Not long ago, I was talking with someone about how Jesus is both God and man. I explained how the Bible affirms this, especially in the beginning of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1,14).
“Jesus cannot be God because Jesus died on the cross,” the man retorted, “and God cannot die.”
Have you ever found yourself pondering this dilemma? Something just doesn’t sound right when we say that God died. It’s as if we are saying that while Jesus was in the tomb for three days the world was without God.
But a world without God would be impossible. Existence is one of God’s attributes. Recall what God said to Moses when asked about His name: “I am who am” (Ex 3:14, Douay-Reims translation). St. Thomas Aquinas even described God as “Him who is subsisting being itself”.1 Existing isn’t just something God does, it’s something He is.
Even more, our existence depends on His. It’s in God that “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). If God stopped existing (even for a moment), creation itself would know about it. It wouldn’t be pretty…
So how do we explain that God died on the cross? We’ll need to investigate two questions: What is man? And what is death? Let’s begin.
What is Man?
Man is like an Oreo. An Oreo is made of chocolate cookies and white frosting. Take away one of those two components and you don’t have an Oreo anymore.
Similarly, man is composed of both body and spirit. That is, he has both a material component (his body), as well as a spiritual component (his spirit). Take one away and he isn’t complete.
Consider the second creation account in Genesis 2. We read that, “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” And after this, “the man became a living being” (Gen 2:7). First God forms man’s body, then he infused in that body the breath of life, a spirit. And it wasn’t until both came together that the first man was complete.
So man is a fusion of both body and spirit. Commenting on this, Frank Sheed said that, “only in man spirit is united with a body, animates the body, makes it to be a living body.”2
So when Jesus took on flesh, He took on a human body, and His divine nature was coupled with a human nature. (For those of you who like big words, this union is what theologians call the Hypostatic Union).
It can be difficult to imagine the God of the universe taking on a human nature. And it can be even more tempting to reduce His humanity to a more comfortable and “bitesize” understanding. But make no mistake, He was (and is) just as much human as we are, similar in all ways except sin. He experienced anger (Matt 21:12-13), sadness (John 11:35), temptation (Matt 4:1-11), and yes, even death (Matt 27:50).
So when we say that Jesus died, we mean it. His death was as real as any other human’s death.
Now that we’ve looked at what a human is, we can move on to what death is.
What is Death?
When we talk about death, it’s easy to be nearsighted. We tend to think of it as “The End” (roll the credits). And understandably so, since death marks the end of our earthly lives, and it’s a tragic event for everyone. But that view of death ignores all mention of an afterlife.
As Christians, we don’t see death as the end. It’s a comma, not a period. Consider St. Paul when he said, “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain… my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil 1:21,23). Though it seems like the end, death only marks a transition from this life into the next.
Death is when our spirit leaves our body, ending our time on Earth. Our spirit passes into the afterlife. Our bodies, on the other hand, remain on earth, lifeless. As it is written, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Eccl 12:7). Frank Sheed describes death in these words:
A point comes—suddenly if there is violence, or by slow wearing—when the body can no longer respond to the life-giving energy of the soul. That, precisely, is death. The body unvivified, falls away into its elements. But the soul does not die with the body. Why should it? As a spirit it does not depend for its life upon the body: matter cannot give life to spirit.3
So death isn’t the end. Though separated from the body, the spirit lives on.
Now that we’ve defined what man and death are, we’re finally ready to come back to our original dilemma.
Did God Die?
Yes, God did die. Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity was tortured to death at the hands of Roman soldiers. Nailed to the wood of the cross, moments before His death, He cried out, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Then, Luke tells us, Jesus “breathed his last” (Luke 23:46).
Jesus’ death on the cross was just as real as any other human death. When His body could no longer sustain life, His spirit departed the material world, leaving His body lifeless. But does this pose any problem for a Christian? Does this sound like a dilemma?
Of course not. The world was not without God for three days. Jesus lived on, in spite of His separation from His body. Dying in no way blotted Jesus out from existence. It only separated Him from His body, causing Him to depart from this world.
