Did only the human part of the Son of God die?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1991.
In posing your question, your explanation of the term 'the Son of God' turns on this: we should make a distinction between the two different parts of the Son of God; or, to put it in another way, we should find ourselves saying that Christ did certain things as a man, and he did certain other things as God. This explanation, of course, is a very ancient explanation. It is not new, and you could find many champions of that view in the theological literature of the centuries. But it is not on that account true.
You are prepared to call both parts of Christ, both the divine part and the human part, 'the Son of God'; but when it comes to our Lord's death, it seems to me that you are still prepared to say only that the human part of the Son of God died. However, you take issue with pejorative statements, like 'the human parts of the Son of God', and affirm that the whole of him was the Son of God, but the part that died was the part that was formed to die, as the agency of the whole.
To support your view you give an analogy, which is that, in any organization or country, there are usually specialist agencies which undertake specialist actions on behalf of the parent body. For example, we say, 'Germany invaded Poland'; whereas the actual invasion was by German soldiers. But that does not get you out of the basic difficulty of your view; nor does your analogy help, for the analogy breaks down. Not all German soldiers invaded Poland, not even during the last war. Other German soldiers were elsewhere. Not all German soldiers died for Germany: only some German soldiers died for Germany. It is true that by the linguistic convention we could say 'Germany fought the last war', when we mean that the country of Germany sent some soldiers to fight the last war. But we could not possibly say 'Germany died in the last war', simply because Germany required some of her soldiers to die in the last war. Germany itself did not die.
It is true, as the old Latin tag has it, qui facit per alium facit per se, that a parent body or controlling individual that does something through an agent is responsible for what that agent does. A government who sends a spy into another country holds responsibility for that spy's death, if it occurs. But to say that the government dies when the spy dies would be quite false.
To take another example of the way this kind of language can be an issue, the Roman Catholic Church—and I mention it without any theological odium—maintains that the Church gave us the Bible. That, of course, is not true. If asked whether all the multimillions of members of the Roman Catholic Church down the ages gave us the Bible, they would, of course, say 'No'. What the Roman Catholic Church means in saying the Church gave us the Bible is that a very few members of the Church, and they mostly apostles, were used by God to give the Bible to the rest of us. In other words, what they really mean is that a very tiny part of the Church gave us the Bible.
To come then to your explanation of the death of Christ: you still seem to me to be saying that the eternal Son of God never died, because he could not die. But at one stage he took on an agency, namely a human body, and that that human body died; and that you can still say 'the Son of God died', because the agent has a right to be called by the same name as the responsible authority, namely, the eternal Son of God. But that is to confuse ourselves with mere terminology. It is like claiming that it is perfectly true to say that Germany died in the last war, because the German soldiers who actually died have a right to be called 'Germany'.
Moreover, there is the question which Christian theologians were forced to face in the early days. In becoming human, did the eternal Son of God merely take on a human body, without also becoming a human soul and spirit? Was his human body merely an external housing for a spirit who was not human at all? If that were true, then the death of the Son of God's human body would have been quite unlike the dying of an ordinary human being.
Or is it your view that, inside Christ, there were two distinct and divisible personalities? That is, as you know, a question that the early Christian theologians debated and decided against, for the reasons given in the literature.
And now to a further point. Your statement—that the traditional belief is that God had to look ahead, see what sins we were going to commit, judge those sins and pronounce the punishment, then add all the punishments together and punish Christ accordingly, as if God was at all interested in the details of our sins—seems to me unsatisfactory on more than one count. It is true that some Calvinist theology seems to take that view, and therefore proclaims that Christ died only for the sins of the elect, and that no other sins were covered by the death of Christ. Their mistake, it seems to me, springs from a very one-sided and partial view of what happened at Calvary.
The New Testament does actually say that Christ 'his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree' (1 Peter 2:24). Notice the plural, 'sins'. So it would not be true to say that God was concerned only with sin in the singular as a principle. On the other hand, one of the thought-models which Scripture uses to help us understand one aspect of the death of Christ is that of the Passover lamb (see 1 Corinthians 5:7; 1 Peter 1:18–19). In ancient Egypt, the blood of a Passover lamb, sprinkled on the door post, provided refuge and safety from the destroying angel for any firstborn who sought its protection. It was not a question of how many individual sins the firstborn had committed. His life was forfeit; but the death of the Passover lamb offered him protection, whether he availed himself of it or not.
Secondly, your view that the Son of God's human agency—also called 'the Son of God'—paid the ransom to set us free, and that, therefore, it can be said that the Son of God also paid the ransom because his agent paid the ransom on his behalf, falls foul of the points that we have already discussed above.
But in addition, it would still mean that the whole of the redeemed were ransomed by the death of one human body, and that one human body—called 'the Son of God' because it was the agent of the Son of God—bore the wrath of God against uncountable millions of human beings. Sin, after all, is not just a principle; Christ did not die for enmity or for rebellion or for sin in the abstract. He died for enemies in the plural; for rebels and for sinners, all of whom were individually guilty. And, as a result of his death, it is not merely enmity that is forgiven, nor the abstract principle of sin that is forgiven, but individual sins: as our Lord observed of the woman in Simon's house, her many sins have all been forgiven. It remains difficult for me—and I think it may remain difficult for the vast majority of the people of God—to see how the death of one sinless human body, even though called 'the Son of God' because it was the agent of the Son of God, could adequately turn away the wrath of God upon innumerable sinners and their innumerable personal sins.
But perhaps I am still missing the point that you are trying to make. At least you can take me as being not unrepresentative of many Christians who try to think about these profound matters: if I have difficulty with the thesis that you are propounding, you are right in thinking that many others will do so as well.
Yours very sincerely in Christ,
