“So that all the peoples of the earth may know that Yehovah is God; there
is no one else.” (1 Kings 8:60, NAU). “Our
one Lord” (LXX of Daniel 7:13).
”Do we not all have one Father? Has not one God
created us” (Malachi 2:10) Jesus: “Why do you call me good, only One Person is
good, that is God Alone” (Mark 10:18)
Ps.110:1 is key text more often quoted than any other
verse from the OT. It gives us an oracle of YHVH to my lord. The title “my lord” for Jesus is ADONI in the
Hebrew, and in all 195 times it occurs it defines non-Deity someone who is not
God!. Deity by contrast is ADONAI, the
Lord God.
Martin
Werner, DD, Prof. at Bern:
“The Church found itself in a dilemma as soon
as it tried to harmonize the doctrine of the Deity of Jesus and the Deity of
the Father with monotheism. For
according to the NT witnesses, in the teaching of Jesus relative to the
monotheism of the OT and Judaism, there had been no element of change whatsoever.
Mk 12:29ff. recorded the confirmation by Jesus himself, without any
reservation, of the supreme monotheistic confession of faith of Israelite
religion in its complete form… The means by which the Church sought to
demonstrate the agreement of its dogma of the Deity of both Father and Son with
monotheism, remained seriously uncertain and contradictory (Dr.
Martin Werner, Formation of Christian Dogma, 1957, p. 241).
How many persons is the God of Israel?
“YHVH the God of Israel”
(203 times). YHVH is the God of Israel, how many Persons is He?
God of Jacob (28 times), God of Abraham (17 times), God
of Isaac (17 times). Of no other ethnic group. Never: God of Europe! But God of Jews and Gentiles. God of the Hebrews (Jonah 1:9).
YHWH is one Father (Malachi 2:10)
Dr. H.H. Wendt (Teaching of Jesus, p. 184ff.):
We can say
that Jesus taught no new doctrine of God, but adopted and built on the Old
Testament view... Jesus indeed taught no new doctrine of the attributes of God.
The God of whom Jesus speaks is the One God of Israel (Mark 12:29; Deut. 6:4),
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Mark 12:26). Jesus sought to unfold no
view as to God which would have required a special explanation and basis for
the Jewish mind. He used the name of Father to designate God. He used this name
as a foundation on which to base weighty teaching in regard to God’s gracious
action and the right mode of piety on the part of man. Frequently in the Old Testament God had
already been designated as Father, ‘Have we not all one Father? Has not One God
created us?” (Mal. 2:10).
“It was reported by the Associated Press of London, June
25, 1984 that a majority of Anglican bishops interviewed by a Television
program said ‘Christians are not obliged to believe that Jesus Christ was God.’
The poll was of 31 of England’s 39 bishops. The report further stated that 19
of the 31 bishops said it was sufficient to believe that Jesus was the supreme
Agent of God.” From London’s weekend TV Program, Credo.
Church of England, Archbishop
Ramsay: “Jesus did not claim Deity for
himself.” Jesus and the Living Past,
p. 39.
• “It must be admitted by everyone who has the
rudiments of an historical sense that the doctrine of the Trinity formed no
part of the original message. St. Paul did not know it, and would have been
unable to understand the meaning of the terms used in the theological formula
on which the Church ultimately agreed” (Dr. Matthews, D.D. D. Litt. God in
Christian Experience, p. 180).
• The
Trinity is a contradiction, indeed, and not merely a verbal contradiction, but
an incompatibility in the human ideas conveyed. We can scarcely make a nearer
approach to an exact enunciation of it, than of saying that one thing is two things.
(Sadler’s Gloria Patri, p. 39, A. H. Newman).
“The evolution of the Trinity: No
responsible NT scholar would claim that the doctrine of the Trinity was
taught by Jesus or preached by the earliest Christians or consciously held by
any writer of the NT. It was in fact slowly worked out in the course of the
first few centuries in an attempt to give an intelligible doctrine of God” (The Image of the Invisible God, SCM Press, 1982, p. Dr. A. T Hanson,
Professor of Theology University of Hull)
“It might tend to moderation and in the
end agreement, if we were industrious on all occasions to represent our own
doctrine of the Trinity as wholly unintelligible” (Dr. Hey, Lectures
in Divinity, 2, 235
Theological Dictionary of the NT
(Kittel): “As regards Trinitarianism in John, there is no express doctrine of
the Trinity in the metaphysical sense of oneness of essence and substance. The
Father, Son and Holy Spirit are formally interrelated only in the non-authentic
comma Johanneum [spurios forgery]” (Vol.V, 1003)
Vol. 5, p. 1010: “For the first beginnings of Trinitarianism....”
see the quote above. [That the Trinity did not begin in the Bible is admitted]
“The NT does not actually speak of Triunity. We seek this in vain in the
triadic formulae of the NT. The Spanish texts of the 6th century are the first
to offer a clear trinitarian formula in the so-called Comma Johanneum of I John
5:7ff.. The Spanish Catholics made of this a trinitarian formula by continuing,
after ‘bear witness’ “...in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit,
and these three are one.” They thus imported a conclusion of early dogma into
the NT. Early Christianity itself, however, does not yet have the problem of
the Trinity in view.”
New
International Dictionary of NT Theology, ed. Dr. Colin Brown at Fuller Seminary:
The Trinity.
“The NT does not contain the developed
doctrine of the Trinity. The Bible lacks the express declaration that the
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are of an equal essence and therefore
in an equal sense God himself. And the other express declaration is also
lacking, that God is God thus and only thus, i.e., as the Father, the Son and
the Holy Spirit. These two express declarations, which go beyond the witness
of the Bible, are the twofold content of the church doctrine of the Trinity
(Karl Barth, CD 1, 1 437)…. That God and Christ belong together and that they
are distinct, are equally stressed, with the precedence in every case
due to God, the Father, who stands above Christ… There is no strict dogmatic
assertion… All this underlines the point that primitive Christianity did not
have an explicit doctrine of the Trinity such as was subsequently elaborated in
the creeds of the early church.”
(Dr. J. Schneider, Prof. of Theology in Berlin.)
Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, p. 865:
“But for Israel there was only
one God and sole devotion to this One God was a paramount essential. To serve
or follow other gods was a cardinal offense, emphasized
particularly in Deuteronomy and Isa. 40-55.” “The NT follows this tradition by taking for
granted the established monotheism of
Judaism.” “In the NT the monotheistic convictions [the all-essential Shema, he has just said] of
Judaism are taken for granted.
(p. 701, “monotheism”). “The first of all commandments according to Jesus
is the shema, the affirmation of the Oneness of God” (Mark 12:29) (p. 701)
Jewish opponents are not represented as criticizing Christianity for abandoning
monotheism. The close association of Jesus with God seems to lead towards the
seeing of monotheism in a different way [John 17:3 and Mark 12:28ff. contra!!].
The implications of this are not yet worked out within the NT”
(James Barr, distinguished prof. at
VanderBilt) “The NT follows this
monotheistic tradition in taking for granted the established monotheism of
Judaism. The NT does not depict Jewish opponents as criticizing Christianity
for reintroducing polytheism.” (p. 865)
Harper
Collins, Thomas Longstaff, Colby College
Maine:
“The
explicit doctrine of the Trinity was thus formulated in the post-biblical period, although the early
stages can be seen in the NT. Attempts to trace the Trinity origins still
earlier to the OT [Jesus believed in the monotheism of the OT, Mk 12:29; Deut.
5:4!] cannot be supported by historical critical scholarship” and these
attempts are readings back. (1179)… The formal doctrine of the Trinity as
defined in councils of the 4th and 5th centuries IS NOT
TO BE FOUND IN THE NT.”
“Because
the Trinity is such an important part of LATER Christian doctrine, it is
STRIKING that the term does not appear in the NT. Likewise the developed concept
of three coequal partners in the Godhead found in LATER creedal formulations
cannot be clearly detected within the confines of the canon” (Oxford Companion to the Bible, Trinity”
Daniel Showalter, Prof of Religion, Carthage College, WI, 1993, eds. Metzger
and Coogan, p. 782
“The Apostles did not
identify Jesus with Yahweh. There were passages which made this impossible, for
example Ps. 110:1, Malachi 3:1.” “It would be rash to conclude that St. Peter
identified Jehovah with Christ” (citing Prof. Hort).
• Charles
Bigg, DD, Regius Prof. of Ecclesiastical History, University of Oxford, in International
Critical Commentary on I Peter, 1910, pp. 99, 127.
“The word Trinity is
not found in the Bible.... It did not find a place formally in the theology of
the church until the fourth century” (Illustrated
Bible Dictionary, part 3, Intervarsity Press, Tyndale House Publishers,
1980, p. 1).
The Trinity “is not
directly and immediately the Word of God” (New
Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967, Vol. XIV, p. 304).
“In Scripture there is yet no single term by
which the Three Divine Persons are denoted together. The word ‘Trias’ (of which
the Latin ‘Trinitas’ is a translation) is first found in Theophilus of Antioch
about 180 AD.... Shortly afterwards it appears in its Latin form of ‘Trinitas’
in Tertullian” (The Catholic Encyclopedia,
1912, Vol. 15, p. 47).
“Hasty conclusions
cannot be drawn from usage, for [Tertullian] does not apply the words [which
were later applied to Trinitarianism] to Trinitarian theology” (Michael
O’Carroll, Trinitas: A Theological
Encyclopedia of the Holy Trinity, 1987, p. 208).
“The Revelation of God in the Gospels: the
Father: (Hastings Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, art.
“Trinity,” Vol. 2, p. 761
We
must never forget that Christianity was built upon the foundation of
Jewish monotheism. A long providential discipline had secured to the Jewish
people their splendid heritage of faith in the one and only God. "Hear, O
Israel, Yahweh our God is the one and only Yahweh, and you are to love Yahweh
your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your might"
(Deuteronomy 6:4). This was the cornerstone of the religion of Israel
[and of Jesus, Mk 12:29] these were perhaps the most familiar of all sacred
words to the ears of the pious Jew [including Jesus], they were recited
continually. Our Lord himself had them frequently in his mind (Matthew 22:37 Mark 12:28, 29, Luke 10:27).
