"Our earthly liturgies must be celebrations full of beauty and power: Feasts of the Father who created us—that is why the gifts of the earth play such a great part: the bread, the wine, oil and light, incense, sacred music, and splendid colors. Feasts of the Son who redeemed us—that is why we rejoice in our liberation, breathe deeply in listening to the Word, and are strengthened in eating the Eucharistic Gifts. Feasts of the Holy Spirit who lives in us—that is why there is a wealth of consolation, knowledge, courage, strength, and blessing that flows from these sacred assemblies." unknown source possibly YOUCAT Mal.1.11 For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith theLord of hosts.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

God abandoning God?//what about wrath?

Interesting take on the words of Jesus on the cross. Psalm 22 being referenced.

1
Also an interesting article here: http://www.creedcodecult.com/understanding-jesus-cry-of-abandonment/below from comment 4 by Bryan Cross: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/the-harrowing-of-hell/#comment-7760
 If Christ lost the Beatific Vision during His three hours on the cross, then He did not consciously die for your sins and mine, but only for sins in the abstract, because by the natural power of His human intellect He could not have known all at once all the persons of the world and all our sins. Nor could He therefore have suffered for all our sins, interiorly. Only if He knew all our sins particularly and individually, could He grieve with the pain of contrition in solidarity with us, for each of our sins. And therefore only if He retained the Beatific Vision could He make atonement for each of our sins by His internal suffering. In the year 2000 Pope John Paul II wrote of this in his Apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte:
26. Jesus’ cry on the Cross, dear Brothers and Sisters, is not the cry of anguish of a man without hope, but the prayer of the Son who offers his life to the Father in love, for the salvation of all. At the very moment when he identifies with our sin, “abandoned” by the Father, he “abandons” himself into the hands of the Father. His eyes remain fixed on the Father. Precisely because of the knowledge and experience of the Father which he alone has, even at this moment of darkness he sees clearly the gravity of sin and suffers because of it. He alone, who sees the Father and rejoices fully in him, can understand completely what it means to resist the Father’s love by sin. More than an experience of physical pain, his Passion is an agonizing suffering of the soul. Theological tradition has not failed to ask how Jesus could possibly experience at one and the same time his profound unity with the Father, by its very nature a source of joy and happiness, and an agony that goes all the way to his final cry of abandonment. The simultaneous presence of these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects is rooted in the fathomless depths of the hypostatic union. (emphasis mine)
Pope John Paul II teaches here that it was precisely because Christ retained the Beatific Vision that He could (and did) see the full gravity of all human sins and therefore suffer for all of them in all of their offensiveness to God whom we should love above all things. How could He suffer more than anyone has ever suffered, while at the same time holding on to the joy of the Beatific Vision? Pope John Paul II says that this is a mystery, and thus we should not try to explain it away by eliminating either Christ’s Beatific Vision or His suffering. Pope John Paul II goes on in the next paragraph to say:
27. Faced with this mystery, we are greatly helped not only by theological investigation but also by that great heritage which is the “lived theology” of the saints. The saints offer us precious insights which enable us to understand more easily the intuition of faith, thanks to the special enlightenment which some of them have received from the Holy Spirit, or even through their personal experience of those terrible states of trial which the mystical tradition describes as the “dark night”. Not infrequently the saints have undergone something akin to Jesus’ experience on the Cross in the paradoxical blending of bliss and pain. In the Dialogue of Divine Providence, God the Father shows Catherine of Siena how joy and suffering can be present together in holy souls: “Thus the soul is blissful and afflicted: afflicted on account of the sins of its neighbour, blissful on account of the union and the affection of charity which it has inwardly received. These souls imitate the spotless Lamb, my Only-begotten Son, who on the Cross was both blissful and afflicted”. In the same way, Thérèse of Lisieux lived her agony in communion with the agony of Jesus, “experiencing” in herself the very paradox of Jesus’s own bliss and anguish: “In the Garden of Olives our Lord was blessed with all the joys of the Trinity, yet his dying was no less harsh. It is a mystery, but I assure you that, on the basis of what I myself am feeling, I can understand something of it”. What an illuminating testimony! Moreover, the accounts given by the Evangelists themselves provide a basis for this intuition on the part of the Church of Christ’s consciousness when they record that, even in the depths of his pain, he died imploring forgiveness for his executioners (cf. Lk 23:34) and expressing to the Father his ultimate filial abandonment: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46).
Here he points out how the great saints have a taste of this mystery in their own lives, in that they simultaneously in different but interrelated respects experience the joy of hope and charity to be fulfilled in the life to come, and the suffering and pain caused by the sins of one’s neighbor (and even of oneself) and by all the present woes due to the not-yet-ness of the culmination of all things in Heaven. On the cross Jesus in His human intellect didn’t lose sight of the loving face of His Father, but simultaneously He experienced in His body and soul the full measure of the desolation, disorder, madness and suffering of this world under the curse of sin. That’s what He is expressing in His “Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?, His full and total immersion into the God-forsakeness of this fallen world of fallen man in its cursed condition in this present life. This is what it means that He bore the curse, namely, that He entered into the fallenness of this world, even unto death.
UPDATE: One of the best refutations I’ve seen online, of Balthasar’s claim that Christ did not have the beatific vision, is Unam Sanctum Catholicam‘s “Balthasar, Christ and the Beatific Vision.”
In the peace of Christ,
- Bryan


