You wrote:
At the very least it must be acknowledged that the Church Fathers taught that the punishment of physical death due to trangression was visited on the Innocent Son by the Father (through the instrument of evil men)–how else could Is 53:10 say: “And the Lord was pleased to bruise Him (Hebrew “Crush Him”) in infirmity” [Douay-Rheims]
If by that you mean that the Church Fathers taught that by the one divine will God the Father (and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit) handed the Son in His human nature over to suffering and death by the hands of wicked men, then yes, but that is fully compatible with the satisfaction doctrine, and in no way indicates or suggests the Protestant position. If, however, you mean that the Church Fathers taught that God the Father used His Son as a divine punching bag, so as to get out all of His wrath for sin, then no. That notion is nowhere to be found in the Church Fathers. If God takes no delight in the death of the wicked, a fortiori He derives no pleasure in bruising the innocent. The meaning of the Isaiah passage is that it pleased God to bring about our redemption by this plan, namely, handing over His Son to be put to death by our hands, so that in His human nature He might make satisfaction to God for our sins.
from comment 251:
doesn’t contradict any of Isaiah 53. Verse 10 does not mean that Christ made Himself guilty. Rather, it means that He made Himself an offering to atone for guilt. You’re assuming that the only way to be a “guilt offering” is to have guilt imputed to oneself, but that’s precisely the point in question, so your objection begs the question.
Further, you did not reconcile the assertion of your original post… ["The Father was never angry with Christ. Nor did the Father pour out His wrath on the Son."] …with Isaiah 53:10… “But the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief;”
The meaning is not that the Father delights in torturing His Son, but rather that God was pleased with this way (i.e. Christ’s incarnation and Passion and death) as the means by which to reconcile us to Himself. His pleasure is with the plan in which the Son suffered (at our hands) for our sake, not with the suffering per se of the Son. As I wrote in comment #142 above, “The meaning of the Isaiah passage is that it pleased God to bring about our redemption by this plan, namely, handing over His Son to be put to death by our hands, so that in His human nature He might make satisfaction to God for our sins.”
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.”
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