No. Christ took the punishment for man’s sin on Himself. But it is absolutely impossible to seperate the Son from the Father. The Divine Essence is entirely indivisible. Soteriologically, Jesus Christ offered Himself in His human nature for man’s sin, and accepted it in His Divine Nature. This holds whether or not one hold’s Christ sacrifice to be intrinsically efficacious (as the Thomists hold) or extrinsicially efficacious (as the Scotists hold). When Christs uses Psalm 22 which beings “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”, He’s using it metaphorically. He was not literally forsaken by God, since He never contracted any sin, which alone seperates from God. But because He took the guilt of our sin on Himself, the pain in His soul was such that He could only describe it as having been forsaken by God. But He still possessed the Beatific Vision throughout. As regards the saying of Mary Magdalene, He went to the Father in His human nature. In His Divine Nature, the Father has been in Him and He in the Father from all eternity.
No I didn’t. What you’re saying is that the Three Persons cooperated in a different albeit complimentary roles in the Resurrection etc. The truth, however, is that the Three Persons, in and one and the same act, raised the body and soul of Christ from the dead. Christ could not do anything ad extra in His Divine nature, that Father and the Holy Ghost did not also do in one and the same act, since the Divine Will, really identitical with the Divine Essence, is numerically one and the same in the Three Persons.
No. The Body of Christ is the body of the Person of Christ which is the Person of the Son, who is really distinct from the Person of the Holy Spirit. Christ never ceased being God (which is why seperation from the Father was impossible), and since the Divinity was united to the humanity of Christ, not in the natures, but in the Person, Christ is present in the Eucharist by the Hypostatic Union (He is made present by transubstantiation, but He is present by the Hypostatic Union). However, since Christ possessed the Divine Nature, which is numerically one, and thus common, to the Three Persons, the Father and the Holy Spirit are present in Christ, by the Trinitarian circumincession. This does not mean that the Father and the Holy Ghost became incarnate. It just means that since the Son was never severed from the Divinity (which is impossible, since they are, in fact, really identical), the Father and the Holy Spirit, although really distinct from the Son, are inseperable from Him, since they are numerically one and the same Essence.
I admit, that this is difficult, so don’t feel terrible if you can’t understand it. But we must be careful that in admitting the distinction of Persons, we don’t seperate them.
Benedicat Deus,
Latinitas
