Many thanks Varsenault, Peter, Paul, and Danutz for sharing your thoughts. Each of you has helped me in different ways. I would like to make a few responses below, but if I don’t respond to a particular thing you said, it’s not necessarily because I think it’s insignificant. I value all your comments and I am learning from each one of you.

Hi Varsenault … Your comments are extremely useful in clarifying the issue. That was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for. Many thanks.

Hi Peter … You gave a very helpful overview of different perspectives. Thank you for giving the wider picture.

I agree this question is not too important in practice when speaking to a non-believer. But I am specially trying to equip myself to articulate helpfully with believers who regard ‘Jesus is God’ as the first & last word on the subject and don’t bother to work through the logical implications.

Why do you think Jesus emphasized divine function more than divine essence? Was it because he wanted us to adopt the same focus, or was he merely accommodating himself to the thought forms of his own culture (like speaking about the sun rising)?

I would like to use something you said, Peter, to make a slight digression. My point is not aimed at you in particular because you were not necessarily aligning yourself with this view. You wrote:

Those wanting a narrative/historical based theology might object that the phrase [‘Jesus is God’] does not do justice to the historical narrative in which our understanding of Jesus needs to be couched, but instead wrenches him out of context and places him in the realm of timeless abstract truths.

With respect to everyone here, I confess I don’t yet see the point of emphasizing narrative/historical theology over modern systematic abstract theology.

I believe God’s being is independent of his creation. I believe the Trinity exists from everlasting to everlasting as the only uncreated being. He had the choice of remaining the only entity in existence, a complete and self-subsistent community of three, relating to one another in perpetual love, joy, and harmony. But instead, he freely chose to create sentient beings in his own image, to whom he revealed himself and with whom he wishes to share his love and joy. Something went wrong but he has intervened by means of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus to inaugurate a renewed community consisting of God and man relating together in perpetual love, joy, and harmony.

I believe God stepped into our world in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This historical event shows us God’s nature more clearly than any other form of his revelation. But if we use the historical narrative as our frame of reference for understanding God, won’t we end up with a distorted view? For example, watching me play chess will tell you something about certain aspects of my personality, but you wouldn’t get a balanced picture of my whole being, because only certain traits would arise during the playing of a game of chess. Different activities call forth different sides to a person’s character. The narrative/historical approach focuses on those attributes of God that happened to become manifest in the course of his involvement with his creation. But since his creation is not an intrinsic part of his existence, then it seems to me that a more balanced view of the whole nature of God would be to try to distil timeless, abstract truths from the data we have, in order to see him as a complete and self-subsistent community of three, independent of any other existence.

Some Christians describe God as:

the Father who is the Creator
Jesus who is the Redeemer
the Spirit who is the Helper

That describes the way we might experience God but it is a very egocentric view. And it is erroneous because the members of the Trinity do not have mutually exclusive job roles. But anyway, the idea of Jesus as Redeemer describes what the second person of the Trinity has done in history but it does not describe the second person of the Trinity as he exists independently of the creation - as the person who would have existed if there was no work of redemption to be done.

Hi Paul … it’s good to hear from you again. You asked: Why use language that the NT didn’t use? Well, perhaps the NT didn’t use that language but it did come tantalizingly close on a few occasions (e.g. John 1:1, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13).

I feel the phrase ‘Son of God’ has its own ambiguities. It means different things to different people. To some it surely indicates deity, but to others (such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims) it proves that Jesus is not God: “Phil is the son of Tony – therefore Phil is not Tony.” Have you encountered these different interpretations by other people?

Hi Danutz … I agree wholeheartedly with all your points. I think point 5 is especially important and something I tend to overlook. However, my own take on Jesus is that the New Testament data points to an ontological unity between God and Jesus in addition to them having shared goals & characteristics. For example, I cannot understand how the exaltation of Jesus in Philippians 2:9-11 increases God’s glory rather than eclipses it unless they are ontologically one. The NT never hints at any rivalry between God and Jesus, which strikes me as strange if they are totally distinct beings.

Respect and thanks to all … Phil

PS. Any more comments from anyone would be much appreciated.