As I’ve been referred to in the foregoing post, I felt some kind of response was called for. The questions I was asking, around which Theocrat has constructed his response, were sketched out in a rough way without having seen how Theocrat would describe his position, but I’m happy for them to be a springboard.

My preliminary response would be something along these lines:

Although Theocrat doesn’t say so, he sees Jesus as being human in the same way as Moses, David etc were human. It’s just that Jesus was a more perfect human. There is so much evidence weighted against this conclusion that it’s hard to know where to begin.

I’ve already commented on this site at some length about Jesus’s own identification with symbols such as temple - which in its suggestion of Jesus as the locus of the presence of God goes infinitely further than placing him in a line with other O.T. figures who experienced the spirit of God coming upon them. So every time Jesus healed someone or performed any of the other miracles, there was a rewriting of the holiness laws taking place, or echoes of what had previously been done by God and God alone. Looked at from that angle, the gospels are alive with the phenomenon of Jesus being himself YHWH, Adonai, God.

This is only the synoptic view. To read John’s gospel and not see Jesus making God-claims for himself is to keep one eye closed and the other very committed indeed to some alternative explanation. I’m still waiting to hear from someone why the Pharisees picked up stones to stone Jesus if it wasn’t for this kind of blasphemous self-identification in John 8:59.

The view of Jesus as God continues throughout the epistles: to see how trinitarian language is used from very earliest times, read ‘What St Paul Really Said’/N.T.Wright. When the early church saw Jesus, they saw God, and worshipped him as such. This was not in the light of any later Greek inspired Christological formulations.

Theocrat also raises questions which have been part of previous discussions on this site. If anyone has read any of these, it will surprise no-one that I believe the core narrative of the bible to be the mystery of how a covenant-keeping God remains true to the covenant - faithful to his people - yet would deal with the sin that was at the heart of their faithlessness to him, and thereby provide the same solution for the whole world.

In this divine project, a merely human Jesus fails to plumb the depths of the seriousness of the problem. Here, the reformers had it right: all who were born of Adam were bound by Adam’s sin. This is the depth of the problem. Man could not be redeemed by the actions of any other mere man - however much he might be the summit and apex of human perfection. I have noticed consistently with religious systems which have a merely human Jesus that the problem of sin is not so central nor profound, the cross not so central, in short, their true focus is elsewhere, and the prescription for living now is: “Try harder!” When the inevitable failures come under this system for living, their response is: “You didn’t try hard enough!” In short, there is no solution offered or found for sin.

The other sense in which the death of Jesus shows the seriousness of the problem is that a merely human figure (however much the paragon of humanity) dying on the cross is one thing, but God identifying himself with the sin which brought separation from himself (2 Corinthians 5:21) shows the nature of sin in its effects, and the depths of sin in its consequences. And I have to admit that in my own view, which would not be the view of everyone on this site, other perspectives which sidestep this issue are simply playing games.

Theocrat’s final paragraph concedes as much as I had suggested - that without these realities in which to believe and find ‘the Spirit of life (that) set me free from the law of sin and death’, we do not have the personal experience of God which God had planned for us to know. It is more than persuasion - it is, as Paul puts it, the love of God poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit whom he has given to us.

To summarise baldly, the narrative line that I would pick out here is the narrative of the presence of God; presence experienced, presence withdrawn, presence given occasionally to individuals, presence marking out a people, presence withdrawn from a people, presence restored, presence completed. (Very bald!) The apostles had more than a message of persuasion; the persuasion had an end in view: the present experience of the eschatolological Spirit - through the eschatological Jesus.

I regret that Albannach finds cause for celebration in seeing here ammunition against what he calls the Jesus cult. If his experience was of something that could be called a cult, with all that is suggested in his use of that phrase, it is regrettable that he did not encounter something more worthy of the name, which might have shaped his views in a different way.

It will also be very apparent in this post that I hold to an evangelical view of the gospel. I believe that the times call for a repackaging of the elements which accompany that view. The narrative/historical explanation seems to me to hold out distinct possibilities, and has opened up startling new insights. I am at variance with interpretations which seem to me to be losing the distinctiveness of the explanations which are not just part of the biblical story, but make it something to be proclaimed and believed - something which people would want to give their lives for, and be worth giving their lives for.

I also realise that this comment goes against the ethos of the site. I did encourage Theocrat to publish his views - so let it be said that I am doing no more than giving my own personal response and perspective. I’m sure, that like Albannach’s, there are others, and the ethos of the site is to give place to each other, which I now do.