Divinity of Christ
At the suggestion of the powers that be, with the closing of the Filioque Question, I will open a thread on the Divinity of Christ.
Not that I doubt the Divinity. I firmly believe it. But I do have a question. At what point did Jesus become divine?
John definitely claims Jesus was the divine word. Through the word all creation came to be.
Matthew and Luke imply Jesus became divine at his conception through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Mark seems to claim Jesus became divine at the point of his baptism by John the Baptist.
Paul claims that Jesus "was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus is Lord." Romans 1:4; but, later, he did move to John's position. That he was by nature God, but emptied himself and became human https://www.bible.com/bible/111/PHP.2.6-11.niv
Where are you in the continuum? My bet is most of us would agree with the Johnine position, but there does seem a progression of thought: from divinity at resurrection, to divinity by adoption, to divinity at incarnation, to preexisting divinity. How comfortable are you with this?
Not that I doubt the Divinity. I firmly believe it. But I do have a question. At what point did Jesus become divine?
John definitely claims Jesus was the divine word. Through the word all creation came to be.
Matthew and Luke imply Jesus became divine at his conception through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Mark seems to claim Jesus became divine at the point of his baptism by John the Baptist.
Paul claims that Jesus "was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus is Lord." Romans 1:4; but, later, he did move to John's position. That he was by nature God, but emptied himself and became human https://www.bible.com/bible/111/PHP.2.6-11.niv
Where are you in the continuum? My bet is most of us would agree with the Johnine position, but there does seem a progression of thought: from divinity at resurrection, to divinity by adoption, to divinity at incarnation, to preexisting divinity. How comfortable are you with this?
Comments
I think it might be a stretch to say that “Matthew and Luke imply Jesus became divine at his conception through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit,” or that “Mark seems to claim Jesus became divine at the point of his baptism.” What Matthew, Mark and Luke wrote can be interpreted in the ways described, but those aren’t the only ways to interpret what they wrote, and I think it’s a stretch to assume they intended the interpretations described.
That said, Jesus, as the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, didn’t exist until he was, well, incarnate—conceived as a human being. Meaning I think @Alan Cresswell has it—the divine was incarnate as Jesus.
This. The human nature of course didn’t exist before it became united with the divine nature, and both together are one Christ— so we can speak of Jesus as pre-existent, it may sound a bit sloppy but the divine Word and Son isn’t somebody OTHER than Jesus… To talk as if he were would be a kind of adoptionism. Better to sound a little sloppy than to run the risk of having hearers assume the Son / Word is someone different than Jesus who more or less just hitchhikes on him. Bleah.
I mean, c'mon. 'In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God ...'
None of this adoptionism shtick.
It's all there in the Creeds and the Ecumenical Councils. And, I'd argue, in scripture.
'To the law and to the testimony. Everyone unto their tents Oh Israel.'
This. All of this. Amen.
Thank you for your input.
To the others, may I direct you to Bart Ehrman's book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Erhman states Jesus never claimed divinity. In fact, he refused to allow people to worship him. For Erhman, it is only after Jesus appeared to his disciples that they began to think of him as divine.
The point is, the development on Christology took over 300 years to finally be settled in the Nicene Creed, It was not at all automatically accepted in the early church. Look at some of the "heresies" that lead up to the Nicene Creed
We need to rediscover the past in order to affirm the present.
The only evidence we have is the texts. I presume Ehrman somehow attempts to devalue the texts in order to support his theory. But if you look AT the texts, the claim to deity is all over the place--and not only in John. It runs through the Gospels all over the place.
I do believe that Jesus is the only begotten son of God and that he lives. I believe that I need Jesus for my salvation.
What about Matthew 23:34, "Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify..."
What about all his "I AM" statements--which his enemies clearly understood as a claim to deity, or else why try to stone him?
What about the way he accepted worship, both before and after his resurrection? You'll find that in both Matthew and Luke, not just John.
@Telford I don't believe in a literal creation story either, and I don't accept the concept of original sin. Neither Judaism nor the Orthodox Church have that idea as it is in the West. I have to accept the Trinity as a mystery, because if I think about it too much it falls apart for me.
