Why does God Allow
Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why Does God Allow Evil
0908.htm
May Christians work on
Saturdays? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Protestant
Rhetoric vs Sabbath Refuted.htm
Should
Christians obey the Old Testament law? /doctrinalhtml/Does
the New Covenant Abolish the OT Law.htm
Do you have an immortal soul? Click here:
/doctrinalhtml/Here
and Hereafter.htm
Does the ministry have authority? Click here:
/doctrinalhtml/Is
There an Ordained Ministry vs Edwards.html
Is the
United States the Beast? Click
here: /doctrinalhtml/Are
We the Beast vs Collins.htm
Should you
give 10% of your income to your church?
Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Does
the Argument from Silence Abolish the Old Testament Law of Tithing 0205 Mokarow
rebuttal.htm
Is Jesus God? Click here:
/doctrinalhtml/Is
Jesus God.htm
Will there be a third resurrection? Click here:
/doctrinalhtml/Will
There Be a Third Resurrection.htm
FURTHER EVIDENCE THAT JESUS IS GOD
A Reply Against
Gary Fakhoury, Anthony Buzzard, and Wade Cox
Revised
edition
by Eric V.
Snow
Table
of Contents
Introduction: Is God Only One Person?.................................................... 1
THE OLD
TESTAMENT EVIDENCE FOR PLURALITY IN THE GODHEAD RECONSIDERED
Does the
Old Testament Uniformly Reveal God to Be One Person?..... 3
Plural
Verbs and Participles That Refer to God........................................ 5
Genesis
1:26 Remains an Obstacle to Unitarianism................................. 6
The Plural
of Majesty is a Hoax!.................................................................. 6
The Two
Beings Who Are One Yahweh.................................................... 7
Psalms
45:6-7 Implies the Duality of the Godhead................................... 8
Yahweh
Sends Yahweh?............................................................................. 9
Yahweh
Delivers Israel by Yahweh?........................................................... 9
The
Shema's Use of "Echad" Supports Binitarianism............................ 10
Moses
Maimonides Uses "Yachid" in Creed........................................... 10
How God Is
One Yet Is More Than One Person..................................... 11
The Old
Testament's Theophanies Versus Arianism............................. 11
When the
Messenger of Jehovah Is Jehovah......................................... 12
Does
"God" Mean "God"?........................................................................ 13
Forcing
the New Testament to Fit a Preconceived Interpretation
of the Old................................................................................................. 13
Shades of
Darrell Conder?....................................................................... 14
The Dead
Sea Scrolls Describe a Divine Messiah................................. 15
THE
PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL PROBLEMS WITH ARIANISM
Historically,
Arianism Based on Pagan Philosophy................................. 16
Will the
Real Polytheists Please Stand Up?............................................ 17
Was Jesus
a Demigod?........................................................................... 18
NEW
TESTAMENT TEXTUAL EVIDENCE FOR THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST REEXAMINED
Was Jesus
"a god"?.................................................................................. 19
Does
Omitting the Article Before the Word "God" Prove Much?........... 20
Does
Colwell's Rule Apply to John 1:1's Third Clause?........................ 21
Why Would
John Omit the Article in John 1:1's Third Clause?.............. 22
Does the
Omission of "the" in Greek Prove "God" Changes in Meaning? 24
Are the
Jews That Dense?....................................................................... 24
Rationalizing
the Throwing of Stones at Jesus........................................ 25
Should
Doctrine Cause Us To Reject Sharp's Rule When Inconvenient? 26
A Doxology
Shows "God" Means "God".................................................. 27
The Blood
of God...................................................................................... 28
Jesus Was
on the Throne of God............................................................ 30
Jesus Was
in "the Form of God".............................................................. 31
How Do We
Know Whether Jesus Eternally Existed?............................ 33
COUNTER-ARGUMENTS
AGAINST THE DEITY OF CHRIST ANALYZED
Psalms
110:1 and Christ Being "Adoni".................................................. 34
Did Jesus
Deny His Deity?....................................................................... 36
Jesus Was
Worshiped, Revisited............................................................ 37
Can
Everyone Forgive Sins?.................................................................... 39
Does God
Have to Fit Our Definitional Box?........................................... 39
Does The
Bible Contradict Itself About Jesus' Nature?......................... 41
Are Men
and Women Members of the Same Species?......................... 42
"All
the Fullness of Deity" Revisited......................................................... 43
The Error
of the Eternal Generation of the Son....................................... 44
Why
"Monogenes" Doesn't Mean the Word Had a Beginning............... 46
A Son Has
the Same Nature as His Father.............................................. 46
Do New
Testament Authors Identify Jesus as Jehovah?....................... 47
Origen
Strikes Again!................................................................................ 48
Was Jesus'
Pre-existence Literal?........................................................... 49
THE THEORY
OF ATONEMENT AND THE CHEAPENING OF CHRIST'S SACRIFICE
Must Jesus
Be God To Save Us?............................................................ 51
The
Governmental Theory of Atonement................................................ 52
The
Implications for the Atonement in the Story of Zaleucus................. 52
Doctrines
Have to Be Logically Consistent with Each Other.................. 53
Conclusion: Should We Accept the Jewish Doctrine of God?.............. 54
INTRODUCTION: IS GOD ONLY ONE PERSON?
Recently, in The Journal,
several writers have denied Herbert Armstrong's teaching of the divinity of
Christ, and have written long articles defending Unitarianism and/or Arianism,
such as Sir Anthony Buzzard, Charles Hunting, Wade Cox, and Gary Fakhoury. Using a number of seemingly strong
arguments, the last has argued in a three-part series in The Journal
that Jesus is not God. However, once it
is realized that Fakhoury's superstructure of arguments rests on questionable
premises, it all comes tumbling down.
The four basic premises are:
(1) The Old Testament evidence
almost uniformly reveals God to be one Person.
(2) The Jews correctly
interpreted the Old Testament as for God's nature, but not Jesus' statements
concerning His Deity in the New Testament.
(3) It's implicitly assumed that
God's revelation of His nature in the Bible is fully developed and fundamentally
uniform from Genesis to Revelation.
Hence, any New Testament evidence that points to Jesus being God or for
multiplicity in the Godhead is dismissed by using unusual translations or
interpretations of the Greek, taking alternative readings of the textual
evidence, or said to be an allegory since it supposedly contradicts the Old
Testament. (4) When a text that calls Jesus "God"
can't be evaded by any other means, then it's said the word "God"
doesn't mean "God" (i.e., the Supreme Being who is omniscient,
omnipotent, the author of creation, and all-loving), but has some lesser
meaning such as "divine hero" or "an angel." Doctrine ends up dictating to grammar,
instead of grammar dictating doctrine.
Although some arguments by Buzzard, Hunting, and Cox are dealt with in
passing, here below mainly Fakhoury's articles denying the Deity of Christ are
examined by further developing each one of these points, which shows that the
New Testament when taken straight reveals Jesus to be God.[1]
THE OLD
TESTAMENT EVIDENCE FOR PLURALITY IN THE GODHEAD RECONSIDERED
DOES THE
OLD TESTAMENT UNIFORMLY REVEAL GOD TO BE ONE PERSON?
A fundamental problem the Church of
God faces today comes from those who think at some level the Jewish
interpretation of the Old Testament (or the Sacred Calendar) is usually
correct. Hence, some believe the Jewish
interpretation of the Old Testament concerning when Pentecost (Sivan 6) and
Passover (Nisan 15) occur is right, even though convincing evidence from the
Scriptures shows otherwise. Similarly,
Fakhoury (as well as Buzzard and Hunting in their recent article in The
Journal) operate from the premise that the uniform Jewish teaching that God
is one Person is correct, even when the Old Testament by itself contains evidence
that contradicts it. By merely citing a
large number of texts that say "God is one," Buzzard and Hunting seem
to think that the emotional impact from raw repetition (which uses an assumed
definition of "one" as a monolithic singularity) is nearly enough to
carry the argument by itself. As for
Fakhoury, he makes a false "trilemma" when writing, "Either
Jesus was not eternal God made flesh, or the Hebrews did not believe there is
only one God being, or their writings are not, in fact, entirely sound guides
for faith and doctrine." A fourth
option is ignored, namely that the Jews have misinterpreted their own
Scriptures, especially because they rejected Jesus as the Messiah and the New
Testament as the further revelation of God.
Making an analogy to the Sabbath as a doctrine, Fakhoury argues that the
traditional Jewish view of God being one couldn't possibly have been changed
without controversy in the New Testament.
But as such texts as John 20:28 and Matt. 28:9 demonstrate, following
His miraculous resurrection from the dead, which had confirmed acts and
statements He had made during His ministry implying or affirming His Deity,
Jesus' disciples almost instantaneously acceptance of His Deity vaporized their
old views that God was one Person. The further
clear revelation of God instantly trumped traditional Jewish
interpretation of Old Testament Scripture, thus permanently removing all
controversy from the primitive, first-century church. Fakhoury also contends that the Old Testament "prophets do
declaim on the nature of God and are consistent (and insistent) that there is
only one God person/being." Here
he merely accepts the Jewish interpretation of the OT. As argued in my previous essay, the
definition of "one" the Bible has may not be what we humans think it
should be based on our human reasoning.
In reality, since the New Testament helps us interpret the Old
Testament, and vice versa, we should be wary of following in the footsteps of
centuries-old Jewish tradition. This
tradition has been influenced by paganism (as Philo and the name of the month
"Tammuz" show) and has not had the Holy Spirit to guide its
development for, by now, almost two millennia.
Let's consider some of the evidence that shows that the Old Testament
adumbrates faintly what the New Testament clearly reveals: God is one, but more than one Person is God.
Consider the brilliant insight of
evangelical scholar Robert Morey, who applies deductive instead of inductive
reasoning to the understanding of Scripture.[2] A priori (before experience), suppose
a Unitarian or Arian inspired the writing of the Bible. How would that differ from what a Binitarian
(who believes two Beings make up the one God) author would have had placed in
the Bible? After opening the Bible and
examining its text (i.e., the evidence), whose presuppositions/hypotheses are
confirmed? For example, would a strict
Unitarian allow the word "elohim," a noun which is translated some
400 times as "gods," to be the main word for "God" in the
Hebrew Scriptures?[3] "Elohim," which George Wigram's Englishman's
Hebrew and Chaldee Concordance of the Old Testament (p. 79) lists as a
masculine plural, appears well over 2000 times as the word for
"God." The second most common
word for God in the Old Testament is "adonai," "the
Lord." The Jews usually read this
word aloud in their synagogues in place of "Yahweh" when the
Tetragammaton (YHWH) appears in the Old Testament. "Adonai," which appears over 400 times in the Hebrew
text, is a plural according to Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English
Lexicon (p. 10). When the two most
common words for God in the Old Testament are actually plural nouns, does the
Old Testament evidence favor the Arians and Unitarians' case as much as they
think? By these nouns, probably nearly
every page of the Old Testament (besides Esther) bears implicit witness to the
multiplicity of the Godhead.
PLURAL
VERBS AND PARTICIPLES THAT REFER TO GOD
Further evidence that God implicitly
revealed Himself to be more than one Person comes from the cases where plural
verbs or participles refer to God. For
example, the verb "caused to wander" in Gen. 20:13, which modifies
the word "God," is in a plural form in the Hebrew. In Gen. 35:7, which says "God revealed
Himself to him [Jacob]," the word "revealed" is in a plural
form. The adjective for
"Holy" in Josh. 24:19 is in a plural form, so it could be translated
"God, the Holy Ones." In
Psalms 58:11, David used the plural form of "judges" in reference to
God. A crude literal translation into
English would be "God who judge on earth." In Job 35:10, the word "Maker" is actually a plural
participle in the Hebrew (i.e., "Makers") according to the vowel
points. Notice Psalms 149:2: "Let Israel be glad in his
Maker." The word "Maker"
is in the plural in the Hebrew, which also happens in Isa. 54:5. The word "Creator" in Eccl. 12:1
is actually a masculine plural participle, "Creators," in the
Hebrew. Hence, Fakhoury was incorrect
to say that "verb tenses where elohim is used for the God of Israel
are always in the first person singular, never the first person
plural." Rabbi Tzvi Nassi, a
lecturer in Hebrew at Oxford University, even says that the "passages are
numerous" which lack "grammatical agreement between the subject and
predicate."[4]
Clearly, the Old Testament refers to
God as both the "Creator" and "Creators," as the
"Maker" and "Makers."
A Unitarian could accuse a Binitarian of "a mathematical
impossibility," of believing the one God is made up of two Persons, yet
the Hebrew agrees with the latter's viewpoint by implicitly portraying God as
"one," but that "one" is defined in a way that allows for a
multiplicity of Beings (re: Gen. 3:22,
"like ONE of US.") Because a
whole major doctrine might not be fully revealed in one place in Scripture
since its bits and pieces may be scattered about within it, Binitarian teaching
isn't self-contradictory. The Unitarian
view has the burden of explaining away the many pieces that don't fit it, while
the Binitarian view embraces the evidence that portrays God as one as well as
the evidence favoring more than one Person being God. Hence, contrary to what Fakhoury maintains, the Binitarians
aren't "making the exception the rule" or engaging in selective
proof-texting, but they are formulating a doctrine that explains ALL of
the evidence, anomalous facts to Unitarianism included, not just a good part of
it.
GENESIS
1:26 REMAINS AN OBSTACLE TO UNITARIANISM
Consider the cases where God uses
plural pronouns when speaking, starting with the classic text on the subject: "Then God said, 'Let Us make man in Our
image, according to Our likeness'" (Gen. 1:26). Belying the claim that this is a supposed "plural of
majesty," the Jews anciently had trouble explaining this text. In the Midrash Rabbah on Genesis, one
rabbi made the following comments on it:
Rabbi Samuel bar Naham in the name of
Rabbi Jonathan said, that at the time when Moses wrote the Torah, writing a
portion of it daily, when he came to this verse which says, 'And Elohim
said, let us make man in our image after our likeness.' Moses said, Master of the Universe, why do
you give herewith an excuse to the sectarians [i.e., Christians], God answered
Moses, You write and whoever wants to err let him err."[5]
Obviously,
if this text and those like it could be explained away as the plural of
majesty, the rabbi(s) who wrote this passage could have easily disposed of this
text's potential problems, since they certainly knew how Hebrew worked.
THE PLURAL
OF MAJESTY IS A HOAX!
According to Morey, during the intense
nineteenth-century debates between Unitarians and Trinitarians, the plural of
majesty was revealed to be a hoax popularized by the famous Jewish scholar
Gesenius. Using the plural of majesty
to explain this and other passages away commits the fundamental mistake of
reading a modern monarchical convention back into Scriptures originally written
millennia ago when this form of speech was unknown. As Nassi notes, the plural of majesty was "a thing unknown
to Moses and the prophets. Pharaoh,
Nebuchadnezzar, David, and all the other kings throughout . . . (the
Law, the Prophets, and the Hagiographa) speak in the singular, and not as
modern kings in the plural. They do not
say we, but I, command; as in Gen. xli. 41; Dan. iii 29; Ezra i. 2,
etc." Compounding their error, the
Unitarians attempt to explain even the plural word "elohim" away as a
form of the plural of majesty, forgetting that the use of the royal
"we" is limited to direct discourse and commands, not narratives or
descriptions.[6] Given this kind of evidence, citing the
authority of Gesenius or Bullinger is simply not persuasive as any kind of real
proof that the Hebrew really does use the plural of majesty. The Unitarians and Arians should completely
abandon this argument if they can't cite ancient Semitic literature in which
kings used the plural of majesty.[7]
Consider the three other cases where
the God of Israel used plural pronouns:
"Then I [Isaiah] heard the voice of the Lord [Adonai], saying,
"Whom shall I send, and who will go for US?" (Isa. 6:8). "And the Lord [Yahweh] said, 'Behold,
they are one people, and they all have the same language. . . . Come, let US go down and there confuse their
language, that they may not understand one another's speech" (Gen.
11:6-7). "Then the Lord [Yahweh]
God said, 'Behold, the man has become like ONE of US, knowing good and
evil" (Gen. 3:22). To explain away
such anomalous facts of Scripture, the Unitarian has to invent unconvincing ad
hoc explanations, such as "the plural of majesty," "the angels were
speaking or being spoken to," etc.
By contrast, the Binitarian's teaching, which maintains that God is one
but more than one being is God, effortlessly glides over such passages while
still comfortably fitting the many more places where God uses singular
pronouns.
THE TWO
BEINGS WHO ARE ONE YAHWEH
In the Old Testament, several texts
appear which imply a duality in the Godhead because the mention of one Divine
Person is juxtaposed with another's.
First, note Genesis 19:24:
"The Lord [Jehovah] rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone [sulfur]
and fire from the Lord [Jehovah] out of heaven." Here "Jehovah" on earth does
something on behalf of "Jehovah" in heaven! Concerning this text, the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther
(1483-1546) wrote in his commentary on Genesis: "This mode of speaking greatly irks the Jews and they try in
vain to explain it." This text
can't be rationalized merely as using repetition for the sake of emphasis,
because one Person who is Yahweh is contrasted with another who is also
Yahweh since they are in different locations. As Morey remarks, "Just as the heavens cannot be interpreted
as a repetition of the earth, neither can the first Yahweh be interpreted as a
repetition of the second Yahweh."
Furthermore, nowhere in the Pentateuch (which Moses wrote and/or edited)
is a name repeated twice, once at the beginning and once at the end, as a
literary device.[8] Although usually the one who became Christ
was Yahweh as He spoke and acted in the Old Testament, both the Son and the Father
can be called "Yahweh." In
Ps. 110:1, "Yahweh" is applied to the Father. Since either member of the Godhead can be
Yahweh, this disposes of Fakhoury's argument that "theological
incoherence" results from saying Jesus is Yahweh. For example, Fakhoury argues that Simeon's
addressing the Lord in heaven would be incorrect if "the God of Israel he
was praying to was no longer in heaven but lying in his arms?" This kind of question assumes the Arianism that
he is trying to prove, since it implicitly denies anyone else is God but one
Person, and if Jesus was God and the only one who was God, then who was God in
heaven when Jesus was down on earth?
The Binitarian is easily rescued from this dilemma: The Father is Yahweh and God also,
not just Christ, since the Godhead is dual, not singular.
PSALMS
45:6-7 IMPLIES THE DUALITY OF THE GODHEAD
Psalms 45:6-7 is another place which
implies more than one being is God:
"Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever [cf. Isa. 9:7]; A
scepter of uprightness is the scepter of Thy kingdom. Thou has loved righteousness, and hated wickedness; Therefore
God, Thy God, has anointed Thee with the oil of joy above Thy
fellows." Although evidently
starting with a purely human king, when the Psalmist reached this point, he
spoke to God Himself, since the king was the Messiah in type. Only if the Psalmist believed the Messiah
was both human and divine does this ultimately make any sense. The ancient Jews interpreted this chapter
messianically, since at least one Targum paraphrased v. 3 as, "Thy beauty,
O King Messiah, is greater than those of the children of men." The various purported alternative
translations exist for Ps. 45:6 that attempt to escape the vocative "O God"
simply aren't persuasive. (The vocative
is a grammatical construction in which the person spoken to is named in a
sentence addressed to him or her. For
example, if a young girl calls out to her mother, "Mommy, come
here!," she has used the vocative).
