Does God Suffer? The Cross and the Crucified God

Does God suffer? Not as creatures suffer: passively, in sequence, and at the hands of something outside Him. His affections are real and eternally whole, and on the cross the Son of God truly suffered in the human nature He assumed, without the divine nature becoming passible. That answer sits between two confident camps. A large share of twentieth-century theologians concluded that God is passible, and a 1986 essay named the result "the new orthodoxy." The fathers and councils held that the divine nature cannot suffer, while confessing that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) argues that passibilism and strict impassibility share one unexamined premise, and that the cross is where it gives way.

Key takeaways

• The church has always said that God suffered, in one precise sense. The Second Council of Constantinople (553) confessed that the crucified Christ is "one of the Holy Trinity," while the claim that the Father suffered was rejected.
• The modern consensus is younger than it looks. Ronald Goetz traced it in 1986 to the decline of Christendom, democratic aspirations, the First World War and biblical criticism.
• Both camps assume that real suffering must be the creature's kind. That shared premise generates the standoff.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds both truths at once. Against strict impassibility and against passibilism alike, the Son truly suffered in His human nature, and the divine nature, whole in God's own frame, was not diminished.

What is the question asking?

Divine passibility is the claim that God can be acted upon by His creatures so as to undergo states such as grief and pain. Divine impassibility denies it. The general doctrine, with its distinction between affections and passions, is set out in our article on God's emotions, and it is assumed here rather than argued again.

Whether we ask "does God suffer?" or "can God suffer?", three questions hide inside the plain one. Does God feel? Can what happens in the world inflict loss on Him? And did God suffer on the cross? The third decides the other two, because Christianity confesses that the one who died at Golgotha is God the Son. Whatever we say of the cross, we are saying of God.

Two terms keep the history straight. Theopaschism, from the Greek for "God" and "to suffer," is the confession that the one who suffered is God; in its orthodox form it says that the Son suffered in the flesh. Patripassianism is the claim that the Father suffered on the cross, and the early church rejected it because it erased the distinction between the Father and the Son. Impassibility belongs among the classical attributes of God, and the cross is where it is tested hardest.

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How did the suffering God become the "new orthodoxy"?

Through a revision of the doctrine of God under cultural and critical pressure, which Ronald Goetz traced in 1986 to four causes, none of them the Holocaust. The shift was predicted before it happened. In 1917, as Richard Bauckham's survey in Themelios records, H. M. Relton wrote: "There are many indications that the doctrine of the suffering God is going to play a very prominent part in the theology of the age in which we live."

In 1986 Goetz wrote in the Christian Century that it had come true. His article opens with the verdict: "The age-old dogma that God is impassible and immutable, incapable of suffering, is for many no longer tenable. The ancient theopaschite heresy that God suffers has, in fact, become the new orthodoxy."

Goetz gave four causes, as his own section titles: "The decline of Christendom," "The rise of democratic aspirations," "The problem of suffering and evil," and "The scholarly reappraisal of the Bible." On democracy he argued that a God conceived as the unaffected source of the world "is irrelevant to what free men and women do in the world." On suffering, his marker is the Western Front: "The brutalities of World War I gave further cause for rethinking the doctrine of God," and he asked, "How could God be love and not lay wounded on the battlefields of France?" On the Bible: "The higher critical approach to the Bible was an early harbinger of the theopaschite revolution."

The Holocaust is often supplied as the origin of the consensus, but it is not among Goetz's causes; he does not mention it. His diagnosis runs back into the nineteenth century.

Thomas Weinandy, writing against it in First Things in 2001, confirms the scale. He judged that "many, if not most, Christian theologians hold as axiomatic that God is passible," and said Goetz had "in a sense rightly" named it the new orthodoxy. Its wider family includes open theism and the broader revision of classical theism that critics call theistic personalism.

