Sorry Peter. I’m still getting the hang of this posting process. I feel like a proper dundus now. Here’s the full article.

 You wrote:Although Theocrat doesn’t say so, he sees Jesus as being human in the same way as Moses, David etc were human. 

Indeed I do. The fact that you would even question whether Jesus was human in the same way as other humans raises serious concerns. As I stated before, orthodox incarnation Christology borders on Docetism. It seems to say “He’s a man like us… except he’s the eternal God and we’re not”. It raises questions as to whether the church councils really won out over Gnosticism, or simply repackaged and assimilated it. If Jesus is human in a different way to the rest of us, where would the validity of the comparisons between him and Adam outlined below be? Where in the Bible is his humanity expressed in qualified terms?

 As you point out, Jesus did identify himself with symbols such as the temple. This was also touched on in my original post. Though God dwelt in the temple, it didn’t become God, so why should the Father’s indwelling of Jesus do so? 

I’ve also covered the fact that, though Jesus functioned as God towards us, he did so as God’s ambassador, not God himself.

He performed his mighty works, not to prove that he was God, but like Moses in the opening verses of Exodus 4, to prove to Israel that their God had sent him. In John 11:42 he prays, like Elijah for the power to perform an attesting sign “that they [Israel] may believe that you have sent me.”

In Matthew 9 he forgave the sins of the paralytic man and was duly accused of blasphemy, not for claiming to be God, but for doing something which was though of as being God’s exclusive preserve. Jesus makes this explicit. In verse 6 he explains that he performs the miracle, not to prove that he is God Almighty, but in order to show that God had conferred upon a human being the authority to forgive sins.

 This is certainly how the crowds understood this in verse 8: “But when the multitudes saw it, they marvelled, and glorified God, which had given such power to men.” 

Jesus’ own self-understanding of the sense in which he was an elohim (god) is revealed in John 10:34 to be functional as opposed to ontological. He chose to define himself in terms of the judges of Psalm 82 who were also called elohim by virtue of their office, not because they were divine persons.

This is how the apostles preached Jesus. A man distinct from God who nonetheless operates in the name, or authority of God:

 Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you. God approved of and worked through Jesus. The power was not his own. This is consistent with John who quotes him in 5:19 as saying that, although he was in a status of functional equality with the Father, he could do nothing by himself. This would be a very strange and misleading thing for a person in the Godhead to say.

Or John 14:10: “The words that I speak to you I speak not of myself, but the Father dwelling in me does the works”.

 Peter again:

How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him. Not- for he was God, but that God was with- as a being distinct from- him.

 You wrote: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. An accusation of blasphemy does not appear in this context. See above, where the charge is made in connection with a claim of derived authority, not inherent divinity.  I’ll prepare a separate post on this text since it can’t be adequately covered briefly. You wrote:When the early church saw Jesus, they saw God, and worshipped him as such. Where in the Bible is Jesus worshipped as God? The only word translated ‘worship’ as applied to Jesus is, in the original Greek proskuneo, the equivalent of the Hebrew shachah, meaning to bow down. Jews would often bow before their seniors, for example Jacob before Esau. Yet this is not the worship given to God alone. For that, the word lautreo is reserved. This is never used of Jesus. See also Revelation 3:9 where the baddies will proskunesosin before the saints. I can’t find a single example where people even pray to Jesus. In Acts, the apostles pray to God, referring to Jesus in the 3rd person, as someone, therefore, other than God. You wrote:A merely human Jesus fails to plumb the depths of the seriousness of the problem. The expression ‘merely human’ exposes a failure to understand the Biblical doctrine of man. Humanity should not be judged by the depths it has fallen to in Adam, but in the height and greatness of God’s design, as revealed through Christ. This comparison does much to expose the debilitating effects of sin and is what I meant by Jesus’ unique normality. Our humanity is broken and stifled. In Jesus, humanity finds its full expression.  Sin could not be taken more seriously than in John 3:16, yet it says that God gave his beloved Son, not himself. Many are the loving parents who would testify that this is the harder and more costly of the two sacrifices to make. You wrote:In short, there is no solution offered or found for sin. 

