Can God die?

My side of an exchange I had on Facebook with a unitarian pastor, regarding this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgIk_N4IfI

These are pointless conversations because they're so repetitious. Debating unitarians is like debating atheists. It's always the same arguments. They always expect you to start from scratch, as if we haven't been over this ground many times before.

You're recycling hackneyed objections to Trinitarian theology as if there are no preexisting answers to these stale objections.

That such a disingenuous comment since the question at issue is not the ability to quote scripture but what the passages mean. I've already interacted with some of your quotes. The video quotes 1 Cor 15:28, but in the context of Paul's eschatological Adam typology, it refers to the economic role of Jesus as the Last Adam. The video quotes Jn 14:28, but in a father/son relationship there can be both equality and inequality at different times. For instance, a crown prince has less authority than the king until the crown prince assumes the throne after his father dies or abdicates.

Disingenuous comment from you. First of all, there's the interpretive question. Not just quoting a statement, but what it means. Contextual considerations. Words with more than one sense. In addition, you arbitrarily confine the relevant evidence to finding one passage that says it all.

Jesus is a composite being: the divine Son in union with a rational human soul in union with a human body. So the "contradiction" is equivocal and simplistic. God qua God cannot die. God qua Incarnate can die in with respect to the body he assumed.

If Scripture teaches the two-natures of Christ, then that makes him a composite being. Yes, Scripture refers to the Father as the one God. It also refers to Jesus as the one Yahweh. Jn 17:3 isn't setting up a contrast between the Father and the Son but between the true God and false gods. The "one true God" is a synonym for Yahweh. But the NT frequently identifies Jesus as Yahweh. It's a demonstrable fact that the NT frequently equates Jesus with Yahweh. Do I need to give you a list of verses?

The argument that Jesus isn't God because God can't die is hamhanded. The unitarian apologist fails to appreciate that if your objective is to show that Trinitarianism is inconsistent, you have to assume the Trinitarian viewpoint for the sake of argument. You must show that it's inconsistent on Trinitarian grounds. But to say God died in the person of the Son Incarnate is perfectly consistent with Trinitarian theology.

Once again, you're not following the argument. If the claim is that Jesus can't be God because Jesus died but God can't die, that is claiming that the Trinitarian position is inconsistent with those two propositions. But when you attempt to accuse the opposing position of inconsistency, then the onus is on you to show that it's inconsistent on its own ground. That means you have to adopt the viewpoint of the opposing position for the sake of argument, then show (in this case) that the two propositions are contradictory. This is just a point of logic. And as I've explained, the two propositions are perfectly consonant with Incarnational theology. What Jews allegedly believed is a non sequitur, since the point at issue is whether the opposing position is logically consistent, not whether it's true. That's a separate argument. So the unitarian argument in the video is philosophically inept in that regard.

As for the pre-Christian Jewish background, scholars have documented that 2nd Temple Judaism had a two Yahwehs doctrine. Another line of evidence is illeism. Finally, the fundamental question isn't whether OT Jews believed in the Trinity, but whether the Trinity is consistent with OT monotheism.

i) Sorry, but you're the one who missed the point of the video. The video is using two different kinds of arguments. One kind of argument is to quote stock unitarian prooftexts. 

The other kind of argument involves the implicit claim that Trinitarian theology is contradictory because Jesus died, but God can't die.  So there are two different types of argument in play. You need to distinguish them. I've commented on both.

ii) You then repeat a misattribution which I corrected in a previous comment. I for one never said only the "human nature" of Jesus died. My own statement was narrower. The human nature includes body and soul. It wasn't the human nature in toto that died, but the body. The soul survived (as well as the divine nature). 

iii) Christian theologians don't argue that the divine nature in isolation is necessary for the atonement, but the divine nature in a particular combination with the human nature.  The divine nature is necessary but insufficient condition for the atonement. So your objection is confused and uninformed.