After performing a highly technical grammatical and contextual analysis
of this passage's Hebrew, Murray J. Harris concludes: "The traditional rendering, 'Your throne, O God, is for ever
and ever,' is not simply readily defensible but remains the most satisfactory
solution to the exegetical problems posed by this verse." The RSV's translation, "Your divine
throne endures for ever and ever," can't be regarded as an equally likely
translation, for the reason Harris notes:
"If [Hebrew word for 'throne'] is in fact qualified by two
different types of genitive (viz. a pronominal suffix kap denoting
possession and an adjectival genitive, [elohim], meaning 'divine'), this
is a construction that is probably unparalleled in the OT (see GKC [Gesenius'
Hebrew-English Lexicon] [section]128d)."[9] Again, to interpret honestly the word of
God, Christians should go with the main or standard meaning of the grammar and
syntax except when that would plainly contradict other passage(s). Preconceived doctrines shouldn't dictate to
grammar, but grammar should determine doctrines.
Since the writer of Hebrews plainly
speaks of Jesus in v. 8, this verse's reference clear for any Christian. Consequently, the next verse's context
("Therefore God, Thy God, has anointed Thee") indicates that the Son
has a "God" over Him, despite He Himself was called God in the
preceding verse! Remember,
"Messiah" means "the anointed one," so it's necessary that
God the Father would anoint God the Son so He could be the Messiah. Since the Psalmist asserted that the Messiah
would be God yet have a God over him, this makes New Testament passages like
John 20:17 more understandable:
"Jesus said to her [Mary Magdalene] . . . 'I ascend to My Father
and your Father, and My God and your God.'" This Old Testament prophecy shows that although God the Father is
over God the Son in authority, still Jesus is God. Here again the Old Testament implies a plurality of Persons in
the Godhead, since the God of v. 8 has a "God" over Him in v. 9.
YAHWEH
SENDS YAHWEH?
Another passage which implies the
Godhead's plurality is Isa. 48:12-16:
"Listen to Me, O Jacob, even Israel whom I called; I am He, I am
the first, I am also the last. . . .
And now the Lord God [Yahweh] has sent Me, and His Spirit." God is plainly the speaker in this section
of Scripture, so the context indicates that God is the "Me" of v.
16. Yet, this "Me" is sent by
Yahweh, i.e., the Father. (As noted
above, the Father is clearly called "Yahweh" in Ps. 110:1). To evade this verse's implications, a
Unitarian may unconvincingly assert that (suddenly!) Isaiah is speaking in
verse 16. But there's little evidence
that someone besides Jehovah is speaking, and nowhere else does Isaiah suddenly
insert himself into some passage where God speaks and then exit.[10] Verse 17 shows that God is still speaking,
"Thus says the Lord [Jehovah] . . ." Furthermore, neither the Septuagint (the
ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament) nor the
Targums (Aramaic paraphrases/translations of the OT made by the Jews) place a
break in verse 16. Hence, only by
holding a preconceived notion about God being a solitary Person could someone
insist Isaiah spoke instead of God in v. 16.
YAHWEH
DELIVERS ISRAEL BY YAHWEH?
Another problematic Old Testament text
for Unitarians and Arians is Hosea 1:7:
"But I will have compassion on the house of Judah and deliver them
by the Lord [Yahweh] their God, and will not deliver them by bow, sword,
battle, horses, or horsemen." Here
God is speaking ("I," as the preceding verses show), yet He suddenly
seems to refer to Himself in the third Person, saying "Yahweh" will
deliver them, as if "Yahweh" were not the one speaking. As Morey pungently explains, "If I
as the first person promise to something for you as the second person
through a third person, am I not implying that I am not the same
as the third person? If grammar means
anything, the answer is, 'Yes.'"[11] Although these four passages (Gen. 19:24;
Ps. 45:6-7; Isa. 48:12-16; Hosea 1:7) don't directly assert the multiplicity of
the Godhead as John 1:1 does, their indirect evidence for God being
"elohim" and not just "el" requires of the Unitarians some
fancy footwork to evade.
THE
SHEMA'S USE OF "ECHAD" SUPPORTS BINITARIANISM
The central Old Testament text thrust
forth as proof that God is one Person is the Shema, which begins with Deut.
6:4. This passage, which every good Jew
has memorized by heart in Hebrew, reads:
"Hear, O Israel! The Lord [Jehovah]
is our God, the Lord [Jehovah] is one."
Of course, some dispute surrounds the exact translation into English,
although the traditional Jewish interpretation agrees with the NASB translation
cited above. One of the RSV's marginal
translations is, "The Lord is our God, the Lord alone." (Since John Wheeler, a Living Church of God
laymember who can read Hebrew, believes the accents point to the passage
meaning, "the Eternal is one," this meaning is analyzed here). Drawing again upon Morey's insight about
applying deductive reasoning to interpreting Scripture, let's examine the word
translated "one" above. It
happens to be that nine different Hebrew words are translated "one,"
but several of these are only applied to man or woman, so they can't plausibly
refer to God. Of the words for
"one" that can be applied to God, one of them, "yachid"
(#3173) means absolute, indivisible unity, while the other candidate is
"echad" (#259), which can mean a composite unity, of more than one
entity put together and regarded as "one," although it more
frequently refers to a singular unity as well.
For example, a husband and wife became "echad" when joined
together in sexual union (Gen. 2:24).
So, a priori, if Moses applied "yachid" to God in Deut.
6:4, that would seriously damage the Binitarian position. But if "echad" describes God's
unity, that would corroborate it, since it teaches that God is two Persons yet
one God, i.e., a composite unity. Since
"echad" is the word actually used to describe God's oneness in Deut.
6:4, this passage actually supports the Binitarian position better than the
Unitarian position. For Unitarians to
wield the Shema successfully against Binitarianism, "yachid" should
appear here, not "echad."
MOSES
MAIMONIDES USES "YACHID" IN CREED
Further evidence that
"echad" doesn't quite capture accurately the strict monotheism of
Judaism comes from the word Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the greatest medieval
Jewish philosopher, chose when drawing up thirteen principles or articles of
faith, which were still taught to Jews centuries later. For the second point, which proclaims God's
oneness, he used not "echad," from the Shema, but
"yachid"! Obviously, the word
"echad" lacked the philosophical precision necessary to teach that
God is one Person only. What the second
point of Maimonides' creed underscores is the traditional Jewish conception of
indivisible unity of God, which requires the word "yachid" for its
exact expression: "I believe with
perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be his name, is a Unity, and that there
is no unity in any manner like unto his, and that he alone is our God, who was,
is, and will be."[12] What was good enough for Moses wasn't good
enough for a medieval Jewish philosopher nearly three millennia later! Far from inflicting a knockout blow against
Binitarianism, the Shema's use of the word "echad" instead of
"yachid" actually supports it better than Unitarianism!
HOW GOD IS
ONE YET IS MORE THAN ONE PERSON
In an argument that echoes one made
almost a century ago by the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, Charles Taze
Russell, Fakhoury argues that the Binitarian conception of God is self-contradictory: "One plus 1 doesn't equal 1 any more
than 1 plus 1 equals 1."[13] This problem's solution is really
surprisingly simple: God is one, by the
Bible's definition of "one," but this describes a composite
unity, not a singular unity.
Herbert Armstrong's explanation was that the Father and the Son were
separate Persons/Beings (which a literal reading of the heavenly scenes in
Revelation supports) while they still composed one Family. (True, Scripture never says, "God is a
family." But since it describes
the Godhead's members using the terms "Father" and "Son,"
and refers to Christians as "Sons of God," it's sensible to deduce
from this evidence that God is a Family).
When Jesus said, "My Father and I are one," He used the
neuter, not masculine, word for "one." Had He used the masculine word, it would have implied the Father
and Son were the same identical Person.
But as shown by the reaction of those hearing Him proclaim His unity
with the Father, the neuter implied that "I and the Father are one and the
same entity by nature and essence."
Similarly, a husband and wife are separate persons, yet they are one in
sexual union. There's only one true
church (i.e., a spiritual organization), but there are many members of it (I
Cor. 12:20). We should define and use
the word "one," as the Bible does, not as human, philosophical
speculations say it should be used. As
the growth of Islam may indicate, perhaps many humanly find a God who is one
Person/one Being a simpler, "cleaner," easier concept to accept. But what is simple isn't necessarily what is
true or Scriptural. The straightforward
teaching of Scripture is that the Father and Son are one in essence, substance,
and purpose, but are separate Persons, which John 10:30 in its context supports.
THE OLD
TESTAMENT'S THEOPHANIES VERSUS ARIANISM
Scripture affirms that nobody has ever
seen God the Father (John 5:37):
"You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His
form." Similarly, John 1:18 reads,
"No man has seen God at any time."
The context indicates both times that God the Father was meant, not
"God" generally speaking.
Fakhoury uses a creatively narrow definition of "seen" to
avoid the consequences of John 1:18 for Arianism, but this falls before the
greater detail of John 5:37. After all,
John 1:18 speaks broadly, and says nothing about restricting its application to
God's face or His glory. Why does this
matter? Because the Old Testament
repeatedly describes God appearing in a human form before men, mankind plainly
saw God. And if the Father wasn't the
One seen, then Jesus, God the Son, had to be the One seen. For example, Jacob wrestled with God, not
just any average "angel" (which means "messenger" in both
the Greek and Hebrew), as Gen. 32:24-30 and Hosea 12:4-6 show. Trying to explain this away by saying the
word "God" doesn't mean "God" falls before the reality that
"elohim" wasn't used in patriarchal times for the angels in the
Bible. God appeared another time to
Jacob as well: Gen. 35:1, 3, 7, 9,
13-13. A most remarkable theophany
occurred when Abraham talked one-on-one to Yahweh in Gen. 18, as shown
especially by verses 1, 22, 33. The
elders of Israel saw God according to Ex. 24:9-11: "Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu and seventy
of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel; and under His feet
there appeared to be a pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself. Yet He did not stretch out His hand against
the nobles of the sons of Israel; and they beheld ['stared at'] God, and they
ate and drank." Notice that Moses
still did see God (Ex. 33:18-33; 34:5-8), for although "you cannot see My
face" (God's full glory) He did promise, "you shall see My
back." In Hebrew thinking,
"face" was used as a synonym for "glory" because at that time
the Jews believed the essential character of a person could be seen in his face
(Prov. 7:13; 21:29; Eccl. 8:1).
Furthermore, note that John 5:37 says God's voice has never been heard,
yet obviously God's voice was heard in the Old Testament, such as when the Ten
Commandments were proclaimed to Israel at Sinai (Deut. 5:4-5, 22-31; Ex.
20:1). Clearly, it couldn't have been
the Father who spoke at Sinai.
WHEN THE
MESSENGER OF JEHOVAH IS JEHOVAH!
Another set of theophanies arises as
the "angel of the Lord" becomes "the Lord" Himself! It must be remembered that the words
translated "angel" in both the Hebrew and Greek both really mean just
"messenger." Therefore, they
don't have to refer to a created spirit being (Heb. 1:7). Hagar spoke to the "angel" of
Jehovah in Gen. 16:7-14, who she identifies as God Himself in v. 13. When Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac
(Gen. 22:9-14), the "Angel" implied He was Jehovah by saying in v.
12, "I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your
only son, from Me." So if
Isaac had died, he would have been sacrificed to this "Angel." Nowhere does Scripture command sacrifices to
be made to any (created) angel, so this Messenger had to be the Eternal
Himself. During the burning bush
incident in Ex. 3:1-15, the "Angel" (i.e., Messenger) of Jehovah in
v. 2 becomes Jehovah Himself in v. 4.
When Balaam insisted on going to see Balak to get dishonest gain and his
donkey spoke miraculously, the passage interchangeably uses the terms
"Messenger of Yahweh" and "Yahweh"! (See Num. 22:21-35). Fakhoury attempts to explain away the
striking theophany in Judges 6:3-22 involving Samson's father Manoah and his
wife by saying they only saw an angel whose acts they attributed to God as his
authority. This interpretation dodges
the text's intended meaning, because seeing a created "angel" would
not be life-threatening, but seeing the Messenger of Yahweh who was Yahweh
would be life-threatening. This
interpretation reads additional thoughts into the text in order to make it
compatible with Arianism, instead of taking it straightforwardly. Even more problematically for Unitarianism
and Arianism, the mere fact that the Old Testament elides the "Messenger
of Jehovah" into "Jehovah" implies by itself that more than one
Being is called Jehovah! One (Jesus) is
the messenger, or "spokesman," to humanity for the other (the
Father).
DOES
"GOD" MEAN "GOD"?
After arguing John 1 is an allegory,
Fakhoury runs up against (evidently) the most insurmountable obstacle of all to
a Unitarian or Arian--John 20:28:
"Thomas answered and said to Him, 'My Lord and my God!'" Since this text cannot be dismissed as a
textual error, as a mistranslation, as omitting the word "the" before
the word "God," or as an allegory, when all else has failed, the last
weapon in the Arian/Unitarian arsenal has to be unsheathed: "Jesus is clear in this Gospel that theos--god--can
have a much broader meaning and application than only to refer to the one
eternal God, which we normally mean when we use the word." That is, the word "God" doesn't
mean "God." Of course, a
similar argument is deployed against Ps. 45:6-7 and Isa. 9:6, by saying "elohim"
and "el" had broader meanings than just Yahweh, the God of Israel.[14] Here the presuppositions of the interpreter
become all-controlling: Is a
preconceived definition of God being "One" (as in one Person)
determining how the Hebrew and Greek should be translated or interpreted? Hence, the main or general meaning of the
Biblical languages' grammar and syntax is overturned in the name of a doctrine
developed from certain texts only. When
the doctrine that God is only one Person encounters trouble with certain texts
(i.e., potential falsification), the Unitarian/Arian replies that the word
"God" suddenly loses its standard meaning in order to save his
doctrine. As noted above, since Peter,
Paul, Barnabas, and John's angel were so quick to correct those who
misidentified them as gods or worthy of worship, how can we accept plausibly
Fakhoury's explanation that Christ blithely accepted without rebuke Thomas'
would-be blasphemy that He was his Lord and his God? In the context of Jesus' stunning victory of life over death,
Thomas' testimony can't be credibly watered-down to some weaker definition of
"God," especially when a weak idea of divinity was fundamentally
alien to the Jewish monotheistic mind-set about the true God.
FORCING
THE NEW TESTAMENT TO FIT A PRECONCEIVED INTERPRETATION OF THE OLD
After unveiling this kind of argument,
one has to ask, "What kind of Scriptural texts would be necessary to
falsify Unitarianism in favor of another version of monotheism?" Such ad hoc, stop-gap
"explanations" could be endlessly devised to neutralize any problematic
texts confronting it. This word game
only becomes plausible to its users and readers when assuming one belief above
all: The Old Testament evidence
overwhelmingly favors God being One Person.
Therefore, the New Testament evidence that keeps seeming to say
otherwise (John 1:1,14; 5:18; 8:58-59; 10:30-33; 20:28; Titus 2:13; Rom. 9:5;
Heb. 1:3,6,8-9; I John 5:20; II Pet. 1:1; Rev. 1:8; I Cor. 10:4,9; Eph. 3:9; I
Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:16-17; Mark 2:7-10; Matt. 14:33; 28:9; I Tim. 3:16; etc.,
etc., etc.) has to be constantly bent to fit a preconceived view of the
Old Testament. (Of course, as explained
above, the Old Testament evidence is hardly as one-sided as the Unitarians make
out, but let's neglect that point for now).
The Unitarian/Arian error resembles that of, but goes in the opposite of
direction of, Brinsmead's Verdict articles against Sabbatarianism. Brinsmead basically argued that the Epistles
interpret the Gospels' meaning, and the New Testament interprets the Old
Testament, instead of having a mutually interactive process of each helping to
explain the other continually.
Likewise, but conversely, the Unitarian approach upholds a particular
interpretation of the Old Testament, the Jewish view that God is one Person
only. It then proceeds to force any
conflicting New Testament evidence to fit its Procrustean bed by any means
necessary. In turn, this approach to
the hermeneutics (systematic interpretation) of Scripture denies progressive
revelation by implicitly assuming that if a given doctrine is taught in Scripture,
it is revealed equally clearly throughout the Word of God. But suppose that God, for whatever
mysterious purposes of His own, left the multiplicity of the Godhead shrouded
in the Old Testament (cf. I Cor. 13:12), but made it clear in the New. If a Unitarian exalts the Old Testament far
above the New for the nature of God, thinks no progressive revelation exists on
this issue, employs texts that lack the clarity commonly thought (such as Deut.
6:4's use of "echad" for "one"), reads a preconceived
definition of "one" into them (i.e., as one Person), assumes the Jews
couldn't be wrong when interpreting their own Holy Word, and uses every ad hoc
"explanation" conceivable to evade New Testament texts that falsify
his doctrine, self-deception can be the only end for this kind of hermeneutics.
SHADES OF
DARRELL CONDER?
One of the most problematic features
of Fakhoury's scholarship is revealed by his essay's footnotes to John Hick's The
Myth of God Incarnate, a standard mainline liberal Protestant work. Hick's work, like many other liberal Protestant
works, relies on the discredited Werde-Boussett-Reitzenstein thesis.[15] Briefly summarized, it claims that
first-century Christianity was a pagan mystery religion (like Mithraism)
proclaiming yet another dying savior-god (here, Jesus of Nazareth) for gentiles
to embrace, but clothed with Jewish and Old Testament conceptions that obscured
the underlying Hellenistic reality. As
this interpretation of Christianity became popular in the early twentieth
century among liberal scholars, it affected their interpretation of the New
Testament. Before coming into vogue,
the nineteenth-century liberal Protestants who attacked Trinitarianism in the
name of Unitarianism labored long and hard to prove the Bible didn't teach the
Deity of Christ. Even to this day,
Jehovah's Witnesses still use the same arguments that these scholars devised
over a century ago. But, with the rise
of the Werde-Boussett-Reitzenstein thesis, liberal scholarship switched gears. Instead of denying that the New Testament
taught that Jesus was God, they readily admitted this, in order to find
evidence that Jesus was just another "dying savior-god." Hence, by tying Biblical Christianity's core
belief to Rome's pagan mystery religions, the liberals unearthed a seemingly
powerful argument to bury Biblical Christianity with. Now, clearly, Fakhoury totally denies the claims of the
Werde-Boussett-Reitzenstein thesis, which presently directly menaces the Church
of God in the form of Darrell Conder's Mystery Babylon and the Ten Lost
Tribes in the End Times.[16] But this idea that the word "God"
shouldn't be taken to mean "God," but rather has some lesser, weaker
meaning like "divine hero," etc., plainly has its intellectual roots
in the Werde-Boussett-Reitzenstein thesis, which John Hick's work, among many
other liberal works, certainly relies upon.[17] Since this well of scholarship is so clearly
spiritually poisoned, whatever concepts we draw from it should be drunk with
the utmost caution. The mere fact that
the Hebrew meaning for the words "el" and "elohim" in a
very few cases does not refer to the Almighty God or a pagan deity
doesn't mean we are free to read the "weak" definition into any texts
referring to Christ whenever they can't be "explained away"
otherwise. The main, standard meaning
should be assumed to apply, unless otherwise proven, especially when Scripture
won't allow a "watered-down" definition of "God" to be
applied to the one true God in any shape or form.
