God "separating" from us (does not exist).

Our alienation from God is only by our choice.

Our understanding of what God(F,S,S)'s justice and forgiveness are plays a significant role in how we understand the difference between separation and alienation.

 

“The human race is positively addicted to keeping records and remembering scores. What we call our "life" is, for the most part, simply the juggling of accounts in our heads. And yet, if God has announced anything in Jesus, it is that he, for one, has pensioned off the bookkeeping department permanently.” —Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus 

 

The quote above speaks to the alienation we create. To understand the passage below is to intimately know that God's justice keeps no records of wrong. It is not about us getting what we deserve (good or bad). It is about us receiving what God (F,S,S) desires: our healing and restoration.

 

1 Corinthians 13 - What is Love (Agape)

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. 6  Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. 7  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.

11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways. 12 Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

 

Ideas of separation and/or alienation from God(F,S,S) are not the same. They have been misunderstood and conflated in our modern Christian teaching.

First things first, let's establish that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are never (have never been) separated from each other, as the F,S,S are One, nor has/is God ever separated from us. However, we do experience alienation from our end. Alienation feels to us like separation, yet God never leaves us nor abandons us. The F,S,S is omnipresent (always with us) in our deepest, darkest times in this life. Our lack of appreciation for or experience of God's presence does not mean God has withdrawn from us. 

We have been taught that our sin (missing the mark) is somehow God's kryptonite. Part of this explanation is that, since God is holy, God cannot be in the presence of our sin. Scripture is typically referenced to establish that separation between God the Father and God the Son occurred on the cross, which is tragically promoted as an educated, theologically correct perspective.

See the following simple explanation that has escaped the majority of Protestant Evangelical and Roman Catholic (Western Church) instruction. It is present in the Eastern Church, but not to the same degree.

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Five Basic Points:

1. As with much of Scripture, the New Testament quotes the Old Testament. Psalm 22:1 is not a metaphysical rupture of the triune relationship of God(F,S,S). To say that Psalm 22:1 is not a "metaphysical rupture” is to say that Jesus was not forsaken in any manner nor means. There was no dissolution of the divine communion. God(F,S,S) did not “stop being God with God"; instead, in the incarnate Son, God enters the deepest and darkest of human experience while remaining the faithful covenant Lord who hears and vindicates the afflicted one, as the latter verse of Psalm 22:24 emphasizes that the Father and Son were face to face on the cross.

• Jesus is quoting the first line of Psalm 22 to invoke the whole psalm, as would have been common for a Rabbi's purpose to bring the listener's attention to the larger relevant Scriptural context, which is Psalm 22 in this case:

  • Describes crucifixion‑like suffering (pierced hands/feet, casting lots).

  • Ends in trust, praise, and worldwide salvation.

  • If the reader doesn't stop with verse 1 of chapter 22, but keeps reading, we see that the Father never turned His face away from Jesus on the cross: “He has NOT hidden his face from him, but when he cried to him, he heard.” (Ps 22:24)

  • The very chapter in the book of Psalms that Jesus references denies that the Father turned away from the Son.

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2. The Trinity is indivisible; no “holy” abandonment.

• Orthodox theology insists: Father, Son, and Spirit are one in being; you cannot peel the Father away from the Son at the cross without falling into heresy.

• God’s holiness is not fragile purity that must flee contact with sin; it is burning, healing love that enters the world’s sin and death to destroy them from within.

 

3. Jesus enters our self-derived alienation (our experience/feeling as if God forsook us).

• The “forsaken” is psychological, not ontological (Lychnos, Reardon).

• He prays Psalm 22 “from inside” our darkness: He feels what we feel—abandonment, dereliction—while in truth the Father is with Him (“Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me” – Jn 16:32).

 

4. Justice as healing, not retribution

• Athanasius (as interpreted by Coptic OA) and Anástasis Center: the “penalty” of sin is not an externally imposed beating, but the intrinsic consequence of turning from the Source of life (corruption, death, exile).

• God’s “wrath” is best understood as the face of love colliding with our refusal, not as a need to balance a cosmic ledger by abandoning or torturing His Son.

• Thus, holiness does not require the Father to abandon the Son; it requires the Father and Son, in the Spirit, to go all the way into our exile/death to bring us home.

 

5. No total depravity: wounded goodness, not worthless sinners

• Eastern Orthodoxy explicitly rejects the idea of "total depravity."

• Humanity is good but wounded, enslaved, and sick; Christ the New Adam assumes our condition to heal, restore, and deify it, not to satisfy an offended honor code.

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