Trinitarian Resilience
The Cry of Dereliction, the Cross, and Theology
I have a habit of “taking away” favorite Bible verses. Such confiscation gives me no pleasure, I can assure you. When a student or church member quotes a familiar passage, in well-meaning sincerity, in order to defend a theological idea that runs contrary to the passage in question or Christian doctrine in general, the last thing I want to do is deflate pious enthusiasm with an “actually, I’m not sure that’s the point of this passage…” If it’s happened once, it’s happened a hundred times:
A new believer expresses amazement that his college ministry group constitutes a local church since Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them” (Matt 18:20).
An enthused student, floored by the humility of Christ in the gospel, can hardly believe that the Son of God would “empty himself” of his divine attributes and prerogatives and prestige (Phil 2:5-8) for our salvation.
A sister in Christ with a knack for teaching aspires to the office of pastor, justifying such an aspiration on the grounds that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).
The responsibility and privilege of a professor in the face of such statements is to offer correction and instruction while seeking to avoid discouragement. We wish to affirm the piety; affirm the zeal; affirm the devotional and worshipful disposition, while attempting to situate these noble characteristics in the truth of biblical and doctrinal fidelity.
And this is why, while it gives me no intrinsic pleasure to “take away” favorite Bible verses, I’m more than willing to do it. I’m more than willing to do it because I want to give those Bible verses back with interest! Often, our favorite Bible verses are actually better, more glorious, and far more beautiful than they often appear to be at first glance.
The Cry of Dereliction
One of the biblical phrases that I frequently have to “take away,” particularly in the season of Lent leading to Easter Sunday, is the Good Friday cry of dereliction that our Lord utters on the cross: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matt 27:46; cf., Mark 15:34). The average evangelical has probably heard multiple sermons that perpetuate the common, misleading interpretation of this passage. The rhetorical high point of the sermon may sound something like this: “Look at the love that Christ has demonstrated toward you! Behold the depths of despair he was willing to plumb to redeem you. Christ, out of his great love for his people, endured the climax of tragedy: the Son of God, who has eternally existed in loving fellowship with his heavenly Father, experience separation from his Father on the cross! In this one moment, for the first time in all eternity, the perfect fellowship and love and joy of the Trinity was broken—the second person of the Trinity received only wrath from the first person of the Trinity where he had always otherwise received affection.”
In other words, the cry of dereliction is often interpreted to bespeak a rupture in the Trinitarian relations. The cost of sin was so great, the thought goes, that paying for it struck death and sadness right up into the very heart of God. Indeed, so thoroughly ingrained is this interpretation within the imagination of us evangelicals that we write songs that seem to affirm this teaching: “How great the pain of searing loss / The Father turns his face away.” The assumption seems to be that to affirm the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement (as we should), we must posit an intra-trinitarian adversarial transaction: the wrath is the unique wrath of the Father, and the object of that wrath is the Son.
Now, all of this is almost right. Christ is our substitute; he is, in his death on the cross, suffering for the penalty of sin (Rom 3:21-26; Gal 3:10-14). Divine wrath most certainly is being poured out on the God-man: and since the Father is God, and since the God-man is the Son—the second person of the Trinity—there is a sense in which we can say that on the cross, the wrath of the Father is being poured out on the Son. But it all depends on “in what sense” we say these things. If, by “the wrath of the Father is poured out on the Son,” we mean something like, “the trinitarian relations are ruptured, and the love and approval between the Father and Son are temporarily replaced with rejection and hostility at the cross,” we are gravely mistaken. Such an interpretation would be a serious violation of three interrelated areas of concern: orthodox trinitarianism, orthodox Christology, and proper exegesis of Holy Scripture. Let me elaborate on each in turn.
Trinitarian Relations and the Cross
Orthodox trinitarianism affirms that God is one in essence or nature, and three in persons. Crucially, we must insist that these two categories (essence and person) do not relate to one another in terms of genus and species. It’s not as if there is this broad category that we call “divinity,” and then within that category, we have three distinct instantiations: a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit. The divine essence is not one kind of being, with the three persons being particular expressions of that kind. If we were to affirm this, our Muslim neighbors would be correct to accuse us of polytheism: the Trinity, in this conception, is something like a very small pantheon composed of three deities.
In contrast to this view, Christian orthodoxy insists that the trinitarian persons are the one divine essence, personally subsisting. The Father is the divine essence; the Son is that same divine essence; and the same is true for the Spirit. In this sense, the persons of the Trinity can be distinguished conceptually from the divine essence, but not essentially so. There is one divine essence, and that divine essence eternally exists in this way: as Father begetting (or generating) the Son, and the Spirit proceeding from the Father (through the Son). If we were to make a sharp divide between God and not-God (i.e., creation), there is only one “thing” on the God-side of that Creator-creation divide, and that one “thing” is the Father who eternally generates his Son, and the Father and Son eternally spirating the Spirit.
