C
Cephas
Guest
Did God the Father suffer while His Son was hanging and dying on the cross?
yepSumma Theologica: Whether Christ’s Passion is to be attributed to His Godhead?
This discusses Christ’s suffering and His two natures. The conclusion is that Christ suffered only in His human nature. By implication, the Father could not have suffered because of the impassibility of the Divine Nature.
Justin
Cool.Summa Theologica: Whether Christ’s Passion is to be attributed to His Godhead?
This discusses Christ’s suffering and His two natures. The Divine Second Person suffered, but only in His human nature. He was enabled to suffer and die because he assumed a human nature. This is because the Divine Nature is impassible–incapable of suffering, just as it is incapable of death.
Therefore, by implication, the Father could not have suffered because of the impassibility of the Divine Nature.
Justin
The Father is not an angry God who demand that Christ be sacrificed.Did God Himself not place His wrath on Jesus as he was hanging on the cross?
The Father is not an angry God who demand that Christ be sacrificed.
The Church has never definitively taught one or another theory of how exactly mankind was Redeemed by Christ. She just teaches that Christ, by his Life, Death, Resurrection, and Asension redeemed man. The nuances she leaves open to debate.That is the flawed doctrine of Protestantism.
Yeah.Remember that the Divine Nature is unchanging, and thus to the extent that suffering implies change, God the Father did not suffer.
However, there may be other aspects of suffering that some of us have in mind.
your right. now, since the human intellect can not fully grasp the mystery of God, and because man’s language can not fully express the mystery either, what we see in the old testament (what you are referring too) is called ANTHROPOMORPHISMS.Wait a minute…when you say God does not experience emotions, what do you mean by that exactly? Throughout the OT (and even NT) emotions are certainly applied to God (happiness, sorrow, love, hate—of sin—etc). Most importantly God is love…and I realize that love is more than an emotion, but the emotion aspect of love is important.
But doesnt God dance for joy when we say sorry to Him at Confession??Back to the original question.
The Church has traditionally taught that God is impassible. Meaning that God does not feel emotions, including suffering.
I do not know what the basis for this teaching it. Just that, until very, very recently, this was an unquestioned teaching of the Church’s Fathers and Theologians. I suspect Saint Thomas Aquinas had a thing or two to say about it.
Good information. Thank you.The Father did not suffer, that is part of a heresy known as the Patripassian Heresy which is tied with the Monarchian, aka Sebellian Heresy. At its root, it claimed that there was a unity of persons in the Trinity, and that by extension, if the Son suffered, so did the Father and the Holy Spirit because they are one. It failed to recognize the difference between the unity of the Divine Nature and the unity of Persons.