The demand that God had to come and die for our sins comes from man, not God. From philosophy, not revelation. Otherwise it would be stated in the Bible. What the Bible does tell us is that God has dealt with sin by sending his Son to be the propitiatory sin-offering. That he takes sin so seriously that he was prepared to sacrifice his own beloved Son in order to provide a solution to the problem.

According to Romans 5:12-21, it was by a man that sin entered into the world, therefore justification would have to come by man, another Adam. This text shows that it is Jesus’ humanity, righteousness and obedience that qualify him to be the redeemer. What’s emphasised over and again is that the Messiah be a kinsman, closely related to those whom he must redeem. Nowhere does ‘divinity’ get a mention.

Likewise, 1Corinthians 15:21 “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from the dead”. What follows is another comparison between Jesus and Adam. Not really a fair one if Adam is a mere man and Jesus is the Godhead incarnate.

 You wrote: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. I was not denying a ‘personal experience’ of God for believers. I was just challenging your assertion that it can be used as a litmus test for truth. Mystics such as Hindus, Shamans and Sufists claim very intense ‘experiences of god’ during their rituals, but their beliefs, or indeed their gods, should not to be validated on that basis. Of course we experience a unique dynamic of God’s spirit through faith in the gospel message. Of course this transforming power goes far beyond what could be achieved by mere persuasion alone, independent of the divine empowerment that comes through the gospel alone. I was simply pointing out that it is through understanding and accepting God’s message to us that this spiritual revolution takes place. Personal experiences are not quantifiable, even by our own selves. Hence they are a poor plumb-line for truth. We could argue about which of us has the most joy and peace, who loves Jesus more or who takes sin the most seriously, but compared to what? Even if I glowed in the dark, you’d still need to go back to the Bible in order to see if what I believe lined up with it. You wrote:Read ‘What St Paul Really Said’/N.T.Wright. 

I don’t have access to this at the moment. What I do have is an ‘Ex Auditu’ article by him entitled ‘One Lord, One People’ in which he sets out his beliefs about Jesus’ standing in relation to Israel’s Sh’ma. I’ll do a short critique on this and post it in the next couple of days.

 In conclusion… 

In this and another couple of other posts I’ll be making I have tried to address the points you raised. I wonder if you could respond to a couple of mine. They are as follows:

In John 14:28 Jesus said that the Father was greater than him. Can God be greater than God? If so wouldn’t the supreme God, the Most High God, the God of the other gods (all designations for the Father) also be the only one who is truly God? If Jesus is someone other than that God, wouldn’t that exclude him from membership of the godhead, or at least relegate him to a subordinate position, even if it is found to consist of more than one person? What do you make of Jesus’ statement in John 17:3 that the Father is the monon alethinon theon?

Like you, I believe the cross is central to Christology, but I also think that standard Trinitarian orthodoxy is missing something important here:

When God forsook his Son, what was left on the cross? A complete man? A human body, minus the divine personal centre?

Was it a matter of ‘God the Son’ merely surrendering his human body and returning to the existence he enjoyed prior to being ‘incarnated’ into it?

Or did Jesus as a man and no more, really pour out all that he was, without remainder, trusting that he would not be left in Sheol, but that God would raise him again?

This would seem to be the faith of the Son of God which Paul refers to in Galatians 2:20. It would hardly take trust for an eternal person to go back to being what he had been for far longer than he had been a man, indeed, for eternity.

At the moment he cried out ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Jesus called on his God. Is the Father therefore the God of the Son, or not? Both Peter and Paul unashamedly call him not only the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but also his God (2 Cor 11:31; Eph 1:3; 1Pet 1:3).

From all this it would appear that Jesus is not just someone other than the Father. He is someone other than God.