To stick with this “Creator-creature divide” image, it’s crucial we identify ourselves rightly on the creature side of this divide. Now, since God is infinite, and we—on the creature side—are finite, God can only reveal his infinite self to us if he accommodates his infinity. He has to show us his infinite self in finite ways, with finite terms and actions. This means that when we are looking for ways of distinguishing between the persons of the Trinity on the God-side of this Creator-creature divide, we can’t simply project everything he does with his creatures onto the inner life of God. We can’t simply conclude, for example: “Jesus obeys the Father in the gospel, therefore the distinction between the Father and Son in the inner life of God—on the Creator-side of the Creator-creature divide—must be that the Father has authority and the Son has submission.” No, rather, whatever we say about what distinguishes the Father and Son in the timeless eternity of their God-side existence must be true with or without the gospel.
To be sure, the gospel informs us about the distinction between the Father and Son, and is therefore a revelation of such a distinction, but the gospel is an accommodated revelation: the inner life of God is reflected by Jesus’s obedience to the Father, but is not, and cannot be, exhaustively and essentially marked by such obedience. When we consider the totality of Scripture’s teaching regarding the Father-Son relation, and consider that relation in a way that transcends the creature-side of the Creator-creature divide (i.e., when we ask, “in light of what Scripture teaches as a whole, what would be true of the Father-Son relation even if creation and redemption never happened?”), our conclusion must be very modest. What distinguishes the Father from the Son? Answer: the Son is from the Father by way of generation. The Father generates the Son, and the Son is generated from the Father. That’s it.
This orthodox view of the Trinity necessitates several conclusions that will have serious implications for how we understand theology. First, it means that the will and nature and attributes of God must be one. If we say, for example, that the Trinity is composed of three individual Willers, we are presupposing that the Trinity is a composed collection of expressions of a single kind. The “kind” would be divinity, and the “expression” would be the Father or Son or Holy Spirit. But the Trinity is not a collection of instantiations of a single kind (divinity); there is one divine Being, and that single divine Being is tri-personal: Father, Son, and Spirit. The will of the Father, Son, and Spirit, in other words, must be singular because the divine nature is singular.
Consider this contrast: we, human creatures, all of different wills (my will is a faculty of my soul, and yours is a faculty of your soul), but they are all the same kind of will (i.e., they are human wills—a will that is of a different kind than angels or God). For us, we can make a distinction between individual will (my will) and its kind (human will). But since God is not composed of genus and species we must affirm that the Trinity has one will. The will of the Father is the will of the Son and Spirit because the nature of the Father is the nature of the Son and Spirit. The kind of will the Trinity has (divine) is a kind that only one being has.
Additionally, this orthodox view of the Trinity implies that all that God does, God does as Trinity. The technical term for this doctrine is “inseparable operations.” All that God does is from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit because the divine life is eternally from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. This is always true because the life of the Trinity is indivisible. When we see the Son doing something in Scripture, he does those things from the Father and in the Spirit. When we see the Spirit doing something in Scripture, he does it through the Son and from the Father.
What does all of this imply for Christ’s cry of dereliction? It means that whatever else this cry may bespeak, it cannot bespeak a rupture in the happy life of the Trinity. Such a rupture is ontologically impossible: you cannot divide the indivisible life of God the Trinity. God would cease to be God in such a separation. The divine life cannot be against the divine life, and the divine life cannot die.
Christ’s Two Natures and the Cross
Does this therefore mean that Christ didn’t die? Certainly not! Christ died on the cross, and this was—in the words of the Nicene Creed—“for us men and for our salvation!” But he died in his human nature. Or, to put the matter differently: the Son of God died in a nature that was capable of dying. And this highlights the all-important Christian doctrine of the hypostatic union—hypostasis here speaking to the reality of the single subject (the Son), and union here speaking to the reality of the union of divine and human natures in the single subject. The Chalcedonian Definition, written in the 5th century, provides the crucial language for making these clarifications. In this document, we read that the distinctions of the natures (divine and human) are not taken away by their union, but that they each preserve their characteristics in the same person without confusion or separation. In other words, all that is divine, Jesus is; and all that is human, Jesus is. But this does not mean that all that is divine, humanity is (and vice versa).
If the Trinity is one “what” (divine) and three “whos” (Father, Son, Spirit), the hypostatic union affirms one “who” (Christ Jesus), and two “whats” (divine and human). So, if we ask: “Is Jesus timelessly eternal, having no beginning and no ending?” We say, “Yes.” And likewise, if we ask, “Was Jesus born in time, and did he die on the cross?” We say, “Yes.” Those are two questions about the same “who,” and both are true according to two “whats.” The first statement is true of Christ Jesus according to divinity, and the second statement is true of Christ Jesus (the same “who”) according to humanity. Which is to say, the “who” who spoke those fateful words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the Second person of the Trinity, and he spoke those words according to his human nature.