That Jesus thought of God always as the supreme One is unquestionable. Indeed
the very idea of fatherhood, which with our Lord, is the characteristic
conception, and which is capable of being presented in a way which might weaken
or injure a true monotheism, becomes in his teaching absolutely monotheistic
because absolutely universal Matthew 5:45, 48; 7:11, 8:11; 10:29; Luke 6:35,
13:29, 30; 15). To the Jewish mind the sovereignty of God was the natural and
characteristic thought. In our Lord's teaching the divine Fatherhood
overshadows and also transforms the divine sovereignty but never threatens to
dissolve the pure and splendid monotheism of the original doctrine…
God is the universal Father. He is, in a very
intimate and special way, the Father of the disciples of Jesus. He is in a
highest and unique sense the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We
find then that the teaching of our Lord Jesus and of the Gospels concerning
God is the union of a true and unwavering monotheism, with a great doctrine
of mediation, according to which God and man enter into very close relationship
in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
“There was certainly no need nor
justification.. to substitute, in the interpretation of of the person of Jesus,
for the original concept of the Messiah simply a Hellenistic analogy such as
that of a redeeming divine being… Indeed it was entirely invalid. It was a
myth behind which the historical Jesus completely
disappeared, because there was nothing common between them” Formation of Christian Dogma, p. 298.
“When the Greek and Roman mind rather
than the Hebrew mind dominated the Church there occurred a disaster from which
we have never recovered.” Canon Goudge of C of England
Hastings
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics
(Judaism): “Abraham, Moses and Elijah were all equally zealous monotheists and
in none of their successors was there any retrogression from the highest and purest form of unitarian belief.”
Mark’s point in Mark 12:28ff was
to emphasize the essential orthodoxy of Jesus
and his faithfulness to the law...Mark’s emphasis on the strict
monotheism of Christianity was particularly necessary (Dr. D. Nineham, Pelican Commentary on Mark, pp. 323,
327)
Leonard Hodgson D. D., Regius
Professor at Oxford: :
“The
monotheism of the Jews was then, as it is still, unitarian.” (Christian Faith and Practice, 1952, p. 74.)
The
Jewish Encyclopedia:
“Judaism
has always been rigorously unitarian,” (“Deism,” Jewish Encyclopedia,
1906.)
Emil
Brunner:
“Judaism
[is] Unitarian” (Dogmatics,
Vol. 1. p. 205.)
Richard
E. Rubenstein:
“the
monolithic God worshipped by the Jews [is worshiped] by… unitarians.” (When Jesus Became God, 1999. p. 209.)
Bishop
Beveridge:
“the
Jews… to this day… still assert that God is only one in person, as well as nature.” (Private Thoughts on Religion,
1829. p. 66.)
“There
was no real doubt as the great commandment, the Shema was repeated daily by the Jews. It was the foundation
text of their monotheism, which was not a speculative theory but a
practical conviction.” (Peake, Arthur Samuel. A Commentary on the Bible,
Mark 12:28ff. 1920, p. 696.)
Bishop
Tom Wright: “The answer Jesus gave [in Mark 12:29] was thoroughly
noncontroversial, quoting the most famous of Jewish prayers. ‘Hear O Israel,
YHVH our God is one.’ The prayer, the
Shema which begins with these lines, was as central to Judaism then as
it is now” (Jesus and the Victory of God, p. 305) “Jesus was a
first-century Jewish monotheist,” p. 652.
Hugh Anderson, New Century
Bible Commentary on Mark, p. 280. Mk 12:29:
“We must
suppose that the Markan form goes back to oral tradition passed on by a Church
that did not any longer recite the Shema [!]. But here at least in his statement of the
first commandment Jesus stands foursquare within the orbit of Jewish piety.”
[Why do we not follow him?]
“The
Unitarians were originally nothing less than the whole body of Christians and
the Trinitarians were the innovators; appearing at first modest and candid, as
was natural, while they were a small
minority” [A History of the Corruptions of Christianity,
by Joseph Priestley p. 334]
“It
is difficult to understand how and why Jesus’ affirmation of the Shema, which
is neither remarkable nor specifically Christian, would have been
created by an early Christian prophet.” “(Commentary on Mark 8-16, Craig
Evans, pub. Thomas Nelson, 2001, p. 261). [So the teaching of Jesus about God
is not Christian!]
His
point is that the recorded saying of Jesus, defining God, must surely be
genuinely the words of Jesus. But he gives himself away with his astonishing
remark that Jesus’ affirmation of the Shema
is “neither remarkable nor specifically Christian” The point should not
be missed. Apparently the teaching of Christ at the most essential point of
defining the true God, is not remarkable or important for us today! Christ,
then, can be happily divorced from his teaching, and the Church can go
confidently on its way, disregarding the theology of Jesus. This points surely
to a huge need for a reformation of the Reformation, to achieve a real return
to Jesus, allowing for the savior’s words to be the controlling factor of all
Christian teaching.
Dr.
James Dunn in his recent “Did The Early Christians Worship Jesus?” gives
us reason for hope that the Trinitarian system may reconsider and return to
Jesus — may in fact thus be revived. (Revival is not achieved by anything less
than a revolutionary return to the Gospel and words of Jesus!). Dr. Dunn must
be read carefully — and he not infrequently blunts clear statements with
various qualifications and retractions,
but he does say this very clearly: “The New Testament writers are really quite
careful at this point, Jesus is not the God of Israel, he is not the Father, he
is not Yahweh” (p. 142). The New Testament writers “recalled that this was
Jesus of Nazareth, who affirmed the same monotheistic creed as they did,
who forbad worship to any other than God and who prayed to God as an expression
of his own need and reliance upon God” (p. 145). “In an important sense,
Christian monotheism, if it is to be truly monotheism¸ has still to assert,
that only God, only the one God, is to be worshiped” (p. 146).
1. Dunn,
“Early Christian and Jewish Monotheism”: (p. 109)
The point then is that Jesus is remembered in earliest Christian tradition not
simply for putting the love commandment (‘love your neighbor as yourself’) at
the heart of his teaching. The influence of that teaching on the first
Christians is clear enough from first century Christian writings, and there are
no grounds for denying that the inspiration of that focus in early Christian
teaching is to be attributed to Jesus. For such a consistent singling out of
just this commandment (Lev. 19:18) can hardly be coincidental. More to the
point, Jesus is remembered as also putting the love commandment second to the
primary command to love God with all one’s being (Mark 12:30, par.). For
Jesus the Shema was fundamental and fundamentally determinative of the
whole orientation of life. It is not the case that Jesus’ ethic can be boiled
down to love your neighbor. On the contrary, the implication is that the two go
together and perhaps is only possible in long-term reality as the corollary to
the first.
The conclusion is
strong then that the Shema [Mk 12:29] continued to be of central
importance for Jesus during his mission and the teaching he both gave and lived
out, which also means that the conviction that God was One continued to be a
basic axiom for Jesus, a core principle from which he drew his inspiration and
instruction. To that extent, at least, in other words, we have to answer the
question ‘was Jesus a monotheist’ of our title with a clear affirmative.
The clear implication of Mark’s account
(10:18) is that Jesus declined the epithet ‘good’ because properly speaking only
God is good… Its theological rationale is obvious: God alone is worthy
of such devotion because God alone is the source and definition of all
goodness…the God-foundation of his whole mission.
From New
International Dictionary of NT Theology, Vol 2, ed. Colin Brown:
The New Testament rests firmly on the
foundation of the Old Testament, when it speaks about God. But its emphases are new. He is the God who is
near, the Father of Jesus Christ who
justifies freely by his grace. His action in election bursts all claims to
exclusiveness. But it is the same God who reveals Himself
here as in the Old Testament, and whose plan of salvation, there promised,
comes to fulfillment here. The one
God, o theos, is the most frequent designation of God in the
New Testament. Belief in the one, only
and unique God (Matthew 23:9; Romans 3:30; I Corinthians 8:4, 6; Galatians
3:20; I Timothy 2:5; James 2:19) is an established
part of primitive Christian tradition. Jesus himself made the
fundamental confession of Judaism his own and expressly quoted the Shema
(Deuteronomy 6:4ff.; Mark 12:29ff. cf. Matthew 22:37; Luke 10:27). This
guaranteed continuity between the Old and the New Covenant. For the God
whom Christians worship is the God of
the Fathers (Acts 3:13; 5:30; 22:14), the
God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob (Acts 3:13; 7:32; cf. Matthew 22:32;
Mark 12:26; Luke 20:37), the God of
Israel (Matthew 15:31; Luke 1:68; acts 13:17:cf. II Corinthians 6:16;
Hebrews 11:16), and the God of Jesus
Christ (II Corinthians 1:3; Ephesians 1:3; first Peter. 1:3). Just as God
once made Israel his people so now He has chosen those who believe in Christ as
an elect race and a holy people for His possession (acts 15:14; 20:28; I Peter
2:9; Hebrews 11:25).
Faith is in Him (Romans 4:3; Galatians
3:6; Titus 3:8; James 2:23; Hebrews 6:1; I Peter 1:21), hope is in Him. The
community of Jesus may have no false gods beside Him, whether Mammon (Matthew
6:24), the “belly” (Philippians 3:19 or the cosmic powers.
Galatians 4:8ff.. It
must serve Him alone, do His will and remain faithful to Him.”
So
if the Shema was God’s attempt to reveal a compound unity in God, the attempt
was an epic failure. It makes much more sense that God gave the verse to the
Jews and intended it to mean what the Jews say it means. Furthermore, the Jews
did not take the Shema as their primary statement of monotheism because many
other verses made that point (we will cover that shortly). Third, the context
of the Shema in both the Old and New Testaments, backed by the Scope of
Scripture, shows that the Shema is not [only] saying “God is ‘one,’ but rather
is saying that Yahweh “alone” is our God.
Notable
Quotes on Trinity and Christology
“God’s
begetting the Messiah” in IQSa. Morton Smith (NTS 5, p. 218-224). See also “the
begotten Messiah” by Gordis in VT 2, 1957.
Smith
says: “But the most generally accepted opinion
Is summed up by Black’s statement that it is
an order for the plenary session of the
council of the assembly as it will be in the end time when a meal of
bread and wine is celebrated when God begets the messiah or anointed one of Israel.”
There are rules for assembly to study Torah, in the event of God’s begetting
the Messiah.
Me:
How can Jesus be God if he speaks of “our God”!
Is
he is own God?
21stcr.org The Only True God by Eric Chang (free on line), p.2
The
Problem Remains:
“But
the fundamental problem created by elevating Jesus to the level of Deity is
that a situation is created in which there are at least two persons who are
both equally God; this brings trinitarianism into conflict with the monotheism
of the Bible...In regard to the N.T. it is Trinitarianism that is on trial; it
will have to explain why it has taken the monotheistic Word of God and
interpreted it in polytheistic terms, thereby utterly distorting its
fundamental character.” “Could it not be this distortion that is the reason for
the disastrous disappearance of the Shema from our prayer lives? Jesus was a
thorough-going, monotheistic, Shema-reciting Jew. We have redefined the core
principle inherent in the Shema. Is this valid?”