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The strongest case that God suffers

The passibilist case begins with love. Love that is untouched by the beloved's ruin seems to be less than love. Jürgen Moltmann, author of The Crucified God (1971), put it in the line Weinandy quotes: "Were God incapable of suffering in any respect, and therefore in an absolute sense, then He would also be incapable of love." In his prison cell, Bauckham records, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reached the same conclusion in a single line: "only the suffering God can help."

The best passibilists do not make God a victim. Bauckham states the case in its strongest form: "But the cross shows us a God who suffers out of the fullness of his being because he is love. He does not suffer against his will, but willingly undertakes to suffer with and for those he loves." On this account divine suffering is chosen rather than inflicted, which answers the classical worry about a God buffeted from outside before the worry is raised.

The New Testament seems to speak this way without embarrassment. Paul describes the gift of the Son from the Father's side: "He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?" (Romans 8:32). The Son cries from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Paul tells the Ephesian elders: "Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood" (Acts 20:28). The text of that verse is disputed at two points, and no argument here rests on it alone. And of the rulers of this age Paul writes: "None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8).

Hence the sharpest form of the argument. The one who was crucified is the Lord of glory. If suffering is truly said of Him, the divine nature cannot be held at a safe distance from it without dividing Christ into a sufferer and a spectator. Weinandy reports the objection fairly: contemporary theologians find the distinction between suffering as man and not as God "illogical and therefore unacceptable."

The modern argument and its answer are set out at length in Volume Four.

The strongest case that God does not suffer

The impassibilist case begins with the fathers. Cyril of Alexandria, whose letter to Nestorius the Council of Ephesus approved in 431, confessed that the Son suffered, and then said how. The Word suffered, he wrote, "not as if God the Word suffered in his own nature stripes, or the piercing of the nails, or any other wounds, for the Divine nature is incapable of suffering, inasmuch as it is incorporeal, but since that which had become his own body suffered in this way, he is also said to suffer for us; for he who is in himself incapable of suffering was in a suffering body."

His later letter, the one carrying the anathemas, sharpens the paradox: "although impassible, yet in his Crucified Body he made his own the sufferings of his own flesh." Weinandy compresses Cyril's position into three words: "The Impassible suffers." The patristic consensus, in other words, is that God suffered impassibly: truly, in His own flesh, with no loss to the divine nature. Both letters are in the New Advent collection.

The philosophical case follows. Suffering is the loss of some good. A God who is fully actual, with no unrealised potential, cannot be deprived of any good, so He cannot suffer in His divine nature. This is the classical argument, worked out most fully in Thomism, and it rests on divine simplicity: a God without parts has nothing in Him that the world could wound.

Weinandy then turns the passibilist's own motive against him. A God injured by evil is enmeshed in it, and so: "There is no hope of divine justice ever setting things right nor is there any hope of love and goodness vanquishing evil." And the point that cuts deepest is about the cross itself: "Ironically, those who advocate a suffering God, having locked suffering within God's divine nature, have actually locked God out of human suffering." If the Son suffered in His divinity, He suffered in a mitigated divine way, and our kind of suffering was never His.

Scripture grounds the constancy that rescue requires. "I the LORD do not change" (Malachi 3:6), the prophet says, and the next clause gives that changelessness as the reason Jacob's descendants are not destroyed. James calls Him "the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows" (James 1:17).

Volume Four's chapters on impassibility and the Incarnation develop this case in full, beginning from the summary statement.

Did God suffer on the cross? The communication of idioms

The church's answer is yes, said with precision. The communication of idioms (communicatio idiomatum) is the rule that the properties of either nature in Christ are predicated of His one Person. Because the Person who was born of Mary is God the Son, Mary may be called the mother of God. Because the Person who died is God the Son, it is true to say that God died.

Cyril made the rule a test of orthodoxy in his twelfth anathema: "Whosoever shall not recognize that the Word of God suffered in the flesh, that he was crucified in the flesh, and that likewise in that same flesh he tasted death and that he has become the first-begotten of the dead, for, as he is God, he is the life and it is he that gives life: let him be anathema." This grammar is what scandalised Nestorius.

