I’m mindful of the very challenging discussion on the canonisation of writings that is currently taking place elsewhere on this site. Nevertheless, continuing from the ‘before Abraham was…’ thread, I get the impression that both of us (Peter and Theocrat) believe the books of the Bible to harmonise with one another. Our approaches seem guided by the conviction that someway, somehow, scriptural texts which deal with a given subject do converge to form some sort of consistent meaning. Our differences seem to stem from the way we go about attempting to reconcile one passage with another in order get to this.All the claims you cite in your response to my ‘Before Abraham was…’ thread are inferential. In none of them does Jesus directly say ‘I am God Almighty’. Neither do the apostles. Instead, in all these cases the meaning you insist upon is just one of many which a text could be taken to have.
Though Jesus did claim a special relation to God (Whether functional- the existing mode of thought concerning the Messiah or ontological- attributed by the later church councils) and role in salvation which transcended the norm, one should be mindful of the influence of existing theological presuppositions before asserting that he could only have said this or that if he was ontologically God.
If the Bible only said that Jesus was God Almighty or if Jesus had unambiguously claimed this, then I would have no trouble accepting it and reading those other, ambiguous statements in the light of this.
But my beef is that it is not fair to read vague claims in such a way as to undermine the face value of the explicit and plain statements that God is not a man, but Jesus is. That God is one, and Jesus plus God are two. That God is immortal and Jesus died.
Rather, my belief is that the inferential and ambiguous should be construed in such a way as to harmonise with that which is clearly stated.
Furthermore, Jesus has already furnished us with an explanation as to how it is that he can forgive sins and be the judge at the last day, but it has nothing to do with who he is. Instead, the theme which emerges out of his many statements is the Father’s committal of these privileges to him. And this is what, as far as scholarship has been able to ascertain, his contemporaries expected. It is unfair to overturn this simple explanation of Jesus’ derived role, in favour of alternative explanations which attribute his role to some intrinsic divinity.
If the Father wants to make his Son the giver of the spirit which anointed him, then what harm is there in accepting that he has done so? Why must we insist- in the absence of scriptural backing- that the Son must be God in order to function in this capacity? If this is the case, why was he only able to do so after he received it from the Father (Acts 2:33)?
If there was evidence that the Judaism of Jesus’ day expected the Messiah to be a God-man, then we could understand how such indirect claims could have been allusions, intended to resonate with some existing pre-understanding. But the opposite is the case. Mars-Hill has pointed this out in the ‘Jesus is not God Almighty’ thread and cites support from NT Wright.
This has some massive implications. For one, it means that if God did become a man, then he did something completely out of left field. That being the case, it is reasonable to expect the apostles to give some sort of detailed reconciliation of the issues raised by this extraordinary theological revolution with the contemporary and scripturally informed expectations of their peers.
Much precious parchment is devoted to explaining that the Messiah had to suffer and die, though this was witnessed to in the law and the prophets. So too the resurrection. Delineating the relationship between faith in Christ and Torah observance was also given a lot of attention. Yet we are to be persuaded that those 1st Century Jews set about proclaiming that their one God was after all divisible into three, one of whom became a man and died, but that this was slipped in though the back door!
Had this been the case, are we really to believe that the most scandalous accusation that could be levelled against the ‘sect of the Nazarene’ was that they disparaged Moses? Is it just a coincidence that the Christological controversy only really seems to kick off in the post-apostolic period, after Justin Martyr introduced his Logos Christology? Or did the debate around Jesus’ divinity start here because it is at this point that the process of making him into God first began?
Why we differ where we differ
Theocrat - there is so much scattered now all over the site on your various responses to comments on the ‘Is Jesus God?’ subject, that I just don’t know where to begin!
Essentially, you seem to be saying that arguments for the divinity of Jesus rest on inferences, whereas the more certain testimony of scripture (to you) is that Jesus is a unique divine agent, but human nonetheless.
There are points that you pick up, but also points that you ignore from previous posts - and to my mind some of the more damaging ones to your case are the ones ignored!
