Answer:
The simple and consistent answer of historic Christianity is this: nothing in His divinity changed or was damaged in any way. According to classical Christology, Jesus has two natures: His divine nature, which is eternal, unchanging, and incapable of dying; and His human nature, which has a real human body and soul capable of suffering, hunger, pain, and even death. These two natures are united perfectly in one Divine Person, a mystery the early church called the Hypostatic Union. Because of this union, we can say that Jesus truly died, but the death took place in His humanity, not in His divinity. His divine nature did not weaken, disappear, or “pause.” Even while His body lay in the tomb, the Son of God remained fully God, still sustaining the universe, still possessing all divine attributes, still eternally alive as God. In short, when the human body of Jesus was pierced or exhausted or crucified, none of these experiences touched or reduced His divine essence, because the divine nature, by definition, cannot suffer or die.
Now, about the popular statement many Catholics and Protestants use today, “God died,” this can sound shocking or even wrong if taken literally. But most theologians don’t mean that the divine nature died. What they mean is that the Person who died is God the Son, and because the same Person owns both natures, what happened in His humanity can be spoken of using His divine title. This is why the early church used the term communication of idioms (communicatio idiomatum), meaning that what human nature experiences can be attributed to the divine Person. For example, Acts 20:28 speaks of the “blood of God,” even though God, strictly speaking, has no blood. The Bible can speak this way because the One who shed His blood is indeed God the Son, though the blood itself comes from His human nature. So many Christians say “God died for us” not as a technical theological formula but as an expression of devotion and faith, emphasizing that the One who sacrificed Himself is no ordinary man but truly God in the flesh. However, if someone hears this phrase without understanding the theology behind it, it can lead to confusion, which is why teachers must clarify that the death happened in the human nature, never in the divine nature.
A more careful and orthodox way to express the truth is this: “Jesus, who is truly God and truly man, died in His human nature; His divine nature never died.” This is exactly what the great councils of the early church taught, especially the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), and is affirmed by mainstream Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical theology. A simple analogy is to imagine a driver using a steering wheel: if the steering wheel breaks, it is the driver who experiences the situation, but the driver’s nature as a person does not disappear or become less human. In the same way, the human nature of Jesus is the “instrument” through which He lived, suffered, and died, but the divine Person, the eternal Son, remained fully and unchangedly God throughout the entire event of the crucifixion.
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