The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator at Saint Catherine's Monastery. The two different facial expressions on either side emphasize Christ's dual nature as both divine and human. (Wikipedia)
One benefit of understanding God as trinity is to help expand our mind to grasp the fullness of God. The New Testament writer Paul speaks of this in Ephesians 3, as he prays that the Christ followers ..."(17) being rooted and grounded in love, (18) may be able to comprehend .. what is the breadth and length and height and depth, (19) and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God."
A helpful strategy is to be willing to hold ideas in tension that may not seem to fit together, to refrain from applying strict logic to the concept, and to accept that the persons of the trinity give diverse insights into God's nature. In simple terms, for example, we may say, "is God one or three," and we may reply, "yes."
Possibly the most difficult part of the trinity to understand is the nature of Jesus Christ as God-man; how these natures come together in Jesus; how this informs our understanding of God. In the event of the cross, we are confronted by the apparent forsaking of Jesus the Son by God the Father, and also the actual death of Jesus, seemingly in conflict with the ideas of God that we may hold.
At the risk of getting bogged down in this complexity, we will push ahead with Moltmann's discussion of the divine and human natures of Christ and the trinitarian theology of the cross, in hope that we can enrich rather than confuse our understanding.
The following quotes are taken from Chapter 6 of Jurgen Moltmann's 1974 work, The Crucified God. The topic of trinity was dealt with previously in the post from August 15, 2019: Moltmann, The Crucified God, 8 - The Cross and the Trinity. The selections below continue the topic in more detail.
"Accounts of the history of the dogmas of the early church are agreed that a central difficulty for early christology was the undisguised recognition of the forsakenness of Jesus... Theological reflection was not in a position to identify God himself with the suffering and death of Jesus. As a result of this, traditional christology came very near to docetism, according to which Jesus only appeared to suffer and only appeared to die abandoned by God: this did not happen in reality. The intellectual bar to this came from the philosophical concept of God, according to which God's being is incorruptible, unchangeable, indivisible, incapable of suffering and immortal; human nature on the other hand, is transitory, changeable, divisible, capable of suffering and mortal. The doctrine of the two natures in Christ began from this fundamental distinction, in order to be able to conceive of the personal union of the two natures in Christ in the light of this difference." (227-228)
"The doctrine of the two natures became the framework for christology not just because of the world-picture of the time, but even more because of the transcendent hope of salvation: God became man that we men might participate in God (Athanasius). The theistic concept of God according to which God cannot die, and the hope for salvation, according to which man is to be immortal, made it impossible to regard Jesus as really being God and at the same time as being forsaken by God." (228)
"The mainstream church maintained that it was impossible for God to suffer... But must God therefore be thought of as being incapable of suffering in any respect? This conclusion is not convincing either. Granted, the theology of the early church knew of only one alternative to suffering and that was being incapable of suffering (apatheia), not-suffering. But there are other forms of suffering between unwilling suffering as a result of an alien cause and being essentially unable to suffer, namely active suffering, the suffering of love, in which one voluntarily opens himself to the possibility of being affected by another. There is unwilling suffering, there is accepted suffering and there is the suffering of love. Were God incapable of suffering in any respect, and therefore in an absolute sense, then he would also be incapable of love. If love is the acceptance of the other without regard to one's own well-being, then it contains within itself the possibility of sharing in suffering and freedom to suffer as a result of the otherness of the other. Incapability of suffering in this sense would contradict the fundamental Christian assertion that God is love, which in principle broke the spell of the Aristotelian doctrine of God. The one who is capable of love is also capable of suffering, for he also opens himself to the suffering which is involved in love, and yet remains superior to it by virtue of his love. The justifiable denial that God is capable of suffering because of a deficiency in his being may not lead to a denial that he is incapable of suffering out of the fullness of his being, i.e. his love." (230)
"Can the salvation for which faith hopes be expressed significantly by means of the general predicates of God from the via negativa, like unchangeableness, immortality and incorruptibility? .. If we are to speak seriously of salvation in fellowship with God, we must go beyond the general distinctions between God and the world, or God and man, and penetrate the special relationships between God and the world and God and man in the history of Christ: God became man that dehumanized men might become true men. We become true men in the community of the incarnate, the suffering and loving, the human God. This salvation, too, is outwardly permanent and immortal in the humanity of God, but in itself it is a new life full of inner movement, with suffering and joy, love and pain, taking and giving; it is changeableness in the sense of life to its highest possible degree." (231)
"The doctrine of the two natures in christology attempted not only to make a neat separation between the natures of God head and manhood, but also to assert their unity in the person of Christ and to reflect upon it. It put the two natures in a reciprocal relationship in the personal union, in conditions which were not to apply in abstract terms to the relationship between Godhead and manhood, creator and creature, but only and exclusively in concrete terms to the God-man Christ. Here the divine nature is originally identical with the person of Christ, in so far as the person of Christ is the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God. That is, the divine nature is at work in Christ not as a nature, but as a person." (231)
Gradually, and in stages in the history of trinitarian theology, there emerged a doctrine of communicatio idiomatum (communication of properties), by which, within the two natures doctrine, the properties, elements, or characteristics of the divine and human natures of Christ might be properly applied across the divide, that is, the characteristics of humanness apply to the divinity of Christ and vice versa. We might call this the "application of Christ's character across his divine and human nature," or, that which is applicable to any part of Christ's nature is applicable to the whole; he is not divided within himself.
"By means of the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, Luther made special efforts to overcome the intellectual barrier against perceiving God in the death of Christ, a barrier which arose out of the doctrine of the two natures ... On this presupposition the communicatio idiomatum penetrated into the inner relationships between God and Jesus and though through the inner life of the God-man Christ, which communicates fellowship with God to men." (234)
"(This doctrine) made it possible to conceive of God himself in the godforsakenness of Christ and to ascribe suffering and death on the cross to the divine-human person of Christ. If this divine nature in the person of the eternal Son of God is the center which creates a person in Christ, then it too suffered and died... Luther's christology of the crucified God remains within the framework of the early church's doctrine of the two natures, represents an important further development of the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum and radicalizes the doctrine of the incarnation on the cross." (234-235)
To be continued.
Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypostatic_union
Bibliography:
The Crucified God. Jurgen Moltmann. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.