The comment
of the writer on “Christ and Christology” in the Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, C. Anderson Scott, is
instructive:
The writer
[of Revelation] carries the equating of Christ with God to the furthest point
short of making them eternally equal. Christ is still “the beginning of the creation
of God” by which is probably to be understood (cp. Col. 1:18, “the beginning,
the firstborn from the dead”; also Col. 1:15) that Christ himself was part of the creation.[1][1]
As the Harvard theologian F. Auer says so well:
“Fourth-century Trinitarianism did not reflect accurately early
Christian teaching regarding the nature of God; it was on the contrary a
deviation from this teaching…It developed against constant unitarian opposition
and was never wholly victorious. The dogma of the Trinity owes its existence to
abstract speculation on the part of a small minority of scholars.[2][1]
Encyclopedia Americana, Vol 27, p. 69, 1949:
“The doctrine of the Trinity is nowhere expressly taught in the OT... the
plural form used to designate the Deity in the account of the creation and many
other incidental circumstances or expressions are however held as implying, if
not teaching, this doctrine...In the NT it is evident that the doctrine of a
Trinity in the divine nature is clearly and copiously taught”
Mackintosh
DD, Doctrine of the Person of Christ
speaking of Prof. S. S. Faut: “Granting the absolute character of the
redemption which Jesus mediates and in consequence the absolute character of
the Mediator’s person, he yet holds that the difficulties of predicating real
Deity to Jesus are insurmountable...But if we go so far, in logic [describing
the position of the exalted Jesus to the RH] we must go still further and
attribute Godhead also to Jesus of Nazareth — which gives us pause. It is
unfitting to speak of the historical Christ as GOD, medium of the final
revelation though he be. For it blurs the interpretation of his earthly
life; also it conflicts gravely with Jesus’ monotheism. The one thing we dare not do is to create
antagonism between Jesus and his own creed. It is simplly unevangelical to dim
the clear shining of the Gospel by dogmatic assertions which collide with trust
in One only God, the Father Almighty (cited from Die Christologie seit Schleiermacher, 1901, pp. 97, 98.
International
Critical Commentary. (John 1-4), 2009, p. 51
“Since
most readers of the Gospel of John
approach the gospel with a firm belief in the Nicene dogma of the Holy Trinity,
a plea for caution is here imperative. Those who listened to Jesus during his
life-time [and the warning should apply to those who desire to listen to him
today] did not come already endowed with faith in a Trinitarian Godhead, nor
did those who heard the preaching of the Apostles; it was not a matter of
teaching people who already believed in a Holy Trinity that one of those divine
persons had become a human being.
Neither in Judaism nor elsewhere is there any trace of such a belief.” [Nor is there a trace of such teaching in
Jesus, who stood foursquare on the creed of Israel, Mk 12:289ff.]
Hugh Anderson, New Century Bible Commentary
on Mark,
p. 280. Mk 12:29:
“We
must suppose that the Markan form goes back to oral tradition passed on by a
Church that did not any longer recite
Schema [!]. But here at least in his
statement of the first commandment Jesus stands foursquare we within the
orbit of Jewish piety.” [Why do we not follow him?]… Jesus statement consists entirely of an
almost word for word citation of two Old Testament texts Deuteronomy 6:4 and
Leviticus 18, a former at the heart of Jewish piety and both much canvassed by
the rabbis.” In stating the first commandment Jesus only repeats what Israel
had repeated for centuries”
“The
primary sense of logos [word, Jn.
1:1] is equivalent to Memra, the very embodiment of God’s everlasting
protective Presence (sein ewiges Dasein, his eternal being) as disclosed in
Exod. 3:15” (p. 30)
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Vol. 4,
p. 133, 134) on Logos [word]: Jesus
Christ is the incarnate form of the Logos…. grace and truth are the nature of
the logos [Paul speaks of grace and truth and logos]. They are the content of
the revelation [IT, the logos]
given in Jesus Christ (v. 17b). which replaces the Mosaic nomos, the Torah [David calls the Torah logos also]… The
terms logos and nomos are interchangeable in Ps. 119. The statements concerning the pre-existence and majesty
of the Torah but they are now intentionally heaped upon the logos. IT
was in the beginning with God. IT was with God and was God, or divine.
All things were made by [through] IT.
In IT was life. IT was the
light of man. In the rabbis theses are sayings about the Torah. But they are now statements about Christ. In
him the eternal word of God and the word of creation, the word of the Law is
not just passed on (“given”) but enacted
(egeneto). [cp the script is
enacted in the actor]
Christ is not just a teacher and
transmitter of the Torah. He is himself the Torah, the new Torah [for the new
creation]. Mosaism which is provisional and intermediary, has passed. In Jesus
Christ the word of God has taken place in truth. What they behold is the
content of this true, final and only Torah: grace and truth [so Paul when
speaking of grace and truth is speaking of the new Torah of Messiah] “Through the firstborn God created the heaven
and earth and the firstborn is none other than the Torah” (rabbis). The divine
nature of the Torah. The Torah is life, life for the world. Light: the
Torah is light. The world lies in darkness and its inhabitants are
without light. The Torah is truth…”
“Seven things were created before the world
was created, namely the Torah, repentance, Garden of Eden, Gehenna, throne of
glory [Matt. 19:28], sanctuary, and the
name of the Messiah.” [not the Messiah himself] The eternal being of the Torah
was with God. IT lay on God’s
bosom while God sat on the throne of glory.”
Dr. John A T Robinson on John 17:3
“In
the first place it should be noted that
John is as undeviating a witness as any in the New Testament to the fundamental
tenet of Judaism, of unitary monotheism (Rom. 3:30; James 2:19. There is one
true and only God (John 5:44; 17:3)
Everything else is idols; I John 5:21. In fact nowhere is the
Jewishness of John [and of Jesus], which has emerged in all recent study, more
clear. The only possible exception is in I John 5:20, where ‘this is the true
God could grammatically relate not to the Father, but to the immediately
preceding words ‘His Son Jesus Christ, though the ‘his’ in ‘His Son’ must refer
to ‘the one who is true,’ that is God the Father, as everywhere else [including
Malachi 2:10, Do we not all have one Father? Has not one God created us?”]
The ambiguities of phrasing in the
Johannine epistles are notorious, but I find it very difficult to be persuaded
by such as Schnackenburg, Bultmann and Brown that is Christ who is being
designated as ‘the true God’ [contradicting Jn. 17:3 and the rest of the
Bible!]. I am convinced with Westcott, Brooke and Dodd that the remaining
Johannine usage (particularly ‘This is the true God, this is eternal life, I
John 5:20 and “This is eternal life, to know thee who alone art true God (John
17:3) which I believe the former deliberately echoes, requires the reference
to be to the Father. There is also the parallel in II John 7 where ‘this is
the deceiver and the Antichrist’ must refer to the secessionists and not to the
immediately preceding words ‘Jesus Christ coming in the flesh.”
He then says, that “despite the clear evidence of the Gospel that Jesus
refuses the claim to be God (10:33) or in any way to usurp the position
of the Father, this is clearly for John not the whole picture.” He goes on to point out that the logos is
God. But he has said above that John’s
Jesus is a unitarian. The logos is therefore the wisdom/word of God and not
a second Person in a Triune Godhead. Jesus is thus what the word (not Word)
became. God, the Father is still “the only one who is true God,” which
excludes the Son from Godhead, although Jesus is the human expression of God..
Jesus and John were unitarians, as were all Jews.
Goppelt on the word, Theology,
II, p. 634
“The logos of the prologue [John 1:1]
becomes Jesus. Jesus is the incarnate logos not the logos as such.”
Lee Strobel: Case
for Christ
• “The truth
is that Jesus was a bit mysterious about his identity, wasn’t he? He tended to
shy away from forthrightly proclaiming himself to be Messiah or Son of God…
• [Witherington]
It is not because he did not think of himself in those terms…If he had simply
announced ‘Hi, folks, I’m God,’ that would have been heard as ‘I’m Yahweh’
because the Jews of his day did not have
any concept of the Trinity.They only knew of God the Father, whom they
called Yahweh and not God the Son or God the holy spirit.” [If he said ‘I am
Yahweh,’ that would be a clear announcement of two Yahwehs]
Professor A.T Hanson, Prof
of Theology at the University of Hull, UK
• No
responsible NT scholar would claim that the doctrine of the Trinity was taught
by Jesus, or preached by the earliest Christians, or consciously held by any
writer of the NT. It was in fact slowly worked out in the course of the first
few centuries in an attempt to give an intelligible doctrine of God.
• (The
Image of the Invisible God)
Dr. W. R Matthews, Dean of
St. Paul’s, writer for years in London’s Daily Telegraph
• “It must
be admitted by everyone who has the rudiments of a historical sense that the
doctrine of the Trinity formed no part of the original message. St. Paul did
not know it, and would have been unable to understand the meaning of the terms
used in the theological formula on which the Church ultimately agreed” (God
in Christian Experience, p. 180).
•
Augustine on John
17:3. He violates the Scripture, tampering with it to force it to yield a
Trinity.
• “And
this,” Jesus adds, “is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.”
• Augustine
(Homilies on John): “The proper order of the words is, ‘That
they may know Thee and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent, as the only
true God.’ Consequently, therefore, the Holy Spirit is also understood, because
He is the Spirit of the Father and Son, as the substantial and consubstantial
love of both. For the Father and Son are not two Gods, nor are the Father and
Son and Holy Spirit three Gods; but the
Trinity itself is the one only true God. And yet the Father is not the same
as the Son, nor the Son the same as the Father, nor the Holy Spirit the same as
the Father and the Son; for the Father and Son and Holy Spirit are three
[persons], yet the Trinity itself is one God.
[4,300 occs of God and none of these = triune God]
Karl Barth on the
Trinity
• “The Bible
lacks the express declaration that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are
of equal essence and therefore in an equal sense God himself. And the other
express declaration is also lacking, that God is God thus and only thus, i.e.
as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These two express
declarations, which go beyond the
witness of the Bible, are the twofold content of the Church doctrine of the
Trinity" (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1.437, our emphasis).
Theological
Dictionary of the New Testament on Trinity
• The NT
does not actually speak of triunity. We seek this in vain in the triadic
formulae of the NT....Early Christianity itself...does not yet have the problem
of triunity in view" (Kittel, Theological
Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 3.108-9).
Donald Guthrie on
Trinity
• Donald Guthrie's
evangelically-oriented New Testament Theology, while arguing that there
are "adumbrations" of Trinitarianism in the New Testament, is
similarly obliged to admit that:
• It cannot
be said that the doctrine (Trinitarianism) is expounded. Indeed, it is significant that none of the NT writers sees the need to
speculate about such a doctrine. They are content to present data which
imply the divine nature of both Christ and the Spirit and which naturally gave
rise to reflections about the unity of God (op. cit., 122).