THE DEAD
SEA SCROLLS DESCRIBE A DIVINE MESSIAH
Hence, when Fakhoury cites Brown,
Driver & Briggs or Gesenius as using a "weak"
definition of "God" for Isa. 9:6, it's quite possible standard
liberal or anti-Christian prejudices influence their choices for what
definition of "el" was meant in this text. After all, in the broad, cosmopolitan Hellenistic/Roman ancient
world, if Jesus was a pagan savior-god like Attis or Mithras, then calling him
a "mighty hero" would make perfect sense, even if it (on some level)
mistakenly reads a pagan Greek idea back into the Hebrew Scriptures. But nowadays, what upsets the liberal
applecart are the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries that shows that the Qumran sect
believed the coming Messiah would be not just the son of God, but God as well. Consider this amazing excerpt from a text
found in Cave #4:
He will be great over the earth
. . . all will worship him. . . . He shall be called
great and he will be designated by his name.
He will be called "Son of God" and they will call Him
"Son of the Most High". . . . His kingdom will be an eternal kingdom
[cf. Isa. 9:7 and Luke 1:32-33, 35], and all His paths in truth and
uprightness. . . . The sword
shall cease from the land and all the provinces shall pay him homage. He is a great God of gods [cf. Dan.
2:47]. . . . His kingdom will be an eternal kingdom, and none of
the abysses of the earth shall prevail against it.[18]
Clearly,
the word "God" in the term "a great God of gods" can't be
downgraded to "divine hero."
Furthermore, this writing destroys liberal scholarship's claims about
Jewish monotheism having no idea that the Messiah was divine, which shows it
wasn't a pagan idea that Paul and/or the early Catholic Church Fathers imported
into early Christianity. Hence, if
ancient Judaism was willing to call the Messiah "a great God of
gods," Fakhoury's claim that "we see that in no case do the Hebrew
Scriptures teach that the Messiah would be God" becomes exceedingly
implausible.
THE
PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL PROBLEMS WITH ARIANISM
HISTORICALLY,
ARIANISM BASED ON PAGAN PHILOSOPHY
Historically, one of the major reasons
why Arius (260-336 A.D.) denied that the Son had eternally co-existed with the
Father was because he applied Plato's concept of the indivisible monas to God
the Father as he interpreted Scripture.
Plato also considered the attributes of the indivisible Monas, or First
Cause, to be incommunicable, meaning they couldn't be shared with any other
entity outside of itself. Following
this logic, Arius denied the Son had the attributes of the Father, such as
eternity and omniscience. He placed the
Son (whom he labeled the "duas," another Platonic term) between the
created world and God as a kind of demigod, who was neither fully God nor only
man. Arius' concept of Jesus clearly is
similar to Plato's portrayal of the Demiurge in his dialog the Timaeus. The Demiurge is the semi-divine actual
creator of the material universe, but his attributes were finite, not
infinite. It has to be remembered that
Arius was part of the same syncretistic Alexandrine school of theologians that
the influential yet borderline heterodox Catholic Father Origen (c. 185-254
A.D.) was in. Undeniably, Origen's
thought was heavily influenced by pagan philosophy (especially neo-Platonism)
in ways even Catholics later denounced.
For example, like the Hindus and Mormons, he believed in the soul's
pre-existence, which the last section of Plato's Republic also
contains. He believed in the eternal
cycles of the creation and destruction of future worlds, that Satan would
ultimately repent, and even the eternal existence of spiritual
intellects/beings who weren't God.[19] Given this pagan philosophical background,
Arianism clearly wasn't the majority viewpoint, despite Wade Cox's claims to
the contrary. In such early post-New
Testament writings by the early apostolic Catholic Church Fathers Clement and
Ignatius (an emphatic Sunday-keeper executed by Rome c. 110 A.D.), Jesus is
undeniably called God. The traditional
Christians who inserted interpolations into the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
plainly believed Jesus was God as well.
The mere fact Arius' contentions produced such an enormous uproar shows
that he was attacking an established consensus in the Sunday-keeping church
about Jesus being God. Thanks to the
discovery of manuscripts of Arius' own writings, it's now clear that pagan
philosophy influenced his interpretations of Scripture. Instead of being a reassertion of strict
Judaic monotheism, Arianism was even more paganized and Hellenistic than
Trinitarian theology. As Gonzalez correctly
notes:
The Hellenizing tendency of Arianism
was constantly manifested in the course of the controversy, when its leaders
repeatedly appealed to the arguments drawn from philosophical speculation,
while the Nicene theologians--and especially Athanasius [the leading defender
of the Nicene creed], as will be seen in the following chapter--usually took
Christian soteriology [salvation theology] as their point of departure.
. . . Therefore, the result
of the controversy is not, as has sometimes been claimed, the victory of a
Hellenized Christianity over another more primitive and Judaic understanding of
the faith, but the setting of a limit, by a moderately Hellenized Christianity,
to the exaggerated influence of philosophical speculation on Christian
theology.[20]
The
historical evidence shows that Arians can't claim that their doctrine
originated in Scripture alone.[21]
WILL THE
REAL POLYTHEISTS PLEASE STAND UP?
As noted above, Arianism in its
original form placed Jesus as a semi-divine creature, as not-quite-God, yet not
only a man either. The question Robert
Bowman raised, borrowed to serve as a subheading above, concerns why Arianism
is not true monotheism. If Jesus is a
"Mighty God" (Isa. 9:6) and "a god" (John 1:1, NWT), but
not a false pagan god, Arianism has two Gods.
The Father is a "big" God, and the Son is a little
"god," and so 1 + 1 = 2![22] The Binitarian avoids this problem by
asserting the Father and Son are both fully God, and that They make up the one
true God. But an Arian can't do this,
since he has to assert that Jesus is not God, yet he won't deny the texts that
show Jesus' status ranks far above any other created beings, thus leaving Jesus
in limbo as a kind of demigod. To an
Arian, Jesus has to be considered a true "god," but not the true
Almighty God (the Father), thus making for an effective polytheism. Wade Cox reflects this, since his position
amounts to a type of polytheism, or at least henotheism (a religion in which
only one God is worshipped, but which asserts that other gods exist): "Now, unless Moses, the psalmists,
Christ, John and Paul were complete liars, there must be multiple elohim. This fact we also know from Hebrew texts,
where elohim is a generic plural term.
These beings were not the one true God. . . . It also appears beyond dispute that the
terms elohim, yahovah, and adonai are plural and apply to
multiple beings who are not the one true God and who are also described as
angels." Ironically, even Fakhoury
gives in to this historic tendency of Arianism by suggesting that if Jesus was
the creator and preexisted, "He could conceivably have been a divine
person included in the 'us' of Genesis 1:26 and elsewhere." Here a fundamental challenge has to be
issued to all Arians: Either Jesus is
part of the one true God, or He isn't.
If you wish to be a strict monotheist who insists God is one Person, you
can't have Jesus haphazardly floating around in status between a God being and
a mere man only. God is one, not one
and a half. If Jesus spoke the words,
"Let Us make man in Our image according to Our likeness," He is 100%
God since the Hebrew text says "elohim," since the Creator, a
defining attribute of God, said these words.
One can't parse "elohim" here to mean at the same time both
the True God, the Creator, and other non- or semi-divine being(s), especially
when the angels are never asserted in Scripture to be the creators of the
universe. Either adopt the Binitarian
view, which assimilates the Father and Son together into one God in two
Persons, or become a Unitarian who totally rejects Jesus as being divine by
reasoning that God is one because He is only one Person. If indeed, "Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One!,"
it can't be Jesus sometimes is "God" and sometimes isn't, if the
Father is the only one true God.
WAS JESUS
A DEMIGOD?
Historically, one of the major reasons
why Arianism lost to Trinitarianism in the decades following the Council of
Nicea (325 A.D.) was because it turned Jesus into a demigod, as Gonzalez
explains:
But one could also see in the inner
nature of Arianism one of the main causes of its defeat. Arianism can be interpreted as an attempt to
introduce within Christianity the custom of worshiping beings which, while not
being the absolute God himself, were divine in a relative sense. The general Christian conscience reacted
strongly against this limited understanding of the Savior's divinity, as was
clearly seen every time the Arians expressed their doctrine in its extreme
fashion. . . . Besides, the
Arian intent of producing such a paganized Christianity by allowing the worship
of a being that was not quite God himself had strong competition in popular
piety that was already beginning to follow the custom--no less pagan, but
certainly less detrimental to the divinity of Christ than Arianism--of
rendering to the saints a type of worship similar to that which antiquity
offered to demigods.[23]
Contrary
to Wade Cox's claims that Arianism (a term he opposes) was the original faith
of the church, in fact "the destruction of the faith by the Greeks and
Romans" would have come even faster had the paganized theology of Arius
been accepted by the Sunday-keeping church.
The first public record of Arius' teachings implies its dissident
nature, since it arose when he objected to a sermon by Bishop Alexander of
Alexandria that stressed the coeternity of the Father and the Son in 318
A.D. Since Arius was reacting against
orthodoxy, it shows orthodoxy existed before Arianism did. Bishop Alexander's letter to Alexander of
Thessalonica confirms this, for in it he complained that Arius was
"attacking the orthodox faith," was denouncing "every apostolic
doctrine," and was denying "the deity of the Savior."[24]
THE NEW
TESTAMENT TEXTUAL EVIDENCE FOR THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST REEXAMINED
WAS JESUS
"a god"?
By citing George Eldon Ladd, Fakhoury
refers to an argument that has been the main way Jehovah's Witnesses have
sought to explain away John 1:1. (To
refute this superficially plausible interpretation of the Greek unfortunately
involves a great deal of explanation which some readers may wish to skip
over). They claim that the Word is a
lesser being than the Father because the word "the" (the article) is
omitted from before the word "God."
Hence, their New World Translation reads, "and the Word was a
god." Ladd's claim that "God
is more than the Word" is fatally wounded by this objection: It turns Jesus into a demigod who isn't
quite God Almighty, but who isn't just an average man either, an issue already
covered thoroughly above. Since God is
one, not sometimes one, sometimes one and a half, applying a "weak"
definition of "God" to the one true God conflicts with the rest of
Scripture, so it must be rejected.
Although admitting for purely grammatical reasons the third clause of
John 1:1 could be translated, "the Word was a god," Harris explains
the insufferable objection to this translation:
But the theological context, viz.,
John's monotheism, makes this rendering of 1:1c impossible, for if a monotheist
were speaking of the Deity he himself reverenced, the singular
["theos"] could only be applied to the Supreme Being, not to an
inferior divine being or emanation as if ["theos"] were simply
generic. That is, in reference to his own
beliefs, a monotheist could not speak of ["theoi," gods] nor could he
use ["theos"] in the singular (when giving any type of personal
description) of any being other than the one true God whom he worshipped.
Although
he says "a god" is a correct translation in Acts 28:6, this is
because the NT here reports what the pagan Maltans called Paul for
surviving a poisonous snake's bite.[25] Hence, the Arians' middle-of-the-road
position is not acceptable: Either
Jesus is fully 100% God by origin, or else He is only a man.
DOES
OMITTING THE ARTICLE BEFORE THE WORD "GOD" PROVE MUCH?
Does the omission of the article (in
English, the words "the," "a," or "an") in the
third clause of John 1:1 really prove all that much? As Harris notes, "From three converging lines of evidence it
becomes abundantly clear that in NT usage ["the God"] and
["God"] are often interchangeable." For example, when Paul writes, "For it is God who is at work
in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure" (Phil. 2:11), it
would be absurd to translate "theos" here as "a god." The genitive form (meaning, a form of the
word "God" that changes its ending because the word for
"of" is built into its ending), "theou," could be
translated "of a god" whenever it appears for it to be consistent
with the Jehovah's Witnesses' rendering of John 1:1. Yet, with some examination (John 1:6, 12, 13; Romans 1:7, 17;
Matthew 5:9; 6:24; Luke 1:35, 78), this argument is exposed as the purest
poppycock.[26] Harris draws particular attention to Romans
1:21, which refers to "the God" before mentioning "God"
without the article. Note the
immediately preceding verse as well, which draws attention to God's divine
essence and attributes (or qualities) as being revealed by the natural world He
created: "For since the creation
of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature,
have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that
they are without excuse. For even
though they knew [the] God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks; but
they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was
darkened." An additional text
showing that "theos" in Greek without the article takes on the
connotation of referring to God's essential and intrinsic attributes, as
opposed to how He acts in history and personally reaches out to humanity, comes
from Paul's contrast between the true God and false gods in Gal. 4:8-9: "However, at that time, when you did
not know God, you were slaves to those which by nature are no gods. But now that you have come to know God, or
rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak and
worthless elemental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over
again?"[27] Each time it appears in these two verses,
the word for "God" lacks the article (is anarthrous). Yet, nobody would assert that the article's
absence in these two verses means a "weak" definition ("divine
hero" or other such blather) of "God" would be correct.
DOES
COLWELL'S RULE APPLY TO JOHN 1:1'S THIRD CLAUSE?
The question, "Why does the word
"God" lack the article in John 1:1?," Morey properly sees as a
prejudiced question. It is prejudicial
because of the a priori weight of Colwell's rule 20, which maintains
that "when a noun is taken out of its normal order and placed before
its verb, 97% of the time it does not have the article" (Morey).[28] Given this fact, the burden of proof is on
those trying to assert the article should have been present, not on those
saying its absence is to be expected.
Furthermore, as John Wheeler as observed, if one back-translates the
Greek into Hebrew, the absence of the article makes perfect sense.[29] Notice that the third clause of John 1:1 has
a word order that's the opposite of the standard English translation: It literally reads "and God was the Word,"
thus placing the predicate (what is being asserted about the subject) before
the subject (who or what is being spoken of).
Colwell explains how his rule applies to John 1:1 thus:
A definite predicate nominative has
the article when it follows the verb; it does not have the article when it
precedes the verb. . . .
The opening verse of John's Gospel contains one of the many passages
where this rule suggests the translation of a predicate as a definite noun
[i.e., not as a quality or attribute, such as "divinity"]. The absence of the article (before theos)
does not make the predicate indefinite or qualitative when it precedes
the verb; it is indefinite in this position only when the context demands
it. The context makes no such demand in
the Gospel of John, for this statement cannot be regarded as strange in the
prologue of the gospel which reaches its climax in the confession of Thomas.[30]
Harris
opposes the application of Colwell's rule to John 1:1 for two reasons: (1) He believes John omitted the article in
the third clause to make sure a reader didn't mistakenly believe the Father and
the Son were the same Person. (2) He
doesn't believe asserting a quality, attribute, or characteristic about
something ("qualitative") and asserting something falls into a
certain category, species, or group of objects with a common name
("definite") are mutually exclusive.
Nevertheless, as pointed out above, Harris believes in most cases the
absence or presence of the article before the word "God" makes little
or no difference in meaning, with a few exceptions, such as Romans 1:21 and
(for him) John 1:1. Harris' line of
reasoning contains force, but it doesn't overthrow a potentially limited,
oblique application to this verse of Colwell's rule, which describes on an
empirical basis how word order in sentences affects whether the article meaning
"the" in Greek is absent or present.
Colwell's rule merely describes what is to be expected in the average or
typical sentence based on standard usage of Greek, not what must be the case or
must be the meaning. It may not be a
controlling or determining rule that "forces" the writer to write in
a certain way here in order for a sentence to "sound" right, but it's
not irrelevant either since it describes what is to be expected under normal
circumstances. Similarly, the makers of
English dictionaries (lexicographers) report what the average definitions or
pronunciations of words are, not what they ought to be, based on
empirical research of what thousands of people have written in print and/or
have spoken in public in previous decades and centuries. Hence, this puts us back in the same
territory as is the case in applying (see below) the Granville Sharp rule to
Titus 2:13 and I Peter 1:1: Do we go
with the usual or expected in meaning based on the standard rules of grammar,
or insist on holding out for something strange based upon preconceived
theology? Harris' denial of the
application of Colwell's rule to John 1:1 provides cold comfort to Arianism
anyway, since it's partially based on asserting the word "God" is
used both qualitatively and definitely of the word
"Word." But since standard
word order in Greek indicates that the article is usually omitted when the
predicate appears before the subject, the burden of proof is on those claiming
John asserted the Word had a limited divinity, not on those who believe John
stated that the Word was fully God.
WHY WOULD
JOHN OMIT THE ARTICLE IN JOHN 1:1'S THIRD CLAUSE?
Although the omission of the article
before the word "God" may mean the term "God" is being used
to emphasize the divine quality or essence of the Being so designated, that
Being so designated is still God. As
Martin and Klann write: "It is
nonsense to say that a simple noun can be rendered "divine," and that
an anarthrous noun conveys merely the idea of quality.
. . . [Jehovah's
Witnesses] themselves later render the same noun Theos as 'a god' not as
'a quality' [such as "divinity."]
This is a self-contradiction in the context."[31] Although tackling the text somewhat
differently, Harris explains that, while demurring against applying Colwell's
rule here:
Colwell wrongly assumes that
definiteness and qualitativeness are mutually exclusive categories, that if
[theos] can be shown to be definite because of principles of word order, it
cannot be qualitative in sense. In the
expression ["pneuma o theos," that is, "God is [a] spirit"]
(John 4:24), for example, [pneuma, i.e., spirit] is both definite (referring to
a specific genus [i.e., category]) and qualitative (denoting a
distinctive quality or inherit characteristic).
It's
illegitimate to read the modern-day vagueness of the word "divine"
(which would allow for a "weak" definition of "God" here)
into what John could have meant by "theos" in the third clause of John
1:1; "Deity" makes for a better translation in present-day English,
if "God" is rejected. As
Harris notes, "In modern parlance, for instance, 'divine' may describe a
meal that is 'supremely good' or 'fit for a god' or may be used of human
patience that is 'God-like' or 'of a sublime character.'" Fakhoury cites Barclay in apparent support
of his own position, but Barclay's statement affirms what no Arian or Unitarian
can accept, viz., "the word was, we might say, of the very same
character and quality and essence and being as God." In his translation of the New Testament,
John 1:1 plainly affirms the Deity of Christ:
"When the world began, the Word was already there. The Word was with God, and the nature of the
Word was the same as the nature of God."
When Barclay says the Word was not "identical" with God, he
affirms what Harris repeatedly states as the reason why John omits the
article: The Father and the Word are
not the same Person, but they both are of the same category of being
"God." As the latter
explains,
In the context of John 1:1, this would
have involved an intolerable equation of persons, with the Logos being
personally identified, in a convertible proposition [i.e., one that can invert
the subject and predicate, yet still be equally true, such as a Hindu saying
that "All is God" and "God is all"], with the Father [o
theos, "the God"] in v. 1b).