A century later the formula came to the capital. At the beginning of 519, according to the Schaff-Herzog encyclopedia, monks from Scythia arrived in Constantinople with the motto "one of the Trinity has suffered in the flesh." It met resistance at first, because theopaschite language had become "suspicious to pious ears since they could be used in a Sabellian sense," that is, as if the Father and Son were one Person. Pope John II affirmed the formula unus de Trinitate passus est in 534, and the Second Council of Constantinople wrote it into its tenth canon in 553: "If anyone does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified in the flesh is true God and the Lord of Glory and one of the Holy Trinity: let him be anathema."

So the tradition holds two propositions together. A theopaschite statement about the Person is orthodox: one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. The passibility of the divine nature is not. Patripassianism stays condemned. The modern consensus claims the first and moves on to deny the second; the history of theopaschism shows the church holding both.

Volume One, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma, introduces the method that later volumes bring to the Incarnation.

What each side presses against the other

The passibilist presses three objections. First, the grammar looks like a verbal trick: if nothing happens to the divine nature, "God suffered" is a courtesy title for what happened to a man. Second, a love that costs the lover nothing looks less than love. Third, the prophets narrate a God whose heart turns within Him, and a doctrine that renders that narration as figure has stopped reading the text. The parallel dispute over whether God changes His mind runs on the same nerve. Bauckham's form of the case adds a fourth: a God who suffers willingly, out of fullness, is not buffeted from outside, so the classical fear is answered before impassibility is needed to meet it.

The impassibilist presses back with equal force. A God whom evil can diminish has spent His aseity, His existence from Himself and dependence on nothing, to buy solidarity. Weinandy argues that a God who suffers from the world's evil must share the world's order of being, which is why, he says, most passibilists end in panentheism. And if the decisive suffering happens inside the Trinity, the cross becomes the outward sign of an inner drama, and the human agony of Jesus, which Scripture presents as the saving event, is reduced to its illustration. Weinandy's charge is that this relegates the Son's human suffering and death to insignificance.

Each side wins its objection. The passibilist is right that a confession of the cross which means nothing has confessed nothing. The impassibilist is right that a God who is losing to evil cannot defeat it. The standoff lasts because each side assumes something the other also assumes, and neither examines it.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that dissolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artefacts of a single formal error. Beings whose natures differ in kind apprehend reality through different frames: God's own frame, which is atemporal, simple and a se, and our finite, human frame, which is sequential, composite and contingent. The Many Beings Fallacy is predicating a frame-carrying term univocally across the two, as though it meant the same thing in both. Its answer agrees with strict impassibility about the divine nature, with passibilism about the cross, and with neither about the term.

Both camps share one premise: that the creature's suffering, inflicted from outside and endured in sequence, is the only thing the word can mean. The impassibilist keeps it out of God and so concludes that God undergoes nothing. The passibilist keeps the cross real and so puts it into the divine nature. Our article on God's emotions traces that move for feeling in general and reads Hosea 11 whole; here it governs the cross. In God's own frame His affections are real and held entire in the one act He is, and Volume Four puts the difference this way: what is removed from God is the weather, never the warmth. Hosea gives the reason in a single clause, "For I am God, and not man" (Hosea 11:9). The compassion holds because He is God and not man.

At the cross the same pairing becomes a Person. The Son took a complete human nature, and with it the human frame: the embodied, sequential way a man meets the world, which hungers, tires, fears and dies. He did not lay aside divine attributes to make room for it, as kenoticism proposes; He added the human frame to the divine, and the one Person spans both. Everything said of Christ is said of that one Person, indexed to the nature through which it is true. "God suffered" is true, because the One who suffered is God, and He suffered in the frame of the flesh. "God is impassible" is true, because the divine nature in God's own frame was not diminished by anything done to that flesh. To infer "the divine nature suffered" from that sentence drops the index, and that is the Many Beings Fallacy applied to Christ.