Dr. R. M Grant on Substance
• R. M.
Grant likewise agrees in his discussion of the Trinitarian controversy that
there is no recorded mention of the Godhead's “oneness of substance” before the
Apology ("A Plea for the Christians") of Athenagoras (ca. A.D. 177),
when for the first time anywhere we read that "the Son of God is the Mind
and the Word of the Father," the latter being "the One uncreated,
eternal invisible, impassable, incomprehensible, uncontainable God" (The
Early Christian Doctrine of God, 91).
Thomas Jefferson, US President,
1801-1809 [there were 5 unitarian presidents of the USA]
• “When we
shall have done away with the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian
arithmetic, that three are one and one is three; when we will have knocked down
the artificial scaffolding, reared to mask from view the simple structure of
Jesus; when, in short, we shall have unlearned everything which has been taught
since his day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he inculcated, we
shall then be truly and worthily his disciples; and my opinion is that if
nothing had ever been added to what flowed purely from his lips, the whole
world would at this day be Christian.”
F.F. Bruce on
Preexistence and Trinity, in personal correspondence:
• “On the
preexistence question, one can at least accept the preexistence of the eternal
Word or Wisdom of God which
(who?) became incarnate in Jesus. But whether any New Testament writer
believed in his separate conscious existence as a “second Divine Person” [i.e.
of the Trinity] before his incarnation is not so clear. On balance I think John
did. I am not nearly so sure about Paul (June 13th, 1981, correspondence)
F.F. Bruce on
Preexistence and Trinity
• “Paul
identifies Christ with the creative word or wisdom of God which certainly existed as long as God did.” (July
29th, 1981)
Dr. James Dunn, who
has written massively on Christology, on Preexistence
• “To avoid
confusion, therefore it would be better to speak of the Johannine Christ as the
incarnation of God, as God making Himself known to human flesh, not as the incarnation of the Son of God
(Intro to Christology in
the Making, xxvii)… To speak of Christ as himself preexistent, coming
down from heaven, and so forth, has to be seen as metaphorical; otherwise it leads inevitably to some kind
of polytheism.”
Dr. Dunn on
Preexistence
• ‘That the
Messiah himself existed before creation is nowhere stated in the Tannaitic
[Jewish] literature… the name of the Messiah is the idea of the Messiah,
or more exactly the idea of redemption through the Messiah. This idea did
precede creation’ (Klausner, Messianic Idea, p.460).Strack
Billerbeck II, 334ff., Vermes, Jesus, 138, Mowinkel, He That Cometh,
334 (294, Christology)
Dr. Dunn, “Early Christian and
Jewish Monotheism:’ (p. 109)
“The
point then is that Jesus is remembered in earliest Christina tradition not
simply for putting the love commandment (‘love your neighbor as yourself’) at
the heart of his teaching. The influence
of that teaching on the first Christians is clear enough from first century
Christian writings, and there are no grounds for denying that the inspiration
of that focus in early Christian teaching is to be attributed to Jesus. For
such a consistent singling out of just this commandment (Lev. 19:18) can hardly
be coincidental. More to the point, Jesus is remembered as also putting the
love commandment second to the primary command to love God with all one’s being
(Mark 12:30, par.). For Jesus the Shema was fundamental and fundamentally
determinative of the whole orientation of life. It is not the case that
Jesus’ ethic can be boiled down to love your neighbor. On the contrary, the
implication is that the two go together and perhaps is only possible in
long-term reality as the corollary to the first.
The
conclusion is strong then that the Shema continued to be of central
importance for Jesus during his mission and the teaching he both gave and lived
out, which also means that the conviction that God was One continued to be a basic axiom for Jesus, a
core principle from which he drew his inspiration and instruction. To that
extent, at least, in other words, we have to answer the question ‘was Jesus a
monotheist’ of our title with a clear affirmative.
The clear implication of Mark’s account is
that Jesus declined the epithet ‘good’ because properly speaking only God is
good… Its theological rationale is
obvious: God alone is worthy of such devotion because God alone is the source
and definition of all goodness…… the God-foundation of his whole mission.”
Leading expert and author Dr. James Dunn (Christology in the Making, 251) provokes
serious thinking about the paganism in popular Christianity. He wrote, “There
is always the possibility that popular pagan superstition became popular
Christian superstition by a gradual assimilation and spread of belief at the
level of popular piety (we must be beware of assuming that all developments in
Christian thought stem from the Pauls and the Johns of Christianity.”
(1980, 1989)
The Trinity: The
Problem
Dr. Gregory Boyd: in Trinity and Oneness Pentecostals
• Trinitarians
are quite clear that God is one: “There can be no question that the Bible does
uniformly and unequivocally teach that there is One God. Certainly it was the
proclamation ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,’ that formed the
cornerstone for everything that was distinctive about the faith of God’s
people in the OT. The message of God’s uniqueness and singularity is driven home literally hundreds of times throughout
the pages of the OT (Isa 42:8; 43:10; 44:6.) This strict monotheism
is by no means forgotten when we enter the NT era. Rather it forms the
presupposition of the Christ-centered faith articulated in the NT (Mark
12:29ff. I Cor 8:4-6; Eph. 4:4; I Tim. 2:5). It is therefore an
incontestable fact that the Bible is monotheistic through and through. No
biblical author would have entertained the idea that there could be more than
one supreme being. This is the cornerstone to ancient and to contemporary
Judaism.” [And powerfully confirmed and commanded by Jesus! (Mk 12:29)
•
•
Dr. W. N Clarke, 1909,
Professor, Colgate University
• [In the
NT] there is no mystery about their oneness and no attempt to show that there are three in one. The word
Trinity is never used and there is no indication that the idea of Trinity had
taken form. It has long been a common practice to read the NT as if the ideas
of a later age upon this subject were in it, but they are not. In the days of the Apostles the doctrine
of the Trinity was yet to be created. But the materials for it were already
there, and the occasion for the growth of the doctrine was sure to arise.
Elohim is not a Proof
of Plurality in God
• Dr. Sir William Smith, Dictionary.
of the Bible, art Jehovah:
• With
regard to Elohim, it has been held by many that in the plural form of the word
there was shadowed forth the plurality of persons in the Godhead and the
mystery of the Trinity was inferred therefrom. Such according to Peter of
Lombard, was the true significance of Elohim. But Calvin, Mercer, Drusius,
Bellarmine have given the weight of their authority against an explanation so fanciful and arbitrary.
• Bishop
Colenso:
• The word
Elohim is a plural noun; it is the general name for Deity in the Hebrew
language, and may be used, accordingly for a heathen god… It is therefore quite a mistake to think of proving the doctrine of the
Trinity, as some do, from the fact that Elohim is a plural name…And as
above it is used of an idol, Dagon (I Sam. 5:7); Astarte (I Kings 1:2, 3, 6),
as of the true God…. Thus we have ‘a cruel lords’ (adonim) (Isa. 14:4)
• Kitto, Cyclopedia
of Biblical Literature:
• An old
opinion is that… the usage of a plural noun with a singular verb [proved] that
God has revealed Himself in His word as subsisting in Trinity, One yet Three…
This has few supporters among the scholars, and has been formally repudiated by
several who were strongly attached to Trinitarian views: Calvin, Drusius,
Buxtorf, Bellarmine, Hottinger.
• Sixtus
Senensis,
Bibliotheca Sanctor, bk 5, annot. 1
• With the
exception of Peter of Lombardy and Paul of Burgos, there has not been amongst
the Greek, Latin and Hebrew writers, one
commentator worthy of imitation who has explained the word Elohim of the Trinity.
•
Dr. South, a
disputant in the controversy over the Trinity in the later middle ages, in
which the King interposed. (Consideration on the Trinity)
• It must be
allowed that there is no such proposition
as this, that One and the same God is three different Persons, formally
and in terms to be found in the sacred writings, either of the Old or New
Testaments; neither is it pretended that there is any word of the same
signification or importance as the word Trinity, used in Scripture with
relation to God”
• Rev.
Mozeley,
brother in law to Cardinal Newman:
• I ask with
all humbleness where the idea of the Threeness is expressed in the New
Testament with a doctrinal sense and force? Where is the Triune God held up to
be worshiped, loved and obeyed? Where is he preached and proclaimed in that
threefold character? We read ‘God is one.’ and ‘I and the Father are one.’ but
never do we read that the three are one, except in one interpolated text, (I
John 5:7). To me the whole matter is most painful and perplexing and I should
not even speak as I do now, if I were not on the threshold of the grave, soon
to appear before the throne of all truth.
• Certainly
we do not find in Scripture the expression God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost.
Whenever I pronounce the word God simply, and first, I mean God the Father, and
I cannot help meaning that if I am meaning anything. [NT means Father 1300
times, when speaking of GOD.]
• James
Hughes,
Roman Catholic Priest:
• “My belief
in the Trinity is based on the authority
of the Church: no other authority is sufficient. I will now show from reason
that the Athanasian creed and Scripture are opposed to one another. The
doctrine of the Trinity is this: There is one God in three persons, Father, Son
and Holy Ghost. The Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Ghost is God.
Mind, the Father is one person, the Son is another person and the Holy Ghost is
another person. Now according to every principal of mathematics, arithmetic,
human wisdom and policy, there must be three Gods, and yet only One God. The
Athanasian creed gives the universal opinion of the Church, that the Father is
uncreated, the Son uncreated and the Holy Ghost uncreated—that they existed
from all eternity. Now the Son was born of the Father; and, if born, must have
been created…therefore to assert that the Son is eternal is absurd and bangs of
nonsense (cont.d).”
• Each has
his distinct personality: each his own essence. How then can they be one
Eternal? How can they all be God? Absurd; extravagent. This is rejected by
Arians, Socinians, Presbyterians and every man following human reason. The
creed says further that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Son of
Man, ‘not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the
manhood into God.’ Now I ask you, Did
the divinity absorb the manhood? He could not at the same time be one person
and two persons. I have now proved the Trinity opposed to human reason.”
Bishop Smallridge (Anglican) on the
Trinity
• It must be owned that the doctrine of the
Trinity as it is proposed in our Articles, our Liturgy and our Creed, is not in
so many words taught us in the Holy Scriptures. What we profess in
our prayers we nowhere read in Scripture, that the one God, the one Lord is not
only one person, but three persons in one substance. There is no such text in
Scripture as this; that the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be
worshiped. None of the inspired writers has expressly affirmed that in the
Trinity none is before or after the other, none is greater or less than the
other.