Jesus could not possibly be separated from God, because He is God. The greatest suffering Jesus went through was not the physical pain of the crucifixion (though of course that was excruciating); it was the sorrow for all the sins of the world, inasmuch as they offended God. We have to be careful to understand rightly what it means for Jesus to “assume” our sins. He did not become sinful. He was perfect and sinless through His entire life, including His agony in the garden and His passion and death. He assumed our sins in the sense that He grieved for them as a man, as the sins of His fellow men. In other words, He grieved for them in solidarity with us. That’s the sense in which He assumed them. Professor Feingold gave an excellent lecture last week on the suffering of Christ in the Passion. You can listen to it here:
Or download it here.
In the peace of Christ,
- Bryan



Psalm 22:1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from the words of my groaning?
22:24 For God has not despised or disdained
the suffering of the afflicted one;
he has not hidden his face from him
but has listened to his cry for help.
This shows how badly people have misread “My God, My God,” not only ignoring 22:1B, but 22:24 and Ps 22 as a whole."
Augustine:
 But this passage, where God is said to have made Christ Himself “sin,” who had not known sin, does not seem to me to be more fittingly understood than that Christ was made a sacrifice for sins, and on this account was called “sin.” (Against Two Books of the Pelagians, Bk III, chapter 16)
see also this article: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/the-harrowing-of-hell/

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/ from comment 41 below:
But what is notable about Roger’s post is what I continue to find among Protestant theologians — namely, a seeming unawareness of any other conception of substitutionary atonement than that of the Father pouring out His divine wrath and everlasting punishment for our sins, on the Son in His suffering and death. But in fact, when the Church Fathers speak of Christ being our sacrificial substitute and bearing our sins, they are speaking not of God the Father pouring out His wrath for our sins, on Christ. They are speaking rather of Christ bearing the curse of suffering and [physical] death, that curse described in Genesis 3 (see, for example, what St. Augustine says here.), and they are speaking of Christ offering Himself up to the Father as both a perfect high priest and a perfect victim, a perfect sacrifice of love, a gift of greater love than the injustice of all our sins. This is the conception of the atonement St. Anselm and St. Thomas later expounded and developed, and which I have described in the post above. It contrasts very distinctly with the Protestant notion epitomized below by R.C. Sproul. At 6’45″ in this video, Sproul says that God the Father says to the Son on the cross, “God damn you.”
Sproul seems to interpret Christ bearing the curse as God the Father hating (lit. damning) the Son, and pouring out His wrath for our sin on the Son, who receives upon Himself the Father’s wrath equivalent to everlasting punishment in hell, for our sins. But that’s not how St. Augustine or St. Thomas understood the curse. That would either make the Father the perpetrator of the greatest evil of all time, i.e. pouring out the punishment for all human sin (or at least that of the elect) on an innocent man, knowing that he is innocent (see this video), or if Christ were really guilty and deserved all that punishment, then Christ’s suffering would be of no benefit to us.
Some Protestants think that God pouring out His wrath and punishment for all human sin on an innocent man, knowing that he is innocent, is fine, so long as that man volunteered to suffer it. Roger Olson seems to think that as well. But what makes it unjust to punish an innocent man for another’s crime is not just that the innocent man doesn’t wish to be punished, or didn’t volunteer to be punished, but that he is innocent. When, at the end of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities Sydney Carton secretly takes Darnay’s place on the way to the guillotine, this is not an unjust act on Carton’s part. But if the judge were knowingly to execute an innocent man, for the crimes of another, that would be an unjust act on the part of the judge.
The reason why punishing an innocent person (knowing that he is innocent) for the crimes of another is unjust, whether or not the person wills that he be punished, is that giving to someone more good than he is due, is compatible with justice because justice does not restrict mercy. But, giving to someone less good (or more evil) than he is due is not compatible with justice. Justice is asymmetrical in that respect. For this reason, punishing an innocent person, knowing that he is innocent, is unjust, whether or not the person volunteers to be punished. That is why the Protestant conception of the Father pouring out His wrath for our sins on Christ makes God the Father unjust to Christ, whereas the satisfaction conception of the atonement does not, because while justice prohibits punishing an innocent person, it does not prohibit receiving a substitutionary gift that makes reparation for the debt owed by another.
This is why St. Thomas uses the language of St. Paul in speaking of the Father “delivering up” Christ, as when St. Paul wrote,”but delivered him up for us all.” (Romans 8:32) St. Thomas writes:
Christ as God delivered Himself up to death by the same will and action as that by which the Father delivered Him up; but as man He gave Himself up by a will inspired of the Father. Consequently there is no contrariety in the Father delivering Him up and in Christ delivering Himself up. (ST III Q.47 a.3 ad 2)
God the Father did not pour out His wrath on His Son; rather, according to His plan He delivered Christ over to the Jews and Romans (i.e. permitted Christ to be arrested and flogged and crucified), and they freely poured out their wrath on Christ. There was no contrariety between the Father and the Son during the Passion, no loss of love from the Father to the Son or the Son to the Father. The Father wholly and entirely loved His Son during the entire Passion. By one and the same divine will and action, the Father allowed the Son to be crucified and the Son allowed Himself to be crucified. (SeeSumma Theologica III Q.47 a.3) (For an explanation of “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?”, see comment #26 above.)
Otherwise, if the Father had wrath for men while the Son had love for men, this either (1) conflicts with the doctrine of the Trinity, in making the Father and the Son be at odds with each other [i.e. "drives a wedge"]; if Christ loves men, then so does the Father, or if the Father has wrath for men, then so does Christ, which doesn’t fit with “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” or (2) it conflicts with the doctrine of the incarnation, in making the Son’s divine will to be that of divine wrath directed toward His own human nature, and either (2a) the Son’s human will contradicting His divine will, by loving His human nature while the divine will hates His human nature, or (2b) the Son’s human will being in perfect conformity with the divine will, and in His enraged human will pouring out wrath on His own human nature and wanting to punish it and kill it, like Phinehas in Numbers 25:7, but toward His own flesh.
This theological mess will continue, so long as the sacrificial and substitutionary language of Scripture and the Fathers is misconstrued as meaning that Christ steps voluntarily into the blind stream of divine wrath so that we don’t receive it. We need to remember and recover the original conception of substitutionary atonement, which long preceded the Protestant Christ-takes-the-divine-wrath version.
from comment 53 on the same thread:

That we can offend God the Father by our sin does not mean that our sin in any way changes Him, or elicits any emotion or sensation in Him. It means rather that our sin changes us in relation to God, such that we cannot be united to Him, but are separated from communion with Him. So, to answer your question, the gift of love Christ (in His human nature) gave to the Father through His obedience unto death, “quenched God’s wrath” in the sense that it made a way through justice for us to draw near to the Father, through union with Christ. Man (mankind), by sin, stood in a relation of infinite debt to God, because of our sin against God, by which we failed to give to God the love and obedience and honor that is due to Him. Christ, however, gave to God a superabundant gift by which mankind no longer stands in that relation of debt. Yet, if we (as individuals) refuse this gift, we remain separated from God eternally, and in that sense remain under the wrath of God.

 from comment 62 on this thread: 
For this reason Thabiti’s claim that the ancient, eternal fellowship of Father and Son could be formed and broken, entails either tritheism, or Arianism. That’s because if the Logos is eternally begotten of the Father and consubstantial with the Father, then the fellowship of the Father and the Logos is not contingent, but necessary. So the ancient, eternal fellowship of Father and Son could be formed and broken (and reformed) only if the Logos is not eternally begotten of the Father. And if the Logos is not eternally begotten of the Father then either the Logos is a distinct deity from the Father (from which tritheism follows), or the Logos is a created being (from which Arianism follows).
Part of the reason for this error is the mistaken notion of the atonement, described in the post above, in which the Father has to pour out wrath on His Son. That notion of the atonement forces the following dilemma: either the Father pours out His wrath only on a human nature, in which case, the suffering isn’t infinite in value and therefore isn’t redemptive, or the Father pours out His wrath on the Logos, which entails tritheism or Arianism for the reasons just explained. Another source of the error is downplaying the Creed among the Reformed, preferring instead to limit themselves to biblical language, and not seeing “eternally begotten” in Scripture. Another possible source of the error is a Christological error in which there are, as it were, two second Persons of the Trinity: the Person of the God-man who can lose union with the Father, and the Logos prior to the incarnation who could not lose union with the Father. According to orthodox Christology, by contrast, the reason the incarnate Logos cannot lose union with the Father is the same reason the pre-incarnate Logos cannot lose union with the Father: there is only one and the same Logos, who is eternally begotten of the Father and consubstantial with the Father. Claiming that the intra-Trinitarian relation between the Father and Son can be (and in fact was) broken implies either that the Logos after the incarnation is not the same Logos who was with the Father before the incarnation [i.e. a form of Nestorian Christology], or it implies that even the Logos prior to the incarnation was only contingently related to the Father, and that entails tritheism or Arianism, as I’ve just explained.

comment 68:

It seems that you may be somewhat confused regarding the Catholic position, that is there is no failing of understanding of those texts in the Bible that speak of sinners meriting God’s wrath prior to justification (via atonement) and that Christ’s loving sacrifice appeases God’s anger with sinners who are forgiven on His account, but that doesn’t mean that the Second Person of the Trinity received any wrath from the First Person of the Trinity. Nor can we say the Second Person of the Trinity’s humanity received wrath because Christ’s humanity is His nature not His Personhood, and natures cannot receive wrath, only persons can.
There is no conflict with Christ’s love propitiating, that is appeasing, the Father’s (and Christ’s; and the Holy Spirit’s) wrath. In fact Scripture writes this to us:
Ephesians 5:2
And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and has delivered himself for us, an oblation and a sacrifice to God for an odour of sweetness
Here the emphasis is that Christ was a sweet odor (incense) to God the Father, and the Father accepted His offering as one is pleased with an odor of sweetness. St. Paul continues to use this reference to newly justified Christians who are the sweet odor of Christ to God, that is they are living sacrifices to the Father in their life in Christ. Now Christ’s sacrifice was an odor of sweetness and so is the lives of the saints, but we know that the saints are not condemned in the sacrifices that they make in Christ.
Here are the references to saints being odors of sweetness to God:
Philippians 4:18, St. Paul speaking to the Philippians and thanking them for their gifts and sacrifices on his behalf:
18 But I have all and abound: I am filled, having received from Epaphroditus the things you sent, an odour of sweetness, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.
2 Corinthians 2:14-15
14 Now thanks be to God, who always makes us to triumph in Christ Jesus and manifests the odour of his knowledge by us in every place. 15 For we are the good odour of Christ unto God, in them that are saved and in them that perish.
Perhaps a better argument might be made regarding how it is said that Christ is made sin for us:
2 Corinthians 5:21
21 Him, who knew no sin, he has made sin for us: that we might be made the justice of God in him.
However, this question has already been responded to in comment #35 of Bryan, where he linked to another post that showed his good (in my opinion) answer.
I think you will find a far more thorough theological description of Catholic conceptions of the Atonement here:
http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/04/aquinas-and-trent-part-6/
from comment 69--NOTE GOOD TO GO TO THE SITE AND READ ALL OF THE COMMENT__THIS IS JUST A PART:
By contrast, in the Catholic tradition the Father loved the Son during the crucifixion, as He does eternally, and was not angry with Him, and did not think Him to be guilty of any sin, and did not turn away from Him. In the Catholic tradition the Father (and the Son and the Spirit in the one divine will) delivered over the Son in His human nature (Christ complying in His human will), into the hands of sinful men to be crucified. What the Son endured, in His human nature, was the curse for sin, which as St. Augustine explains, is suffering and death, not wrath or anger or rejection or hatred from the Father. (Again, see the link at comment #41.) God did not create man to suffer and die. Suffering and death were the result of the fall, not part of the original design. (See “Lawrence Feingold on Original Justice and Original Sin.”) And that (i.e. suffering and death) is what the Son, in His human nature, endured.
Yes, the Son, through His human nature, satisfies God’s (not just the Father’s wrath, but the Son’s and the Spirit’s as well) wrath for human sin, meriting grace for our eternal life, as I explained above, andon your site. He did this by offering Himself, in His human nature, to the Father as a sacrifice for our sin, and this act of love, in His human will, made satisfaction for our sins, by making an offering that is more pleasing to the Father than all our sins are displeasing. The meaning of 2 Cor. 5:21, as St. Augustine explains, is that Christ was made a sin offering. (See comment #35 above.) That doesn’t mean that sin was imputed to Christ, or that He became legally guilty in the eyes of the Father. It means that He, as innocent, offered Himself to the Father for our sin, as a gift more pleasing than all our sins were displeasing. The meaning of Isaiah 53, likewise, was explained in the body of the post, and in comments #17 and #19. This way of understanding the atonement makes sense of all those passages you cited (Rom 5:9, John 3:36, Rom 3:25-26, etc.). But, nowhere in Scripture does it say that God the Father poured out His wrath on His Son. You are bringing that assumption to the text of Scripture, and reading it into the passages on the atonement, and into the passages on our being saved from God’s wrath. And it is difficult for you, I think, to see the other paradigm, and see these passages through the framework of the other paradigm, because you are so used to reading the concept of “God pouring out His wrath on His Son” into these passages, rather than understanding them as the Son, in His human nature, offering to the Father a sacrifice of love that is more pleasing than all our sins are displeasing. Resolving this disagreement would take some time, so I’ll push this disagreement to the back burner as well.
The second way in which we do not agree regarding what was happening between the Father and the Son during the crucifixion is that you claim that the “ancient, eternal fellowship between Father and Son was broken,” whereas in the Catholic tradition, that fellowship cannot possibly be broken, any more than God could possibly cease to exist. And this disagreement, concerning whether that ancient, eternal fellowship was broken, is the one on which I wish to focus
from comment 80 on the post:


I have looked a little more at the relevant chapter of the Institutes. I think you’re right about what Calvin’s trying not to say. The “money quote,” if you will, is at 2.6.11:
We do not, however, insinuate that God was ever hostile to [Christ] or angry with him. How could he be angry with the beloved Son, with whom his soul was well pleased? or how could he have appeased the Father by his intercession for others if He were hostile to himself?
This, I take it, is what you’re referring to as a denial of “subjective” wrath. In the very next sentence, though, Calvin expresses what (if I’m reading you aright) you refer to as the (objective) “judicial execution of justice”: “But this we say, that he bore the weight of the divine anger, that, smitten and afflicted, he experienced all the signs of an angry and avenging God.”
I think Calvin’s trying to have his cake and eat it. I haven’t yet sufficiently crystallized my thinking to explain or defend that fully, so this comment is kind of a placeholder to let you know I’m still here, and I’m thinking."

Augustine:
 But this passage, where God is said to have made Christ Himself “sin,” who had not known sin, does not seem to me to be more fittingly understood than that Christ was made a sacrifice for sins, and on this account was called “sin.” (Against Two Books of the Pelagians, Bk III, chapter 16)



On the contrary, that is precisely what St. Thomas is speaking of when he writes of the interior suffering (suffering in soul) of Christ for the sins of the whole human race. According to St. Thomas, because Christ in His Passion retains the beatific vision, He sees each sin ever committed and to be committed, and sees perfectly the way it wrongs God by failing to give Him the love, obedience, honor and glory that is due to God. Hence St. Thomas says in Summa Theologica III Q.46 a.6, when he writes:
The cause of the interior pain was, first of all, all the sins of the human race, for which He made satisfaction by suffering; hence He ascribes them, so to speak, to Himself, saying (Psalm 21:2): “The words of my sins.”
According to St. Thomas, the interior pain was not one of His conscience tormenting Him for wrongdoing, since He had never sinned. Nor was the Father angry with Him, and pouring out an angry tirade within Christ’s soul for our sins, while Christ ‘took it like a man.’ Rather, Christ was sorrowed, grieving in His soul over our sins. In Catholic language, as our High Priest He was making an act of contrition for all our sins, in solidarity with us. His solidarity with us, in His heart grieving over our sins and their offense against God, this was the source of His internal suffering. This is the way He ‘stood in the gap,’ not by receiving a stream of wrath from the Father, but by making the perfect act of contrition to the Father on our behalf as both intercessor (High Priest), and victim (i.e. sacrifice).
end
and here in the comments

You asked: "then why did Jesus say" 

Exactly! If you're asking "why," that shows the text does not clearly say the Father's wrath was poured out but rather that you must assume that and take it as the best interpretation. 