The flesh He suffered in was ours, in the condition the fall left it: weak, mortal, open to hunger, pain and fear. Volume Four holds that such weakness is not sin, any more than temptation is, and that He bore it without any desire toward evil and without once sinning. The passibilist keeps a God who truly suffered at Golgotha. The impassibilist keeps a nature no evil can diminish. Cyril's paradox, that the Impassible suffers, turns out to be exact.

The full Christology, from Chalcedon to Golgotha, is argued in Volume Four.

How the positions compare

The positions divide over where the suffering of the cross is located.

What does this mean for those who suffer?

The God who did not spare His own Son has not watched your suffering from a distance. The Son entered it in flesh like yours, and Scripture draws the conclusion for the sufferer directly: "Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted" (Hebrews 2:18).

What a sufferer needs from God is love that cannot be worn down by what is happening to him. Weinandy puts it this way: "What human beings cry out for in their suffering is not a God who suffers, but a God who loves wholly and completely, something a suffering God could not do." And again: "The suffering and death of the Son incarnate is the Father's answer to human suffering." A God losing to your pain could join you in it. Only a God whose love is whole can bring you out of it.

Volume Two draws a distinction that belongs here. Finite suffering is real and grievous, and it is bounded by this life; absolute suffering is final separation from God. God permits the first with the eternal intent of sparing as many as possible from the second. Why He allows suffering at all, and why He sometimes seems hidden within it, are separate questions with their own answers. The end is promised without qualification: "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away" (Revelation 21:4).

Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, carries the argument from finite suffering to its end.

Frequently asked questions

Did God die on the cross?

Yes, in the sense the church confessed. The Person who died is God the Son, so by the communication of idioms it is true to say God died; Cyril's twelfth anathema requires confessing that the Word "tasted death" in the flesh. What did not happen is the death of the divine nature. The Son died in His human nature, and that nature was raised on the third day.

Is theopaschism a heresy?

It depends which theopaschism. The formula "one of the Trinity has suffered in the flesh" was suspected at first, then affirmed by Pope John II in 534 and by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. Patripassianism, the claim that the Father suffered on the cross, was rejected. The modern view that the divine nature itself suffers is the theopaschism Goetz called the new orthodoxy, and classical theology does not accept it.

Did the Father suffer when Jesus died?

The early church said no: patripassianism was rejected. Moltmann's trinitarian account answers yes, and strict impassibility answers no. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism ascribes real, whole affections to the Father, and ascribes suffering to the Son in His human nature only. The Father gave up the Son (Romans 8:32), and the giving was an act of love that cost the Son His life in the flesh.

If God cannot suffer, how can He love?

The objection assumes that love proves itself by being damaged. Divine love proves itself by giving, and its greatest gift was the Son, who did suffer, in our flesh. Compassion is among the attributes God shares with His creatures in measure, as our article on communicable attributes explains; the question is only whether He has it in our mode. Bauckham's strongest form of the objection, a God who suffers willingly out of fullness, comes close to this answer; the remaining difference is where the suffering is located.

Can a God who does not suffer understand my pain?

Yes. The Son knows human pain from inside a human life: hunger in the wilderness, anguish in Gethsemane, death on the cross. As Hebrews 2:18 says, because He suffered He is able to help. You are not asked to choose between a God who understands and a God who can save.

Where to go from here

The question is usually asked as if there were two answers. There are two half-answers, and the church held them together long before anyone had a name for the error that pulls them apart. The cross is where the divine nature's fullness and the Son's real agony meet in one Person, and it is the clearest case of God's frame and ours held together without rivalry. Two neighbouring questions follow from this one: God's emotions, and why the Son's limits emptied Him of nothing.

Volume One, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma, is free to download, and it is where the method behind every answer here begins.