On
the Trinity, Athanasius
• The Jews
at the time being in error and thinking that the Messiah would be a mere man of
the seed of David, for that reason the blessed Apostles in great wisdom first
instructed the Jews in the things concerning our savior’s humanity
• All the
Jews were so firmly persuaded that their Messiah was to be nothing more than a
man like themselves, the apostles were obliged to use great caution in
divulging the doctrine of the proper divinity of Christ.
•
John of Damascus (675-749) on Trinity
•
John of Damascus replied to the criticism
that icons are unscriptural by admitting the fact and adding that you will not
find in Scripture the Trinity or the “one substance” or the two natures of
Christ either. But we know these doctrines are true. And so
having acknowledged that the icons, and the incarnation are innovations, John
goes on to urge his readers to hold fast to them as venerable traditions
delivered to us by the fathers. It they were lost the whole gospel would be
threatened.
• He adopted
the argument of John of Damascus that the Trinity should be accepted just as
tradition. Professor Don Cupitt comments: “It brings out an odd feature of
Christianity, its mutability and the speed with which innovations come to be
vested with religious solemnity to such an extent that anyone who questions
them finds himself regarded as the dangerous innovator and heretic (Myth
of God Incarnate, p. 133)
Gregory of Nazianzus (leading church
father) on Spirit
• Gregory
was “the theologian.” Born in 328, friend of Basil of Caesarea, nominated
patriarch by Theodosius, wrote in 380:
• “Of our
thoughtful men, some regard the holy spirit as an operation, some as a
creature, some as God; while others are at a loss to decide, seeing the
Scripture determines nothing on the subject.”
• In 387 the
Nicene creed was added to: “With the Father and the Son the Spirit is
worshipped and glorified.” Before that the creed in 325 attempted no
definition of the Spirit.
• Dr.
Longley,
Bishop of Ripon.
• It was our
blessed Lord’s divinity which, we have seen, he studiously concealed, but
wished all men to come to the knowledge of (Tracts for the Times, Vol.
4, 80)
• Richard
Armstrong
(1904) (Trinity and Incarnation)
• Most of
those who profess and call themselves Christians, both in this country and in
the rest of the world are in the habit of saying that Jesus is God. It is
taught by the creeds. The average Englishman holds this opinion in a vague and
loose sort of way. He has not thought out exactly what he means by it. So he carries
about with him in his mind four propositions:
• 1) Jesus
Christ is God. 2) God is our heavenly Father. 3) Jesus Christ is
not our heavenly Father 4) There are not two Gods.
• Yet he has
never considered how to reconcile these four separate opinions of his together.
It has probably not occurred to him that they are inconsistent with one
another… The average Englishman has not troubled himself with the matter.
Dr. James Dunn on Luke 1:35
• (Christology
in the Making, p. 51)
• Luke is
more explicit than Matthew in his assertion of Jesus’ divine sonship from birth
(1:32, 35). But here too it is sufficiently clear that it is a begetting, a becoming, which is in view, the coming into existence
of one who will be called, and will in fact be the Son of God, not
the transition of a preexistent being to become the soul of a human baby, or
the metamorphosis of a divine being into a human foetus… Luke’s intention is
clearly to describe the creative process of begetting…. Similarly in Acts there
is no sign of any Christology of preexistence.
• “For
Matthew and Luke there was no thought of preexistence or incarnation associated
with the mystical [sic] dogma of the virgin birth. The fact is that Virgin
Birth and preexistence cannot be reconciled. A preexistent being who becomes
man reduces himself to the state of a human embryo, but he is not conceived [or
begotten] by action exterior to himself in the womb of a woman. Conception is
the point at which an individual is
formed who did not exist before at least as an individual.” (p. 43)
Fitzmeyer on Luke (Anchor Bible)
• Luke
presents Jesus as a Palestinian Jew, born in Bethlehem of Davidic lineage and
raised in Nazareth. He speaks of him as ‘a man attested to you by God with
mighty deeds, wonders, and signs, which God did through him in your midst.’
With many a deft stroke of the artist’s brush he has painted a portrait of
Jesus as a human being with great concern for others… In Lukan Christology
there are four phases of Christ’s existence. The first begins with his virginal
conception…In Lukan Christology there is no question of Jesus’ preexistence
or incarnation…. Neither of these aspects of his existence emerge in the
Lukan portrait of him… In the time of Jesus the title ‘Messiah’ would have
denoted an expected anointed agent sent by God either in the Davidic, kingly or
political tradition for the restoration of Israel and the triumph of God’s
power and dominion, or in the priestly tradition…. We have no certain way of
assessing what form that relationship would have taken in his own
consciousness…Luke’s [concept of Son] does not yet carry the later connotations
of physical or metaphysical sonship or
identity of substance associated with the later Nicene or Constantinopolitan
creeds. Nor adoptive sonship. Luke’s explicit relation of the title Son to the
conception of Jesus connotes much more.
Fitzmeyer on Luke 1:35
• Holy
spirit is understood in the OT sense of God’s creative and active power present
to human beings. Later church tradition made something quite other out of this
verse. Justin wrote: ‘It is not right therefore to understand the Spirit and
power of God as anything else than the Word, who is also the first begotten of
God (Apology 1:33). In this interpretation the two expressions, spirit
and power, are being understood of the Second Member of the Trinity. It was
scarcely however before the 4th century that the Holy Spirit was understood as
the third person….There is no evidence here in the Lukan infancy narrative of
Jesus’ preexistence or Incarnation. Luke’s sole concern is to assert that the
origin of God’s Messiah is the effect of His creative spirit on Mary (p. 350,
351). [He says the elements of the Trinity but not the doctrine itself are
found in Luke]
• Dr. John
Owen
on Trinity:
• What is
there in the whole book of God that nature at first sight more recoils at than
the doctrine of the Trinity. How many still stumble and fall at it? (Divine
Origin of Scriptures, p. 132)
Bishop Hurd on Trinity
• In this
awfully stupendous manner (the scheme of redemption by the sacrifice of a
person of the Godhead as maintained by Trinitarians) at which Reason stands
aghast, and Faith herself is half confounded, was the grace of God at last
manifested Sermons at Lincoln’s Inn, 2, 17)
Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to
Decadence 2000, p. 30)
“Luther said of the Trinity that he did
not so much believe it as find it true in experience….
Can Luther have done anything but allegorize, if it was experience and not faith alone which made him a
Trinitarian?… Servetus, a Spanish physician,
paid with this life at the hands of Calvin for disbelieving that three could simultaneously be one.”
A.
H. Newman on the Trinity
•
It is a
contradiction, indeed, and not merely a verbal contradiction, but an
incompatibility in the human ideas conveyed. We can scarcely make a nearer
approach to an exact enunciation of it, than of saying that one thing is two
things. (Sadler’s Gloria Patri, p. 39).
Moody
Bible Institute on Trinity,
Doctrinal statement, 1994-5:
•
God is a Person who has revealed Himself as a
Trinity in unity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit — three Persons and yet one God (Deut.
6:4; Matt 28:19; I Cor. 8:6) [3 x’s = 1x]
Trinitarians Contradict their Creed
•
Expositors.
Comm. (10: 286) on I
Cor. 15:27:
•
“God will be
recognized by all as sovereign and He – the Triune God
– will be supreme.” cp. Rev. 22:3-5.
•
[So the one God is
a He, and not a “What”?]
Dr. John Blanchard on ECHAD. the Hebrew
word for ONE
11th April, 2005 (I had written to him
to challenge the idea that ONE in Hebrew means more than one).
• Following
our recent correspondence I have taken theological and academic advice and it
seems clear that in the final paragraph on page 450 of Does God Believe in
Atheists? my comments on the Hebrew word echad are inaccurate. I am
very grateful to you for pointing this out, and assure you that in the future
printings of the book the paragraph will be replaced by one that uses other OT
arguments for the plurality of Yahweh’s being. Thank you again for preventing
that particular error being perpetuated in the book.”
Dr. Emily Palik on ONE
• One place
(Gen. 1:9), one man (Gen. 42:13), one law (Ex. 12:49) one side (Ex 25:12) one
ewe lamb (Lev. 14:10), one of his brethren (Lev. 25:48), one rod (Num. 17:3),
one soul (Num. 31:28), one of those cities (Deut. 4:42), one way (Deut. 28:7)
one ephah (I Sam 1:24) one went out into the field (I Kings 4:39). One shepherd (Ezek 37:24),
one basket (Jer. 24:2). One thing (Ps. 27:4), two are better than one (Ecc.
4:9), for one day or for two (Ezra 10:13) Abraham was only one person (Ezek
33:24), a unique day Zech 14:7.
Dr. Hey, lecturing on
the Trinity at Cambridge, on Trinity
• It might
tend to moderation and in the end agreement, if we were industrious on all
occasions to represent our own doctrine
(the Trinity) as wholly unintelligible (Lectures in Divinity,
2, 235
Is
Orthodoxy Orthodox?
Dr. Norman Snaith
• Dr Snaith,
leading Methodist: “Your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece.” (Zech.
9:13) arose first as a rallying cry in days long ago when some Jews sought to
reinterpret Judaism in order to make it more acceptable to Greek ways of
thought and life. There have always been Jews who have sought to make terms
with the Gentile world and it has in time meant the death of Judaism for all
such… the question needs to be faced as to whether it is right. Our position is
that the reinterpretation of Biblical theology in terms of the ideas of the
Greek philosophers has been both widespread and everywhere destructive to
the essence of Christian faith. Father Hebert (RC) rightly sees in the
Catholic system a conception of salvation conceived in Aristotelian terms and
‘an idea of Beatitude… closely related to the Neo-Platonic idea of the Vision
of the One and bearing little relationship to the Beatitudes of the Gospel.’
Equally rightly he sees a marked tendency in contemporary Protestantism ‘to lay
emphasis on the development of personality and a human movement towards the
realization of ethical ideals. The KG is regarded as something achieved by
human effort’ cont’d
• If these judgments are sound, and we
believe they are sound, then neither Catholic nor Protestant theology is
based on biblical theology. In each case we have a domination of Christian
theology by Greek thought. cont’d
• “What, then, is to be done with the Bible?
It is to be regarded as the norm, and its distinctive ideas as the determining
factors of Christian theology? Or are we to continue to regard Plato and
Aristotle with their pagan successors as contributing the norm, and the main
ideas of Greek philosophy as the determining factors of Christian theology,
with the Bible as illustrative and confirmatory when and where suitable?... We
hold that there can be no right answer to the question what is Christianity
until we have come to a clear idea of
the distinctive ideas of both the OT and the NT and their difference
from the pagan ideas which have so
largely dominated ‘Christian’ thought.”
• Dr. Norman
Snaith:
• We find in
the OT no passages at all which speak of the any immortality of the soul, which
is not a biblical idea at all.