Such an affirmation--fitly described as embryonic Sabellianism [the heresy
that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same Person, similar to
modern-day "oneness" Pentecostalism's teaching]--would contradict the
unambiguous clause that immediately precedes:
"The Word was with [o theos, "the God"]." Whatever John's word order, [o theos] would
have been inappropriate in verse 1c, given the immediate context.[32]
So in the
second clause, John uses "God" as the personal name of the Father,
but then in the third clause, he used "God" to refer to the divine
essence or nature, which is said to describe the Word. For example, if someone said, "Smith is
Jones," this statement's terseness could make it seem they are confusing
two separate persons who are both human (of the same essence, who are in the
same category or species). If not a
mistake, this statement would be convertible, which means "Jones is
Smith" is equally true. If true,
it then would have to refer to the same Person, such as a woman whose maiden
name was "Barbara Jones," but whose married name is "Barbara
Smith." Since John wanted to avoid
implying the Father was the same Person as the Son, he omitted the article.
DOES THE
OMISSION OF "THE" IN GREEK PROVE "GOD" CHANGES IN MEANING?
Bowman effectively demolishes the
claim by Ladd (and others!) that the omission of the article in the third
clause of John 1:1 "implies that God is more than the Word." For example, when the same grammatical
construction appears elsewhere in the New Testament, is a "weaker"
meaning of the predicate implied when it precedes the subject? For example, the NWT has in Luke 20:38: "He is a God, not of the dead,
but of the living, for they are all living to him." In the Greek, the word "God" has
no article in front of it, but in translation it's inserted since it makes for
much better English. Does its absence
in the Greek make "the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God
of Jacob" (v. 37) a demigod who isn't fully divine? Similarly, "a ghost" would be
fully a ghost when the disciples thought they saw one (Mark 6:49). Satan is as fully "a manslayer"
and fully "a liar" as anybody has been (John 8:44). Furthermore, whenever this grammatical
construction (the predicate precedes the subject while the article is omitted)
appears using the word for God, the one true Almighty God is meant, not
some limited divinity (see John 8:54; Phil. 2:13; Heb. 11:16; Luke 20:38). Furthermore, there are texts where the word
for "God," "theos," appears twice, once with the article
and once without, with little or no shift in meaning (John 3:2; 13:3; Rom. 1:21;[33] I Thess.
1:9; Heb. 9:14; I Peter 4:10-11). In
these texts, whether it is "the God" or "God," the one
Almighty God is meant in each case. So
how could such an enormous shift in meaning supposedly erupt between John 1:1's
second and third clauses? Consequently,
Bowman maintains the main problem with the Jehovah's Witness translation of
"a god" for "theos" in the third clause of John 1:1 is the
small "g," not the article being omitted or added.[34] Perhaps "the god of this
world" (II Cor. 4:4) has blinded Arians and Unitarians into believing the omission
of the article before the word "theos" in the third clause of John
1:1 proves Jesus wasn't fully Divine.
ARE THE
JEWS THAT DENSE?
In order to avoid the witness of such
texts as John 10:30-33 and John 8:58-59 for the Deity of Christ, Fakhoury's
explanation is that the Jews misunderstood Jesus. How is it known that they misunderstood Jesus? It's assumed a priori that the Old
Testament almost uniformly reveals God to be one Person. So when Jesus says anything that causes the
Jews to accuse Him of making claims to divinity, it's said that their
accusations can't be true in any shape or form. But let's take a more open-minded approach. This argument's fundamental flaw is if
someone allows others to think he is God when he isn't, and he fails to correct
it immediately, he is abominably negligent morally. Since Christ's character was so much higher than our own, an
immediate and clear correction would have been morally required had others
falsely thought that He was claiming to be God. Undeniably, Jesus could attack clearly the errors and
misunderstandings of His listeners when in debate or dialog with them, such as
when Peter thought He wouldn't be crucified (Matt. 16:22-23) or when arguing
with the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matt. 22:15-46). He corrected misunderstandings about how to keep the Sabbath when
confronted with them (Luke 6:1-10; Mark 2:23-28). Importantly, when the Jews were wrong on something, frequently it
involved a misplaced emphasis or wrong spiritual priorities within a list of requirements
to obey God, not complete error (Matt. 23:23; Mark 7:5-13). Furthermore, three times in the Bible after
someone mistakenly started worshiping someone else falsely, he was (or they
were) immediately corrected. When
Cornelius "fell at his feet," Peter told him, "Stand up; I too
am just a man" (Acts
10:25-26). Having been overwhelmed by
the visions he had received through one angel, John "fell down to worship
at the feet of the angel." But the
angel replied to him, "Do not do that; I am a fellow servant of yours and
of your brethren the prophets and of those who heed the words of this book;
worship God" (Rev. 22:8-9). After
the pagans of Lystra misidentified Paul and Barnabas as the gods coming down to
earth as men, they brought sacrifices out to offer to them. In response, Paul and Barnabas tore their
clothes and cried out to the crowd, "Men, why are you doing these
things? We are also men of the same
nature as you, and preach the gospel to you in order that you should turn from
these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the
sea, and all that is in them" (Acts 14:11, 14-15). These were immediate, clear corrections, not
implicit acceptances or "sidesteps" that partially changed the
subject. Hence, since Jesus failed to
correct the misunderstandings of the Jews concerning His own identity, but was
willing to correct them on just about everything else they had wrong (Matt.
23!), the accusations of the Jews can only be seen as correct. Jesus didn't make His divine claims even
more clear because He didn't want to be taken before His time (cf. John 2:4;
7:6, 8, 30; 8:40). Since the Jews were
quick to pick up stones to throw at Him for committing seeming blasphemy (John
8:59; 10:31-32), there was no need to tempt fate unnaturally.
RATIONALIZING
THE THROWING OF STONES AT JESUS
It's a rationalization to say the Jews
were trying to stone Jesus for asserting He was just a greater human than
Abraham in John 8:53, 58-59 since the reasons to stone someone under the law were
clear and narrow. Notice that Jesus'
repeated denunciations of the Pharisees never resulted in a stoning threat,
including when He called them "sons of vipers" destined for the Lake
of Fire (Matt. 23:33). A person could
be stoned for having a spirit (Lev. 20:27), cursing (blasphemy) (Lev.
24:10-23), false prophesying (Deut. 13:5-10), being a disobedient, stubborn son
(Deut. 21:18-21), and the sexual sins of committing adultery and rape (Deut.
22:21-24; Lev. 20:10).[35] True, the Jews accused Jesus of demon
possession (John 8:48, 52). This Jesus
plainly denied (v. 49). The final
trigger was Jesus' statement "before Abraham was born, I am" in v.
58, making it clear blasphemy was why they stoned him. Fakhoury claims that Jesus was merely saying
He was older than Abraham (which ironically undercuts his interpretation of
John 1:1 as an allegory since it concedes Jesus pre-existed literally, not just
mentally in the mind of God). But had
Jesus only meant this, no stoning threats would have come His way, since
asserting that He was older than Abraham wasn't blasphemous, but merely
(seemingly) eccentric. For Jesus to say
lived before Abraham did, who had lived some 2000 years earlier, still
reflected a question about His true identity, since no possible ordinary human
could have lived that long before.
Neither in John 8:58-59 nor in John 10:30-39 did Jesus issue an equally
plain denial that He was God, despite it would have instantly defused the
second incident. Furthermore, as Bowman
observes, the Gospel of John is full of Jesus making "I am"
statements of unusual significance (John 4:26; 6:35, 48, 51; 8:12, 24, 28, 58;
10:7, 11, 14; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1, 5; 18:5, 6, 8). It's logical to conclude these statements are tied to one another
thematically, so to translate John 8:58 as "I have been" robs it of
its apparent tie to these other texts.
The contrast between Abraham's coming into existence and Jesus' "I
am" of self-existence is paralleled by Psalms 90:2, which compares the
mountains' coming into existence with God's eternal existence: "Before the mountains were born
. . . from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God."[36] As Morey observes, the Greek words
translated "I am," "ego eimi," are undeniably in the present
indicative. If Jesus had merely meant
that He had existed before Abraham, He easily could have used the imperfect
tense, "I was." Claiming that
Jesus used the historical present (which uses a present tense in order to make
a description of a past event more vivid) is not persuasive, because this
grammatical construction is found in narratives, not dialogs and debates, as in
John 8.[37] Since Jesus nearly got stoned for saying
"ego eimi," it's simply not convincing to believe those listening
thought He merely meant "I have existed" instead of "I am that I
am."
SHOULD
DOCTRINE CAUSE US TO REJECT SHARP'S RULE WHEN INCONVENIENT?
Ultimately, should doctrine determine
grammar, or grammar doctrine? Shouldn't
the standard, normal meaning of terms and words be controlling, unless the
text's context in Scripture indicates otherwise? There are a number of texts bearing heavily favoring the Deity of
Christ for grammatical and syntactical reasons. Of course, an inventive Arian or Unitarian can always find an
escape hatch or secret passage through any barrier or wall a Binitarian may
erect. But if rationality is going to
prevail when interpreting Scripture, the meaning that's 90-95% likely, not the
5-10% possibility, should be accepted.
For example, the following three texts, according to the Granville Sharp
rule in Greek grammar, should all be references to one Person, not two: "Looking for the blessed hope and the
appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus" (Titus
2:13); "By the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ" (II
Pet. 1:1); "In order that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in
you, and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and Lord Jesus Christ
(II Thess. 1:12, NASB marg.) This rule
of Greek grammar maintains that when two nouns of the same case have the word kai
("and") separating them, if the first noun has the article
("the" or "a") in front of it, but the second noun doesn't,
then the sentence refers to only one person.
But when both nouns have definite articles in front of them, then they
refer to separate persons. Hence, in
the literal Greek, Luke 20:37 refers to "The God of Abraham and God of
Isaac and God of Jacob." The
omission of the articles from the second and third words "God" shows
that only one God is meant, not three.
As Greek scholar A.T. Robertson observed about II Thess. 1:12: "Here strict syntax requires, since
only one article with theou and kuriou that one person be meant,
Jesus Christ, as is certainly true in Titus 2:13; II Pet. 1:1." Further contextual or cultural clues strengthen
the syntactical weight of Sharp's rule for two of these texts. For example, Titus 2:13 uses a stereotyped
formula, "God and Savior," which first-century Jews in Palestine and
the Diaspora routinely used.
Furthermore, even pagans employed it to refer to their kings, such as
the Egyptian Ptolemaic formula "tou megalou theou . . . kai
soteros," (that is, "the great God and Savior") which obviously
only applied to one person/one king.
When discussing this text, Harris notes that Ptolemy I was called
"Savior and God" and Julius Caesar "God and Savior." Hence, by using this formula, but applying
it to Jesus, potentially Paul was pointedly showing, by contrast, who
Christians should regard as their God.
True, an Arian can play games, and hunt for exceptions to the Granville
Sharp rule. Nevertheless, its weight
towards meaning grammatically one person was so great in Titus 2:13 that Winer,
a Greek scholar, admitted that his doctrinal commitment to Arianism was why he
denied that this text referred to one Person!
Ironically, for II Pet. 1:1, even Winer had to concede that it referred
to one Person! Evidently, since I Pet.
1:3 refers to one Person, "the God and Father," it's highly
inconsistent to assert that "Our God and Savior" refers to two! So which will it be? Will grammar determine doctrine, meaning we
accept the (say) 95% likelihood, or will we insist on holding out for the 5%
possibility, because we are so committed because of our a priori bias
and commitment to some doctrine that we think it can't be refuted by further
evidence?[38]
A DOXOLOGY
SHOWS "GOD" MEANS "GOD"
Another hurdle Arians must jump is
Romans 9:5: "and from whom is the
Christ according to the flesh, who is over all [cf. Col 1:15-18], God blessed
forever. Amen." Since this text is a doxology, it is
particularly troublesome to Arians and Unitarians, because it can't be evaded
by saying "God" doesn't mean "God." Why?
A doxology is an expression of praise to God. The word "Amen" ending it indicates it is a form of
prayer to God. Some examples are Gal.
1:4-5; Eph. 3:21; Phil. 4:20; I Tim. 1:17, 6:16; I Pet. 4:11, 5:11. Since Scripture indicates that we should
only pray to the self-existent, almighty, omniscient God (Ex. 20:2; Matt. 4:10;
Deut. 6:12-14), a prayer to Jesus would show He was God in an undiluted
sense. In order to evade this text's
meaning, Unitarians have engaged in all sorts of word games and creative
efforts at punctuation. The principal
problem they face is the reality that the Greek words translated "who is"
must normally grammatically refer back to the immediate antecedent, which is
"Christ." As Robertson notes,
"To make a full stop after sarka [flesh] (or colon) and start a new
sentence for the doxology is very abrupt and awkward." Similarly, Harris explains:
But the overriding difficulty with
this [Unitarian] understanding is that it awkwardly separates [Greek for
"the [one] who is"] from its natural antecedent ["the
Christ."] . . . So my point
stands--that to promote a divorce of ["the [one] who is"] from the
grammatical consonant ["the Christ"] is unconscionable. There is also the consideration that in all
NT doxologies an explicit link is found between the doxology itself and some
preceding word or words; one never find asyndetic [separate, without
conjunctions like "and," to some preceding phrase or statement]
doxologies.[39]
He then
enlists Rom. 1:25 and 11:36 as evidence for this point. In addition, since the word
"blessed" comes after "God," it can't mean Paul suddenly
broke off and exclaimed, "Blessed be God!" Instead, he meant that
Christ is the God whom Christians bless.
Furthermore, the New Testament never has a doxology in it without first
introducing the Person being referred to.
Paul, in Romans 9:5, doesn't even mention the Father in this verse, but
the immediately preceding verses refer to Christ (vs. 1, 3). Harris sees another reason why this verse
most likely doesn't refer to the Father:
With one seeming exception, whenever the word "eulogetos"
("blessed") does appear in an independent or asyndetic doxology in
the Greek Bible, this word appears before the name of God, not after
(see II Cor. 1:3; Eph. 1:3; I Pet. 1:3).
In Rom. 9:5, "blessed" appears after the word
"God." The apparent Old
Testament exception (in the LXX) in Ps. 67:19-20 is simply unpersuasive since
it involves a double case of praise being given to God, in which one
still is in the otherwise universal word order in which "blessed"
appears before the name of God.
Clearly, taking a truly peculiar Old Testament case, and applying
it to interpret a hotly disputed New Testament verse against standard usage is
an extremely suspect exegetical procedure.[40] So although the Arians and Unitarians can
devise the usual inventive ad hoc explanations to save their teaching, the main
weight of this passage points to Jesus being called God by Paul. So again, do we go with the normal and
usual, or do we hold out for the abnormal and rare?
THE BLOOD
OF GOD
A standard rule of textual criticism
comes to the fore when examining Acts 20:28:
"Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the
Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He
purchased with His own blood."
When copying books by hand anciently, a temptation scribes faced was to
"correct" strange or seemingly contradictory statements into familiar
and clearly non-contradictory statements, believing that some scribe before
them had made a mistake. Because Paul's
statement about the blood of God is unique, although the term "church of
God" appears about ten times in Paul's epistles, it appears very likely
that scribes emended "God" to "Lord," or added the latter
to the former. The textual evidence in
the Critical text is highly divided, since the fourth-century Vaticanus (B) and
Sinaiticus (Aleph) have "God," but other of its manuscripts (such as
the fifth century Alexandrinus, "C") have "Lord." The usually more reliable Received/Byzantine
text has two obviously conflated readings with both "God" and
"Lord" appearing, which consequently means on balance, based on
textual evidence alone, there's a decisive tilt towards the word
"God" originally appearing in the text.[41] But then a separate textual issue arises,
with serious implications for the most likely meaning of the text: Did the original read "by [the] blood
of his own" or "his own blood"?
If it read the first, then it's quite possible to believe (although not
necessarily) the phrase has an implied additional word, namely, "Son,"
so it would read altogether, "to shepherd the church of God which He
purchased with the blood of His own [Son]."[42] On the other hand, if the second reading is
correct, it would say, "to shepherd the church of God which He purchased
with His own blood," making this clearly a reference to the Deity of
Christ. With this word order, the
additional word "Son" or "One" couldn't be assumed to be
implied. Since the Critical text
contains the former reading, but the Received/Byzantine text mostly includes the
latter reading, we should favor the second.
Furthermore, as Morey observes, since the New Testament mentions the
blood of Jesus elsewhere, but the blood of God is a unique expression, it would
make more sense to see some scribe(s) "correcting" a manuscript from
"with His blood" to "the blood of His own [Son]." The change may have been motivated by a
desire to quell the ancient heresy of Patripassianism, the belief that God the
Father died on the stake for our sins, not Jesus. Additional textual evidence that this text read "the blood
of God" comes from the early Catholic Church Fathers, who repeatedly used
this term, and had clearly derived it from Acts 20:28.[43] Altogether, although an Arian can always
find a semi-plausible way to wiggle out of this text, its main weight still
comes down on the side of Jesus being plainly called "God" by the
apostle Paul. The careful analysis made
above, as well as Morey's detailed discussion of these texts, shows Fakhoury's
claim that such texts as Acts 20:28, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, and II Peter 1:1
"are all disputed on technical grounds and most were long ago abandoned by
informed scholars as proofs of Jesus' Deity." Maybe they were "long ago abandoned" by the liberal
scholars Fakhoury leans upon, such as John Hick, but Morey and Harris's works
analyzing many of these texts show that this sweeping generalization is without
foundation.
JESUS WAS
ON THE THRONE OF GOD
As noted above, Fakhoury disposes of
Ps. 45:6-7 (which is cited in Hebrews 1:8-9) by saying "God doesn't mean
God." Because of the surrounding
context in Hebrews 1, this text is one of the strongest proofs of the Deity of
Christ in the New Testament. As
Fakhoury himself notes, this passage contrasts the Son with the angels: "And of the angels He says, 'Who makes
His angels winds [spirits], and His ministers a flame of fire.' But of the Son He says, 'Thy throne, O
God, is forever and ever.'"
Now, how is the Son said to be superior to the angels? He is worshiped by the angels (v. 6), and
then is called "God" in v. 8 after the writer of Hebrews uses the
word "but" to clearly distinguish Jesus ontologically from the
angels. Given this context, can one
honestly maintain that the word "God" doesn't have its normal meaning
here? Suppose Jesus was created, but
composed of spirit, like angels are.
(Indeed, Jehovah's Witnesses teach that Jesus was Michael the
archangel). If so, how would He be
different enough from the angels ontologically, that is, in His fundamental
substance or being, to justify the writer of Hebrews' drawing such a sharp
contrast between the two? How Psalm 45
could refer initially to an evidently human king who later is called
"God" in this Psalm was already dealt with above implicitly. This text is a prophetic verse that
discusses a human king as a type of the Messiah, so its context doesn't eliminate
the word "God" being used of the God of Israel instead of just a
human king. The Psalmist moved from a
purely human king to discussing the Messiah who would one of his royal
descendants, who he labels "God."
Just because the king (who is called "God") has a
"God" over him (v. 9, "therefore God, Thy God") doesn't any
more prove Jesus isn't God than when Jesus said (John 20:17): "'I ascend to My Father and your
Father, and My God and your God.'"
Since the Son is under the Father in authority (I Cor. 11:3), it can
always be said that He has a "God," over Him, but that doesn't prove
He isn't God. (Notice, incidently, that
Hebrews 1:8 has the article before the word "God," which means Arians
have to deny implicitly their standard argument about its absence in John 1:1
proving the word "God" merely means "a god" when explaining
away Hebrews 1:8).