However like you, I have a strong devotional relationship with Jesus, which has been revolutionised in the last couple of years by the Jesus Prayer and a prayer rope.
That's not to say the assumption is false, merely that the evidence is largely circular.
Of course I don't think he's divine at all, if he even existed. But I still have a lot of scripture and theology rattling around in the ol' brainbox.
@mousethief it seems your lil' ol' brain is muddling up Bible verses ... 😉
@Lamb Chopped no, we don't just have the text. We have 2000 years of accumulated T/tradition and yes, let's throw reason and experience into the mix too.
That's not to topple scripture from its primary and 'normative' position but it is a both/and.
No Church, no scripture.
And vice versa.
We can't uncouple one from the other.
How can we be sure any of the Gospels are accurate, not just John's?
I pretty much agree with @pablito1954. I don't take the Genesis Creation story literally either nor do I believe in Original Sin in the way it has traditionally been framed within Western Christianity.
Neither do many 'Western' Christians either, come to that.
I am thoroughly Trinitarian though, but that doesn't mean I don't struggle with the 'Mystery' at times. If the Father is God then the only-begotten Son is God.
So is the Holy Spirit.
It was a close-run thing between Arianism and O/orthodox Trinitarianism in the 4th century. I'm not pretending it wasn't. But at the risk of being a pain in the neck, as I undoubtedly was on the filioque thread, the latter is a mast I nail my colours to.
It isn't just that we need Jesus for our salvation. He is our salvation.
Here I stand ...
Here’s the link, it’s in Purg.
https://forums.shipoffools.com/discussion/5659/the-boring-thread-on-how-we-know-what-we-know-about-what-jesus-said-and-did/p1
I believe that the gospels may not be totally accurate but they are good enough for me.
I am not arguing from textual criticism. I am just pointing out it took a while for the Divinity of Christ to be fully established
But let's just assume Mark is the original written gospel. Along side it another unwritten gospel, Q, was circulating, and another unwritten source of sayings was out there. And then there is the Johnine sources.
Mark had no problem with saying Jesus' divinity was formally established at the time of his Baptism. He is not denying a preexisting divinity. It just was not his concern.
Matthew and Luke both used the Markan Gospel and the Q Gospel in their writings. Q would have claimed the Divinity of Jesus is established at the incarnation.
It is as if the curtain has been drawn open a little bit more than what Mark was saying. While Mark had opened the curtain a fourth of the way, Matthew and Luke drew it back to half way.
Then there was the pesky heresy called Gnosticism that said Jesus was divine only he appeared human.
To which John comes in, throwing the curtain wide open, asserting that Jesus is fully human and fully Divine. Thus, the I AM sayings which is found only in John
Then along comes Arian who said ""If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: hence it is that there was when the Son was not. It follows then of necessity that he had his existence from the non-existence."
Which the church finally addressed in the Nicene Creed. It is as if they drew up the lights even more than what had already been established in the Gospels.
The curtain is wide open, the lights are fully up. As much as we can tell, Jesus is Divine period.
But even then we still see through a glass but dimly. Eventually we will fully understand. It will not be in this world, but in the new world.
is that really what you want to know, or do you want only to know "At what point was his Deity fully established as truth in the minds of his hearers?" which is an entirely different question?
I'm asking, because you seem to be shifting the goalposts. There's your OP, and then there's this:
You need to pick one.
We have already offered you data from the four Gospels that shows Jesus presenting himself as Deity basically from the get-go. So if you want that first question answered, to anyone who accepts the texts as authoritative, the answer is "He has always been God."
If you want rather to discuss the question of when did his disciples realize the truth about him, that's another discussion, because certainly they disagreed on the subject and some do even today.
But please, pick one question. It's super confusing otherwise.
@Nick Tamen You are saying that my interpretation of the Baptism of Jesus is only an interpretation. I am thinking the process Mark relays is very similar to how David felt he was adopted by God in Ps 2:7ff
7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:
He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron;
you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”
And Paul does make the point we are formally adopted into the Body of Christ at the time of our baptism.