Jesus was intoning Psalm 22: 
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?"

Notice that "abandon" here is explicitly shown to mean "not coming to save me" from my enemies! It's not God abandoning a soul to hell. Look at how Psalm 22 perfectly describes the plain teachings of the Gospel accounts: 

"7 All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads;
8 “He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!”

"16 For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me;
they have pierced my hands and feet—
17 I can count all my bones—they stare and gloat over me;
18 they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots."

"23 You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him,
24 For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted,
and he [God] has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him."



St. Athanasius notes that Christ bore the wrath of the Father (“Thy wrath”) that was the penalty for our transgression (in reference to Ps 88, Ps 69, and Is 53): …He suffered these things, not for His own sake but for ours. “Thou hast made Thy wrath to rest upon me,” says the one; and the other adds, “I paid them things I never took.” For He did not die as being Himself liable to death: He suffered for us, and bore in Himself the wrath that was the penalty for our transgression, even as Isaiah says, “Himself bore our sickness.”
The ‘wrath’ being referred to there is not the retribution for the sinner’s sins, but the punishment which God gave to Adam and Eve, and through them to all their descendants conceived in original sin, namely, physical death. This has been explained in many of the comments above.
Even notable post-reformation Roman Catholics thought so–St. Alphonsus [Sermon for the Feast of the Purification]:
The Eternal Father had already determined to save man who had fallen through sin, and to deliver him from eternal death. At the same time He willed that Divine JUSTICE should not be deprived of a worthy and fitting SATISFACTION. And so He did not spare the life of His Son Who had already become man to redeem men, but willed that He should pay with the utmost rigor the PENALTY which all men deserved. He who has not spared even His own Son, but has delivered Him for us all [Rom. 8: 32].”
Just because St. Alphonsus uses the word ‘penalty’ does not mean he holds or is defending the Protestant theory of penal substitution. To infer such would be an example of the word-concept fallacy. Here St. Alphonsus is upholding the [Catholic] satisfaction doctrine. Christ’s sacrifice satisfies justice, in the way I have described above. The ‘penalty’ being referred to here is physical death. Yes God willed (permissively) that Christ suffer the penalty of death. But that’s altogether different than God pouring out on Christ the punishment for every sin committed by every man (or by all the elect). That would make God (who is perfect Justice) guilty of knowingly punishing an innocent man. None of the Fathers teach such a thing.
http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/  from comment 397

Why would Jesus subject Himself to only a part of our punishment?
The full punishment for sin is eternal separation from God, so we can’t say Jesus endured the full punishment for sin on the cross. Therefore, penal substitution, even if it were true, would not add up on its own. What makes Jesus’s offering perfect is not that he endured the full punishment of Hell – rather it was a perfect offering because of the perfect love and obedience Jesus which He offered to the Father. Not just a lamb, but a “spotless” lamb.
As to Christ’s feeling of being “forsaken”, St. Thomas discusses it in ST III, 50, Article 2.
Such forsaking is not to be referred to the dissolving of the personal union, but to this, that God the Father gave Him up to the Passion: hence there “to forsake” means simply not to protect from persecutors. or else He says there that He is forsaken, with reference to the prayer He had made: “Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass away from Me,” as Augustine explains it (De Gratia Novi Test.).


from comment  412 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/#comment-79303

  I don’t think it’s accurate to read Psalm 22 as the cry of a man being punished for sin. Rather, it seems like the cry of a man who is being scorned and humiliated by others for his faith. The Psalmist is not the evildoer, rather, he is surrounded by evildoers. They taunt him, saying “Commit your cause to the Lord; let him deliver – let him rescue the one in whom He delights!”

 The implication of the Psalm is that sometimes the Lord “delights” in us, and yet allows us to experience the evil of the world. In this way, the Lord “forsakes” us, or, like Nick said, “turns His back” on us for a time.

 This suffering is part of the human experience and part of the life of faith. But we don’t suffer it alone. On the cross, Christ experienced this kind of suffering with us, when the Father abandoned Him to the evil of the world.

 from comments here

 How can you say I give no coherent and straightforward meaning to Christ’s “forsaken me”

  words? I’ve repeatedly

  said that Christ was *truly* forsaken in a very real way. And the way Christ was truly forsaken in 

 a very real way

  was precisely in the Father not intervening, just as God didn’t intervene with David when David

  spoke those

 words. Was David spiritually forsaken by God, or did David “not mean what he actually said”? 

 Of course David

 meant what he said, the key is that David didn’t *mean* God forsook him in a spiritual sense. 

This is a perfect example of the problem of the Protestant hermeneutic. When turned around,

  you are forced to 

 say that David himself must have been damned by God when David penned those words of 

 Psalm 22. Otherwise

  David didn’t mean what he said or else you’re not taking David at face value. Clearly the 

 problem is simply one o

f Lexical definition: what can the term “forsaken” mean? Does it strictly mean suffering spiritual 

 wrath? Certainly

  not. In fact, where does it ever mean suffering spiritual cutting-off from God? I know of no suc

 h verse. 
Bryan answers questions I asked http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/