Dr. Millard Erickson God in Three Persons [He is promoting the
Trinity]
• “Davis has
examined the major contemporary explanations [of the Trinity], and having found
them not to accomplish what they claim to do, has been honest in acknowledging
that he feels he is dealing with a mystery. In so doing he has been more candid
than many of us, who when pressed may have to admit that we really do not
know in what way God is one and in what different way He is three.” (p.
258)
Erickson, God in Three Persons
• “It is
claimed that the doctrine of the Trinity is very important, crucial and even
basic doctrine. If that is indeed the case, should it not be somewhere more
clearly, directly and explicitly in the Bible?... Little direct response can be
made to this charge. It is unlikely that any text of Scripture can be shown to
teach the doctrine of the Trinity in a clear, direct and unmistakable fashion.”
(p. 109)
Erickson Making Sense of
the Trinity
• “Thus the begetting passages should be
seen as referring to the earthly residence of Jesus rather than some
everlasting continuous generation by the Father.” (p. 86)
• “The
status of the propositions forming the doctrine of the Trinity is not that they
can be shown directly, either from Scripture or from experience. They are
however part of a coherent whole, which can be shown to fit well and intergrate
and explain well the data that it is called on to tie together. As a necessary
(or at least the best available) explanation of the data of biblical
revelation, this doctrine is meaningful… It
is simply not possible to explain [the
Trinity] unequivocally… It may also be necessary, in order to convey the
unusual meaning involved in this doctrine, to utilize what analytical
philosophers would call ‘logically odd language.’ This means using language in
such away as intentionally to commit
grammatical errors. Thus, I have sometimes said of the Trinity, ‘He are
three,’ or ‘They is one.’ For we
have here a being whose nature falls outside our usual understanding of
persons, and that nature can perhaps only be adequately expressed by using
language that call attention to the almost paradoxical character of the
concepts” (pp. 267, 268, 270).
•
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and
Destiny of Man, , vol. 2, p. 61
• The mixture of God and man is “logical
nonsense”
John Hick, The Myth of God Incarnate, by
John Hick, 1977, p. 35
• “The
simple equation ‘Jesus = God’ not only fails to represent what Christian
tradition has claimed, but is distinctly odd. To reduce all of God to a human
incarnation is virtually inconceivable.”
Apostle Peter on Jesus. Apostle John on Jesus.
• “You are
the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” (Matt. 16:16-18)
John
on Jesus, “These things have been written [Gospel of John] that you might
know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.” (John 20:31)
Professor Godet,
Commentary
on Luke 1:35
• “By the
word ‘therefore’ the angel alludes to his preceding words: he will be called
the son of the Highest. We might paraphrase it: ‘And it is precisely for this
reason that I said to you….’ We
have then here, from the mouth of the
angel himself, an authentic explanation of the term SON of GOD, in the former
part of his message. After this explanation Mary could only understand the
title in this sense: a human being of whose existence God Himself is the
immediate author. It does not convey the
idea of preexistence… But it implies more than the term Messiah which only
refers to his mission. The word upsistou, of the Highest also refers to the
term ‘Son of the Highest., v.32 and explains it… how could we assign any serious meaning to the moral struggles in the
history of Jesus, the temptation for example, if his perfect holiness was the
necessary consequence of his miraculous birth? But it is not so…. Entering into
life in this way he was placed in the normal condition of man before his fall
and put in a position to fulfill the career originally set before man, in which
he was to advance from innocence to holiness… Jesus had to exert every instant
his own free will and to devote himself continually to the service of good and
to the task assigned to him, namely the keeping of his Father’s commandment”
His miraculous birth in no way prevented this conflict from being real.
It gave him liberty not to sin but did not take away from him the liberty of
sinning” (p.58, 1881)
• “The holy
thing begotten in you will be called the Son of God.”
Dr. W. N. Clark on Trinity,
1909,Prof. at Colgate University
• [In the
NT] there is no mystery about their oneness and no attempt to show that there
are three in one. The word Trinity is never used and there is no indication
that the idea of Trinity had taken form. It has long been a common practice to
read the NT as if the ideas of a later age upon this subject were in it, but
they are not. In the days of the Apostles the doctrine of the Trinity was yet
to be created. But the materials for it were already there, and the occasion
for the growth of the doctrine was sure to arise.
Dr. A.T. Hanson on
Trinity
• The
puzzling fact is that the synoptic gospels, which as publications are later
than Paul and contemporary with Hebrews, do not exhibit any tendency to
elaborate a doctrine of preexistence [and thus no Trinity]
• (Image
of the Invisible God)
Dr. A. T. Hanson on
Trinity (Image of the Invisible God)
• In Hebrews
it is not even certain that the name ‘Son’ is unhesitatingly applied by the
writer to the preexistent state. Heb. 1:2 could be rendered: ‘He has in these
last days spoken to us in the mode of a Son, which would imply that the sonship
only began at the incarnation.
F. F. Bruce on Acts 13:33
• “raised
up” – that is by raising him up in the sense in which he raised David (v.22).
For anistemi in this sense, see 3:22; 7:37; 3:26 (“raised him up and
sent him”). The promise of v. 23, the fulfilment of which is described in
13:33, has to do with the sending of the Messiah, not his resurrection (for
which see v. 24). The addition of “from the dead” in v. 34 differentiates this
use of “raise up” from its use in v. 33” (Acts of Apostles, Comm. on
Greek text)
Dr. Dorner on the
Defects of Trinity
• It must be
allowed of course that the doctrine of the Trinity, as laid down even by the
Nicene fathers, leaves much to be desired. In one point above all, that is to
say, that the Father is represented not merely as the logical commencement of
the trinitarian process, but often as the root and source of all Deity and
identified with the Monas. He thus acquires a predominance which necessarily
involves the subordination of the Son and the Spirit.
• (Person
of Christ, Div, 1, Vol. II, p. 327)
Encyclopedia
Britannica,
1949
• Unitarianism.
“It is usually conceded that even though it might not be correct to speak of
Christianity during the first two or three centuries as being substantially
Unitarian, it at least was not Trinitarian. It was this generally held belief
that Jesus was a man that Arius was trying to save in his conflict with
Athanasius… those who held to the simple humanity of Jesus were usually
subjected to bitter persecution… Later at the Reformation Servetus was burned
at Geneva at the direct instigation of Calvin for the sin of writing (1531)
“errors of the Trinity.” Bishop Mant in
his history of Ireland records that in 1326 at Dublin, one Adam Duff was burned
alive for his denial of the Trinity. In 1551 George Van Parris was burned alive
for the same offence. Martin Cellarius (1499-1564), a close friend of Luther,
had written against the Trinity; and Ludwig Haetzer, whose views were not
disclosed until after his execution for anabaptism in 1529. Servetus first put
the issue squarely before the world; “Your Trinity,” he wrote,” is a product of
subtlety and madness. The Gospel knows nothing of it. The old fathers are
strangers to it. It is from the school of
the Greek sophists, that you, Athanasius, prince of tritheists, have borrowed
it. “
Dr. Dorner on
“Defects of the Trinity”
• The second
defect is that these [Nicene] teachers determine rather negatively than
positively what ‘hypostasis’ is. But when the idea of the Father suffering
(patripassionism) was rejected, the question naturally suggested itself: How
shall we determine the nature of the distinction between the God who became man and the God who did not become man,
without destroying the unity of God on the one hand, or interfering with
Christology on the other. Neither the Council of Nicea, nor the Church Fathers
of the 4th century satisfactorily answered that question. (p. 330)…. Through
their labors the pantheistic and deist conception of God and the heathen and
Jewish error was excluded…the How of the procession of the Son and the Spirit
is unsearchable (p. 331).
Professor Loofs on the Trinity
• Orthodoxy cannot say what ‘begetting’ in the case
of the Son strictly signifies (What is the Truth about Jesus Christ? p,
165) The Trinity is said to be the One
God of the ‘Hear, O Israel.’ [According to orthodoxy] It is not a human
personality that the Son of God assumed… The Divine subject in the life of
Christ properly speaking did not suffer or die.
– I wish at
the outset to state quite openly that I cannot hold this old Christology. 1) To
rational logic it is quite untenable. 2) It does not agree with the NT. 3) We
can show that it was influenced by antiquated conceptions of Greek
philosophy…. Reason cannot approve such
thoughts as hopelessly contradict themselves.
– It is the orthodox
doctrine that the incarnated Son of God retained the human nature he had
assumed, even after the ascension. The oneness of the Trinity is dissolved
after the Incarnation. The Trinity has become something different after the
Incarnation from what it was before.
Professor Loofs on the Trinity
• The criticism of orthodox Christology which I
have described is not the property of a few people. To a certain extent it may
be considered as generally recognized by the whole German Protestant theology
of the present time (1911)… At present all learned Protestant
theologians of Germany really admit unanimously that the orthodox Christology
does not do justice to the truly human life of Jesus and that the orthodox
doctrine of the two natures in Christ cannot be retained in its traditional
form. All our systematic theologians… are seeking new paths in their
Christology (p. 202, 3)
Dr. Edwin Hatch. The
Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, 1888
• “I do not
propose to dwell on the sad and weary history of the way in which for more than
a century these metaphysical distinctions [ousia and hypostasis]
formed the watchwords of political as well as ecclesiastical parties– of the
strife and murder, the devastation of fair fields, the flame and sword
connected with it.
• These evils mostly came from that which
has been a permanently disastrous fact in Christian history, the interference
of the state which gave the decrees of councils that sanction the resolutions
of the majority upon the deepest subjects of human speculation to the
factitious rank of laws which must be accepted on pain of forfeiture,
banishment or death” (p. 280)
Professor Colin Brown,
currently at Fuller Seminary, CA
• The title
‘Son of God’ is not in itself a designation of personal deity or an expression
of metaphysical distinctions within the Godhead. Indeed to be a ‘Son of God’
one has to be a being who is not God.’
• (“Trinity
and Incarnation,” Ex Auditu, 7, 1991)
• It is a
common but patent misreading of John’s gospel to read it as if it said: ‘In the
beginning was the Son, and the Son was with God and the Son was God.’ What has
happened here is the substitution of Son for word (logos), and the Son is thus
made a member of the Godhead which existed from the beginning. (Ex Auditu,
7, 1991)
Colin
Brown and unitarians
• “I thought
you would appreciate hearing that you [AB] were given honorable mention by Dr.
