is not the Son; he was not born in Bethlehem. Incarnation is the shared divine work whose personal bearer is the Son. For this, Thomas distinguishes bringing about the union from the person with whom human nature is united.[1]
The Son therefore suffers as a human. The Father does not likewise possess this human nature and is not crucified with him.
2. Jesus' cry is genuine lament
Mark 15,34 takes up Psalm 22's opening. Jesus voices the distress of the suffering righteous one. This must not be flattened into a mere theatrical gesture: His suffering and experience of absent rescue are real. He bears our judgment and takes the path of death rather than being delivered from the cross.
At the same time, the lament's form is revealing. He calls on his God. Even in the utmost distress, the cry is relationship to God, not a declaration that God no longer exists for him.
3. Forsakenness is no dissolution of divine being
Psalm 22 leads to answered prayer and praise of God. Verse 25 explains that God did not despise the afflicted one's misery and heard his cry. The opening must therefore be separated neither from its grievous seriousness nor from the entire psalm.
The statement that God did not preserve the Son from death in suffering is different from the claim that their shared deity was severed. The second claim does not occur in the cry from the cross. Moreover, it would make the work of redemption a temporary dissolution of God.
4. The cross is God's shared reconciling action
Facing the coming scattering, John 16,32 says that the Father is with the Son. Paul says that God reconciled the world to himself in Christ. At the cross, therefore, the Son does not encounter a God alien to his being or acting against his will.
The personal and natural distinctions together explain the evidence: The Son truly suffers in his humanity; Father and Son remain the one God. The Father need neither become human for the cross to be God's action nor deity break apart for Jesus' suffering to be serious.[2]
Biblical texts in context
Sources and further study
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiaeIII, q. 3, a. 4: shared divine causation and personal attribution of incarnation.
- Council of Chalcedon, Definition of FaithThe distinction of natures remains preserved in Christ's one person.