“There is one God, the Father, who is the only one who is truly God, the one who alone is God, and one Mediator between that One God and man, and this is the MAN/lord Messiah Jesus” (I Cor. 8:4-6; John 17:3; 5:44; I Tim. 2:5). Such is the Bible’s invitation to a clear-headed view of the God we are to worship in spirit and truth (John 4:26). To maintain, in the face of the above statements, that Jesus IS God places an unbearable strain on the propositions listed above.
The biblical creed, combining John 17:3 with I Timothy 2:5 and I Corinthians 8:4-6, appears to us to put all possible doubt to rest. These passages are of course directly creedal statements, but Trinitarians stay away from these and go for the ambiguous verses which do not bear directly on the creed. Jesus did say formally that “eternal life/salvation consists in knowing the Father as the only one who is truly God, who is alone the true God” (John 17:3; 5:44). When these statements are understood and confessed we are on the way to unity.
The Bible says that Jesus was begotten by the Father. To state that Jesus is the begotten Son is simply to say that he was brought into existence, that he had a beginning. The idea that Jesus, the Son of God, is a Person without beginning, as the Trinitarian doctrine maintains, is to contradict plain texts of the Bible. The New Testament leaves no doubt at all about this fact. In Matthew 1:18 we read about the genesis of Jesus Christ. We learn that “what is begotten/generated in Mary” (Matt. 1:20) is the product of the action of the holy spirit of God. Translations have apparently tried to conceal this simple truth by rendering the word “beget” as “conceived.” This diverts our attention from the significant information that the beginning/begetting/ generation/coming into existence of the Son of God is being described. Take a long and careful look at Matthew 1:20. What you are seeing there is a stupendous event — the coming into being of the Son of God by a divine creative miracle. This is one of the truly awe-inspiring landmarks of the whole of human history. The Creator of Heaven and Earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and of Jesus stoops down to “engineer” a staggering miracle in the womb of a young Jewess, Mariam. What happens in that precious moment of time is the coming into existence of the Messiah, Son of God. “That which is begotten — that which is being given existence — in Mary is from God, through His operational presence, His spirit” (see Matt. 1:20).
It is a considerable scandal that the public has so long put up with a system of “interpretation” which negates the actual meaning of simple words. To beget, in English, Hebrew and Greek means “to give existence to, to bring into existence, to bring into life.” Orthodox traditional church teachings invented a new non-dictionary meaning for the vitally important word “generate” or ”beget.” That tradition announced dogmatically that the Son of God was “eternally generated.” This is language without meaning — church-speak, a jargon which innocent church members were, and often still are, compelled to believe. But the vast majority have not seriously thought through the implications of what they have been taught. The Bible says that the Messiah, the Son of God was to be “begotten today” (Ps. 2:7). “Today” cannot mean outside of time, in eternity. To speak of an “eternal generation” is to speak of square circles or of 2 and 2 equaling 5. It is — not to put too fine a point on it — nonsense. It is an abuse of the precious gift of language to speak of a beginningless beginning. It was no less subversive of the laws of language when Charles Wesley, in a celebrated hymn, taught churchgoers to sing of Jesus as “the immortal who died”: “Tis mystery all, the immortal dies.”[1] Such misuse of language encourages a mystical confusion, the very opposite of sound, biblical Truth.
When Gabriel announced the staggering event of the coming into existence of the promised Son of God, he avoided all ambiguity. In a concise statement he informed the world that “the thing being begotten” is from the holy spirit. No one could possibly imagine that the “the thing to be begotten” was already in existence as the eternal Son of God, as traditional creeds propose. Far from proposing any sort of mystification, Gabriel places the begetting of the Son of God squarely in history (it was the Gnostic heretics, remember, who constantly tried to obscure the historical facts of God’s salvation program). Around 2 or 3 BC the Son of God was created in the womb of Mary by a supernatural intervention from God. “For that reason, the holy thing to be begotten will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). For what reason? The answer is simple. Because of the mighty intervention from God and the activity of His spirit in generating — bringing into existence — the Son of God.
