Theopaschism


Theopaschism is the belief that a god can suffer. In Christian theology this involves questions like "was the crucifixion of Jesus a crucifixion of God?". The question is central to the schism between those churches which accepted the First Council of Ephesus and the Assyrian Church of the East. While not Nestorian, the Assyrian Church of the East, along with their greatest teacher, Babai the Great, deny the possibility of a suffering God.
Some theologians of the Byzantine period also held similar views, although they were never held to be very orthodox.
Classical Augustinian theology, on the contrary, maintains that the man Jesus suffered to a much greater extent, in order to avoid charges of modalism and patripassianism.
A number of modern philosophers and theologians have been called theopaschists, such as G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone Weil. Kitamori's Theology of the Pain of God and Moltmann's The Crucified God are two 1900s books that have taken up the ancient theological idea that at least unus de Trinitate passus est. In the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar: "At this point, where the subject undergoing the 'hour' is the Son speaking with the Father, the controversial 'Theopaschist formula' has its proper place: 'One of the Trinity has suffered.' The formula can already be found in Gregory Nazianzen: 'We needed a...crucified God'."
Some proponents of liberation theology have extended the theopaschist debate to the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, questioning whether the Spirit may or may not have felt pain during the incarnation. This debate has had implications in ecclesiology, per Leonardo Boff's Church: Charism and Power.