 --I asked "I saw 26 above and that is one reason I am asking the question. In that comment you stated,
Likewise, in His human nature he experienced the absence of spiritual consolation, and in that respect too He was forsaken, even though He (in His human nature) did not cease to behold the Father. He spoke these words as man, that is, according to His human nature. But the Father never ceased to love Him, nor did the Father’s love for the Son ever diminish in the least.
I am asking what you meant here when you said he experienced the absence of spiritual consolation. In Ignatius I think spiritual consolation refers to ” an interior movement is aroused in the soul, by which it is inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord”. I don’t think that is what you mean, so I would like clarification on what you meant in comment 26 by the absence of spiritual consolation.
Secondly, in my thinking spiritual consolation would be part of fellowship, but his fellowship with the Father was not broken. Therefore –
1. What do you mean by spiritual consolation?
2. Why would Christ have an absence of this consolation if his fellowship was not broken?
3. Are not the two related or closely linked? If they are related then why the absence of the consolation?
and he answered in comment 428:
"Spiritual consolation is at the level of the sensitive powers of the soul, whereas fellowship is at the level of the rational powers of the soul, because agape is a virtue in the will. So there can be an absence of spiritual consolation (e.g. dark night of the soul) while friendship and fellowship remain. Christ suffered spiritual desolation at the level of His sensitive powers, not by losing sanctifying grace, or losing agape, or losing the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, or losing the Beatific Vision in His intellect and will, but by no longer enjoying in His sensitive powers the sense of God’s presence, protection, and love."
I don’t think Jesus felt abandoned or forsaken. In Jewish tradition, it was common to quote the first line of a Psalm, and all Jews who were listening would have been aware of ALL of the Psalm, much like all Americans will know the rest of (and the gist of) “Dashing through the snow….”
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me is the first line of Psalm 22. Further into the psalm, we see these words:
For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one;
he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.

So I believe that Jesus was reminding all those listening that although it seemed like He was forsaken, He knew God was with Him (even in Him, as you pointed out), had not hidden His face, and had not scorned this suffering. Beautiful picture of the love of the Trinity!


 I believe in substitutionary atonement. Christ makes atonement for us, in our place. What requires God to affirm falsehood is extra nos imputation, whereby I’m actually unrighteous internally, but simulataneously declared by God to be righteous, and Christ is actually internally righteous, but simultaneously declared by God to be unrighteous. If God were to pour out His wrath in punishment for our sin on the innocent, knowing that innocent Victim is innocent, that would make God unjust, knowingly punishing an innocent Person for crimes He did not commit. The Catholic doctrine has no such problem.

 ...........
Christ’s Person taking our place in the offering of the atoning sacrifice is not the same thing as Christ’s righteousness substituting for our righteousness. In the Catholic doctrine, there is no ontological or legal transfer of obedience, righteousness, sin, or guilt. In His human nature Christ bears our sin through solidarity with us, making an act of contrition to God for us as one of us, in fact, as our High Priest. But there is no ontological or legal transfer of guilt, sin, righteousness, or obedience between Christ and ourselves.

commenting on a statement of calvin's in comment 77:

Jesus does not cry out “God,” but “My God.” The fact that he does not address God as his father is hardly indicative of the assumptions you read into the language. I guess you’ve never taken the time to notice that in Calvin’s commentary on Matthew 27:46, he takes the cry “My God, My God” as a confession of Jesus’ faith that God had NOT in fact abandoned him on the cross. Despite his experience of suffering and sorrow (which Calvin does take to be a judicial execution of justice upon Jesus as the substitute) on the cross, Calvin does NOT think that God’s wrath was literally and subjectively “poured out” on his own Son. While Calvin did advocate penal substitution, he saw it only as Jesus experiencing the objective consequences of human sin, not as an actual punitive enactment of divine wrath on the part of God the Father. What started out as a minor overemphasis on the forensic context of the atonement in the Reformers, has become a monstrous false teaching in the hands of their less adept theological heirs.

 Feingold also talks about this in comment 4 there is an audio---start listening around minute 29:  http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/the-harrowing-of-hell/#comment-7760  A few notes from this audio:   He refers to Christ making all of humankind's sin present to himself.

The greatest of all the pains of Christ would be this weight of human sin seen in all its disorder, malice, and cruelty in its offense to God. We don't know what sin is (that is why we do it) -if we knew what it was we wouldn't do it. But we don't know what it is. Now Jesus is the only one who perfectly knows what sin is because He knows the Father. If sin is an offense to the love of God, to the mercy of God, well, if you don't know God and the extent of His love, sin seems like little, but if you perfectly know God , then you know what sin is.  So really Jesus is the only one who could properly do contrition for sin.  We don't grasp what sin is because we don't know God and so it would have been precisely Jesus who could do ,as it were, an act of contrition for all of our sins.[around minute 38-9]

Contrition is the sorrow for sin that we should feel. We feel contrition in proportion to our charity. The more charity the more we feel contrition, the more we are sorry that we have offended God. Christ is the only one who could love God as God deserves to be loved, and thus the only one who could properly atone.

Now he made himself victim of our sins and he took them upon himself as if He were the culpable party and thus prostrated himself spiritually before God in solidarity with us because He is our head. He became man precisely to be the head of the human race and that means putting himself in solidarity with all human sin.(around 42 minutes into the lecture). So this would be the heart of the passion--the secret heart in which He makes himself, as it were, [he is not responsible-Christ can't lie to himself] but because of the solidarity of love He took our sins as His so as to atone for them since we don't . So he would make the act of contrition that we should , but don't. So it would be a kind of rending the heart for offending God . So Christ in Gethsemane had more sorry than any man could have---more sorrow then all of mankind combined, I think is the right way to understand this. Because he is experiencing sorrow for all.humans.........for every human being....So that is the meaning of what Isaiah said, Surely he has born our infirmities and carried our sorrows [alright, interiorly].