I didn’t question the basis or reasonableness of your interpretation, which I think “only an interpretation” implies. I questioned the reasonableness of saying “Mark had no problem with saying Jesus' divinity was formally established at the time of his Baptism,” given that Mark doesn’t explicitly say that Jesus’s divinity was formally established at the time of his baptism. Whether one thinks that’s what he meant depends on how one interprets what he wrote.
It was a rhetorical question.
I take issue with that. Which is why i refer you to that thread, rhetorical or not.
Today I think, given the clear recognition of the Trinity as a Mystery, it might well have been seen as a matter of conscience which understanding one chose. Not a reason for anathema.
I’m like Gamaliel. I accept as a matter of faith the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, and the paradoxes that produces. Alternatively, Jesus could well be accepted as fully human, fully Divine, while holding that he was a fully Divine Son, created by God.
And I’m honestly not sure whether the Arian view, coupled with “fully human, fully Divine”, puts any strain on either belief or practice. I think the Orthodox view was that the Arians were wrong because they were!
I’m told Rowan Williams has written a very good book on the subject but I haven’t read it. Maybe I will now?
The Nature of Will, the Will of Nature
What was divine about Jesus, the hypostatic union? A nature, no question, and its questionable will. In addition to a human nature and its will; there are two of each since Constantinople in 681.
The hypostatic union is of two natures, human and divine, and two wills, from those natures, instantiated in one prosopon - person - ousia - substance (Chalcedon, 681) or hypostasis - person, subsistence (Ephesus, 431, 250 years earlier).
Tho' the will is questionable:
Luke 22:42: "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done."
Matthew 26:39: "Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.'"
Philippians 2:6-8: "Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross."
Nothing in the text indicates whether the will was intrinsic to the hypostatic union, i.e, Jesus, or extrinsic in the Father. But, I imagine that a nature or two has a will, have wills, in a person.
So far so good.
Cosmic Christ
The human prosopon, hypostasis, person Jesus could not exist before his conception.
The text says he did. As @Gamma Gamaliel alludes.
He says he did: 'Before Abraham was, I am'. 'I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven'.
That is the mystery. For those who trust, i.e. believe on no rational basis, not as coherent true belief, the gospel of John and the epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians.
So, ignoring the scandal of the particular for a moment, to try and make this hypothetically-statically work, the divine nature included memory that the human mind of Jesus could access. Including an oddly local, Earth parochial, infinitesimally particular way. That opens a can of wyrms. It would be appropriate that Jesus' mind could access a memory of Earth's supernatural history, or be given a vision of it. Naturally, of course, he dreamt it. Unless we're saying that Satan is a demiurge local to this universe's supernatural history. Which also leads us back to the scandal of the particular. That a bloke-divine hybrid is the only hypostatic incarnation in eternal, infinite creation. The multiverse.
That all creates one biiiiiig blind spot 'mystery' doesn't it.
Not good.
Atonement
This isn't good either.
What you see as a series of illogical contradictions I see as an attempt to understand an admitted mystery. Personally I’m not exclusive about that. People can honestly come to different conclusions and I can be friends with them. I don’t do anathematising.
At the end of days according to Jesus (sheep and goats) what matters the most is the demonstration of kindness to the suffering and disadvantaged. Folks who not only talk that talk but walk that work are folks I relate to.
Nope.
Barnabas
Thank you. I always appreciate your contributions. Your manner. You take my points seriously and yet they do not, as they should not, could not challenge your faith.
(My vicar's going through the Valley of Death in triplicate and I'm very glad he has faith.)
I lived with some of the illogical contradictions quite happily while I believed. I now cannot believe and the illogical contradictions have proliferated, But. I would, and could, happily live with them all, make it, the mystery, all work, if God in Christ came back on for me. If God in Christ were true, the humanity of the hypostatic union, the enculturation, the ignorance, let alone of his followers, would easily explain his attempt to understand the mystery of himself, and their even less capable attempts to understand him.
Including his use of damnationism to which you allude. God admitting failure.
And in my unwanted loss, I too wish that I could demonstrate kindness to the suffering and disadvantaged.
I quite like that. It’s intended as a wake up call to the indifferent.