Colin Brown in class the other day. He briefly commented on how the NT does not
establish a trinitarian creed and that there are some scholars who do not follow
the early church’s venture to establish such a doctrine. He mentioned one such
scholar with whom he has a warm friendship, who teaches in Atlanta, an
Englishmen such as himself: you.” (27th March, 2007)
• Dr. J.A.T Robinson, Professor
of NT at Cambridge, Twelve NT Essays
• “John is
as undeviating a witness as any in the New Testament to the unitary monotheism
of Judaism.” (John 17:3; 5:44)
Professor Mackey on
Preexistence
• “It is
best to begin with the problem of preexistence, not only because there are
linguistic difficulties here, because it leads directly into the main
difficulties encountered in all Incarnational and Trinitarian theology. As soon
as we recoil from the suggestion that something can preexist itself, we must
wonder what exactly preexists what else, and in what sense it does so” (The
Christian Experience of God as Trinity, p. 51).
– “It does
not take a systematician of any extraordinary degree of perspicacity to notice
how exegetes themselves are the unconscious victims in the course of their most
professional work of quite dogmatic (that is, uncritical) systematic
assumptions.”
Dr. Simon Gathercole, The
Preexistent Son, 2006, p.9
• [That
there is no preexistence in the synoptics certainly would represent the majority
view of commentators]
• Raymond
Brown notes the fundamental difference between the Virgin Birth and
preexistence. In preexistence christology, conception cannot be a real
begetting. For Kuschel the absence of preexistence is virtually determined
by the presence of the virginal conception.
Dr. Simon Gathercole The Preexistent
Son, by, 2006, p. 41
• [In
preexistence christology] “it is the person of Jesus who is continuous with the
preexistent one.”
• [This
means that no new person came into existence in Mary, thus eliminating the Son of
David/Son of God/ New Adam/New creation]
Dr. H.R. Mackintosh, on
Preexistence
• We need
have no hesitation in confessing that the preexistence of Christ outstrips our
faculty of conception, and that no theoretic refinements alter this in the very
least. Christ cannot after all be preexistent in any sense except that in which
God himself is so relatively to the incarnation… When we speak of the
preexistent one, what is, as logicians say, the subject of discourse? Who
preexists? Not the historical Jesus, exactly as he is known in the Gospels. The
church has never affirmed that the humanity of Christ was real prior to the
birth in Bethlehem [note how Jesus has been reduced to ‘human nature’ which is
NOT the Son of David, and thus not the Messiah]… These are a few of the
perplexities we meet in the effort to derive from history the content of ‘the
Preexistent.’
• …And if
problems so baffling gather around it, the pretemporal being of the Son cannot surely be a datum for faith [but
you may be excommunicated for not believing it today!]
• (The
Person of Jesus Christ, 1912, p.
457, 8)
Dr. A Reville, History
of the Dogma of the Deity of Christ, 1905
•
Gospel of the Hebrews made the holy spirit
the mother of Jesus. “My mother the holy spirit,” Jesus is made to say. For the
NT writers Jesus was not the less a man, but a man born miraculously. No thought either of preexistence or of
Incarnation was associated in their minds with the doctrine of the Virgin Birth.
The fact is that the two ideas cannot be reconciled.
•
A Preexistent being who becomes man, reduces
himself, if you will, to the state of a human embryo; but he is not conceived
by action exterior to himself in the womb of a woman. Conception is
the point at which an individual is formed, who did not exist before, at least
as an individual.”
Dr. Hanz Schwartz, Christology,
p. 236
• Preexistence
should not be construed to mean that Jesus waited in some heavenly realm until
the time ‘was fully come,’ and he could be incarnated. As the analogy and even
interchangeability of logos, sophia, and Jesus indicates, preexistence does not
imply a preexistent person but the
certainty and insistence that that which appeared in the human form of Jesus of
Nazareth was indeed of divine origin and had occurred with divine sanction.
Hastings Bible Dictionary. Vol. 5, p. 696, on
Micah 5:2
• “The
reference to the remote antiquity from which the origin of the Messiah dates…
Deut 32:7 shows that this is the meaning of y’me olam (not ‘days of
eternity’ as if what were spoken of were the eternal preexistence of the
Messiah).”
• New Int.
Dict. of OT Theology and exegesis (Vol.
3:347):Micah 5:2 predicts the coming of a Messianic King from Bethlehem whose
origin was “from old, from ancient times.” Here the phrase could well refer to
the pristine days of the Davidic monarchy (as the reference to Bethlehem,
David’s hometown suggests. It probably expresses the hope for the new David who
would take control of the decrepit monarchy and restore Israel’s glory (Cp.
Ezek.34:23-24; 37:24-25. While it is tempting to see here a reference to the
eternal preexistence of the Messiah, no such an idea is found in biblical or
post-biblical Jewish literature before the time of the similitudes of Enoch,
Ist cent BC – 1st cent AD (I Enoch 48:2-6). Joel 2:2 says that the Day of the
Lord is such as “never was of old,” the phrase essentially means forever. There
has never been a day like it before.
•
Dr. Dean Inge
• The
intelligent study of Christianity is impossible without knowledge of Greek and
Roman religion. We generally assume that there is an unbroken line of
continuity between the religion of the Jews and our own, and that there is none
between paganism and Christianity. But the opposite is the truth…
• The Catholic Church was the last creative
achievement of classical antiquity; it owes far more to Greece and Rome than to
Palestine… Christian ethics are a blend of Platonic and Stoic teachings about
the good life” (Lay Thoughts of a Dean)
Dr. Hans Schwarz, Christology,
1998
• “Preexistence
should not be construed to mean that Jesus waited in some heavenly realm until
‘the time was fully come’ and then he could be incarnated. As the analogy and
even interchangeabilty of word, wisdom and Jesus indicates, preexistence does not imply a preexistent
PERSON but the certainty and insistence that that which appeared in the human
form of Jesus of Nazareth was indeed of divine origin and had occurred with
divine sanction” (p. 236)
Marcellus of Ancyra on Trinity
• On the
basis of a work of Valentinus, entitled On the Three Natures, Marcellus
claimed that the latter was the first to conceive of a trinity of Father,
Son and Holy Spirit (Ps. Anthimus, de sancta ecclesia, 9 = Valentinus
frag. 9)
•
Alistair Logan, Gnostic Truth and
Christian Heresy, 1996, p. 60
Dr. Logan on Trinity
• It would
only make sense for Gnostics claiming to be Christians and evidently influenced
by the 4th Gospel and its community, to compose a pseudographical work in the
name of John, son of Zebedee, when the Gospel had come to be accepted in the
Great Church, i.e, by the time of Irenaeus and Theophilus. The next stage of adding
the frame story, developing the pronoia-epinoia
scheme with its final pronoia hymn…
dates from the last quarter of the second century” (p. 44).
• [Note the
frame story implies putting the picture into a new frame– reframing the
theology of John as the Apocryphon of John, Jesus talking to John personally.
Composing a new story, or plot, just as the Da Vinci code composes a new plot,
altering the story drastically]
Strongs
Concordance on Logos
• 3056 logos (log'-os), word
• Meaning: 1) of speech 1a) a word, uttered by a living voice, embodies a conception or idea
1b) what someone has said 1b1) a word 1b2) the sayings of God 1b3) decree,
mandate or order 1b4) of the moral precepts given by God 1b5) Old Testament
prophecy given by the prophets 1b6) what is declared, a thought, declaration,
aphorism, a weighty saying, a dictum, a maxim 1c) discourse 1c1) the act of
speaking, speech 1c2) the faculty of speech, skill and practice in speaking
1c3) a kind or style of speaking 1c4) a continuous speaking discourse -
instruction 1d) doctrine, teaching 1e) anything reported in speech; a
narration, narrative 1f) matter under discussion, thing spoken of, affair, a
matter in dispute, case, suit at law 1g) the thing spoken of or talked about;
event, deed 2) its use as respect to the MIND alone 2a) reason, the mental
faculty of thinking, meditating, reasoning, calculating 2b) account, i.e.
regard, consideration 2c) account, i.e. reckoning, score 2d) account, i.e.
answer or explanation in reference to judgment 2e) relation, i.e. with whom as
judge we stand in relation 2e1) reason would 2f) reason, cause, ground 3) In
John, denotes the essential Word of God, Jesus Christ, the personal wisdom
and power in union with God, his minister in creation and government of the
universe, the cause of all the world's life both physical and ethical, which
for the procurement of man's salvation put on human nature in
the person of Jesus the Messiah, the second person in the Godhead,
and shone forth conspicuously from His words and deeds.
Strongs on God (theos)
• 2316 theos {theh'-os}
• Meaning: 1) a god or goddess, a general name of
deities or divinities 2) the Godhead, trinity [no verse given!].
2a) God the Father, the first person in the trinity 2b) Christ, the second
person of the trinity 2c) Holy Spirit, the third person in the trinity 3)
spoken of the only and true God 3a) refers to the things of God 3b) his
counsels, interests, things due to him 4) whatever can in any respect be likened
unto God, or resemble him in any way 4a) God's representative or vice-regent
4a1) of magistrates and judges
•
• Origin: of uncertain affinity; a deity,
especially (with 3588) the supreme Divinity; TDNT - 3:65,322; n m
• NAB Notes
on Psalm 110:1
• <1> [Psalm 110] A royal psalm in which a
court singer recites three oracles in which God assures the king that his
enemies are conquered (Psalm 110:1-2), makes the king "son" in
traditional adoption language (Psa. 110:3), gives priestly status to the king
and promises to be with him in future military ventures (Psalm 110:4-7).
<2> The LORD says to you, my lord: literally, "The LORD says to my
lord," a polite form of address of an inferior to a superior. Cf. 1 Sam
25:25; 2 Sam 1:10. The court singer refers to the king. Jesus in the synoptic
gospels (Matthew 22:41-46 and parallels) takes the psalmist to be David and
hence "my lord" refers to the Messiah, who must be someone greater
than David. Your footstool: in ancient times victorious kings put their feet on
the prostrate bodies of their enemies.
Strongs
on ADON (lord)
• 0113 'adown {aw-done'} or (shortened) 'adon {aw-done'}
• Meaning: 1) firm, strong, lord, master 1a)
lord, master 1a1) reference to men 1a1a) superintendent of household, of
affairs 1a1b) master 1a1c) king 1a2) reference to God 1a2a) the Lord God 1a2b)
Lord of the whole earth 1b) lords, kings 1b1) reference to men 1b1a) proprietor
of hill of Samaria 1b1b) master 1b1c) husband 1b1d) prophet 1b1e) governor
1b1f) prince 1b1g) king 1b2) reference to God 1b2a) Lord of lords (probably =
"thy husband, Yahweh") 1c) my lord, my master 1c1) reference to men
1c1a) master 1c1b) husband 1c1c) prophet 1c1d) prince 1c1e) king 1c1f) father
1c1g) Moses 1c1h) priest 1c1i) theophanic angel 1c1j) captain 1c1k) general recognition
of superiority 1c2) reference to God 1c2a) my Lord, my Lord and my God 1c2b)
Adonai (parallel with Yahweh)
• Origin: from an unused root (meaning to rule);
TWOT - 27b; n m
• Usage: AV - lord 197, master(s) 105, Lord 31,
owner 1, sir 1; 335
• J. Skinner, D.D. pointed out in
1902 in his Cambridge Commentary for Schools and Colleges, p. 94:
“Isa.
