“Allah said, O Jesus, I shall cause you to die and will exalt you in my presence and shall purify you of the ungrateful disbelieving people, and shall place those who follow you above those who deny the truth, until the Day of Judgement; then to Me shall all return and I will judge between you regarding your disputes.” (Qur’an 3:55)
“Allah! There is no god but He,-The Ever Living, the Self-Subsisting, Eternal.” (Qur’an 3:2)
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Can God Die?
The answer to this question is the death knell to Christianity.
This is the question that every Christian who thinks he/or she is saved should really know the answer to. This is the question that anyone who is even considering Christianity as a viable faith tradition should be asking themselves.
This is why Christianity fails as a faith tradition on a very basic and fundamental level.
It simply does not reveal the true nature of God. In Islam, God is the Ever-Living God, and as such it is an impossibility for God to die. A dead god would be no God. A God that dies even for a fraction of a nanosecond in time could not by definition be called ‘The Ever Living’ God.
We have dealt with this subject here:
“God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen.”(1 Timothy 6:15-16)
“Incline Your ear, O Lord, and hear; open Your eyes, O Lord, and see; and listen to all the words of Sennacherib, who sent them to reproach the living God.” (Isaiah 37:17)
So now who or what died on the double-cross?
There are serious intra-Christian debates that rage over this issue until this very day. You would think the answer would be simple: “Jesus died on that double cross.” That is until you investigate the debate that rages between Miaphysis, Monophysis, and Dyophysis.
One group proclaims that Jesus has divinity and humanity continuing in Him without mixture or separation, confusion or change. He is one and the same person both in his eternal pre-existence.
They claim that if you separate the natures after the union and say that Jesus is in two natures, you will be confronted with serious theological problems. For example, you will have to admit that Jesus merely died as a man.
Yet that does not take the Oriental Orthodox off the hook either. Because statements like “without mixture or separation” are really not saying anything at all. Did his one nature that is neither mixed or seperated die?
So, in strict Monophysitism, the crucifixion risks meaning that God’s single nature actually suffers and dies—a view many Christians consider theologically problematic.
If Jesus had only one, divine nature (Monophysis), then He didn’t truly die, as God cannot die. This would make the Crucifixion a sham. In this view people witnessed nothing more than a hologram on the double cross.
If Jesus were two separate persons (called Nestorianism), then only a human person died, and God merely watched. This would mean humanity was not truly saved.
Just as God is not tempted, doesn’t increase in knowledge, doesn’t require sleep, God does not die.
God didn’t die. God’s essence did not die. God the Father did not die. God, the Holy Spirit, did not die. God the Son did not die.
That is the end of Christianity. It so frustrates Christians in debates with Muslims that the Christian immediately pushes a panic button and will either introduce a non sequitur, or statements that are not analogous at all.
“Even my Muslim friends don’t believe that death is the cessation of life!” I have heard one of them say. So the Christian tries a diversion tactic. Say something truthful about your opponent that they are forced to agree with and take the tension out of the room.
To our dismay, time and time again, Muslim debaters let Christians off the hook on this.
True, Muslims believe that there is life after death, but the Christian is trying to avoid the subject of death altogether. Muslims also believe that our souls are created; they are not eternal. Muslims believe that we do indeed die.
So that which Christians claim died on the double-cross: Was it created or eternal? And notwithstanding the fact that there is life after death, back to the pointed question:
Who or what died on the double-cross?
If they say a man died on the double-cross, then there was no redemptive sacrifice. After all, what is the point of the incarnation if man alone can atone for the sins of mankind.
Saying the god-man died is also nonsensical, as that would be saying that the two natures co-joined died.
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matthew 10:28)
Which also begs the question: what did God really sacrifice?
We can’t say God sacrificed his life because God cannot die.
We can’t really say that God sacrificed his son because he got his son back.
We can’t even really say that God sacrificed time, as God exists outside space/time.
Which also still leaves our Christian friends in their sin.
All that happened, in reality, was a cosmic charade. In the end, a man was left to suffer. God didn’t partake in any suffering. It was simply flesh that was abandoned on the double-cross.
