More on a theology of the cross

It is also important to recognise that there are pastoral implications involved in the doctrine as well. Whilst those who espouse the notion that God Himself suffers have claimed their doctrine for the purposes of theodicy, it is in fact possible to 'turn the tables', and argue that the doctrine of impassibility guarantees a theodicy of solidarity with suffering human beings - something which the proponents of a 'suffering God' theology cannot do.

As Karl Rahner remarks: “To put it crudely, it does not help me to escape from my mess and mix-up and despair if God is in the same predicament”.

Whilst it is permissible to speak of the death of the Son, this is to be understood as the death of the Son of God as a human being. The new mode of the existence of the Logos is as a human being, and it is as a human being that he experiences suffering and death, not as God. It is nevertheless right and proper to equally assert that it was the Son of God who experienced this. God truly experiences our human suffering and radical finitude as manifested in death. Thus one can, along with Moltmann, assert God’s solidarity with suffering humanity and furthermore it is experienced in a like manner to us; as explicitly human suffering. The preoccupation that theologians like Moltmann have with asserting that God in is essence suffers makes them lose sight of the essential truth that God suffers as a human being and that it is this which comforts and, more importantly, saves us.

A God who was entrapped in the same ontological reality as us human beings would be similarly trapped in this 'vale of tears'. Moreover, to say that God the Son dies, but that God the Father does not, imperils the unity of the Godhead: Opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa (“the external works of the Trinity are undivided”).