[OBW]

SC,

I fully understand what you are saying. God is a mystery. On one hand, He is quite fully One, and on another He is Three.

In the thread on the response of the GLA brothers to the Biblical scholars, I made the first comment. I am preparing a second comment on a different issue than the first. But in short, I question whether mixing the discussion of God’s unity/oneness with the discussion of the three personas He used to speak of His attributes is to muddy our understanding of God. God had a reason for introducing Himself as Father, Son and Spirit. Each has specific meaning. How fully independent these are, as in the presumption of separate human individuals is not clearly stated. Yet we clearly see evidence of their separateness in certain passages. On the other hand, our God is One.

We devise various methods based on our observable universe to explain this mystery. The BARM likes the term “essence” to explain it. But it is almost clearly not the whole story. Lee liked the “one” aspects of God. He majored on them. Many others seem to major on the “three.” Neither is the whole story.

So when we say that the Immortal dies, what do we mean? First, I will make one comment that someone else said to me a couple of years ago. I quoted lines from a song and someone essentially said “since when are song lyrics part of the canon of scripture.” Did Wesley use this particular set of words to indicate that he believed that God, in His entirety, died as we understand it?

We understand death in two ways: 1) separation from God, and 2) the ceasing of our biological functions. Clearly the biological functions of Jesus ended. But even before that happened, He cried out concerning being forsaken. By the time of the physical death, Jesus was fully dead. His biological being had ceased to function and His whole being was “forsaken,” or separated from God. Yet Paul writes that God raised Jesus from the dead. So God in His entirety did not die.

Between the death and resurrection, did God in heaven have the full understanding, feeling, sense of the situation of Jesus such that the reality of that separation was universally felt? Or alternately, was the forsaking of Jesus by God in heaven an act that caused separation of God which essentially affected both sides of the separation? This is where an inquiry in a truly logical and philosophical manner fails. Logic cannot bridge the chasm and philosophy must either accept the mystery as an assumed fact or it throws up its hands and says it must not be true.

Don’t try to answer these. I have no idea if they are even valid questions. But thinking through the questions that the death of part of a “Trinity” raises gives a tremendous appreciation for what God is and did/does without ever getting an answer to those questions.

God had a reason for revealing Himself in three personas. It is more than parlor tricks. But He is still One God. He spoke of the incarnation and life of Christ in terms of the Son, although there are backgrounds of the oneness throughout the gospels. But the incarnation was of the Son of God. That has meaning. It is part of the whole of God, not the whole. I do not find scripture that negates the idea that all of God was in Christ, but the actual scriptures on the subject speak of the Son of God. I will stick to the Son as what was incarnated.