Perhaps this is why the writer of this Gospel is making a theological statement.
It says, “About the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice,” ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46)
Jesus is speaking as flesh here. The Father can never abandon the Son because they are co-eternally joined in one essence.
All that was left was flesh, the same flesh that we are told can’t please God.
“Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.” (Romans 8:8)
The Creator cannot be overcome by his creation. Both death and life are creations of God.
“Who has created life and death that He may try you which of you is best in conduct; and He is the Mighty, the Forgiving.” (Qur’an 67:2)
It is both blasphemous and nonsensical to think of a God that is one in essence that is shared with three persons, that anyone of those persons could actually be dead. That in and of itself would destroy the Trinity.
The central theme of Christianity is that the Divine entered into his Creation and died for us. It is the very undoing of the Christian faith tradition itself.
“And say: Truth hath come and falsehood hath vanished away. Lo! Falsehood is ever bound to vanish.” (Qur’an 17:81)
“And when they hear what has been revealed to the Messenger, you see their eyes overflowing with tears because of what they have recognized of the truth. They say, “Our Lord, we have believed, so register us among the witnesses.” (Qur’an 5:83)
May Allah Guide them to the truth so that they do not burn in hellfire.
Prima Quran 
It is intriguing that even the great Platonists of the Later Roman Empire similarly perceived the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and Crucifixion as not only incorrect, but deeply disturbing and unfitting to the divine. Celsus famously stated that the Highest God, also known as the ‘Unutterable Principle’ who “is good, and beautiful and blessed, and that in the best and most beautiful degree”, could never enter into the midst of human misery, since this would entail that it must undergo change “from happiness to misfortune, and from what is best to what is most wicked”(Origen, Contra Celsum 4.14).
Indeed Porphyry, the biographer of Plotinus, would state that the Crucifixion was wholly inappropriate to God, who is “the Generator and the King before all things, at whom heaven trembles, and earth and sea and the hidden depths of the underworld and the very divinities shudder in dread”.
Furthermore Julian himself, possibly the greatest synthesizer of the wildly disorganised Philosophical Cults of late Antiquity, proclaimed in his letter to the Priest Photinus that “he whom one holds to be a god can by no means be brought into the womb”. In this Julian would in ‘Against the Galileans’ even criticise the ancient Christian practise of venerating Mary; “why do you say that the virgin is the Mother of God? For how could she bear a God since she is, according to you, a human being?”.
The Christian faith, from the Incarnation to the final Crucifixion, was anathema to the educated Pagans of the later Empire, particularly the Neo-platonists, to whom the notion of the Supreme God suffering was to be abhorred.
Well, I do not find it intriguing at all that a bunch of pagans and polytheist embraced a religion that cannot tell us who or what died on a cross. Not surprising for a people who do not understand the basic nature of God.
What I do find intriguing is that Judaism as a whole was kept from ever embracing such a doctrinal mess.
“Incline Your ear, O Lord, and hear; open Your eyes, O Lord, and see; and listen to all the words of Sennacherib, who sent them to reproach the living God.” (Isaiah 37:17)
The living God, not the living God (minus the time he died).
What ever initial push back they had against Christian doctrine there was certainly a kindred spirit in such passages as:
“Then Jesus said unto them, “Verily, verily I say unto you, unless ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.” (John 6:53) in drinking blood and eating flesh.
Plenty of pagans at that time partook in the drinking of blood.
Yet when the revelation came to the Prophet Muhammed (saw) and he re-established that sound doctrine that is in common with the Hebrews namely:
““Allah! There is no god but He,-The Ever Living, the Self-Subsisting, Eternal.” (Qur’an 3:2)
Look what happened to Orthodox Christianity. Maa sha Allah. Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, The Byzantine Imperium, Egypt, East Africa….. many saw the truth and the undeniable fact that God is ever living and cannot be conquered by death.
But let us fast forward the pagans who felt that kindred spirit with the drinking of blood eventually succumb to Christianity either the Eastern Orthodox or the Roman Catholic Church, some times via marriages, some times via missionary work and very often by cohesion and the might of the sword.