And this calls our attention back to an earlier point I made about the singular will of the Trinity. Perhaps you were wondering, “What of Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane? Doesn’t he make a distinction between his will and the Father’s when he prays, ‘Not my will, but yours be done (Luke 22:42)?’”
This is another passage that may need a temporary confiscation. I’ll give it back, don’t worry…
It is certainly true that this verse indicates a distinction of subjects: the Son distinguishes his will (“my will…”) from the Father’s (“your will…”). But we often miss a most crucial distinction that screams out from this passage—a distinction that is hidden in plain sight: not only does this passage distinguish between the wills of two subjects, it also distinguishes between the wills of two kinds of subjects—it assumes two “whats!”
When Jesus says, “not my will,” what kind of will is he describing? What is being submitted to God’s will? Christ’s human will! You see, Christ’s assumption of a human nature is incomplete if he did not assume all that goes into the essence of humanity: body and soul, with an intellect and will. In other words, the who that submits his will to the Father is Jesus Christ—the Son of God—and the what that he submits to the Father is a human will. This means that, while the Son is addressing the Father in prayer, the what of the Father’s here (i.e., his will) is not unique to the Father alone, because the Father doesn’t even have a “what” that isn’t common to the three persons of the Trinity.
So, the what of the Father’s (the what that Christ submits to) is the what of the Trinity: the divine will of Father, Son, and Spirit. Conversely, the what that the Son submits to the Father is the what of his human sou: the human will of the incarnate Christ.
All of this also implies that Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane is not describing a tension between the will of Christ and the will of God but is rather revealing the perfect harmony between the two. The interpretation of this biblical episode that posits a competition between God’s will and Christ’s, with Christ bowing out and reluctantly conceding defeat, would imply a competition between Christ’s divine and human natures. But Christ is not divided. This episode is included in our Bibles to demonstrate the perpetual conformity of Christ’s human will to the divine will: even when an action (i.e., willingly go to the cross) includes no natural good for Christ, his human will is always to do the will of God.
Similarly, like how we can say that the will to which Christ submits in his humanity is the will of God the Trinity, we must say that the holiness of God that expresses itself as wrath on the perfect Substitute on Golgotha is the holiness of Father, Son, and Spirit. It’s not the wrath of the Father alone that the God-man propitiates on the cross, it’s the wrath of God the Trinity. The same who we see dying on the cross according to humanity sustains the cross—and all things—according to divinity (e.g., Jn 1:1-3; Col 1:15-18; Heb 1:1-2). At the cross, we see God the Trinity save us: the wrath of Father, Son, and Spirit is poured out on the God-man on behalf of man. “For us men, and for our salvation.”
Holy Scripture and the Cross
So far, we have leaned heavily on dogmatic theology about the Trinity and Christology to rule the common interpretation of the cry of dereliction out. Whatever this passage means, we have insisted, it can’t be contrary to sound trinitarian and Christological theology. But can we say more? When we consider the passage in its own context, and in the broader canonical context of the psalter and the life of David who penned the words Jesus is quoting, what are we left with? This is a crucial question because our theology must be governed by Holy Scripture. If our dogmatic categories run directly contrary to what Scripture teaches, it’s our categories that need to bend the knee, not the other way round. So, what does Psalm 22 and Matthew 27:46 (and Mark 15:34) teach us?
Three brief considerations will suffice. First, we can rest assured that the New Testament does not teach that the Triune life of God is ruptured at the cross. The New Testament context itself rules this interpretation out of bounds. Consider that Jesus “commends his spirit” to the Father (Luke 23:46), asks the Father to forgive the sins of his accusers (Luke 23:34), assures the thief on the cross that he will join Christ in paradise (Luke 23:42), and triumphantly declares, “It is finished” (Jn 19:30) all around the same time that he utters the cry of dereliction. This point is so obvious it’s easy to miss. If we take Jesus’s cry, to be a despairing complaint that his eternally loving Father has stopped loving him, whence comes these confident assertions and continued dialogue with the Father? Does he so quickly change his mind? Is the Father schizophrenically switching his disposition towards the Son between wrath and delight? Is Christ, within minutes, switching between despair of God’s abandonment to confidence for entrusting his soul to God? Certainly not. Therefore, the New Testament context of the crucifixion means that Christ’s cry of dereliction must be something other than the personal despair of intra-trinitarian separation.
