The key to Christian teaching on the subject of the Crucifixion is closely related to the Christological point I was speaking about in my last post (30 September). Christ is not merely empowered or indwelled by the Divine Logos or Word; He is that Logos in human form.

This being so, everything Christ says, everything He does, and everything He experiences, as described in the Gospel, must be predicated of the Word. It is the divine Word Himself who is therefore born, which is why Mary is the Theotokos; but it is also He who weeps at the death of Lazarus, He who is scourged and beaten, and He who dies on the Cross, “trampling down death by death”, in the words of the Orthodox troparion for Pascha (Easter). “If anyone does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified in the flesh is true God and the Lord of Glory and one of the Holy Trinity: let him be anathema” (Capitulum X of the Sixth of the Ecumenical Councils (Constantinople, 553) [Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. XIV, The Seven Ecumenical Councils (Grand Rapids, 1983), 314]. This was the Council’s way of expressing the so-called “Theopaschite Formula”, which can be traced to Saint Cyril of Alexandria: “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh.” It’s very easy, I admit, to become confused on this point, and indeed many Christians don’t understand their own faith in this regard. But it’s crucial to an adequate grasp of the Christian darshana.

I’m afraid our friend Martin Lings was therefore misinformed when he wrote, “There is never any question in Christianity of the Divine Nature having been crucified” (A Return to the Spirit, 23). I suppose one might rescue his formulation by saying that the Divine nature was not itself killed on Golgotha, but of course a “nature” is not such as to be killed or to die in any case. Even when a given man is executed, human nature doesn’t die. Nonetheless, the implication of the statement is that the Person of the Word was not crucified but only “the human being” named Jesus, and this is simply wrong, and rather egregiously wrong, for the reasons I’ve indicated. In any case, the interpretation you offer of Sūrah 4:157 (“They slew him not nor crucified”), an interpretation that divides Christ into two separate parts—one divine, which does not die, and one human, which does—is simply not going to fly with an informed Christian audience.

On the other hand, the “ambiguity” (your word) of this Koranic passage could well be at once stressed and accounted for—in perfectly acceptable Christian terms—by calling attention to the soteriological significance of saying that “God died” when Christ died. Obviously, this is a highly paradoxical affirmation from any point of view. It seems to me, however, that a Christian could agree—at least in principle—with the “quantum” proposal you put forward (à la Professor Nasr): namely, that the Crucifixion both did and did not occur, depending on perspective.

Something certainly did happen, and in the Christian tradition what this something was involved the death of the eternal Logos. “Though [Christ] was in the form of God [i.e., fully divine], He counted equality with God a thing not be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant. . . . and being obedient to death, even the death of the Cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). Nonetheless, precisely because He is divine—because, as the creative and life-giving Word, He Himself is the Origin and the Sustainer of all things (John 1:3)—when He died it was actually death that was “killed”, not God. This is the very heart of the Christian Mystery. “Though we die,” said Saint Athanasius, “we no longer die death as before” (On the Incarnation, 21), and this is because death has lost its “sting” (1 Cor. 15:55), having been “defeated” by the crucified God.