God suffered?

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Odell

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What heresy are we fighting when we say God suffered? And explain why he had to suffer please
 
We don’t say God suffered. It was Jesus who suffered.
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; …
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It’s in the creed as a statement against *Patripassianism and Modalism. *While Jesus is one of the three in the trinity of God, God The father, and God the Holy Spirit did not suffer physically, only Jesus did.

As to why he had to suffer, the plain answer is that didn’t have to, he only had to die. The wages of sin is death. If we die in sin we suffer in hell, not on earth. It is generally viewed that the suffering came from Satan’s hatred of God and that Satan used his influence on the fallen nature humanity to cause them to be so brutal to Him.

However we should keep his suffering in mind as we live our daily lives as in the end that suffering is a result of our own sin. Each time we sin, that’s a lash from the whipping he endured, each sin is a thorn in his brow, each sin, is a punch at his body, each sin is spit in his face, each sin is one indignity he endured on His way to be crucified.
 
Odell said:
I thought the Church teaches this in response to those heresy that taught Jesus did not have a divine nature
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Oh… well in that case, the heresy that denies His divine personhood is Arianism. The problem with it is, if a mere human suffered for us, then we are still in our sins, for many other mere people did the same.

Mortal sin separates us from God by an infinite distance, and therefore we need an infinite power to restore us to His Grace. Only God has infinite power, therefore only God could do restore man to grace. An old couplet summarizes this:

Man should have, God can.
Therefore, a God-Man.
 
Odell said:
What heresy are we fighting when we say God suffered? And explain why he had to suffer please
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It would contradict any heresy that denies that Jesus is God, such as Arianism. It could also contradict Nestorianism, which states that Jesus’ divine and human natures were completely separate and it was possible to do something to His human nature, but not his Divine nature. For instance, Nestorians would claim that the Virgin Mary was not the mother of God, but of the human nature of Jesus. So a Nestorian could claim that God did not suffer, but only the human person Christ suffered.

As for your second question, I believe I heard in a Fulton Sheen sermon once (paraphrasing) *Christ’s sacrifice was of infinite value because He was God, but could be made on our behalf because he was human. *
 
Check out what I found from the Catechism 468

After the Council of Chalcedon, some made of Christ’s human nature a kind of personal subject. Against them, the fifth ecumenical council, at Constantinople in 553, confessed that "there is but one hypostasis [or person], which is our Lord Jesus Christ, one of the Trinity."93 Thus everything in Christ’s human nature is to be attributed to his divine person as its proper subject, not only his miracles but also his sufferings and even his death: "He who was crucified in the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ, is true God, Lord of glory, and one of the Holy Trinity."94
 
Odell said:
Check out what I found from the Catechism 468

After the Council of Chalcedon, some made of Christ’s human nature a kind of personal subject. Against them, the fifth ecumenical council, at Constantinople in 553, confessed that "there is but one hypostasis [or person], which is our Lord Jesus Christ, one of the Trinity."93 Thus everything in Christ’s human nature is to be attributed to his divine person as its proper subject, not only his miracles but also his sufferings and even his death: "He who was crucified in the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ, is true God, Lord of glory, and one of the Holy Trinity."94
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This is the traditional ‘communication of idioms.’ This means that anything we can say about the human or divine nature of Jesus, we can attribute to His person. For instance, Jesus, in the flesh, was crucified. Hence we may say that Jesus was crucified. Now, ‘Jesus’ refers to the divine person, or the subject, and hence we can interchange this for any other term which picks out Jesus. For instance, we may say that “the Second Person of the Trinity” was crucified on the cross. This is a valid application of the communication of idioms.

We could say that “God was crucified on the cross.” (For this reason, what poster Gelsbern said about: “We don’t say God suffered. It was Jesus who suffered.” is false.)

When we say this things, they are all valid because they affirm something true about either the divine nature or the human nature, of the person. All such predications are valid.

What is not valid is ‘confusing the natures.’ We can say that “God suffered on the Cross.” But we may NOT say that the divine nature suffered on the cross. Suffering is proper to the human nature, and thus we are forbidden to predicate what is proper to the human nature of the divine nature. Likewise, it is true that, “the man Jesus is the eternal son of the Father.” (for we speak of the person, Jesus) But it is *NOT * true that “the human nature of Christ is eternal.” This again is confusing the natures, for we predicate something proper to the divine nature, eternity, of the human nature.

Now, it is of course true that to say, “God died on the Cross” is true, but it is also true to specify in what respect it is true: God died on the Cross according to His human nature. We do not claim that the divine person, the Word, does anything proper to one nature, according to the other nature. But it is necessary to be able to refer everything proper to either nature to the person, because it is the unity of the natures in the person which avails to our salvation.
 
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