Than let us fast forward some more and where do these churches find themselves?
We have the Orthodox Church proudly announcing its first female deacon:
https://www.thezimbabwemail.com/zimbabwe/zimbabwean-woman-becomes-first-deaconess-in-eastern-orthodox-church/
The Roman Catholic church is besought by the Sedevacantism movement, We have the Pope allowing same sex unions to be blessed.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pope-formally-allows-priests-to-bless-same-sex-couples#:~:text=ROME%20(AP)%20%E2%80%94%20Pope%20Francis,moral%20analysis%E2%80%9D%20to%20receive%20it.
We watch Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics eat the scraps of the table that the Protestant tradition affords them with its apostates.
Debates raging about energy essence distinction, the Thomist going to war with missionaries of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
I mean so yeah I am not the least bit surprised that pagans and polytheist with no foundational knowledge about who God is were initially perplexed by some aspects of Christian theology (or that at least which came to them) as what is/is not ‘Christian’ theology is a matter of continuous internal debate.
But yes, I am not the least bit surprised that people with no foundational knowledge of God would come to Christianity (some willingly at least)…
Forgive me sir, I only wished to say from a purely historical perspective that the Islamic condemnation of the Incarnation and Crucifixion was shared by the most philosophically rigorous Platonists of the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. In this, if in nothing else, the Platonists were far closer to the Islamic perspective in their belief that the transcendent ‘One’ could in no way suffer at the hands of men. The central Christian notion that the the all-comprehensive, all-comprehending idea, the Logos of God himself, should all at once enter the human estate, and partake of all of the aspects of that nature, was utterly preposterous to the Platonists of the Later Empire, since it constituted nothing else than a complete inversion of the Platonic insistence upon the transcendence of the Divine. In other words this enfleshment of the eternal in time posed a complete contradiction to the doctrines of Plato, Plotinus and Julian.
These were not uneducated or theologically crude men, but rather represented the best of pagan philosophy, holding to a belief in the transcendent ‘One’ and ‘Good’. This “First God” is, therefore “alone called King” since it “precedes the other causes (gods) in an exempt and uniform manner”, un-associated in its divine transcendence with “the whole of things, and is neither celebrated by Plato as co-ordinated with them, nor as the leader of a triad”. This Being beyond all being and Source beyond all sources stands anterior to all things, from the ranks of the gods to the “nature of the world, of intellect soul and essence”.
(See: ‘Theology of Plato: v. 8’, Prometheus Trust; New edition)
Even the resolutely pagan 4th century Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus (who knew Christian theology very well) credited his “imperial office to the Mighty God, even to him who is able to direct my reign to the noblest ends”, and called for the Jews to intercede and to “offer more fervid prayers for my reign to the Most High God, the Creator, who has deigned to crown me with his own immaculate right hand”. He would famously seek to “rebuild by my own efforts the sacred city of Jerusalem,” both in order that the Jews might “glorify the Most High God therein”.
(See: ‘Theology of Plato: v. 8’, Prometheus Trust; New edition)
I must be absolutely clear that I do not believe that these men were right, and indeed I believe that they were very incorrect in many things. Yet they cannot be simply seen as unsophisticated idolaters who knew no theology. Rather they were formidably educated individuals who, in their belief in a singular transcendent Divine ‘One’, concluded that the early Church was hopelessly wrong in its belief that the Supreme God could be Incarnate and Suffer. As I said before, in this if in nothing else, Islam and the Platonists agree wholeheartedly.
Furthermore, what you say regarding the Eucharist is very interesting indeed, given that amongst the educated pagans of the middle and later Empire the Christian notion of feeding upon the flesh and blood of Christ was met with intense distaste, if indeed not horror. This explains why the early Church was often accused of cannibalism. This view is communicated by Minucius Felix in his ‘Octavius’, in which the pagan interlocutor mocks the Christians for their worship of a Crucified Man described their Eucharist as cannibalism, which horrified the Romans more than any other custom.