One standard alternative translation
for Hebrews 1:8 is worthy of discussion, which is found in the NWT: "God
is your throne forever." But the
main weight of the grammatical construction, especially because of the
parallelism between the angels and the son indicates both were addressed in
succeeding verses (v. 7-8), points to "God" being used as a vocative
(i.e., as in the traditional translation), as Lenski notes:
Here we have a vocative even in the
Hebrew as well as in the LXX [the Septuagint] and in Hebrews, and only the
unwillingness of commentators to have the Son addressed so directly as 'Elohim,'
[o theos] (the article with the nominative is used as a vocative),
"God," causes the search for a different construction.
Even
ignoring the grammatical difficulties that the pro-Arian translation
encounters, the context indicates it makes no sense. As Morey asks, "How does such a phrase prove that Jesus has
a superior name and nature to the angels?"[44] Hebrews 1:4 says Jesus has "inherited a
more excellent name than they," i.e., the angels. So for the Son, in Hebrews 1:2-14, what name
is given to Him that makes Him superior to the angels? The only ones available are "God"
(from vs. 8-9) and "Lord," a translation from YHWH in the original
Hebrew, in v. 10. Either choice refutes
Arianism and Unitarianism.
JESUS WAS
IN "THE FORM OF GOD"
"Have this attitude in yourselves
which was also in Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God, did
not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking
the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He
humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a
cross" (Phil. 2:5-8). Having been
the subject of so much scholarly controversy for literally centuries, this
passage is the most difficult text to interpret correctly in the New Testament
for all those potentially directly referring to Jesus' Deity. A careful, close analysis of the Greek is
necessary to understand the nuances of Paul's thought on Jesus' debasement and
exaltation serving as a model for Christian conduct today. One key word is "morphe,"
translated "form" twice in this passage. Does this term only refer to the outward appearance or shape of
something, or does it include the underlying reality or essence? An important clue is lent by the word
translated "appearance" in v. 8, "schemati," which such
scholars as Lightfoot, Trench, Vincent, and Hendriksen maintain refers to the
superficial outward appearance, while "morphe" at least implicitly
refers to the underlying essence or substance.[45] Consider some evidence for this viewpoint
from contrasting v. 6, "the form of God" with v. 7, "the form of
a bond-servant." Arians,
Unitarians, and Binitarians will all agree that Christ was fully and literally
just as much of a human as you are.
Hence, when Jesus became "a bond-servant," he was by essence a
man, not a ghost who appeared to look like a man, as v. 8 confirms. But then this evident parallelism recoils
back against Unitarians and Arians, because if Jesus was "in the form of
God" just as much as He was "in the form of a bond-servant,"
i.e., a man, then Jesus was God.
"In the form of God" doesn't mean He merely had the outward
shape, appearance, or moral character of God the Father (cf. John 14:9), but
had the underlying essence or substance of God as well. As the author of The Expositor's Greek
Testament sensibly maintains, the technical use of the word
"morphe" found in classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle
shouldn't be read into Paul's usage here, who was writing to average, unlearned
people centuries later in "Koine" Greek. Paul likely used it in a loose popular sense, equivalent to what
the word "nature" means to us today.
Then consider the implications of the present participle
"uparchon," translated "existed" in the NASB above. A literal translation is
"existing," which means, according to Rienecker and Roger, a
"continuance of an antecedent state or condition." As Hendricksen comments: "The present participle ['uparchon']
stands in sharp contrast with all the aorists [past tenses] which follow it,
and therefore points in the direction of continuance of being: Christ Jesus was and is eternally 'in the
form of God.'" So when the words
for the kenosis theory (i.e., "emptied Himself" of His Deity
completely) are examined, the present tense of "uparchon" implies He
still is (not was) in "the form of God." As Morey explains, "the present participle in such cases is
concessive," meaning, the use of the seeming past tense is really about a
continuing state that existed in the past but goes on into the present and then
into the future.[46] For example, Hebrews 5:8 reveals that,
"Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which
He suffered." Now--did Jesus cease
being the Son of God after He learned how to obey from His sufferings? No, since He still is the Son of God now,
and will be in the future. A parallel
grammatical structure to Phil. 2:6-7 appears in II Cor. 8:9: Christ "though He was [Morey has
'being and remaining to be'] rich, yet for your sake He became poor." The picture being drawn is not that of a
rich man who loses all his money and becomes poor, but, says Morey, "a
rich man who, while remaining rich, did not take advantage of those riches, but
lived among us as a poor man."
True, it appears that the word translated as "grasped,"
"arpagmon" ("robbery" in the KJV) is grammatically
ambiguous considered by itself. (See
the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich Greek-English Lexicon, p. 108; Thayer's,
p. 74. Fakhoury's claim that "the
Greek is unambiguous" in favor of the "snatch" definition is
simply not correct). Does "did not
regard equality with God a thing to be grasped" refer to (1) the
act of retaining and holding onto something already possessed, or mean (2) to
grab at and seize something not yet owned?
In the context, because of the immediate contrasts with the preceding
clause, "although He existed in the form of God," and with the
succeeding clause, "but emptied Himself," the balance is
tilted towards the first interpretation.
After all, what did He empty Himself of, unless it was something He
already had in some way? Similarly,
N.T. Wright remarks: "One cannot
decide to take advantage of something one does not already have." So although this Scripture's evident
ambiguities gives Arians and Unitarians some more maneuvering room than other
texts discussed in this essay, it still appears that the weight of scholarly
authority in recent decades has increasingly been arrayed on the side of this
text as an affirmation of Jesus' Deity.[47]
HOW DO WE
KNOW WHETHER JESUS ETERNALLY EXISTED?
Now someone might accept that Jesus
was "God," but deny His eternal separate pre-existence. What texts show Jesus had always lived
before the incarnation? Consider first
the messianic prophecy found in Micah 5:2:
"But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, too little to be among the
clans of Judah, from you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, from the
days of eternity." Undeniably, at
least for Christians, Jesus' birth fulfilled this text (Matt. 2:1-11; cf. John
7:41-42). True, an Arian might assert
that the Hebrew word translated "eternity," "olam," doesn't
necessarily mean literally "forever." But this objection ignores the passage's climatic parallelism,
since the second line amplifies and intensifies the meaning of the first
line. The translator of this passage in
the Septuagint (LXX) understood it this way, since he translated "from
long ago" as "from the beginning" (cf. John 1:1) but "from
the days of eternity" as "to days of eternity." Similarly, God's eternal existence is
contrasted with the mountains' temporary existence (Ps. 90:2; Hab. 3:6); nobody
would dare claim "olam" doesn't literally mean "forever"
here! Another text pointing to Jesus'
eternal pre-existence is the straightforward interpretation of Hebrews 7:3,
which describes the high priest Melchizedek:
"Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having
neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, he
abides [present tense!] a priest continually." Here it's now necessary to make the case that Melchizedek was a
theophany (an appearance of God to man) of God the Son. Note that Melchizedek is the "king of
righteousness." Can any average
human have such a name without it being at least presumptuous (cf. Mark
10:18)? Melchizedek is "king of
Salem," meaning, the king of peace; Christ was prophesied to be the
"Prince of Peace" (Isa. 9:6).
Melchizedek "abides a priest continually." If Melchizedek is still alive, yet we know
the dead know nothing (Eccl. 9:5), then Melchizedek can't be an ordinary human
who died at some point in the ancient past.
Melchizedek is "without father, without mother, without
genealogy." Can this be said of
any human? The standard rebuttal to this
line of reasoning maintains that the writer of Hebrews meant that the records
of Melchizedek's ancestry were lost.
But consider this more carefully:
If you were adopted, but all records of your birth and adoption were
lost, could you really be described as being "without father, without
mother"? It's absurd! Now it's been argued that this terminology
is a kind of Jewish idiomatic phrase for someone whose family tree is
untraceable. Only upon the production
of examples from (say) the Talmud or Midrashim should anyone consider
repudiating this argument. Until
otherwise so shown, a literal interpretation of Hebrews 7:3 proves the Being
who became Jesus was self-existent, and had no father or mother at this point
in His existence. So if Jesus has no end
of life after His resurrection, He couldn't have a beginning either in the
period before time itself was created.
[48] Finally, consider the implications of John
1:1: "In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Who was "in the beginning"? God?
No--it was "the Word."
If God created Jesus, why is Jesus mentioned first? If Jesus was a mere plan or thought in the
Father's mind, why does John open his Gospel by referring to Jesus? Again, using the kind of theological
deductive reasoning Morey advocates, if I were a Arian or a Unitarian, and I
wrote the Gospel of John, I would start it, "In the beginning was
God," not, "In the beginning was the Word," since God existed
before Jesus. Furthermore, the
imperfect past tense of "en," translated "was" in the first
clause, implies Jesus already was in existence when the beginning began. As Rienecker and Rogers maintain: "The imperf. expresses continuous
timeless existence (Bernard), and is contrasted with ['egeneto'--'came to be']
of v.3 (Barrett)."[49] As the above evidence shows, Micah 5:2,
Hebrews 7:3, and John 1:1 point to Jesus having an eternal pre-existence, which
would make Him God by definition.
COUNTER-ARGUMENTS
AGAINST THE DEITY OF CHRIST ANALYZED
PSALMS
110:1 AND CHRIST BEING "ADONI"
In their article in The Journal,
Sir Anthony Buzzard and Charles Hunting argue that since the Hebrew word in Ps.
110:1 translated "Lord" in reference to Christ was "adoni,"
Christ couldn't be God. In what may be
the single most frequently cited Old Testament Messianic text in the New
Testament, David wrote: "The Lord
[Yahweh] says to my Lord [Adoni]: 'Sit
at my right hand, until I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy
feet.'" They reason that Jesus
couldn't be God, since "adoni" refers to "in every one of its
195 occurrences, human (and occasionally angelic) superiors."[50] This argument runs into an insufferable
weakness, however: The only difference
between "adoni" and "adonai" is one of vowel pointing, as Buzzard
and Hunting themselves point out. Since
Hebrew originally was written only in consonants, the vowel points were added
later, probably in the sixth or seventh centuries A.D. Neither Jerome in the fourth century (who
translated the Latin Vulgate) nor the Talmud in the fifth century mention them,
despite "both at times discuss in detail different vocalization
possibilities of Hebrew consonants . . . It is inconceivable that had such signs existed Jerome and the
rabbis should have failed to mention them." Since three different schools of writing the vowels and accents
developed among the Jews (the Babylonian, the Palestian, and the Tiberian,
which triumphed over the others), it's hard to believe that the vowel and
accent marks were originally inspired by God.[51] We know it's quite possible the Jews made
mistakes when putting in the vowel points.
For example, some say Gen. 47:31 contradicts Hebrews 11:21, since the
first text has Jacob worshipping at the head of his bed, but the second while
he leaned on his staff. The Hebrew
words for "bed" and "staff" have the same consonants, but
different vowel points:
"mittah" vs. "mattah." When the vowel points got added, the Jewish scribes had to
determine the reading of MTTH here.
They chose the vowels that made this word "bed." But since the New Testament, the Greek
Septuagint, and the Aramaic Peshitta read "staff," it's likely the
scribe(s) choosing this reading were wrong.
Consequently, this possibility must be examined: Could have the Jews deliberately inserted
the vowel points for "adoni" instead of "adonai" in this
key messianic text? After all, since
the New Testament gives this text such prominent placement, the traditional
oral reading of the Jews by the time the vowel points were created and inserted
could have "softened" this text to weaken it as a "Christian
prooftext." Despite the Jews'
marvelous skill and meticulousness in preserving the Old Testament, there are
signs they altered the reading of one or more texts to weaken Christian
messianic interpretations of some texts.
The most obvious case is the apparent insertion of a semi-colon in the
middle of Dan. 9:25, between the 7 and 62 weeks, which pushes back the arrival
of the Messiah to just 49 years after the Persian king, Artaxerxes, issued a
decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 457 b.c.
Thus the Seventy Weeks Prophecy, one of the best proofs that the Messiah
had to arrive by the first century A.D., is conveniently disposed of. Another curious case is the closed
"mem" which appears in the word translated "of the
increase" in Isaiah 9:6-7. If the
rules of Hebrew grammar had been followed, a closed "mem" could never
appear at the beginning of a word, but only at the end. This Hebrew word, "marbeh," always
has an open "mem" elsewhere in the OT, except for here. Although this difference doesn't change the
word's meaning and the reasons for this deviation can be speculated upon, it's
still a slightly suspicious oddity since it appears in a key messianic text.[52] Having extensively dealt with the biased
Jewish translations of the messianic texts of the Old Testament that Darrell
Conder cited against Christianity, I'm quite convinced that the bias of these
Jewish translators on many Messianic texts nearly equals Jehovah's Witnesses in
the New World Translation on the Deity of Christ. It's not a wise idea to base a key Christian
doctrine on the vowel pointing of a single Hebrew word in the Old Testament, a
set of vowel points surely determined by the traditional (anti-Christian)
Jewish oral reading of this text, not by the Holy Spirit.
DID JESUS
DENY HIS DEITY?
Fakhoury cites Mark 10:17-18 as
evidence that Jesus denied His own Deity.
The young rich ruler asked Him, "Good Teacher, what shall I do to
inherit eternal life?" Jesus
replied, "Why do you call Me good?
No one is good except God alone."
Consider carefully Jesus' opening question in His answer: Was He denying His own goodness? If Jesus wasn't good, He couldn't be God,
right? Given the Arian/Unitarian
understanding of these verses, Jesus denied His own goodness first in order to
deny that He was God! But, of course,
the New Testament is absolutely emphatic that Jesus never sinned: "For we do not have a high priest who
cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all
things as we are, yet without sin" (Heb. 4:15). "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that
we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (II Cor. 5:21). Christ "committed no sin, nor was any
deceit found in his mouth" (I Pet. 2:22).
Jesus clearly was "good," as Hebrews 7:26 affirms: "For it was fitting that we should have
such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and
exalted above the heavens." For
the Arian/Unitarian argument to work using this text, they must accept the
following syllogism:
1. Only God is good.
2. Jesus is not good.
Therefore,
Jesus is not God.
But Arians
and Unitarians (at least those who aren't liberal skeptics) must reject the
second premise as totally unacceptable.
That leads to a more persuasive syllogism that turns this text into
evidence FOR the deity of Christ:
1. Only God is good
2. Jesus is good.
Therefore,
Jesus is God.[53]
Furthermore,
as McDowell and Larson observe, Jesus concluded His reply to the young rich
ruler by saying, "come, follow Me," not, "come, follow
God."[54] Similar
to the great "I am" statements of John's Gospel, but more obliquely
here, Christ drew attention to His own Person and authority in a way no prior
prophet of God had ever done. Where did
Jeremiah or Moses ever say, without further explanation, "follow me"?
JESUS WAS
WORSHIPED, REVISITED
As an Arian, Fakhoury's solution to
the problem of Jesus being worshiped in the New Testament is ultimately
unsurprising. Since Jesus is greater than
any man or angel, He can be worshipped, but He still isn't the Almighty God:
So, if Jesus were not God, why didn't
He also refuse? Because the apostles
and angels understood they were mere men and ministering spirits, respectively,
and the New Testament teaches that Jesus is greater than all men and all angels
(Hebrews 1). Jesus was greater than men
and angels because he was the Son of God, and that is what made him
worthy of worship. . . .
Jesus was the unique Son of God.
This was all the reason He needed to receive worship (see also John
9:35-38), and it is all the reason He will ever need to receive worship.
Although
this would be denied, the ancient Arian proclivity to turn Jesus into a demigod
once again rears its ugly head in this "solution" to the problem of
Jesus being worshipped. Jehovah's
Witnesses, being somewhat more consistent monotheists, strive to avoid the word
"worship" concerning Jesus in the current edition of the NWT by
substituting in the word "obeisance." (See Heb. 1:6; Matt. 28:9; John 9:35; Mark 5:6; Luke 24:52,
NWT). Fundamentally, human beings now
should only worship the uncreated Being, the Eternal. No men, no angels, and no other god is worthy of worship. Jesus dismissed Satan by saying,
"Begone Satan! For it is written,
'You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only'" (Matt.
4:10). The Greek word translated
"serve," "latreuo," effectively means "worship"
as well. As Thayer's
explains: "univ[ersally] to
serve, minister to, either gods or men, and used alike of slaves and of
freemen; in the N. T. to render religious service or homage, to
worship . . . in the
strict sense; to perform sacred services, to offer gifts, to worship God in
the observance of the rites instituted for his worship" (pp.
372-73). The Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich
explains this word as meaning, "serve, in our lit[erature] only of
the carrying out of relig[ious] duties, esp[ecially] of a cultic [ritualistic]
nature, by human beings" (p. 467).
Besides the First Commandment, Revelation 22:9 presents additional
although implicit evidence that only God should be worshiped since the angel
corrected John by saying, "Do not do that . . . worship God
[that is, only]." Hence, if only
God is to be "worshiped", and if Jesus was "worshiped" and
didn't just receive mere "obeisance," such as a human king receives
from a subject bowing down to him, then Jesus was God. Fakhoury ironically asserts what Jehovah's
Witnesses strenuously avoid conceding, because the latter are aware of the
implications of Matt. 4:10 and Luke 4:8 for the Deity of Christ.
There are other places where Jesus is
worshiped, or likely was worshiped. For
example, while he was being martyred, Stephen cried out (Acts 8:59-60: "And they went on stoning Stephen as he
called upon the Lord and said, 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!' And falling on his knees, he cried out with
a loud voice, 'Lord, do not hold this sin against them!'" Another, more disputable instance occurs
when the apostles pray for a replacement for Judas Iscariot (Acts 1:24-25). Notice that "the Lord Jesus" of v.
21 makes it likely that the "Lord" of v. 24 is Jesus. Notice that in Ananias' vision of Jesus,
during which He told Ananias to help restore Paul's sight, that the saints
called upon "the Lord" (v. 14), who surely is Jesus (v. 17). Note that Paul most likely prayed to Jesus
to be healed from the thorn in his side (II Cor. 12:8-10). Notice that "the Lord" said my
"power is perfected in weakness."
Whose power is this? If the
"power of Christ" (v. 9) dwells in Paul, then Paul had prayed to
Jesus. Consider that the four living
creatures and the twenty-four elders in heaven fell down before "the
Lamb" (Rev. 5:8), and the elders did it again shortly thereafter (Rev. 5:14). The Lamb and God receive blessings in verses
12-13 that are highly similar to those clearly given to the Father (Rev.
7:11-12). In saying, "To Him who
sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and
dominion forever and ever" (v. 13), the similarity to a doxology (a type
of prayer) is unmistakable. Is the
doxology to "the Lord" of II Tim. 4:18 to Jesus or the Father? "The Lord" in the chapter's
context (vs. 1, 8, 14) certainly is identified with Jesus. In the doxology of Hebrews 13:21, the weight
of grammar makes "Jesus Christ" the referent of the phrase "to
whom" since it is the closest antecedent.