And this brings us to our second biblical consideration. What does Christ mean by this cry of dereliction. Some insight is given by the fact that Christ is quoting Psalm 22. The context of the entire psalm, therefore, is instructive here. One thing we must remember about Psalm 22 is that it does not end in despair. It ends in covenantal hope. Written by David in the dark night of his soul, David writes as a suffering king who lays all his hopes on Yahweh being true to the promises he has covenantally granted to David and his household. We can assume, therefore, that Christ was not quoting a single verse from this psalm out of context: he was appealing to the entire thing and was identifying himself as the covenantal fulfillment of what David longed for in the psalm. Christ is the true suffering, Davidic King, who can say even more emphatically than David could:
All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before you.
For kingship belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations.
All the prosperous of the earth eat and worship;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
even the one who could not keep himself alive.
Posterity shall serve him;
it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation;
they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn,
that he has done it. (Psalm 22:27–31)
In other words, the cry of dereliction is a claim to royalty. Our Lord identifies himself as the ultimate fulfillment of what was typified in the life and prayers of David. All of this is further confirmed if we consider one final biblical horizon: Psalm 22’s place in the psalter. This horizon is crucial because divine inspiration does not begin and end with the human authors who penned the individual psalms: the Spirit of God was at work in the ordering of the psalter as well. That Psalm 22 comes before Psalm 23 and 24 is not an accidental happenstance. Together, they make up a Davidic dramatization of Holy Week. If Psalm 22 foreshadows Good Friday, Psalm 23—wherein we find David walking “through the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps 23:4)—foreshadows Holy Saturday, when the body of Christ was buried in the tomb while his Soul descended to Sheol. What, then, does Psalm 24 signify if not the glorious resurrection and ascension of Christ? In this psalm the gates of heaven are commanded to open to welcome the triumphant ascension and coronation of King Jesus, the one who truly has clean hands and a pure heart and deserves to ascend the hill of the Lord (Ps 24:3-1). The Lord, having apparently descended, here now ascends to dwell on his own holy hill.
Further, the longer we look at these psalms in their wider context, the more Christological they appear to be! For example, Psalm 15 and Psalm 24 contain many parallels. They each ask essentially the same question at their heart: who deserves to come into the presence of God? Both answer with unflinchingly high standards: he who is perfect (Ps 15:2-5; 24:3-6). These similarities suggest that Psalm 15 and Psalm 24 are bookends of sorts: the beginning and end of a unit of psalms that form what literary theorists call a “chiasm,” where the first and last correspond, the second and second to last correspond, and so forth.[1] Put visually, this chiasm of Psalm 15-24 might look like this:
A – Psalm 15 – Resurrection/Ascension: who shall ascend?
B – Psalm 16 – Holy Saturday (“he will not abandon my soul to Sheol…”)
C – Psalm 17 – Good Friday (“Hear a just cry, O Lord; attend to my cry!”)
D – Psalm 18 – Gethsemane: Entrusted to God (“I will call on the Lord”)
E – Psalm 19 – The glory of the Word of God
D’ – Psalm 20-21 – Gethsemane: Entrusted to God (“May he send you help from his sanctuary…” [cf., Lk 23:43])
C’ – Psalm 22 – Good Friday (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”)
B’ – Psalm 23 – Holy Saturday (“… the valley of the shadow of death”)
A’ – Psalm 24 – Resurrection/Ascension: who shall ascend? The Lord!
Conclusion
The cry of dereliction does not mark the ontological rupture of the Trinity. It is far more glorious than that! So, let us re-receive Matthew 27:46 as far richer a treasure than we may have at first supposed. This verse is the assurance that God keeps his promises, and that the Savior-sacrifice who hung on the tree is none other than the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who endured the horror of crucifixion “for us men and for our salvation.” God the Trinity’s inseparability in this moment is the greatest of news! We lose nothing worth holding onto by throwing away the interpretation of this text that pits Father against Son.
The crucifixion is the summit of the Trinity’s inseparable work in salvation. God the Trinity saves humanity by assuming humanity and crucifying sin in the human Christ as a divine act of salvation through judgment. Even further, the crucifixion is prerequisite for the resurrection. So, taken in the light of Christ’s completed work as a whole, which fulfills his Davidic office and the drama of salvation foreshadowed in Psalm 15-24, the crucifixion is gathered up and transformed from a means of death into a life-giving expression of sacred worship and love—both God’s love for man, and man’s love for God, as is fitting for the work of the God-man.
[1] I must tip my hat to Harrison Perkins, who first suggested this chiasm to me. What I’ve contributed (a contribution Harrison wouldn’t approve of, to be sure) is the notion of Christ’s localized descent to Hades in Psalm 15 and Psalm 23.
Excellent! I cringe whenever the song you mention is sung. I have heard Christian friends of mine talk about an “internal rupture.”