Further detail has arisen coincidentally since your last visit to the site - such as Thomas’s confession (‘My Lord and my God’), Stephen’s dying prayer (‘Lord Jesus receive my spirit’) and so on. And you yourself are actually importing post-biblical concepts in your insistence that the ‘oneness’ of God was held as something like a mathematical formula. Duality in the godhead appears in Jewish literature of the post-exilic period and was not denounced as heresy, and, to echo Wright, the ‘oneness’ of God was not an interior analysis of his being.
My argument is, against yours, that in just about every way possible Jesus is represented not just as a human messiah (which he was), but as God, in the terms of reference which were held by Jews: which were not abstract/philosophical, but in terms of symbol, and polemic - visualised in contrast with and opposition to polytheistic idolatry.
On many points we are in agreement - such as that there is a harmony (of a kind) between different biblical texts, which display a continuing (recapitulatory and incremental) thread of divine purpose over millennia of history, and also that Jesus is thoroughly human. But we are just going to have to differ over his divinity. To me, it is not an issue that can be divorced at all from the biblical narrative and testimony, and it is not something cooked up by a later church. Also there seem to be a lot of people out there who agree - though in the end it is arguments and not heads that count. I think the arguments I have been advancing are convincing.
Crucially, I don’t believe there is a gospel to proclaim if Jesus is only man, I don’t believe he could have been the sin-bearer if he was only of Adam’s line, and I don’t believe a gospel of a human-only Jesus is one endorsed by the Spirit when it is proclaimed. Inferences? Maybe - but I base these four-square on the scriptures.
Peter, There are points
Peter,
I’m sure you will appreciate that if keeping track of my many scattered postings is a bit of a task, so was writing them! I’ve had a lot to respond to and done my best to address all the points raised. If, after you’ve read through them all you still feel that there is anything that I have neglected, please feel free to point it out and I’ll do my best to deal with it.
Also, if you’re referring to the most recent posts by smcloud, rickRitchie and others I plan to write replies to them ASAP.
‘One’ is a number. Surely it doesn’t take an army of rabbis several hundred years to reach the conclusion that numbers pertain to the real of mathematics. Also, it’s stretching things a bit referring to the number one as a ‘formula’. It’s not rocket science, it’s the first number we learn to count to.
I would be interested in seeing the sources you refer to here. I also wonder if heresy-hunting was as much a feature of post-exilic Judaism as church history.
James Dunn has done considerable research in this area in his ‘Christology in the making’. The closest thing to it that he can identify is Philo’s attempted shotgun marriage of Judaism with Greek philosophy which relied very heavily on allegory. Even then, his language, for the most part, seems to have involved the personification of God’s attributes. Justin Martyr seems to have read Philo without understanding this and developed his Logos Christology as a result. This was the first step towards the kind of explicit articulation of Jesus as God Almighty that we find in the later creeds.
Yes, but I see this quote as supporting the last statement I made in the post above. Because it was the process of making Jesus into God that was the cause of all this discussion in the first place. It was the ‘fathers’ with their schooling in Greek philosophy that first began gazing into the navel of God. It was they that imported terms such as ‘essence’ and ‘substance’ into discussions about God and brought ontology to the table. Extrabiblical words and models had to be introduced in order to articulate an extrabibilical doctrine of God and of the Messiah.
Why is there no discussion of this momentous development in the New Testament period, if it was during this time that the church developed these ideas? God becomes a man yet this raises not so much as a murmur until about 100 years later!
Jesus is presented as being the prophet like Moses. Yet the prophecy was made in connection with Israel’s request that someone other than God speak to them (Deuteronomy 18:16-17). Therefore to be the prophet like Moses Jesus had to be someone other than God.
Jesus is the temple. But the temple isn’t God, it’s the place where God dwells. In Ezekiel’s vision he abandoned the temple, just as he abandoned his Son on the cross. So God and his temple are not the same thing, any more than God and his Son are. Worship of the temple as divine in and of itself would have been considered idolatrous. If Jesus associated himself with this symbol, should we not draw the same conclusions about worshipping him?
