Critique by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

If the title of the above linked article seems strange to you, that is probably because you are a Catholic or member of one of the Apostolic Churches of the East.

This is because, in none of these Churches do we say, “Jesus Christ died and raised Himself from the dead.”

Rather, we confess in the Nicene Creed: that “He suffered, died and was buried, and rose from the dead”.

This is not nit picking. There is a deep reason why we say Christ rose from the dead and not that Christ raised Himself from the Dead.

And it has both to do with grammar and theology.

You see, when you say, “Christ died and raised Himself from the dead”, you must use the same subject for both verbs, “died” and “raised”. And then you are signifying that the same one who is dead was able to raise himself dead from the dead. And that means the one who raised Him from the dead was dead when he raised himself.

This is why we Christians do not say this. We do not ascribe the power of the Resurrection to someone who was dead.

We say something entirely different: we say the One who died is also the One who rose from the dead. By confessing that He rose from the dead, we signify that He did this by His own power, but we do not signify that He did this by His human power or through His humanity which died.

Christ is both God and man. In His one Eternal Person He is Divine, but in His two natures He is God and man. Not God and a man. And not a God and man. But God and man. This is because as God, He is the Second Person of the Trinity, He is not another God. Nor is there any other God but the Trinity. And so there is no such thing as a mere god. Also we do not call him a man, because He is not a man, He is God become man. That is, He is the Eternal Son of God, fully God, Who became man, that is took to Himself as His own most intimate possession and alternate nature, the nature of man.

And this is what is wrong with the statement made by J. D. Vance. As God He raised His humanity from the dead, that is, He reunited His human body and human soul together. But neither His body nor His soul was ever separate from His Divine Person and Nature. They were dead, but they were never separated from Life.

Vice President Vance has uttered a grave error in theology and misrepresented the Christian Faith. And someone better tell him, before his grave error spreads among Christians. I sure hope he has spoken out of ignorance. But since the CIA has used converts to spread errors in Christian Churches to destroy them from within, I fear that he has intentionally made this error to seduce Christ’s flock into a very erroneous form of Christology to misrepresent our central tenet of faith, Christ’s Resurrection, which is not a self-suscitation.

However, if you are a transhumanist, and believe that life is merely a mechanical process in motion, then you can accept a self-suscitation, the same way you can accept that a computer turn itself back on.