It seems like there are three possibilities here.
- Jesus died while on the Cross (includes what FoA is saying as well as traditional Christian beliefs).
- Jesus was on the cross but did not die while God allowed people to think he did.
- Jesus was not on the cross, but God made it seem like it or replaced Jesus with someone else so that they thought he died.
Wouldn’t the second and third option make God guilty of a deception?
The first option makes God guilty of standing aside and allowing a gruesome murder to take place despite being in a position to stop the crime.
On the other hand, performing a grand illusion like what David Copperfield did by making the Statue of Liberty “dissapear” is surely not a crime.
Hamba2han, your analysis is flawed. Let me explain. I that you do not understand some important underpinnings of Christian theology.
Briefly these are:
- The necessity of sacrifice.
- God works through nature.
- God cannot change.
- God cannot deceive.
Theology, specifically Jewish theology, the context in which the Crucifixion took place, requires a sacrifice for sin. Jesus, being both God and man combined in a mystical way known as the hypostatic union, is that perfect sacrifice. Thus, it was not a matter of God standing idly by doing nothing to prevent a crime, but rather Him allowing this Perfect Sacrifice to be made for the atonement of sins.
Your analysis of the second and third points reduce the omnipotent and omniscient creator of the universe to the level of a Las Vegas showman. Since I do not think that is what you really meant, then the only alternative is that God is a deceiver. After all, he “fooled” not only all the onlookers, but nearly 70 generations of Christians.
Islamic theology allows for God to be a little capricious at times, even change His mind or choose differently later than He did earlier. Christian theology does not permit any of this. God is perfect, lives outside of time and has perfect and complete knowledge of absolutely everything without exception. Therefore He cannot change, nor be capricious.
Another difference between Islamic and Christian theology is that in Christian Theology, God only works through the natural world. Even the miracles of Jesus and signs of God’s abilities working through nature by restoring someone to health. Thus God never engages in illusion. An example of this would be the Israelites fleeing the Egyptians and crossing the Red Sea. God performed a miracle in allowing the Israelites to pass through the Red Sea on dry land, then collapsed the waters on the Egyptian soldiers who pursued them. If God were a deceiver He could have simply misdirected the soldiers into going the wrong way. Instead, He permitted the free will of the Egyptians to lead them into disaster.
In Christian theology, God can never deceive (nor be deceived).