Jesus is our great high priest. The qualification for priesthood was humanity. Someone who could relate to human weaknesses and limitations. Yet, since God cannot be tempted with sin he wouldn’t make a very good priest. Even the angels are disqualified on these grounds (Hebrews 2:16-18).
As the sacrificial lamb, Jesus had to give his life. Again, God who cannot die could not do this.
Jesus is another Isaac, another David, another Adam etc. etc. Obviously, none of these men where God.
I accept that this is your view. It’s just that I’m yet to see where scripture demands this.
One important issue for me that comes up again and again as I consider this subject is the cry from the cross and the death of the Son of God. This is something I would love to discuss with you (And, of course anyone else who wants to participate), when you have the time to post something on it. The conversations so far seem to have revolved around objections to what I have set out. Though I welcome all these thoughtful comments, it would be good if we could also spend some time exploring a few of my objections.
Nothing if not persistent
Theocrat - on the plus side, I have to concede that there is more to the unitarian case, in terms of biblical argument, than I would ever have imagined, and you are nothing if not persistent! I do think, however, that your alternative explanations of the verses Phil quotes to substantiate Jesus’s pre-existence are bordering on the desperate.
Just to mention some of the places where your arguments break down: your post on John 8 reaches the point where you provide your own interpretation of John 8:58 - and it simply fails to make any sense. Much simpler to take the obvious interpretation: Jesus was linking his own identity with YHWH through the use of the phrase: ‘I am’ - which was not only an echo of Exodus 3:14, but a much closer echo of the ‘I am’s’ of Isaiah in Isaiah 44-48 (which in themselves echo the Exodus self-disclosure).
You say that ‘the temple isn’t God, it’s the place where God dwells’ … ‘So God and the temple are not the same thing’. That is correct, but by identifying himself throughout his ministry with the function of the temple, Jesus was also identifying himself with the temple not just as the place of God’s presence, but as the very shekinah glory of God itself (John 1:14).
You overlook how consistently Jesus claimed for himself authority to do what only God could do: eg declare himself lord of the sabbath, forgive sins, reverse ritual uncleanness procedures, and through his ministry to include all categories of people who were ritually excluded by the holiness code.
In fact what is so fundamentally remarkable about the ministry of Jesus is how self-centred it was. An agent of YHWH, especially a human agent, would have been more careful to acknowledge himself as such. Jesus did the opposite: hence the remarkable repetitions of ‘I am’ throughout John’s gospel, as opposed to ‘YHWH is’.
Yes, Jesus was our high priest, but in the line of Melchizedek, not Aaron; a priest like Melchizedek ‘without beginning of days or end of life, like the Son of God he remains a priest forever’ - Hebrews 7:3.
The use of the word ‘God’ is, for us, heavily influenced by the Enlightenment use of the word - and theology swerves towards a philosophically abstract use of the term. Your response above illustrates my point precisely: the ‘oneness’ of God was not conceived in terms of mathematical number, but distinguishing God from polytheism. The conception held by Israel of her God was not in terms of mathematical unity, but in God as creator, and through covenant, election, eschatology and symbols. It is perhaps not insignificant that Isaac Newton, author of principia mathematica, was also a unitarian (and, to illustrate the folly of the ‘wise’, a committed alchemist).
It’s possible that all the ways in which Jesus is identified with YHWH are ‘inferences’; the trouble is that there seems to be such an overwhelming amount of inferences! Maybe you need to try some lateral thinking: look at things from a different angle - suppose Jesus was God …
Flaw...
The flaw here is reference to the frequency of ‘I am’ throughout John’s gospel, which is hardy historical.
http://www.pluralist.co.uk
Flaw
The perceived flaw doesn’t really alter the argument - the key issue becomes how Jesus is presented if John’s account is not taken to be literal. The same would apply to the gospels.