[he quotes someone here around 43.30--a preacher from the 17th century Botsway or something] Truly the grief alone of this would have killed him if he had not held back his soul in order that he might still [because it was not his time to die the night before at Gethsemane.he had to be crucified, ..but it could have killed him if he had let it] but he would not, he did not will to die on the Mount of Olives but he shed his blood, the blood he shed in the sweat of his agony, in order to show us that sin alone without the help of an executioner was sufficient to strike his death blow..............

This shows the principle cause of his death isn't Caiaphas, isn't Pilate ,....the principle cause is us.-of all sin of all human history. .....But he chose to have an executioner to add to his suffering.--all the dimensions of suffering. ...physical as well as interior.

Now we see the full extent of this in his words , 'My God my God, why have you abandoned me.' These are puzzling words to exegetes, to theologians. What could he mean by that? .......The text he is citing Psalm 22, which is a messianic psalm precisely about Christ's death...................So the first thing is doing is showing that psalm is being realized in his person [so that is one sense].  The psalm ends with his triumph--with the conversion of the Gentiles as the fruit of his suffering............But how should we take it.......abandoned in the sense that the hypostatic union was broken? No, that is totally impossible. alright what God took on He never relinquishes. So when the Son of God took the humanity of Jesus to be His that remains for eternity even in the tomb. Even in the tomb Jesus' body was the body of God  and Jesus' soul separated was the soul of the son of God. --the human soul of the Son of God [46.39 on the video]. So it is not that the hypostatic union was broken or something so that Christ was in interior reality abandoned by God, certainly not!  So it doesn't mean that .

 So what does it mean? Does it mean he was abandoned by not being loved by God, obviously not. No, in fact, this would be when he is most lovable. He is always lovable , but here he is more lovable than ever and that is preciously why he wanted to suffer all of this so that we would love him. Was he abandoned in the sense of suffering the pains of Hell? Some theologians hold this. What should we think about that? What are the pains of Hell in essence? Desperation --could Christ suffer desperation? No. Hatred of God for putting you there--could Christ suffer that?---of course not. The pains of Hell are pains that Christ could not suffer because they are the most opposite of Him that can be conceived. So he suffered, but not that--he suffered contrition which is very different than......... the remorse of an unrepentant person that is not contrition [48.07]-[which ]-is in a sense hatred of God's justice --that's the pains of Hell. Christ did not suffer that. Was he abandoned by loosing the beatific vision? Some theologians think this.I think it is a mistake.Because it was precisely the vision of God that enabled Him, we said, to fully suffer for every human sin, because it enabled him to see as it were every human sin. So it wouldn't be in that way either that he was abandoned.

So how then, was he abandoned? Well, St.Thomas Aquinous, [speaks of it in two senses] exteriorly and interiorly, in the emotional level. Exteriorly it is easy to see, that is obvious. We say that when parents abandon a child they don't protect it, right? They let it suffer, whatever comes its way when you abandon a child. Well, certainly Jesus was abandoned in that way.......now it is his hour, the hour in which , as it were, abandoned, turned over to all the powers of darkness, turned over to all his adversaries and above all, the principle adversary which isn't Caiaphas, but Satan. So he was abandoned in that sense of not being protected, of being allowed to be buffeted by Satan in every way that Satan wanted. And of course Christ wanted it because He wanted that precisely to redeem us. So that is, I think, the more obvious sense in which He was abandoned. Right, and that doesn't cause any particular difficulty [around minute 49].But I believe there is a more profound sense as well that St. Thomas Aquinas... [and others bring out] .  That he would have been abandoned in the sense of emotional desolation. And this is something the great saints are given the privilege of sharing, as it were and we call that the dark night of the spirit. ....There are 2 dark nights according to the mystical writers. One dark night that purchased?? [maybe purged?(not sure I got this right) the soul of attachments to sensible consolations--that wouldn't be this. But there is another dark night in which the saint is purged, as it were, even from any consolation that is purely spiritual--the consolation of having a sense, say of heaven ,of the presence of God, a sense of a reality of the goodness of God...............[he mentions mother Theresa of Calcutta--50 years having this--this is not the doubting of faith/ no, on the contrary it is the extreme strength of faith that God allows these trials in the saints so that faith can be strengthened because it gets no support from feeling. It is the lose of any feeling of God's presence so that the saint has to go by faith alone. St John of the Cross is the one who brilliantly analyses this. But this is just a hint/ Christ does not allow his saints to suffer more than he does. He gives them a tiny taste of what He drinks to the full. But that is how we should try to approach it. That he would have experienced all emotional desolation that is possible to experience. And that make sense because when you are thinking about sin and its hideousness, its deformity, ...what it causes...the love that it extinguishes, the love of God it tramples, when you think about that of course those reflections create desolation, they don't create consolation.

And so we can not penetrate Christ's emotional life. But the great theologian, Thomas Aquinas , has this principle, which I think is very wise,/ because of original sin our emotional life has a life of its own . We can't dominate it; that is one of the effects [concupiscence]  of original sin that we are not able to rationally control our passions.We can, to the extent that we acquire virtue to a certain extent.. , but we can't simply  feel what we will to feel. But Christ could because he was immune to original sin. He was an unfallen, perfect man and he would have had a perfect dominion over his emotional states so he would have willed his emotional state to do what he wanted it to do which is to atone. In other words to experience every desolation which is the worse kind of suffering--the suffering of the most extreme depression and desolation.

