Christ's Death On The Cross

[Marika X]

I'm a Greek Orthodox Christian.  A Catholic friend recently told me that both Jesus as Man and Jesus as God died on the Cross.  Since God always has been and always will be, how could God die?  I don't understand. 

 

[cappie]

No, God cannot die.  The Bible tells us that God is immutable (Psalm 90:2; Malachi 3:6). This means that he cannot change.  If he died, that would be a change.  The nature of God's divinity is that he cannot change, so he cannot die.  Furthermore, death is a biological function where something that is alive ceases to be alive.  But God is not biological.  God is different than us.  In theology we say that he is "Wholly Other.”  That is, he is completely different than what we are.  We die, but God does not.

 

Also, the idea of dying has the implication of nonexistence.  This is a further problem when considering the idea of God dying.  In Christianity, God cannot cease to exist - again implying a change in his nature, which cannot be.  Therefore, God cannot die.

Sometimes people will say that Jesus can't be God because Jesus died and God cannot die.  What they fail to understand is that Jesus has two natures: God and man.  In theology we call this the hypostatic union.  It is the teaching that in the one person of Christ are two distinct natures, the divine and human.  It was the human nature that died on the cross, not the divine nature.  But because Jesus is both divine and human, it is sometimes said, although not with the greatest accuracy, that God died on the cross.

 

So, God cannot die; but in the person of Christ, who is a man with the divine nature, we see a biological death, not the death of the divine being who is God.