Most modern scholars recognize that behind Arius’s campaign to differentiate Jesus from God was the Hellenistic theological conviction that the high God cannot suffer. Rowan Williams argues that Arius had the right idea about divine suffering, but the wrong idea of God, which “puts the unavoidable question of what the respective schemes in the long term make possible for theology.” One must honestly admit, according to Williams, the “odd conclusion that the Nicene fathers achieved not only more than they knew but a good deal more than they wanted.” (Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition [London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 198]), p. 22). Now, what does that mean?
The Arians recognized the importance of the genuine sufferings and death of Christ as God. R.P.C. Hanson notes that “at the heart of the Arian Gospel was a God who suffered” (The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318-381 [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988], p. 121). Unfortunately, they would not (or could not) go the whole way with this insight because they too were under the control of the Greek philosophical impassability axiom. The Arians argued that God must have suffered in Christ, but only a god whose divinity was somehow reduced could suffer. Therefore, the Son was god (theos), but not the one high and immutable God (o theos). He was something of a demigod: created by the high God, but not of the same substance or being as the impassible God.
Although Hanson praises the Arians for not “shying away from the scandal of the cross,” in fact, their own theological program was its own attempt to explain away the scandal of the crucified God. If the Nicene theologians, as Rowan Williams argues, did not fully understand the implications of contending for the homoousios of the Father and Son, they nevertheless rightly emphasized the unity of the one Lord Jesus Christ in such a way that eventually the question of God’s participation in the suffering and death of Jesus would have to be addressed.
We’re still addressing this issue. Many Christians are uncomfortable with affirming that God the Son experienced death as a man (the theopaschite formula). They feel the need to distance God from the suffering of the man Jesus. This is a huge mistake. It’s pretty close to Peter insisting that what Jesus had said about his suffering and death in Jerusalem would “never happen” to him (Matt. 16:22). Jesus pushes Peter aside as a Satan, saying that he does not have “his mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (16:23). Indeed.
God the Son lived as a man, suffered, and experienced death. There is no Gospel if this is not the case.
Biblical Horizons 
[…] Yes, I’m a Theopaschite Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
I think Philippians 2, along with the claim in the gospels that he who saw Jesus saw the father, requires this doctrine. When Jesus suffered and died, he did not merely fix a huge problem on our behalf, rather, he revealed the father to us. Our God is one who suffers for his enemies. Now go and do likewise.
R.R. Reno recommends Garvilyuk’s _The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought_ (http://tinyurl.com/3938m6) in which Garvilyuk is somewhat critical of Theopaschite moves in modern theology. I have not read it myself, but I wonder if you have any thoughts on this work?
Gavrilyuk’s book is similar to Wienandy’s Does God Suffer?. There are great insights in both. But in the end they are both less than satisfying to me because of the awkward, convoluted way in which they defend the impassibility of the divine nature while nevertheless allowing that the Person of the Son experienced suffering in union with man. That is true enough. But it’s not the whole truth.
Doesn’t the fact of the incarnation show that it was precisely in the flesh that God had to suffer. Could the pre-incarnate Logos have died?
I think impassibility is basically correct, and that God was able to suffer as he took on a nature in which He could suffer.
Could the pre-incarnate Son have died? What do you mean be died? Could he have died to self and lived for the Father and Holy Spirit? Not only yes, but I would argue that dying to self was/is the divine Son’s mode of personal subsistence. I submit that this is distinctive to to the divine fulness of life lived as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is how all Three live vis-a-vis the other Two. It is the ur-passion that insures that the incarnate passion of the Son and the com-passion of the Father during his Son’s death were not merely “and now for something completely different.”
Could the pre-incarnate Son have died as mortal man experiences death? No, of course not. The curse of death (the violent separation of body and soul) cannot be experienced by God apart from his union with humanity. God the Son experienced death united to our mortal human nature. His divine and trinitarian mode of life (dying to self) was turned outward to embrace the curse of death. The later was possible because of the former. Indeed, the later reveals the existence of the former.
If Steven’s question is modified slightly to “Could God suffer apart from the incarnation?” the biblical answer is surely a resounding yes. After all, Isaiah 63:9 says of God: “In all their affliction, he was afflicted.”
My first hit with this was in Schmemann’s *Great Lent.* I don’t have it before me, but he talks about suffering as an attribute of God. Jeff has called out attention to the fact that each Person of God delights to humble Himself for the glory of the other two — to “die” to His own things for Their sakes.
Van Til challenges the whole impassibility of God notion. God is not impassible; He is the fullness of passibility. Each Person totally feels the other two and is totally influenced by and responds to the other two. And the Spirit, who can be grieved by us, is total in His feeling and response to us.
Patripassionism is the only “heresy” that remains, and even here, it’s only a heresy if we say the Father & Spirit suffered for the sins of the world. They did not so suffer. But they surely suffered to see their Son and Companion screaming on the cross.
Just a clarrification:
Patripassionism is not the heresy that the Father suffers, but that the Father was incarnate, and thus it was the Father who suffered on the Cross. (It’s a synomym for Sabellianism.) So it doesn’t have anything to do with whether there is Divine Suffering in the Father, nor whether the Father suffers over the Sins, or even whether the Father suffers for the Sins of the World, because we can say the Father suffered for the sins of the world by giving His Son, and watching His Son die.
For an excellent</b little book on the suffering of God see The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God
http://www.amazon.com/Pain-Christ-Sorrow-God/dp/0818906898/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1201414101&sr=11-1
Thanks for the clarification. Yes, you’re exactly right. – Jim Jordan
James Jordan is exactly right – God is the fullness of passability. I am mystified by people who have some sort of emotional investment in the impassability of God; I don’t know what they seek there. I furthermore think that the Son in His incarnate nature really did suffer; the only real problem is the notion that He was abandoned by God in this suffering (“My God, what hast thou forsaken me?). This is the theme of Moltmann’s book THE CRUCIFIED GOD. I am still working out my response to this, but I think Moltmann is wrong to say that Christ’s words represent the abandonment of humanity by God.
The answer has to lie in the differentiation of the Persons of the Trinity. The Son-Person did have to die, and possibly it was necessary for Him to experience abandonment in order to totally take on our sin. But if so, we run up against the idea that He had to know in advance that this was what would happen, given that He predicted His own death and resurrection repeatedly. (This would have been, I think, the cup which He prayed to the Father not to have to drink of.) So yes, He suffered, but how could He have really felt abandoned if He knew that the Father would raise Him in three days? This is the hard problem and as I am still formulating my answer I welcome suggestions.
Beth,
Have you ever played sports? This sort of thing happens in sports (or anything strenuous) all the time. From the outside we know we must pass through, and are determined to. But once we get into it, once we’ve ran seven suicides, we can’t see the end anymore, we can’t see the victory, just the pain in our legs. We keep going then because we must, and on the strength of our earlier resolution (and often just because someone tells us “you must do more”), but the earlier optimism about victory is gone.
I thought you might appreciate this stanza from Luther’s hymn “Dear Christians Let us Now Rejoice” translated by George MacDonald:
Then God was sorry on his throne
To see such torment rend me;
His tender mercy he thought on,
His good help he would send me.
He turned to me his father-heart;
Ah! then was his no easy part,
For of his best it cost him.