A similar, but more disputable construction arises in I Peter 4:11. But since the Greek word "estin"
appears in for the word "whom," the doxology is turned into a
statement of fact, making the "o" ("to") more likely a
referent to Jesus. There's no escaping
the doxology that concludes II Peter 3:18 as being a reference to Christ: "but grow in the grace and knowledge of
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To
Him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen."
In the doxology of Rev. 1:5-6, the repetition of the third person
possessive ("his") and third person pronoun ("to him")
surely tilts this strongly to being a doxology to Jesus. Since there are no prayers directed to the
apostles, prophets, patriarchs, or the Virgin Mary in Scripture, but prayers
are so directed to Jesus just as they are to the Father, it's hard to escape
the conclusion that these prove Jesus is God.[55] Clearly, if an Arian or Unitarian wrote scripture,
these only slightly or moderately ambiguous cases of prayers to Jesus wouldn't
have been allowed to exist, since grammar and context point to Jesus being the
object of human or angelic adoration in them.
CAN
EVERYONE FORGIVE SINS?
Fakhoury replies against the argument
that Jesus' ability to forgive sins shows He is God (Mark 2:7-11) by citing
John 20:23 as proof this power was later given to other men who clearly weren't
God. In this text, Jesus told the apostles: "If you forgive the sins of any, their
sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been
retained." Hence, if anyone can
forgive anyone else for his or her sins, and assuming this wasn't a specific
power given to the ministry about their authority to disfellowship (I Cor.
5:3-5, 11-13), then Jesus' power to forgive sins is no proof of His
divinity. So then, is there a
difference between forgiving the sins of someone who did something against you
personally, and generically forgiving the sins of someone who sinned against
God or someone else? For example, it
makes sense I can forgive a friend in the church for offending me, but could I
forgive (say) the sin of idolatry that a now repentant ex-Hindu committed by
worshiping an idol in a temple in Calcutta last week? It seems that this basic distinction between what sins that a man
can forgive another man for is not some creation of traditional Protestantism
attacking the power of Catholic priests to pronounce absolution upon a
parishioner who confessed his sins, but reaches much further back. Notice that Peter, long before the
crucifixion, asked Jesus, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me
and I forgive him? Up to seven
times?" (Matt. 18:21). I've heard
it said that Peter's question was partially a response to a Jewish teaching
that you had to forgive someone only three times for his or her sins against
you. Peter's question doesn't seem to
reflect anything particularly innovative or "controversial," as if he
were asking for a prerogative that only God had had, but he was asking for
additional light on how to conduct his life properly. Given this background, John 20:23 likely concerns the forgiveness
of sins committed against the apostles personally, not the generic power to
give absolution to the sins of all repentant comers, similar to what Catholic
priests do after confessions. There is
no case in the New Testament in which an apostle forgave the sins of repentant
believers that had been committed against God or against others besides
himself. Hence, for the Arians and
Unitarians to carry this argument against the Deity of Christ, they have to
prove more from Scripture that individual believers can directly forgive any
sins committed by anyone else against anyone else.
DOES GOD
HAVE TO FIT OUR DEFINITIONAL BOX?
Some of Fakhoury's seemingly best
arguments come from showing Jesus the man doesn't fit our standard definitions
of "God" as derived from the Bible.
Hence, Jesus was tempted (Heb. 4:15) yet God can't be tempted (James
1:13). Jesus didn't know the day of his
return (Matt. 24:36), yet God knows everything. Jesus died (Matt. 27:50, 58), yet God cannot die (Dan. 4:34; Isa.
57:15). Hence, Fakhoury reasons, if our
definition of "God" contradicts what the Bible reveals about Jesus,
then Jesus couldn't be God. The
fundamental assumption here is that the definitions of "God" we
humans derive from the Bible are true in all places at all times, that God
Himself can't choose to limit His attributes in some manner if He doesn't wish
to. In a letter to the editor of
"The Journal," Eric Anderson replied to Fakhoury's arguments on this
point:
He criticizes orthodox Christology for
redefining the meaning of the word God to fit human limitations. It seems to me that Mr. Fakhoury has taken
biblical descriptions of God in the glorified state and then turned them
into inviolable definitions of God that will help him make the case the
Jesus was not God in the flesh. Mr.
Fakhoury just might be confusing descriptions of God in the glorified state
with definitions of God that distinguish "God" from
"non-God" in all states of existence (spirit, human or any other
possible state of being) at all times.
I'm not convinced the leap from description to definition is always
justified.[56]
Although
Fakhoury strongly attacks it, the standard, orthodox view of Jesus, which
maintains He had two natures, one human, one divine, in one Person, can still
be readily defended, even if some modifications may be necessary. One solution to the puzzles Fakhoury raises
is to maintain Jesus chose to limit the expression of His divine nature while
in the flesh so that He wasn't literally omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent,
etc. The human nature of Jesus imposes
limitations, by necessity, on a Being who had been an omnipresent Almighty
Spirit for all eternity beforehand.
Hence, by taking on a physical body, Jesus made it possible for His
human side to be tempted, even as the divine side wasn't. This wouldn't give Jesus "split
personalities" that didn't know what the other was doing, since one part
of His one mind could be tempted while the rest wasn't, just as part of our own
minds may be tempted by something while another may be simultaneously repulsed
by it. (For example, consider Goya's
painting of a woman trying to take the teeth of a hanging corpse to gain their
supposed magical powers. While placing
her hand in its mouth, she still looks away in horror and disgust, and
partially covers her face with a handkerchief). By converting Himself into flesh alone, and shedding the Spirit
body/extension He had always had, He made it possible for Him to die. As John Wheeler explains in his article
defending the Deity of Christ: "God
can die--and here is the great mystery which began this article--because
God can set aside His immortality (by setting aside His glorious body) and
still be God."[57] After all, there's always the mystery of how
a (say) five-foot five-inch, 140-pound body could contain such attributes as
omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, etc.
However, Jesus could still be called "God" in the flesh
because of His perfect character (since He wasn't born with an evil human
nature)[58] and
because His divine nature (unlike his human nature) was self-existent,
uncreated, unmade.
DOES THE
BIBLE CONTRADICT ITSELF ABOUT JESUS' NATURE?
Although some of the standard
definitional attributes traditionally asserted to define "God"
wouldn't have always fit Jesus, they do fit Him other times. For example, consider the evidence for his
omniscience, or knowing everything.
Although Jesus didn't know the day of His return, His disciples still
said of Him the night before He died (John 16:30): "Now we know that you know all things, and have no
need for anyone to question you."
Similarly, Fakhoury casually
explains away such texts as John 1:48; 4:16-19 as proving no more than that
Jesus was a prophet, but in the light of John 16:30 and His other high claims
(such as John 14:6), some reconsideration is in order. Similarly, He promised to future believers
that He would be omnipresent in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:20): "lo, I am with you always, even
to the end of the age." How could
He be with us now, scattered around the earth, unless He were everywhere? He also promised: "For where two or three have gathered together in My name,
there I am in their midst" (Matt. 18:20).
Again, how could this be done, unless He was omnipresent through the
Spirit? (II Cor. 3:17-18; Col. 1:27; II
Cor. 13:5). Jesus learned and grew
(Heb. 5:8; Luke 2:52), i.e., was changeable.
Yet Jesus was also immutable (unchangeable) (Heb. 1:11-12; Heb. 13:8),
just as the Eternal is (Ps. 102:26-27).
Despite his death, Jesus is now "the King of kings and Lord of
lords [Rev. 19:16 17:14]; who alone possesses immortality" (II Tim.
6:16-17). Of course, the Father is
"the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God"
(I Tim. 1:17). Just as Jesus
"alone" having immortality doesn't prove the Father lacks it, neither
does the Father being "the only God" prove Jesus isn't God. Scripture reveals that God is Spirit (John
4:24). Although Jesus was once in the
flesh, as we are now, He is now a spirit being: "The last Adam became a life-giving spirit" (I Cor.
15:45).[59] Hence, even assuming the traditional
definitions are universally applicable, if Jesus is now omniscient,
omnipresent, immortal, immutable, and spirit, isn't it logical to deduce He is
God? Furthermore, since Jesus has
seemingly mutually-exclusive attributes asserted of Him at different times, the
Arian/Unitarian solution of denying Jesus is God doesn't really solve the
problems involved. Instead, it
heightens them, because although their teaching adequately explains the
attributes congruent with His humanity, those which fit Deity sometimes aren't. Traditional orthodoxy's solution of
asserting Jesus had two natures, one human, one divine, one limited, one
unlimited, is more compatible with Scriptural evidence than Unitarianism's
theory, even as it fundamentally ignores the necessary limits the flesh placed
on His divine nature.
ARE MEN
AND WOMEN MEMBERS OF THE SAME SPECIES?
Based on I Cor. 11:3, Bowman argues
that Jesus' subordination to the Father is one of only authority and supremacy
and not one originating in substance and kind because it's analogous to women's
subordination to men in marriage being rooted in social roles, not in men's
innate superiority to women. Knowing
this analysis has some force, Fakhoury outrageously replies that men and women
have fundamentally different natures in order to deny the Son's intrinsic nature
equals the Father's!:
The verses [following I Cor. 11:3]
argue emphatically that there is absolutely a difference between men and women
"in terms of nature" (and they say nothing of this being about
"husbands" or "wives"). . . . Thus we must conclude that God's headship
over Christ is not merely heavenly stagecraft but a real reflection of their
respective natures, just as it is between men and women.
By this
reasoning, since the Father is God and Jesus isn't, which puts them in totally
different categories of being, men and women are effectively made into
different species! At this point, it's
worth reminding ourselves that although God has given married men authority
over their own wives (I Pet. 3:1-6), this doesn't mean men and women are so
totally different by essence that they aren't in the same class or group. Paul wrote that, "There is neither Jew
nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor
female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28). If the fundamental differences between men
and women were equal to those between the uncreated Almighty God the Father and
the (supposedly) created limited Jesus Christ, Paul could not have said men and
women have an equal status before God as Christians in spiritual potential. Although God made the man before he made the
woman, He made the woman from the rib of the man, i.e., of the same
flesh, with nearly identical DNA. The
difference between men and women that causes "nature itself" to teach
that a man's long hair is shameful but a woman's is glorious (I Cor. 11:14)
can't be said to put men in a totally different species or class from
women. There's indeed an innate
difference between men and women, one which most contemporary feminists are
determined to ignore (except when it's to their advantage, such as in the
claim, "If women ruled the world, there would be no war"), but it is
completely trivial compared to the differences that loom between what is God
and what isn't God, which distinguish the Father from Jesus according to
Arianism. The differences involved in
the social custom of covering or uncovering an unshaven woman's head when
praying in public, which Paul discusses in this context, simply can't even
begin to approach the fundamental ontological or intrinsic differences between
Deity and humanity. If Arianism has to
put men and women in different categories of being to preserve its teaching
based on I Cor. 11:3's analogy between men and women with God and Christ, it's
time to reconsider Arianism!
"ALL
THE FULLNESS OF DEITY" REVISITED
In Colossians 2:9, Paul writes: "For in Him [Jesus] all the fullness of
Deity dwells in bodily form."
Fakhoury maintains that the term "theotes," which is
translated "Deity" here in the NASB, can mean "divinity,"
and thus have a "weak" definition.
As noted in my earlier essay on this subject, the Unitarian scholar
Joseph Thayer ironically denied that "theotes" can have a
"weak" definition. The mere
fact the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich Greek-English Lexicon says that
"theotes" is an "abstract noun for [theos]" does not weaken
its meaning, since the word "theos," "God," is a noun
itself. Today, in modern English, the
term "divinity" has both a "weak" and "strong"
definition. If someone said in slang,
"For her performance, that actress was divine," he used its
"weak" definition, since no one hearing such a statement would
mistake her for being Almighty God.
But, as I have used the terms "divinity" and "divine"
above when referring to Christ, they have the "strong" definition,
i.e. are synonyms for "Deity."
Hence, objecting that "divinity" is a "quality" is
irrelevant when the "strong" definition is meant: Someone who has the quality of
"deity" is God, just as if I have the quality of
"humanness" I am human. When
the B-A-G says (p. 358) that "theotes" can be translated both
"deity" and "divinity," I suspect only the
"strong" definition of "divinity" was meant by its authors,
in light of Thayer's emphatic differentiation between the two words. Morey claims that "All the lexicons, grammars,
and commentaries define [theotes] as 'absolute Deity.'" As Kenneth S. Wuest maintains: "It is not merely divine attributes
that are in mind now [in Col. 2:9's use of 'theotes'], but the possession of
the essence of deity in an absolute sense."[60] Had Paul written such a term as
"theios," it could easily (although not necessarily) have meant the
"weak" definition, as the B-A-G's definitions for it show (pp.
353-54). When discussing why John may
have avoided using "theios" in the third clause of John 1:1, Harris
comments: "The use of [theios]
would have left the statement open to what from John's point of view was a
grave misinterpretation, viz. . . . that the Son was essentially
inferior to the Father."[61] Since "theotes" has no
"i" in it, it's simply not persuasive to say it can have the
"weak" definition of "divinity" without (say) corroboration
from ancient non-Biblical Greek documents.
THE ERROR
OF THE ETERNAL GENERATION OF THE SON
One pervasive error of standard Trinitarian
thinking is the concept that the Father eternally generates the Son, which
Fakhoury justly labels "self-contradictory." Herbert Armstrong avoided this trap by
stating that Jesus did not become "the Son of God," that is, have
that title, until the incarnation occurred:
The Word [of John 1], then, is a
Personage who was made flesh--begotten by God, who through this later begettal
became his Father. Yet at that
prehistoric time of the first verse of John 1, the Word was not (yet) the Son
of God. . . . He was made
God's Son, through being begotten or sired by God and born of the virgin
Mary.[62]
The
clearest verse favoring this doctrine is Hebrews 1:5, which cites Ps. 2:7 and
II Sam 7:14: "For to which of the
angels did He ever say, 'Thou art My Son, today I have begotten
Thee"? And again, 'I will be a
Father to Him, and He shall be a Son to Me.'"[63] An additional, but hotly disputed (see
below), verse denying Jesus' eternal sonship is Hebrews 7:3, which describes
Melchizedek as "without father, without mother, without
genealogy." If Jesus was
Melchizedek, and Melchizedek at the time of Abraham was "without
father," then Jesus couldn't be a "son" if He had no father. The Old Testament Scriptures that seem to
refer to Jesus as "the Son of God" or otherwise refer to His humanity
then either are prophetic in nature (such as Isa. 7:14; 9:6) or they say He
looked "like" a man (Dan. 7:13) without actually being one. Although Morey cites Prov. 30:4 to back the
doctrine of eternal generation, this Scripture is one of a series of
semi-rhetorical questions, which makes it a weak reed for this doctrine to lean
upon. Notwithstanding his credentials
as the past leading "cult" critic and defender of orthodoxy, Walter
Martin attacked the doctrine of eternal generation:
The doctrine of "eternal
generation" or the eternal Sonship of Christ, which springs from the Roman
Catholic doctrine first conceived by Origen in A.D 230, is a theory
which opened the door theologically to the Arian and Sabellian heresies which
today still plague the Christian Church in the realms of Christology.
. . . The term
"Son" itself is a functional term, as is the term "Father"
and has no meaning apart from time. . . . Finally; there cannot be any such thing as eternal Sonship, for
there is a logical contradiction of terminology due to the fact that the word
"Son" predicates time and the involvement of creativity. Christ, the Scripture tells us, as the
Logos, is timeless, ". . . the Word was in the
beginning" not the Son![64]
Hence,
although Jesus, as the pre-incarnate Word, had always existed, He did not gain
the title "the Son of God" until He was conceived in the Virgin
Mary's womb, which was when He became human, not before. Jesus' human nature (which was
sinless, unlike ours) was created by God through the impregnation of the Virgin
Mary, but not His Divine nature. Jesus also was considered "the Son of
God" because of His resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1:4): "who was declared the Son of God with
power by [marg., 'as a result of,'] the resurrection from the dead, according
to the spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord." Nevertheless, Jesus couldn't be a
"son" until He was a human.
WHY
"MONOGENES" DOESN'T MEAN THE WORD HAD A BEGINNING
Now why does the falsehood of eternal
generation/Sonship even matter?
Fakhoury argues that "monogenes," translated "only
begotten" in John 3:16 and elsewhere, "always involves the actual and
literal procreation of offspring."
But if Jesus became "the only begotten Son" only at the
incarnation, then this argument is easily dismissed. Because Christ had a dual nature, His taking on a human nature to
add to his divine nature does not mean He had no existence before the Virgin
Mary first became pregnant. The Father
only begot the human nature of Jesus, not His divine nature, which had
eternally existed. Since Jesus'
humanity had a beginning in time, but not His divinity, the Council of Nicea
could say Jesus was "begotten, not made" without committing a
contradiction. Historically,
"monogenes" couldn't have had a strongly pro-Arian meaning because
Arius himself, in a private creed written A.D. 328, used the term
"gegennemenon" to refer to Christ, not "monogenes" or
"ginomai." Similarly,
Eusebius, who was a follower of Arius around A.D. 325, used the term
"gegennemenon," not "monogenes." When the use of the word "monogenes" is studied in both
classical and "Koine" Greek (the latter being what the New Testament
used), a dominant meaning it has is "only" or "unique."[65] The Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich Greek-English
Lexicon (p. 527) states that monogenes means "only
. . . of children . . . Of an only son
. . . Also unique (in kind) of someth. that is the only
example of its category. . . . In the Johannine lit. [monogenes]
is used only of Jesus. The [meanings] only,
unique may be quite adequate for all its occurrences here." Hence, as applied to Jesus, monogenes
means merely He was the unique Son of God, "the only example of [His]
category." So this word doesn't mean He began in time like any other human
in His mother's womb. The special
meaning in ancient Greek that monogenes had undermines Fakhoury's
argument that interprets this word by saying "beget" means to
procreate, and "generate" to create, neither of which has the same
meaning as monogenes.
A SON HAS
THE SAME NATURE AS HIS FATHER
Following Nicea (A.D. 325), the
battleground terminology between the Arians and Trinitarians concerned whether
Jesus was of the same substance, similar substance, or even unlike
substance. It's important to realize
that the term "son," in the Semitic cultural context in which the
Bible was written, didn't mean merely subordination and dependence to a father
who was superior and the source of his being, as it does to us Westerners
today. As Loraine Boettner observes, it
involved "rather the Semitic and oriental ideas of likeness or sameness
of nature and equality of being. . . . As any merely human son is
like his father in his essential nature, that is, possessed of humanity, so
Christ, the Son of God, was like His Father in His essential nature, that is,
possessed of Deity."[66] Hence, if you have children, they are just
as human as you are: They possess the
same essence and substance that you have.
Correspondingly, since Jesus was the special, unique "Son of
God," He was just as much God as His Father was by origin.
DO NEW
TESTAMENT AUTHORS IDENTIFY JESUS AS JEHOVAH?