Now how could he have suffered this [54.57minutes into audio]-St Ignatius explains this in His spiritual exercises--the experience of desolation. Darkening of the soul, troubling of the mind, movement to base and earthly things, restlessness,feeling apathetic, tepid,...separated from one's creator and Lord. Well, clearly that is what Jesus willed to feel, emotionally even though he is the most closely united to God. [hypostatic union--he is God]. But he willed to feel separation emotionally which we call desolation. He could do this because he had control of His emotional states, but it is a kind of miracle because normally what happens in the spiritual life is that the saints are normally the most joyful people because they have the most lively awareness of the goodness of God. Even the saints who are going through the dark night of the soul, we don't see it, we look at Mother Theresa and we thought she was joyful. But normally there is a certain overflow from the higher part of the soul to the lower part of the soul . The higher part would be that that lives by faith, hope, and charity. The lower part would be our feelings Jesus wanted to experience this dark night to the fullest.
That is the way we should understand those words, My God my God why have you abandoned me. Exteriorly yes, but also interiorly to atone.

[he mentions that John Paul II in the year 2000 (number 27 of some doc) spoke of this in one of his documents--the saints give us insights into some of these theological realities of faith and the gifts of wisdom, understanding and knowledge.] HE speaks of the paradoxical blending of bliss and pain. We can experience two different things at once if they have different causes. We can experience one type of emotional experience that has one cause and we can experience another one which has a different object. Because of the unity of the soul, normally it doesn't completely happen. Normally an overflow from one to another, but in Jesus he willed to do away with that overflow, we said. So there could be one and the same time a certain bliss or peace and at the same time the most excruciating pain. [joy and suffering can be present together in holy souls--can be both blissful and afflicted.]  The bliss is seeing the glory of God, but the affliction is seeing precisely the glory of God offended by all human sin and they go together. It is precisely the knowing God that enables the knowledge of sin to be so afflicting.[he talks of some saints that felt this ]  Even in the depths of Christ ' pain , he died imploring forgiveness of his executioners and expressing to the Father his ultimate filial abandonment.'Father into your hands I comment my spirit.' And we should see in that line something of peace. The peace of having done what He was born to do.....now he has drunk his chalice to the bottom. So there is the joy have having redeemed mankind.

 So both things are happening at once and we to can be involved in both things.Our sins were the cause of his pain.......but we can console him through our fidelity, because that to he saw.

NOTE:  refutations  of Balthasar’s claim that Christ did not have the beatific vision, is Unam Sanctum Catholicam‘s “Balthasar, Christ and the Beatific Vision.”

This above is a great link---just wanted to put a tiny bit of quotes from it: 

 O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself" (Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 48, 75).
and

If Christ possesses the Beatific Vision, as Pius XII clearly teaches, then He cannot experience faith. The Beatific Vision is simply the consummation of sanctifying grace, which ends in a participation in the very life of God. It is the end to which Faith tends. Therefore, if Christ in His human soul is already at that terminus, He cannot possess Faith, a virtue which is proper only to those who do not yet see God. But Christ does see God. For this reason, too, He does not have hope. "For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen, is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he hope for?" (Rom. 8:24

andDoes the Beatific Vision render the suffering of the cross "innocuous", as Balthasar asserts?

St. Thomas easily explains how the bodily suffering of Christ can be reconciled with the Beatific Vision, since bodily pain is felt with the lower powers of the soul and the joy Christ experiences through the Beatific Vision is limited to His spiritual soul. Thomas says:

"As was said above, by the power of the Godhead of Christ thebeatitude was economically kept in the soul, so as not to overflow into the body, lest His passibility and mortality should be taken away; and for the same reason the delight of contemplation was so kept in the mind as not to overflow into the sensitive powers, lest sensible pain should thereby be prevented' (III, Q. 15, art. 5). 

This follows from the nature of the Incarnation, in which Christ, because of His union to the eternal Word, should experience the Beatific Vision, but as true man should still suffer the conditions natural to man (sensible pain, hunger, etc). 

A larger problem is how Christ could experience the spiritual joy of the visio beatifica and at the same time experience the interior, spiritual sorrow necessitated by the Passion. There have been various theories on this, but St. Thomas teaches, in the words of Dr. Ott, "that he bliss proceeding from the immediate vision of God did not overflow from the ratio superior (=the higher spiritual knowledge and will directed to the bonum increatum) to the ratio inferior (=human knowledge and will directed at the bonum creatum) nor from the soul to the body." Thus, Christ experiences sorrow and sadness in His soul insofar as His truly human soul is directed towards things of earth; but insofar as Christ's soul, reason and will are fixed on God, He experiences joy. This joy of the higher reason (ratio superior) does not overflow into Christ's ratio inferior (STh III, Q. 46, art. 8).

cocernting it is finished
in comment    12 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2011/01/indulgences-the-treasury-of-merit-and-the-communion-of-saints/#comment-48459

 Hart implies that the Catholic doctrine of the communion of the saints conflicts with Christ’s statement “It is finished.” But that is not true. The “It is finished” refers to Christ’s Passion. It does not refer to the participation in, and extension of Christ’s redemptive work by the members of the Body of which He is the Head. Jesus wasn’t saying that St. Paul’s sufferings were already completed, the sufferings that filled up what was lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Colossians 1:24). If Hart asserts otherwise, he is simply begging the question against the Catholic doctrine


St. Thomas discusses it in ST III, 50, Article 2.

Such forsaking is not to be referred to the dissolving of the personal union, but to this, that God the Father gave Him up to the Passion: hence there “to forsake” means simply not to protect from persecutors. or else He says there that He is forsaken, with reference to the prayer He had made: “Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass away from Me,” as Augustine explains it (De Gratia Novi Test.).
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)