Such teaching of course tells us in no uncertain terms that Jesus is the Son of God, but he is not the eternal Son of God. There is no hint of an eternal generation of the Son in Scripture. John in his first epistle speaks of Jesus as the one who was begotten. The aorist tense points to a single event in history. The event was the miracle of creation effected in Jesus’ mother. Jesus really was a man. “He [the Son] who was begotten keeps him [the believer]” (I John 5:18). Notice that this proposition was an embarrassment to some. The King James Version shows signs of a corrupted Greek manuscript. This turned the word “him” into “himself.” In this way the begetting of the Son of God (Jesus) was removed from the text. Modern versions of the Bible have happily given us the real words of John in this verse.
However, some modern versions (like the NIV) have elsewhere misleadingly given the impression that Jesus was God Himself! Thus in Philippians 2:5ff we read in the NIV of the Son “being in very nature God.” But no Greek manuscript says this. What the Greek text does say is that the Son was “in the form of God.” “Form” occurs (apart from this passage) only in one other verse of the New Testament (Mark 16:12) and it describes the outward — what is visible. To say that Jesus was in the form of God is equivalent to saying that the character and mind of the One God, the Father of Jesus, were reflected in the historical Jesus, the Son of God. To be in the image of God, as Adam also was, is to be a visible representative of God. Jesus was just that, but he was a human being originating at his (supernatural) conception. Though he was the reflection of the one God, his Father and endowed with divine characteristics and authority he nevertheless resolved to fulfill the role or “form” of a servant. In so doing he provided a realistic model for his followers.
As many scholars have pointed out, the idea that “Jesus was God who became man” lures us into belief in two Gods. The theory adopted by the church in the 4th and 5th centuries implied that while God the Father remained in heaven, “God the Son,” who was equally God, became a man, or rather “man.” (The classical creed says that Jesus is “man,” but not “a man”). If God the Father remained in heaven and God the Son was walking the earth, we are presented with two Gods. We are asked to believe in the one who was God who did not become man and the one who was God who did become man. That is plainly ditheism, belief in two Gods.
Once the church set out on this path, the most fundamental of all unities was undermined. Unity amongst believers may be recovered when we all begin to agree with Paul that “there is one God, the Father, one God and Father over all,” and that Jesus is His Son who came into existence around 3 BC. Jesus is the Lord Messiah (the adoni of Ps. 110:1) and his Father is the Lord God.
Bible teachers who have taken on the teaching of the classic creed struggle with its difficulties. Ryrie writes:
“Trinity is, of course, not a biblical word. Neither are triunity, triune, triunal, subsistence, nor essence. Yet we employ them, and often helpfully, in trying to express this doctrine which is so fraught with difficulties. Furthermore, this is a doctrine which in the New Testament is not explicit even though it is often said that it is.” “A definition of the Trinity is not easy to construct. Some are done by stating several propositions. Others err on the side either of oneness or threeness. One of the best is Warfield’s: ‘There is one only and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons, the same in substance but distinct in subsistence.’”
Other scholars candidly admit that the Trinity is a mistaken doctrine. Encyclopedia Britannica:
“The propositions constitutive of the dogma of the Trinity were not drawn from the New Testament and could not be expressed in New Testament terms. They were the products of reason speculating on a revelation to faith…they were only formed through centuries of effort, only elaborated by the aid of the conceptions and formulated in the terms of Greek and Roman metaphysics.”
Dr. W.R. Matthews, Dean of St. Paul’s, God in Christian Thought and Experience, p. 180:
“It must be admitted by everyone who has the rudiments of an historical sense that the doctrine of the Trinity, as a doctrine, formed no part of the original message. St. Paul knew it not, and would have been unable to understand the meaning of the terms used in the theological formula on which the Church ultimately agreed.”
We comment: There is much that is in fact inscrutable about God and His purpose. But the fact that He is a single Person and not three Persons jumps out at the open-minded reader on every page. “I am God alone; there is no one besides Me; there is no other God beside One. Do we not all have one Father? Has not One God created us? You, Father, are the only one who is truly God, the one who alone is God.”
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