Ok. I apologise that I didn't make it clearer what I meant.
Look at the context. @Telford asked how we could be certain that John's Gospel was accurate. My reply was a rhetorical one.
What I should, perhaps have written is:
"How can we be sure any of the Gospels are accurate, why single out John's Gospel rather than the Synoptics, particularly when there are variations and disagreements on points of detail between the Synoptic Gospels.
That doesn't mean they aren't reliable or 'accurate.'"
I could then have cited some of the standard apologetics, but I didn't have time to go into all of that.
I'm not dismissing your thread but I don't have time to go looking it up and citing chunks of it. From what I remember it was very thorough and detailed and also, understandably of course, very Protestant. I don't mean that in a perjorative way.
I wasn't questioning or challenging the reliability of the Gospels, simply posing a rhetorical question to Telford as to why he was singling our John's Gospel rather than the other three.
Hope that clarifies things.
Elaine Pagels described the progression towards Trinitarianism as “The triumph of John”. Although I disagree with quite a lot of her writings, I think she had a point.
Yes, I'd like to read Rowan Williams's book too. Perhaps I should.
If I were to be pedantic, or sectarian perhaps? - I might suggest that you don't actually 'accept as a matter of faith the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity' as that goes hand in hand with the eternal procession of the Son from the Father.
That doesn't mean I don't regard you as Trinitarian.
But from a Big O perspective the eternal Word of God as a non-created being is non-negotiable. That doesn't mean that we don't recognise nuances and variations in the Arian position nor that the final wording of the Creed wasn't a close call. We accept all of that.
Nevertheless, we'd regard it as a slippery-slope to accept an Arian position in however modified a form.
You will find Orthodox who are very suspicious of both liberal and evangelical Protestants as they feel they are iffy and inconsistent on the Trinity. Early dissenting groups like the Independents and Baptists were riddled with all sorts of ancient heresies - Arianism, adoptionism, Appollinarianism, Sabellianism ...
Some of their leading lights spent their lives combating such things.
Heck, even in our own day the late Douglas McBain said that the Baptists were 'inconsistently orthodox.'
There were Christological controversies back in Spurgeon's time and again across the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland during the 1970s.
I regard my Baptist brothers and sisters as small o orthodox but without the 'ring-fence' of Creeds and Councils - which doesn't necessarily imply a straitjacket - they can easily topple into error - from a Big O perspective.
That doesn't mean I'd anatematise them or consider them to be going to hell in a hand-cart.
I'd be interested to see what Rowan Williams has to say on this one.
I'd certainly accept that some of the terms used about Arius were very intemperate - even, or particularly, in liturgical contexts. The guy is condemned in no uncertain terms. That's par for the course for polemics from way back then - and it continues to this day of course, in all Christian traditions. My own can be particularly guilty of that. We can certainly have more heat than light.
As an Orthodox Christian I don't believe in 'sola scriptura', of course, but accept that it doesn't necessarily imply solo scriptura. I certainly wouldn't dismiss @Lamb Chopped's very thorough analysis of the scriptural texts, for instance.
I s'pose I do have a positional stake in all of this as it was concern about rather loose Christology and Trinitarianism that was a major factor in my moving towards Orthodoxy.
I felt that the evangelicalism I'd been involved with was losing its moorings on these issues to some extent.
Hence my entrenched stance on the filioque thread and my refusal to budge on traditional Creedal understandings here.
That doesn't mean, though, that I don't think there's room for debate (as long as people end up agreeing with me of course ...
I'm trying to tread carefully and not cause offence. Whether I'm successful in that is for others to judge.
You've done it again. Spoken with the voice of wisdom. And that's what I'd have said when I believed. Truly. I did. One can deconstruct Jesus' hard sayings and reconstruct them according to taste. And we both have excellent taste.
... but. It's... grandiose. Not of him. But of us. We can come nowhere near. But we delude ourselves that we do. Wellllll, we're on the side of those who do. Whoever they are.
We come nowhere near, and that's OK. Reach and grasp. He projected our ideal self. And he could only deliver supernaturally.
Ah well.
Sure. I'm not saying there wasn't development.
You're right that's Psalm 2.