So if anyone ever objects that Jesus can’t be God because Jesus died, simply explain that death only separates the spirit from the body, and that in no way poses a dilemma for a Christian. God came that He might redeem us through His death on the cross. And redeem us He did.
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Sources
[1] Summa Theologiae I, Q 4, Art 2,
www.newadvent.org/summa/
[2] Sheed, F. J. Theology for Beginners, 1981, p. 10.
[3] Sheed, F. J. “Life After Death.” Theology and Sanity,
http://www.ecatholic2000.com/sheed/untitled-31.shtml
On This Rock Apologetics 
The section about what it means to be human is often misunderstood. We are not embodied souls (which the Platonists believed, and is a common way of thinking today), as our souls are not complete without our bodies. I like your Oreo analogy. An interesting implication of this is that after death, but before the resurrection of the body, we are not complete, as our souls do not have their bodies. This is also the metaphysical horror of death, as it is a separation of things that are not meant to be separated.
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Thanks Joe! I considered mentioning how after death the soul is incomplete without the body, but I decided against it. You raise a good point though, that part of the tragedy of death is that the soul is separated from the body. It seems like our modern view of the body is that it “weighs down” the soul. But really, the two were made to be together.
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Another interesting result that I just thought of touches the transhumanist movement. In particular the idea that we can download our consciousness into computers. I don’t think that is possible due to how the mind works vs. how computers work, but if we ignore that and assume that we somehow are able to transfer our mind (and therefore our soul) to a computer, we would technically be dead. We would be a literal “ghost in the machine”, as opposed to the whole point, which would be to become immortal.
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Hey Eric Shearer, great post! I believe it. Jesus is God, but also how would you explain the fact that Jesus went to hell? Because surely he paid a full price, body and soul. So would you explain the fact that Jesus could have gone to hell as well. For me I’d say that God the Father and God the Son are separate yet they are still God. What do you think? I don’t know if I’m explaining myself.
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Hi Gilberto! I think I see where you are coming from. Scripture definitely tells us that Jesus descended to the dead, but I don’t think that is referring to the Hell of the damned. Before Christ opened the gates of heaven, the just souls who had passed before Him were waiting. In the book of Daniel we read that, “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2).
When St. Peter speaks of Christ’s decent to the dead, he describes Him as proclaiming the gospel to those in prison: “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison” (1 Peter 3:18-19). So His decent wasn’t as one damned to Hell, as we understand it now, but as one on a mission to proclaim the good news to all of those whom God saved. Does that answer your question?
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This actually gets into the Limbo of the Fathers and where it would be “located”. It also touches on the various concepts of Hell (for example, in the East, Hell is often seen as the same place as Heaven, but the state of the soul is such that it is painful to be in God’s Presence instead of blissful).
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Yes, thank you for the detailed response 🙂 God bless.
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Very well written and easy to follow your line of reasoning! Thanks!
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Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed it!
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MY FRIEND SAYS THAT
THE DIVINE PERSON DIED LITERALLY
MY QUESTION IS,
CAN THE
GOD-2ND DIVINE PERSON DIED LITERALLY ?
Or
GOD-2ND DIVINE PERSON CANNOT DIED LITERALLY ?
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Hi Yell,
Thank you for the comment! Sorry it took me so long to reply. In answer to your question, the 2nd person of the Trinity (Jesus) literally died on the cross, just as we humans can die. While that sounds hard to fathom, it’s the truth. You see, Jesus became man completely. He could feel pain, joy, hunger, and even experience death (my article goes into more detail on this).
When we understand what death is (the separation of the body from the soul), it isn’t as hard to imagine anymore. When Jesus died, his body hung on the cross lifeless. But his spirit lived on, just as ours does after we experience death. And 3 days later, he was united to his body again, but it was a glorified body – just as we will one day unite with our glorified body’s in heaven. I hope that answers your question!
God bless!
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