Jesus is both truly God and truly man, being the incarnate Son of God. He was the eternally preexistent Word and Son who was God in nature, but then entered into time to take on human flesh. There never was a time when the Son did not exist because he is also truly deity. That is the Christian teaching.
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[Jesus is both truly God and truly man, being the incarnate Son of God. He was the eternally preexistent Word and Son who was God in nature, but then entered into time to take on human flesh. There never was a time when the Son did not exist because he is also truly deity. That is the Christian teaching.]
It may be Christian teaching, but I hold it poorly put, not least because ‘take on’ can sound pugilistic. I remain convinced that we undermine the Christian revelation when we use J
esus-is-God shorthand: N T Wright helps in seeing that though
Jesus can be shorthand
covering the noncarnate son, linking in, Jesus is technically the temporal carnate son and
not the eternal noncarnate son. We should open the biblical
letters from the biblical
envelopes (texts), and put them into systematic theology.
If trinitarians we should distinguish between the father, the son, and the spirit, though affirming one ‘name’ (Mt.28:19), one
ousia. Eg 1 Cor.8:6—the father was θεος, not the son, said Paul. Paul elsewhere stated that the son
was θεος. Different senses of the word; translatable differently (nuances matter).
Paul highlighted the father as ‘God’. What would he have made of ‘the crucified god’ (Moltmann)? I decap since Moltmann’s term is polytheistic, as if God were a
type of god, a crucified
type of god contrasted to noncrucified gods. To claim the father-crucified (God-crucified) is patripassianism, an early heresy (Tertullian’s lament). Yet that’s a pitfall of an imprecise J
esus-is-God phraseology.
So, Jesus-is-God-
the-son at least reduces somewhat the heresy slope of
Jesus-is-God, by
not reducing trinitarianism. In isolation Jesus-is-God tends to fall into the all too frequent Sabellianism of Hillsong: “You
alone are God, Jesus!”, which disallows the idea of the father and the spirit being persons but allows them to be modes: there is one god, Jesus (Reuben Morgan). Stuff and nonsense! The trinity is God. GIGO.
Next we should see that the eternal son ‘became’ human, incorporated a personal human mode, and that the human mode lacked the omnis. In short, while there never was a time when the son did not exist—because he is truly deity in substance—there was a time when his Jesus-mode, his carnate mode, did not exist. Jesus, conceived c.6 BC, was the incarnation of God-the-son.
And let’s scotch the imprecision of his being ‘in flesh’: the Greek is εν σαρκι (1 Tm.3:16) and how it should be translated is another matter. As I said, the English term ‘flesh’ is imprecise, as Paul showed. The Latin
in carne has the value of a technical foreignness not tied to ‘flesh’, so can be kept. But ‘in flesh’ can easily suggest a mere dropping into flesh, a Christology below true humanhood. I would not deny Jesus his humanity.
I subscribe to deity as deity being omni. I do not subscribe to Jesus as being omni (Apollinarianism). He was truly human, and a truly human pattern for us: his miracles were not by his deificity (though he was deific), but by the spirit (Mt.12:28), as ours can be (though we are not deific).
With Wright, we can and should in principle differentiate between God the son as noncarnate, and God the son as carnate, and draw systematic truth from the unsystematic text.
[Neither did Paul deny the eternal preexistence of the Son (1 Cor 8:6, for instance), which must be the case if the Son is deity. Do you agree?] To prefix my reply, ‘preexistence’ suffers from implying a time
before, whereas deity is intrinsically
beyond time-space. I prefer the term ‘beyond’, though panentheists prefer the idea of deity existing solely in the time continuum, evolving alongside matter. C S Lewis pictured the trinity to space-time, as being like an uncreated cube (three-dimensional personhood) with a created line (one dimensional time-space) within. Even JWs affirm the
preexistence, howbeit as a divine angel, of God’s son before the incarnation.
I agree that 1 Cor.8:6 did not deny the
beyondness/transcendence of God the son noncarnate, although when penning it Paul might have merely thought of the carnate Christ who became functional lord (Php.2:9-11). Fuller theology picks up other meanings of the term
lord (κυριος), ranging from a temporal
sir to an eternal Yahweh/deity meaning (ontology).
[You seem to be contradicting yourself here by saying the Logos was deity but then saying the Logos was not divine. Can you clarify what you mean?] Yes. I go back to the Latin distinction: Roman emperors generally hoped for death to elevate them to the divine (
divus) level, not the deity (
deus) level. Where we have both terms, I hold that the uncreated logos was the higher, deus, not the lower, divus. Since we call angels or chocolate divine but not God, in systematic talk I disallow that lower term to deity.
[Anyone who denies the deity of Jesus, the deity of the Son, cannot, by definition, be a Christian.] Do you not see that when churches divided into Arian or Athanasian, the Christians within either side did not cease to be Christians simply because they found themselves to be on the wrong side of the creedal divide, and that indeed credal formulation was slow and muddy, with majority votes toggling for years between Arius and Athanasius? That Arian congregations moved away from, or one might say failed to move into, higher light and onto firmer ground, is another matter, but essentially their divide was over the deity of God’s son noncarnate (huiology), not God’s son carnate (christology).
I might deny the deity—but not the deificity, the deity-link—of Jesus. I deny not the deity of God the son. Jesus is the permanent temporal mode of the uncreated eternal second person of deity.
[…begs the question as to what a church is and what a Christian is.] Perhaps wrongly I take the term
church to mean
of the lord (kuriakon), though the NT kurion focus is Jesus. I take any church by definition to be Christian, of Christ the lord. I take it that any church, being Christian, can and will be of mixed (and probably mixed up) theology, since comprised of mixed (and probably mixed up) Christians. That many congregations (εκκησιαι) can wrongly claim to be churches, to be Christian, I do not deny. Thus I would deny that Spiritualists
truly have churches, whatever States might define them as, since Spiritualism is not of the lord.
