Michael Lawrence: The Roman Catholic Church began to teach...

...Christ was forsaken by God. From the beginning of Christianity many have tried to save Christ from the horror of God-forsakenness on the cross.

In the early centuries of the church, Docetists of various forms and types claimed that Christ’s sufferings weren’t real but only appeared to be real. Hence, they were called “Docetists,” doke being the Greek word for “appearance.” Others claimed that it wasn’t really Jesus who died on the cross but that, at the last second, God rescued Jesus, whom he loved, and put someone else there, the most popular substitute being Judas. This idea especially was later picked up by Islam and popularized in the Muslim world.

By the Middle Ages the rescue attempts had taken on more sophisticated forms. The Roman Catholic Church began to teach that though Christ did suffer God’s forsaking wrath on the cross, he did so only in his human nature, not in his divine nature as the God-man. Quite naturally this led to a focus and an emphasis on the physical sufferings of Jesus the man, reflected in the piety of the crucifix, with the body of Christ still on the cross, and of the mass, in which the body of Christ is supposedly crushed again in our mouths.

... To begin with, the God-forsakenness that Christ experienced on the cross is not merely the absence of God’s favor and blessing, though it is that. It is also the positive infliction of God’s wrath for sin. On the cross, Jesus Christ bore the penalty for sin. This is extraordinary, of course, for he had no sin of his own. The sin that he bore was the sin of others, the sin of those he had come to save. Yet God made him who had no sin to be sin (2 Cor. 5:21); he endured a cursed death because God had made him to become a curse (Gal. 3:13). There on the cross, bearing sin, Christ endured the wrath of God that sin deserves. God’s wrath at that point was not personal anger. He was not angry at Jesus. He was angry at sin, and Jesus bore it. Christ experienced a judicial wrath.

Dever, M., & Lawrence, M. (2010). It Is Well: Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement (pp. 84–87). Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

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