In order to get around texts in which
Jesus or others apply Old Testament texts about Yahweh to Jesus, Fakhoury
reasons that "in Jesus, God was represented and expressed to such a degree
that when God does or say something Jesus may as well be doing or saying it;
and when Jesus is doing or saying something, God may as well be doing or saying
it." He then explains, in a
convention still used in modern English, that when someone does something for
an authority figure it's considered as if that authority figure did it
himself. For example, if someone said,
"Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal," this doesn't mean he dug
it out entirely with his own hands, but he led to its building by his
instigating a revolt in Panama against Columbia and indirectly but ultimately
supervising the efforts of hundreds of workers hired to construct it in
Panama. Consider the basic flaw in
Fakhoury's reasoning: If it's true that
the New Testament's authors could have willy-nilly applied Old Testament texts
about God to Jesus effectively out of context, why isn't this done for other
humans? Why aren't texts about Yahweh
or Elohim applied to Paul, Peter, Matthew, or John? Morey observes that various Old Testament texts about God are
applied to the Father by New Testament writers. If these texts prove the Father is God, they equally must prove
Jesus is God: "Any attempt to deny
this method will overturn the deity of the Father as well as the
Son." Again, using his method of
deductive theology, Morey observes that "if the authors of the New
Testament were Arians, they would never dream of doing this [applying OT texts
about God to Jesus]. It would be
blasphemous for them to take a passage referring to Yahweh and attribute it to
Jesus [i.e., a mere man]." For
example, Jesus allowed "Hosanna," an Aramaic word that had become a
Jewish liturgical term that was used in worship, to be applied to Him during
his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
When the chief priests and scribes objected, Jesus cited Ps. 8:1-2 in
response. (See Matt. 21:15-16). Since the children were crying,
"Hosanna to the Son of David," i.e., Jesus, and Jesus applied Ps. 8:2
to their praises of Him, "Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes
Thou hast prepared praise for Thyself," He was indirectly asserting that
He was Yahweh, as Ps. 8:1 shows. Yahweh
says when He wages war against those coming against Jerusalem that "they
will look on Me whom they have pierced" (Zech. 12:10), which John alludes
to and applies to Jesus in Rev. 1:7.
When Paul quotes Joel 2:32 in Romans 10:16, the context (especially v.
9) indicates Jesus is the "Lord" in question: "Whoever will call upon the name of the
Lord [Jehovah] will be saved."
Now, if this text, which is about an act of prayer and worship towards
Yahweh, had been applied to any mere human, it plainly would be
blasphemous. Since it is so casually
yet directly applied to Jesus by Paul, it means Jesus must also be God,
not just man. In Hebrews 1:10, a text
about Yahweh (Ps. 102:25; cf. v. 22) created the earth is applied to
Jesus: "Thou, Lord, in the
beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth." Now who did this? Yahweh did it, yet the author of Hebrews said the Son did
it. So if Jesus did it, Jesus is
Yahweh. Could anyone imagine applying
this text to ANY mere human, such as (say) John the Baptist, Peter, or Isaiah,
and calling him thus the Creator? If
Jesus is going to return, how could it be that God the Father will stand on the
Mount of Olives (Zech. 14:3-4)? How
could Jesus indirectly stand for the Father when He stands on the Mount
of Olives?[67] The theory of agency, as illustrated by the
Theodore Roosevelt/Panama Canal analogy, simply does not fit such passages
since Jesus is said to fulfill literally the texts in question, not just
through the works of another person, just as Yahweh will or did.[68]
ORIGEN
STRIKES AGAIN!
Is John 1:1-18 an allegory or
personification? Drawing upon various parallels
between the word "word" in Jewish literature and the life of Jesus,
Fakhoury argues that the opening verses of John shouldn't be taken at all
literally. Here is another dubious
offspring of Origen's thought, the allegorical school of exegesis (interpretation),
just as his concept of eternal generation helped spawn the Arian heresy. Christians can always pick up the Bible, and
deny a standard, literal interpretation of its content in favor of something
fanciful. For example, Roman
Catholicism promotes a non-literal interpretation of the Book of
Revelation--amillennialism--which by this standard becomes
"obviously" more sensible than premillennialism, which takes a
"crudely literal" interpretation of Revelation (and Matthew 24). The references to ancient Jewish literature
making personifications of the word "word" shouldn't be allowed to
obscure the reality that Unitarians suddenly unveil a conveniently allegorical
interpretation of John 1 in order to explain away the most problematic passage
in Scripture for their viewpoint.[69] Similarly, they try to escape statements
that imply Christ's pre-existence, such as John 6:50-52, 58, by resorting to a
non-literal interpretation of them. If
true, the biggest mystery becomes how, if "the Word was God," a thought
in God the Father's consciousness is actually God as well, indeed just as much
God as He is. Furthermore, how this
"thought" was able to create the universe by itself--for it's not
stated here that the Father did it at all--remains equally an enigma: "All things came into being by Him, and
apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being . . .
the world was made through Him" (vs. 3, 10). Furthermore, unlike an idea (or plan of action) in somebody's
mind, "In Him was life." Can
an idea be said to be "alive," i.e., have a self-acting
self-existence independent from the consciousness thinking it? Furthermore, notice that the middle verses
of the passage literally refer to John the Baptist: "There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John. He came for a witness, that he might bear
witness of the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came that he might
bear witness of the light" (vs. 6-8).
John is returned to in v. 15 again.
Why is the reference to John literal, but not that to Jesus? It's a mighty peculiar
"personification" or "allegory" that suddenly steps in and
out of the historical time-space continuum.
Can a parallel case be found in all of
Scripture, of a mixture of history and allegory/parable in a single passage,
instead of figures or entities systematically standing for something else? Furthermore, non-literal, symbolic modes of
writing in Scripture often have attention drawn to this very fact. In Gal. 4:21-31, Paul says he is "allegorically
speaking" (v. 24) while making the comparison between Hagar's offspring
being Jews who still practicing Judaism, and Sarah's offspring being Christians
who accepted Jesus. Similarly, Christ's
parables were at times followed by an immediate interpretation explaining the
symbols involved, such as the parable of the sower (Mark 4:2-20). In prophecy, it's self-evident that the
Beasts of Daniel and Revelation aren't intended to be taken literally, but (as
is clearly explained) they stand for nations or governments. The process of spiritual conversion
mentioned in vs. 12-13 concerns something literally true: "But as many as received Him, to them
He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His
name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will
of man, but of God." Furthermore,
in v. 10, 11, Jesus's actual earthly doings are referred to: "He was in the world . . .
the world did not know Him. He came to
His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him [Luke
4:24-30]." The impersonal term
"this one" used of the Word in v. 3 doesn't show that the Word has no
independent consciousness, because this term is used of John the Baptist as
well (vs. 7, 8). The reason why the
masculine pronouns referring to the Word's personality shouldn't be seen merely
as grammatical artifices is because, unlike the Holy Spirit, Christ walked the
earth as a conscious human being (John 1:14).
The personality of the Son is never in doubt in Scripture, while that of
the Holy Spirit most certainly is.
WAS JESUS'
PRE-EXISTENCE LITERAL?
Similar to Fakhoury's argument about
John 1, Anthony Buzzard claims that Jesus' pre-existence wasn't literal because
Hebrew thought would mention spiritual things as if they existed in the past
even when they literally didn't.
Instead, it's Greek, pagan thinking to believe anyone had a literal
preexistence before he or she was born.[70] Throughout this article, it's conspicuous
that most of the texts favoring Jesus' preexistence are never actually
quoted. Buzzard's reasoning is
fundamentally flawed because it makes a literary category mistake: What may make some sense when applied to
prophecy is wildly out of place in dialogs, monologs, or historical
narratives. Furthermore, his reasoning
seems to be based on extra-Biblical Rabbinical or inter-Testamental sources,
not Scripture. For example, it seems
Buzzard cites no good OT example of this kind of reasoning. In the case of Jeremiah being known by God
before his conception (Jer. 1:5), it's clearly a revelation of God's
foreknowledge about what would exist in the future. It's not a case of someone later on artificially reading back
into the past something which did not exist at that time. In the case of Micah 5:2, which contradicts
his claims Judaism knew nothing about the Messiah literally preexisting,
there's nothing about God knowing the Messiah in His mind, but it merely
states, "His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of
eternity." Note John 6, where
Jesus states He is the bread of life that came from heaven:
For the bread of God is that which
comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world. . . . I am the bread of life. . . . For I have come down from heaven, not to do
My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. . . . The Jews therefore were grumbling about Him,
because He said, 'I am the bread that came down out of heaven.' And they were saying, 'Is not this Jesus,
the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does He now say, "I have come down out of heaven"?'
. . . This is the bread which
comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down out of
heaven. . . What then if you should behold the Son of Man
ascending where He was before? (vs. 33, 35, 38, 41-42, 50-51, 62).
Can one
honestly look at Jesus' dialog with the Jews here, but still think He wasn't
saying He literally came from heaven?
How can one say He didn't mean He had a personal preexistence here, but
He meant He was merely a thought in God's mind about His future will or
plan? Notice Jesus didn't correct the
misimpression of the Jews, who took His words literally. The mere fact the crowd took Jesus literally
undermines Buzzard's claim that the popular Jewish mind accepted these
philosophical abstractions about a non-literal preexistence. Similarly, Jesus declared He saw that
something someone who literally didn't preexist before his human lifetime could
not have seen (Luke 10:18): "I was
watching Satan fall from heaven like lightning." We know the fall of Satan occurred many centuries or millennia
earlier from Isa. 14:12-14; Eze. 28:12-17.
Although this event will occur again, as Rev. 12:9 indicates, only a
Unitarian determined to impute an unlikely timing of events into Scripture
would insist it occurred during Christ's human lifetime on earth. John the Baptist asserted that Jesus
"existed before me" (John 1:30) despite he was born before Him. If Christ literally ascended to
heaven, wouldn't His descent from heaven be equally literal when
mentioned in the same sentence (Eph. 4:10; John 3:13)? Jesus denied He was from the earth like
other men: "You are from below, I
am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world" (John
8:23). Then there are the texts which
assert Jesus was the Creator (Eph. 3:9 (NKJV); John 1:3, 10; Heb. 1:2; I Cor.
8:6; Col. 1:16-17). It's intrinsically
absurd to call a thought or plan in the mind of God the Father the Creator. If Jesus was the Creator of the universe, He
obviously had to exist before it did!
When Jesus prayed to the Father, "glorify Thou Me together with
Thyself, Father, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was,"
this can't be some abstract thought of Christ's future glory in the Father's
mind. Why? Because if this glory wasn't actual, then what glory He
was praying for wouldn't have been actual either! In Gethsemane (John 17:24), He also reminded the Father that
"Thou didst love Me before the foundation of the world." In such a
personal prayer, it seems exceedingly unlikely this was a reference to the Father loving a certain
thought in His mind, as opposed to real love being manifested to another Person
in a relationship between mutually conscious Beings. By making all these references to Jesus' previous life
non-literal based upon (supposedly) standard Jewish thought patterns,
Unitarianism not only stretches the boundaries of credulity, but ruptures them.
THE THEORY
OF ATONEMENT AND THE CHEAPENING OF CHRIST'S SACRIFICE
MUST JESUS
BE GOD TO SAVE US?
To argue that Jesus only had to be
human to save us, Fakhoury cites texts that emphasize Jesus' humanity in the
process of redemption. The ultimate
problem with the Unitarian and Arian theories of redemption is that they make
it ultimately utterly arbitrary. One of
the fundamental mysteries of God's plan of redemption is why did Jesus have to
die? Why couldn't God the Father in
heaven just look down and say, "You're all forgiven if you
repent"? Why couldn't some other
human serve in place of Jesus as the source of redemption? Someone may reply, "Because only Jesus
lived a sinless life, only He could be the source of redemption." But how do we know that, except by indirect
theological argumentation? Scripture
clearly teaches Jesus was sinless, but how is that fact connected with the
atonement's requirements for its existence?
Could some other righteous God-fearing human serve as the redeemer, such
as Elisha or John the Baptist? If the
atonement has no ontological basis, but was a mere arbitrary cancellation of
the penalty of God's law for sin, how do we know that God is just in His
actions? How do we know He will punish
sins when they should be punished?
Ultimately, the source of redemption has to be the Lawgiver Himself,
since God's moral laws are intrinsic to His eternal character and nature. Having been the Lawgiver to Israel through
Moses, Jesus was the originator of the Law for humanity. Having been the reason for its existence, he
also could take in His own Person the penalty resulting from that law, and
stand in our place for it. The one who
put the moral law in motion has to be the Creator, and thus be God. The violation of the moral law demanded
human death as the penalty for its violation.
Consequently, Jesus had to become human (which Fakhoury stresses) to
save us by becoming just like us. He
also had to become human in order to die, and to give up His life temporarily
so we may live eternally ourselves.
Although Jesus was our Creator physically, and thus His life was worth
more than all of humanity's combined, He also had to be the Lawgiver in order
to be able to receive the penalty of sin in His own Person in our place. If someone believes Jesus was merely a man
like any other, and not divine, the atonement has no ontological/metaphysical
basis, Jesus appears to be capriciously chosen to be our Savior, and the
working out of the plan of redemption must be the mere unfolding of an
arbitrary whim.
THE
GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF ATONEMENT
The reason why an atonement was
necessary to begin with was that God's government over all the universe has a
law ordained by Him. This law is for
the good of all. But since humans have
an evil nature, they naturally wish to sin, and violate the laws of God's
government, God's kingdom. There are
two reasons for God having to punish sin, and not just arbitrarily let us
off. First, to deter the future
violations of God's own law for later acts of sin, God's government has to
inflict a formal penalty upon all who violate His law. By punishing sin, it encourages others in
the future not to sin. Second, it also
has to inflict a penalty to uphold justice.
By this second point of reasoning, punishing a murderer through the
death penalty is perfectly just, even if it doesn't deter a single future
murder or criminal act. However,
importantly, this doesn't mean God's sense of justice requires the inflicting
of an exact punishment for each act of sin by all humans. Otherwise, as Calvinism has proclaimed (to
various degrees), as our sins must be transferred onto Jesus for us to be
forgiven, Jesus became a sinner vicariously.
Instead, what's required is a sufficiently great, perfect, and high
sacrifice that shows that God's law (which is an expression of His moral
character and nature) is so important to Him that it can't be casually
ignored. A penalty for its violation
must be inflicted. By having the
Creator and the Lawgiver die for us, this bears witness to all the
intelligences in the universe (human and angelic) that God's moral government
over all the universe isn't a mere paper tiger, but has full substance behind
it. As theologian John Miley commented,
while defending the Arminian governmental theory of the atonement against the
Calvinistic theory of satisfaction:
Nothing could be more fallacious than
the objection that the governmental theory is in any sense acceptilational, or
implicitly indifferent to the character of the substitute in atonement. In the inevitable logic of its deepest and
most determining principles it excludes all inferior substitution and requires
a divine sacrifice as the only sufficient atonement. Only such a substitution can give adequate expression to the
great truths which may fulfill the rectoral office of penalty.[71]
THE IMPLICATIONS
FOR THE ATONEMENT IN THE STORY OF ZALEUCUS
The story of Zaleucus, a lawgiver and
ruler over a colony of Greeks in southern Italy, helps to illustrate how God's
law requires a high but not necessarily fully exact penalty for its
violation. Zaleucus's own son violated
the law, which required as a penalty the son being made blind. This case came before Zaleucus himself,
causing him inner torment as his two roles as father and lawgiver conflicted. Although the citizens of the colony even
were willing to ask for his son to be pardoned, he knew as a statesman that
eventually the reaction against letting his son arbitrarily off would be to
accuse him of partiality and injustice; consequently, in the future his laws
would be broken more. Yet, as a father,
he yearned to lessen or eliminate the punishment for his son. His solution? He gave up one of his own eyes so that his son would only lose
one of his own![72] Notice that had he paid a sum of money, or
had found someone else to take the penalty for this punishment, his authority
as a statesman and lawgiver would have still been subverted, since the law and
the penalties for its violation weren't being taken seriously then. By giving up one of his own eyes, Zaleucus
showed his own high regard for the law and the moral sense standing behind
it. Likewise, the fundamental problem
with the theories of atonement put forth by those denying the Deity of Christ
is that they undermine the moral justice of God's government by making the
sacrifice of Christ a much smaller, weaker vicarious penalty for the sins of
humanity. It's well on the road to
making God's forgiveness of sins arbitrary, and making the penalty for
violating His law trivial. After all,
if God could forgive sins for all humanity through a mere man who was sinless
and virgin-born, why couldn't He use a righteous man who sinned some as the
ground for atonement, such as Elijah or John the Baptist? And if the latter could be true, why not
dispense altogether with someone dying for humanity's sins? Only by making a great sacrifice, such as
Zaleucus did for his son, would God make it clear to all the universe's
intelligences that the violation of his moral government's law, which expresses
His intrinsic moral character, is not to be taken lightly, or arbitrarily
ignored as He expresses His great love for humanity.
DOCTRINES
HAVE TO BE LOGICALLY CONSISTENT WITH EACH OTHER
Now someone might reply to the above
reasoning, "That sounds nice, Mr. Snow, but since you don't cite any
specific texts, how do we know it's anything more than theological
speculation?" Here we face the
reality that if we Christians are to be systematic in our theology, we can't
uphold one doctrine that logically clashes with another. One or the other (or both) can't be correct then,
showing somewhere we have misinterpreted the Bible. Miley uses the examples of three theological systems found within
Protestantism to one degree or another, the Socinian (Unitarian), the
Calvinist, and the Arminian. The
doctrines of each logically interrelate to others upheld by it, and if one key
doctrine or another is changed, then others must be changed for them
still to cohere logically together. For
example, suppose a classic Calvinist changed his mind, and denied that the
atonement was limited to the elect (the saved), but was for all humanity. Obviously, such texts as John 3:16-17; 6:51
certainly indicate the sacrifice of Christ was for all men and women, not just
those who actually accept Him as Savior.
But then, logically, he would have to discard his belief in
predestination, in which some are destined from birth to be saved, and others
damned, because if Christ died for the whole world, and those whom He atones
for must be saved, then all would be saved.
But clearly since not all will be saved, their individual free wills
must be what determines who is saved and who isn't. So then, the teaching of "once saved, always saved"
must be eliminated, because if God grants us free will to accept salvation, it
must be He will let us cancel our salvation any time we wish. Consequently, a major problem with
Unitarianism and Arianism is that their advocates (if logically consistent)
inevitably cheapen the costs of Christ's sacrifice. The (liberal Unitarian) Socinian system, for example, doesn't really
believe in the atonement having any objective, ontological ground, since
Christ's life and death is seen as only having a moral influence on others to
live more righteous lives. As Miley
notes:
With Socinus [1539-1604] the moral
theory sprung naturally from his system of theology, especially from his
Christology. In the assertion of
Christ's simple humanity, doctrinal consistency required him to reject all
schemes of a real objective atonement, and to interpret the mediation of Christ
in accord with his own Christology. The
moral theory is the proper result. It
is the scheme which his system of theology required, and the only one which it
will consistently admit.[73]
Although
Fakhoury, Buzzard, Hunting, etc. presumably reject Socinus' theory of the
atonement, it becomes an uphill struggle to avoid the implications of their own
Christology that favors an arbitrary, capricious treatment of God's law and
government, which necessarily causes questions about His moral character. If God can forgive any offense without a
penalty being inflicted, or without it being inflicted on someone of substance
to the Lawgiver, how do we know He will uphold justice in the world to
come? Only through the sacrifice of a
God being, indeed, the Lawgiver Himself, does it become clear to all men and
all angels that God will uphold His law and the necessary penalties for
breaking it regardless of cost to Himself, thus ensuring His grace and mercy do
not undermine His justice and equity in the eyes of His creatures.
CONCLUSION: SHOULD WE ACCEPT THE JEWISH DOCTRINE OF GOD?
Although a book could easily be
written on the evidence for the Deity of Christ, the above analysis shows the
Arian/Unitarian case only has a superficial plausibility. Its fundamental error lies in accepting at
face value the interpretation of the Jews of the nature of God since it
effectively denies the progressive nature of God's revelation about His nature
in Scripture and denies how frequently the Old Testament itself implies a
plurality in the Godhead. The Jews'
definition of "one" as "one Person" is utterly taken for
granted. Having done so, it then
proceeds to overturn standard grammatical usages and interpretations of words
to support its teaching, or evade the meaning of texts that contradict it. In order to save itself as a theory, it has
to allegorize texts, retranslate texts, and/or revise texts. By contrast, Binitarian monotheism so much
more effortlessly fits the available Scriptural evidence without so many ad hoc
secondary modifications to save itself from falsification. It employs effectively wields Occam's Razor,
by using the simplest yet most complete explanation of all the facts of a
complicated reality. It accepts the
likely or most likely meaning and/or reading of many texts where Unitarianism/Arianism
usually has to submit a special pleading for the rare or unusual meaning or
reading of the texts in question. It
makes grammar determine doctrine, not doctrine grammar. But the greatest problem Unitarianism and
Arianism face is their cheapening of the sacrifice of Christ and our Savior by
demoting Him from God Almighty to mere man or angel, thus making God's plan of
redemption look increasingly capricious and His sense of justice more
questionable. Since the God whom we
worship has revealed to us that "great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh" (I
Tim. 3:16, NKJV), let us reject the Arian and Unitarian heresies against the
Deity of "Our Great God and Savior" (Titus 2:13), Jesus Christ.
Click here to access essays that defend
Christianity's truth
Links to elsewhere on this Web site: /apologetics.html /book.html /doctrinal.html /essays.html /links.html
/sermonettes.html /webmaster.html
For the home page, click here: /index.html
[1]It's
important to note that this article will generally avoid restating the detail
of arguments already made in my earlier article in the July 31, 1998 Journal
that defended the Deity of Christ, unless further explanation or correction has
proven to be useful and/or necessary.
[2]Robert
Morey, The Trinity: Evidence and
Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: World
Publishing, Inc.), pp. 7-8, 87.
Admittedly, Morey's book promotes false teachings such as the Trinity,
the personality of the Holy Spirit, and presuppositionalism in apologetics
(i.e., God is assumed to exist, not proven to exist). Nevertheless, its powerful arguments for the Deity of Christ and
the multiplicity of the Godhead are freely drawn upon in this essay.
[3]Although
Fakhoury properly notes "elohim" is used of singular entities, such
as Moses, Dagon, and the Golden Calf, this argument ignores that this word's
part of speech is a plural noun. Citing
a few scattered references in in which "elohim" refers to singular
entities in order to deny its basic plural meaning is selective proof-texting
as well.
[4]Tzvi
Nassi, The Great Mystery (Jerusalem:
Yanetz, 1970), p. 6, as cited in Morey, The Trinity, pp. 94-95.
[5]as
quoted in M.G. Einspruch, A Way in the Wilderness (Baltimore: The Lewis and Harriet Lederer Foundation),
p. 95.
[7]It
has been said that the plural of majesty isn't a hoax because in the Quran
(Koran) Allah extensively uses "We," not "I." However, there still is a gap of over 2000
years between the time of Moses and the time of Muhammad, so something more
ancient, and thus concurrent with the writing of the Hebrew Scriptures, is
necessary to make this point stick.
Admittedly, as John Wheeler has observed in a letter written to me dated
December 24, 1998, the use of the plural noun with a singular verb used in
agreement appears elsewhere in the OT, such as Wisdom in some Proverbs, the
Behemoth in Job, and "your teachers" in Isa. 30:20. However, this still doesn't refute Morey's
point about the plural of majesty (or, perhaps more precisely, the "royal
we") being limited to direct discourse when spoken aloud. The question remains about why such terms
are sometimes plural in form, and sometimes aren't, when power or might is
implied may not be, strictly speaking, a "plural of majesty" because
no monarch (including God) is speaking directly when they appear. Still, this issue remains, and constitutes
one for further research: Did ancient
Semitic monarchs or gods use the "royal we" in historical records or
myths?
[8]Martin
Luther, Luther's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Grand Rapids,
MI: Zondervan, 1958), p. 354; as cited
in Morey, The Trinity, pp. 97.
[9]Murray
J. Harris, Jesus as God: The New
Testament Use of Theos in Reference to Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), pp. 202, 192.
[10]John
Wheeler, a laymember of the Living Church of God, says the accents of verse 16
point to a break, although not a total divorcement, in the passage. After the phrase, "Come near to Me,
listen to this," he believes it is the Messiah who is speaking since He is
the subject of the immediately preceding verses. Personal communication, December 24, 1998.
[12]as
quoted by Rachmiel Frydland in Einspruch, ed., A Way in the Wilderness,
p. 93; Morey, The Trinity, pp. 89-90.
[13]For
Russell's argument, see The At-one-ment between God and Man, Studies
in the Scriptures, vol. 5 (East Rutherford, NJ: Dawn Bible Students Association, 1899 (original publication), pp.
54-55.
[14]As
for Isa. 9:6 in particular, note that in the following chapter, Yahweh is the
"mighty God" (Isa. 10:21), not some lesser god.
[15]Buzzard's
citation of J. Harold Ellens viewpoint, "Thinking of a human as being God
was strictly a Greek or Hellenistic notion," may reflect the influence of
this thesis as well. Anthony Buzzard,
"What is the Nature of Preexistence in the New Testament?," The
Journal, Sept. 28, 1998, p. 11.
[16]Five
key books proving the show falsity of Conder's thesis, which originally derived
from liberal Protestantism: J. Gresham
Machen, The Origin of Paul's Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965); Seyoon Kim, The Origin
of Paul's Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1981); Edwin M. Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1983); R.N.
Ridderbos, Paul and Jesus (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1952); F.F. Bruce, Jesus &
Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982). My specific rebuttals against Conder's claims, "Is
Christianity a Fraud?" and "Round Two!," are available at the
UCG--Ann Arbor website (www.io.com/~ucgaa./ucgaa.html) and Alan Ruth's
(biblestudy.org).
[17]Morey,
The Trinity, pp. 207-10, 315-17, 348.
For a general critique of the claims that first-century Christianity's
doctrinal content came from pagan religion and philosophy, see Ronald H. Nash, The
Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New
Testament Borrow From Pagan Thought? (Richardson, TX: Probe Books, 1992). A general rebuttal of Hick's work is Michael
Green, ed., The Truth of God Incarnate (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
1977). In the 1970s, this book (which Hick
edited) created an enormous uproar in the Anglican Church in England.
[18]my
emphasis, 4QAramaic Apocalypse [4Q246] col. I:7-9; Col. II:1,5-8; as cited by
Morey, The Trinity, pp. 228-29.
[19]Justo
L. Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought, vol. 1, From the
Beginnings to the Council of Chalcedon (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1970), pp. 226-233.
[21]Morey,
Trinity, pp. 454-65; 469-78.
Morey refers to G.C. Stead, "The Platonism of Arius," JTS,
n.s., 15 (1964), pp. 16-37; Robert Gregg, ed., Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments
(Philadelphia: Patristic Foundation,
1985), pp. 1-58.
[22]The
question comes from chapter 4 of Robert M. Bowman Jr., Why You Should
Believe in the Trinity: An Answer to
Jehovah's Witnesses (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Book House, 1989), p. 49; For the mathematical example, see Gordon
E. Duggar, Jehovah's Witnesses:
Watch Out for the Watchtower! (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1985), p. 66.
[25]Harris,
Jesus as God, p. 60. However,
Harris seems to concede too much to the enemy here. See Bowman's insightful comment below about the word
"god" being the problem (the small "g"), not "a
God" (the absence or presence of the article).
[26]Walter
Martin and Norman Klann, Jehovah of the Watchtower (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1981), p. 49.
[30]as
cited by Bruce M. Metzger, The Jehovah's Witnesses and Jesus Christ
(Princeton, NJ: Theological Book
Agency, 1953), p. 75; as found in McDowell and Larson, Jesus, p. 29.
[33]The
shift in meaning Harris sees in this verse's two uses of "theos" is a
mere tremor compared to the earthquake change Arians want to read into John
1:1. This verse concerns how God
is known, not what God is, and the writer emphasizes the quality of
being God, as opposed to referring to God as being a member of a group of
beings or entities.
[41]Proving
the reliability of the Received Text against Wade Cox's calumnies against it is
beyond the basic scope of this essay.
It should be noted that the pro-Trinitarian interpolation in John 5:7-8
is found in only TWO quite late Greek manuscripts of the Received Text, but was
in most copies of the Latin Vulgate.
The main, best argument for the Received/Byzantine text's reliability
comes from the simple truth that the early Catholic Church Fathers (but with
the notable exception of Origen) mostly quoted from it, not from the Critical
Text in the centuries and decades before the two main critical text manuscripts
(Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) were copied in the fourth century. For example, the last eleven verses of Mark
are quoted in such second-century sources as Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus,
and Tertullian (who lived to after 220 A.D.), as well as the Old Latin and
Syriac versions. In light of it being
so commonly cited elsewhere earlier, why is it sensible to believe that because
Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, copied in the fourth century, omit them that
therefore Mark didn't write them? To
explain the difference of why the Byzantine/Received Text was so much more
commonly preserved than the Critical text, Hort claimed that the (Catholic)
church made a recension (that is, it edited) the NT's text at Antioch in the
fourth century. No direct evidence for
this claim has ever appeared.
Ironically, and pointing to a fundamental reliability problem in the
Critical text's copying, more significant variations appear within the far fewer
manuscripts of the Critical Text than within the far greater number of
Received text manuscripts! For a good
general (if admittedly polemical) defense of the Received text, see David Otis
Fuller, ed., Which Bible? (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids International Publications, 1975).
[44]Lenski,
The Interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistles of James
(Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1966), p. 54;
as cited in Morey, The Trinity, p. 349.
[45]Admittedly,
this connotation or implication of the word is effectively denied by the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich
(p. 528) and draws divided opinions in Thayer's (p. 418).
[46]Consider
President Clinton's frequently ridiculed discussion of why "is"
didn't mean "is" in this light:
He asked if the word "is" also included a past relationship
with Monica Lewinsky, or just referred to a present time, ongoing
relationship.
[47]Fritz
Rienecker and Cleon Rogers, Linguistic Key to the Greek New Testament
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1980), p.
550; William Hendriksen, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Philippians
(London: Banner, 1963), p. 103, n. 82; The
Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. 3, pp. 435-36; N.T. Wright,
"arpagmos and the meaning of Philippians 2:5-11, The Best in Theology,
ed. J.I. Packer (Carol Stream:
Christianity Today, n.d.), vol. 2, p. 101; as quoted in Morey, The
Trinity, pp. 336-41.
[48]Further
oblique evidence that eternal Sonship/generation is false comes from
Melchizedek being said to be "like the Son of God." In the time of Abraham, the Word was not yet
"the Son of God" because He had not yet been born of the Virgin
Mary. For more on Melchizedek being
Jesus, see the reprint article by Herbert W. Armstrong, "The Mystery of
Melchizedek Solved!," 1956, 1972.
[50]Anthony
Buzzard and Charles Hunting, "The One God of Israel and Deut. 6:4 is the
God of the Bible," The Journal, July 31, 1998, p. 14.
[51]S.K.
Soderlund, "Text and MSS of the NT," in G.W. Bromiley, gen. ed., International
Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol. 4, p. 807. John Wheeler, in a personal communication to me (Dec. 1998),
maintains that some Dead Sea Scroll fragments have vowel points and that
Clement of Alexandria (who died c. 213 A.D.) mentioned the existence of the
accents and vowel points. He believes
what became the Tiberian system was rediscovered after the translation of the
Vulgate and the writing of the Talmud by a cache of manuscripts found near
Jericho which the Karaites brought to Jerusalem. However, this viewpoint goes against the present-time scholarly
consensus against their antiquity, which got its start in the sixteenth century
when the Jewish scholar Elias Levita challenged their antiquity. The mere fact the vowel points totally
dropped out of (evidently) centuries of Hebrew manuscripts, i.e., God's holy,
inspired word, indicates they weren't considered integral to the text. It's nearly as inconceivable as imagining
someone printing a book written in English without any vowels!
[52]See
William Dankenbring, "Who is the 'Angel of the Lord' and the
Messiah?," Prophecy Flash, Oct.-Nov. 1998, pp. 15-17.
[53]Someone
who has taken a class in formal logic might complain that these syllogisms
seemingly have an invalid form, because the key joining term "God"
remains the predicate in both cases, instead of being the subject once and the
predicate once (i.e., in a diagonal layout).
(Similarly, in algebra, if A is B, and B is C, then A must be
C). However, the use of the word
"only" in the first premise removes this objection, since it makes
the first proposition asserting "God is good" convertible, i.e., one
could write just as well, "All good beings are God." Hence, the fully logically valid syllogism
is: 1.
Jesus is a good being. 2. All good beings are God. Therefore, Jesus is God.
[57]John
Wheeler, "How the Bible Speaks of Jesus' and the Father's Divinity," The
Journal, Aug. 31, 1998, p. 11.
[58]One
long-time dispute among Seventh-day Adventists has been over whether Jesus'
human nature was what Adam had before the Fall or after the
Fall. An important issue in this debate
concerns whether one accepts the doctrine of original sin, and if one does,
which theological school's interpretation is correct. Calvinism and Roman Catholicism maintain that babies are born not
just with an evil human nature, but are born guilty, with Adam's sin on
them. Calvinism's great rival in the
Protestant theological world, Arminianism, maintains babies are born with an
evil human nature, but without being guilty of Adam's sin. Herbert Armstrong changed his position on
this subject relatively late in life.
In the reprint article, "Millions Do Not Know What Christ Really
Was?," (1963), he asserted Jesus had an evil human nature, just like ours: "Christ . . . had become human,
having human nature with all of its desires and weaknesses
. . . The Satan-inspired
doctrine that Jesus was not human and that He did not inherit the
sinful nature of Adam . . . is the doctrine of the Anti-Christ.
. . . Then there is the
belief that denies the fact that Jesus inherited human nature
from his mother, Mary." But in The
Incredible Human Potential (1978), he denied the doctrine of original sin
in both versions, writing that humans acquire an evil human nature from
Satan's influence. However, he
maintained, Christ was an exception:
"The Ephesians (Eph. 2:1) acquired it [evil human nature] from
Satan--as all humanity, except Jesus Christ." Similarly, in The Missing Dimension of
Sex (1981), pp. 160-61, he wrote:
"Jesus Christ obeyed God, kept God's commandments, resisted Satan,
never allowed what we call 'human nature' to enter Him." See also The Wonderful World Tomorrow,
1982, p. 29. Hence, when HWA abandoned
the doctrine of inherited evil human nature, then Jesus' human nature had to be
automatically good.
[59]See
Bowman's useful list of attributes about Jesus and God being seemingly
contradictory in Why You Should Believe in the Trinity, p. 75. Despite
quoting from this page of this book, Fakhoury makes no attempt to solve the
counter-puzzles Bowman poses: Jesus has
seemingly contradictory attributes asserted of Him, independent of whether they
are necessarily the attributes of God.
Hick's "solution" of denying Jesus is God doesn't really solve
the problems involved, such as the seeming conflict between Hebrews 13:8 and
Luke 2:52.
[63]It
has been argued, based upon Acts 13:33's citation of Ps. 2:7, that this text only
refers to Jesus' resurrection (cf. Rom. 1:4).
It may merely refer to the completion of the process of Jesus being
"born again," i.e., made into a spirit Being, since Jesus was
"the first-born from the dead" (Col. 1:18). Therefore, since Jesus was the Son of God in the flesh before
being crucified, buried, and resurrected, Ps. 2:7 proves nothing against
eternal sonship. But this
counter-argument has a major flaw, since II Sam. 7:14 is cited also as a
prophecy about the future Messiah to come.
Granted a standard definition of terms, since it says "I will
be a Father to Him, and He shall be a Son to Me," the future tense
shows Jesus wasn't the "Son of God" at the moment this text was
written in the Old Testament. It's
hazardous to take Acts 13:33's narrow use of Ps. 2:7 to make it refer to the
resurrection only, and then apply this to II Sam. 7:14 also merely because
Hebrews 1:5 cites together both Ps. 2:7 and II Sam. 7:14. Furthermore, Ps. 2:7 may have more than one
application or fulfillment, and not just refer to the resurrection. Note that Hebrews 5:5 also cites Ps. 2:7,
but the context of verse 7 ("In the days of His flesh") seems to
point to a meaning separate from the resurrection. A dual application of texts in matters of prophecy is certainly
possible here, since Peter applied a text about "the last days" to
Pentecost's overwhelming grant of spiritual gifts in 31 A.D. (Acts
2:15-21). As for Ps. 2:7 referring to
Jesus being "born again," a problem exists with saying Jesus could
have been the "Son of God" before being conceived in the Virgin
Mary. Jesus, by analogy with us humans,
couldn't have been begotten by God until He had the Holy Spirit, which is when
we are begotten by God. Although He had
the Holy Spirit from the moment of conception, unlike almost all other humans,
He still was human when He was so begotten, not earlier. For Jesus' spiritual life humanly to be like
ours, He couldn't have been spiritually begotten before He was human.
[64]Walter
Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1985), p.
117. Perhaps nothing is more ironic
than to see Herbert Armstrong and Walter Martin agreeing on a point of
Christian doctrine! For Morey's
interpretation of Prov. 30:4, see The Trinity, pp. 174-76.
[66]Emphasis
in text, Loraine Boettner, Studies in Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William V. Eerdmans, 1947), from pp. 152-53;
as quoted in Josh McDowell and Bart Larson, Jesus: A Biblical Defense of His Deity (San Bernardino, CA: Here's Life Publishers, 1983), pp. 75-76.
[67]For
the point about Jesus and Zech. 14, I'm indebted to an observation of John
Wheeler's. Personal communication,
December 1998.
[69]Naturally,
in a "wisdom book" such as Proverbs, Wisdom unsurprisingly is
personified (re: Prov. 8). But it's a dubious claim to read an extended
allegory about wisdom into a Gospel, a primarily historical book, especially
when there's no discourse about the value of wisdom, etc. in the general
context of the book. This is a literary
category mistake.
[70]Anthony
Buzzard, "What is the Nature of Preexistence in the New Testament?," The
Journal, Sept. 28, 1998, pp. 9-11.
[71]Miley
extensively discusses various theories of atonement, including the Socinian
(Unitarian) moral-influence theory, in the following work: Systematic Theology (Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson Publishers), vol. 2,
pp. 65-240. The specific quote is found
on p. 183.