49:14. ‘my Lord,’ better as RV, The Lord. The word when pointed as here
(ADONAI) is always equivalent to Yahweh. The suggestion that it may be used in
the sense of husband (Gen. 18:12) would require a different vocalization
(ADONI).”
•
Robert Morey, Jesus is God, 1983
cannot read the Hebrew
• “Jesus’
reference was to the oft-quoted Ps. 110:1, readily acknowledged by the Jews of
his day to be both Davidic and Messianic, where King David called the Christ
‘my Lord’, using one of the names of Deity, Adonai.” (p. 321)
• “Messiah’ was not merely David’s son after the
flesh by genealogical descent, he was God’s Son in eternity past– one known and
loved and acknowledged by David…”
• “Incidentally
note the Trinitarian reference in this passage, Jehovah, Adonai, Spirit!” (p. 321)
Strongs
on gennao, beget, procreate
• Meaning: 1) of men who fathered children 1a) to
be born 1b) to be begotten 1b1) of women giving birth to children 2) metaph.
2a) to engender, cause to arise, excite 2b) in a Jewish sense, of one who
brings others over to his way of life, to convert someone 2c) of God making
Christ his son 2d) of God making men his sons through faith in Christ's work
• Origin: from a variation of 1085; TDNT -
1:665,114; v
• Usage: AV - begat 49, be born 39, bear 2,
gender 2, bring forth 1, be delivered 1, misc 3; 97
• 5685 Tense -
Aorist (See 5777) Voice - Passive (See 5786) Mood - Participle (See 5796) Count
- 215
• 1080 gennao {ghen-nah'-o}
• Geneva
Bible Notes:
• Mat 1:20
but while he pondered on these things, behold, an angel of the Lord
appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, fear not to (1) take
to thee Mary, thy (2) wife, for that which is (3) begotten in her
is of the Holy Spirit.
• Youngs Literal
Trans: Matthew 1:20 And on his
thinking of these things, lo, a messenger of the Lord in a dream appeared to
him, saying, 'Joseph, son of David, thou mayest not fear to receive Mary thy
wife, for that which in her was begotten is of the Holy
Spirit,
• DBY Matthew
1:20 but while he pondered on these things, behold, an angel of the Lord
appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, fear not to take to thee
Mary, thy wife, for that which is begotten in her is of the
Holy Spirit.
Thayer’s
Lexicon on gennao
• Passive, to
be begotten: to en aute gennethen ‘that which is begotten in her womb,’
Matt. 1:20.
Bauer’s
Lexicon on Gennao
• 1624 gennao
• • See A
Rahlfs, Genesis 1926, 39. Generate, to cause something to come into existence,
primarily through procreation or parturition.
• 1. become
the parent of, beget
Liddell
and Scott on Gennao
• 8263 gennao
• Gennao,) Causal
of gignomai. of the father, to beget, engender, Aesch., Soph.;
rarely of the mother, to bring forth, Aesch.
German
on I John 5:18
Munchener NT, 1998
•
MNT 1 John 5:18
Wir wissen, daß jeder aus Gott Gezeugte nicht sündigt, sondern der aus Gott Gezeugte
bewahrt ihn, und der Böse berührt ihn nicht.
•
My Question to Dr.
Paula Fredriksen
• I have
read your interesting account of early Christianity and gained much from your research and vigorous
writing. I do have an observation on a point which has been of concern to me as
a teacher of NT and biblical languages. You say on p. 139 that Ps. 110:1 refers
to the Messiah as adonai. But this is not actually so. The Hebrew is not the
divine title Adonai, Lord God, but adoni, my lord, RV, RSV, etc.
• It seems
to me that this is rather a crucial issue, since the early Christians were not
thinking of Jesus as the Lord God, as kurios=Yahweh, but as the human lord
Messiah (Luke 2:11) Adoni as opposed to Adonai, is not the divine title in all
of its 195 occurrences.
Reply from Dr. Frederiksen
• Thank you
for this note. I have just grabbed my Jewish Bible. You are absolutely right. I
made a mistake. My English transliteration is wrong (also misleading) and I
will take advantage of your notice to me to fix it in the next printing. I am
terribly grateful to you for bringing this to my attention. We all depend on
each other. Yours with thanks.
The Torah of Christ (Gal. 6:2; I Cor.
9:21)
“In
rabbinical circles there was talk of the Torah of Messiah… a new interpretation
of the Old Torah, not a suppression of it, but in some sense a new Torah:
Midrash on Qoh (Ecc.) 11, 8: “The Torah which a man learns in this world is
nothing compared with the Torah of Messiah.
(Strack-Billerbeck, Vol. 3, p. 577)
Prof. Dale Brown of
Bethany Seminary, on Abrahamic Faith Aug. 4, 1992
• “It is an
honor to have had the privilege of working with a student who edits a Journal
of substance and impeccable diction and style. What you and your church put
together as theology increasingly makes more sense to me.” cont.d, 145
Henry Alford on II
Pet. 1:2
• Undoubtedly
as in Titus 2:13, in strict grammatical propriety, both God and savior would be
predicates of Jesus Christ. But here as also in Titus 2:13, considerations
interpose which seem to remove the strict grammatical rendering out of the
range of probable meaning.
• In II Pet.
1:1 I think that God refers to the Father
and the savior Jesus Christ to the Son. Here there is the additional
consideration in favour of the view that the Two are distinguished most plainly
in the next verse.
Professor Brown of
Bethany Seminary
• “I wonder
whether your Journal [Journal from the Radical Reformation] is getting the
reviews and reading it deserves. I wonder about the nature of the dialogue, if
any, you may have with liberal Unitarians. The revised hermeneutic of
premillennialism is both prophetic and useful to many rooted in or attracted to
the chiliastic tradition.”
Dr. John Meagher
• “I think
it is relevant for me to say that I am a professor of theology and of New
Testament at a Roman Catholic institution…and that I think that your
publication Focus on the Kingdom is theologically important, however
much it may be neglected by the sector that I thus represent. You address
radically important issues in Christian theology which are entirely appropriate
because in fact the theological exercise is only adolescent and in need of further
guidance. I think you are doing a good work that I hope will eventually have an
impact on my own church tradition. There is much work to be done before we can,
collectively, think clearly, and I am glad that your magazine’s honesty about
these things is so unflinching. What you are doing strikes me as a very
important contribution. And I thank you for it.”(2002)
John Morris
• Anthony, I
know that you don’t like the praise, at least it is not your own lips, but I
can hardly be silent. I feel like you are my ‘father’ in the faith. I wouldn’t
know how else to put it. I have literally been in darkness, and Oh, how dark it
has been. Your broadcast and the conviction of the spirit of the Lord have been
my salvation. I shudder to think of the hardness which would have been built up
in my heart if I had not received the truth of what you have spoken. All praise
to Him who has called us to be His own. How thankful I am. Life in Christ has
never been so sweet. Thank you for you obedience to Him. Until next time I remain
your brother in the Beloved. (March, 2000)
Worship
•
“Worship was sometimes offered to Christ and
prayer addressed to him. Some indefiniteness attaches to this subject, partly
owing to the two senses of the Gk. Proskuneo.
• It cannot
be proved in any of the cases where proskuneo is used of Jesus that
anything more than an act of homage and humble obeisance is intended. Josephus
uses the word of the High Priests (BJ, iv 5. 2)… The physical act of
prostration in profound humility and as rendering great honor is all that can
be meant… The prayers of the saints are presented to him (Rev. 5:8) and songs
are sung in honor of him (9. 11, 12). II
Cor 12: 8, 9 Paul speaks of praying to Christ (lord).”
•
(HDB, Vol. 4, p.
943, W.F. Adeney)
William Barclay on John’s human
Jesus
• The blood
at the cross was the final unanswerable proof [for John] that Jesus was a real man with a real body.
Here was the answer to the gnostics with their ideas of phantoms and spirits
and unreal manhood. Here was proof that Jesus was bone of our bone and flesh of
our flesh (Comm. II, p. 304)
Marcellus of Ancyra
• "Now with the heresy of the Ariomaniacs, which has corrupted the
Church of God...These then teach three hypostases, just as Valentinus the
heresiarch first invented in the book entitled by him 'On the Three Natures'.
For he was the first to invent three hypostases and three persons of the
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he is discovered to have filched this from Hermes
and Plato." (Source: Logan A. Marcellus of Ancyra (Pseudo-Anthimus),
'On the Holy Church': Text, Translation and Commentary. Verses 8-9. Journal of
Theological Studies, NS, Volume 51, Pt. 1, April 2000, p.95 ).
Dr. Hinrich Wendt on John
17:3
• Jesus is
not speaking in John 17:3 about eternal life, as to its essence, but about
how eternal life is to be obtained.
‘Jesus is the resurrection’ means that Jesus is the answer to the
question about how we get resurrected…
his words are the means to achieving eternal life (6:63)… John 17:3 tells
us that the knowledge of God and Messiah is the exclusive and perfect means of
obtaining eternal life… Jesus was sent to impart life for ever… in 6:63 he was
conscious that a divine spiritual power operated [energized] through his
preaching – a power shared in by all who received his message in faith (Teaching
of Jesus, 244-247) [Cp. I Thess. 2:13]
Dr. Bultmann, Primitive Christianity.(1956)
• The
proclamation of Jesus must be considered within the framework of Judaism. Jesus was not a “Christian”
but a Jew and his preaching is couched in the thought forms and imagery of
Judaism” (p. 71).
Isidore Epstein, Judaism, 1959
• Philo’s
conception of the logos was totally alien to Judaism. The God of the Bible is a living God, not the
impersonal being of Greek metaphysics. He does employ intermediaries to execute
His will, but is certainly not inactive Himself. Furthermore the conception of
the Logos as a second God seemed to impair the absolute monotheism of the
Jewish religion… all this accounts for the little influence Philo exerted
on Jewish thought. His works were
however studied eagerly by Church Fathers who found in them much material for
the synthesis of Jewish and Greek thought that came to be known as Christian
theology. (p. 198)
Basil of Caeserea, on holy spirit, 18,
44
• We confess one God, not in number but in
nature.
•
• Gregory of
Nazianzus,
“The divine is indivisible in its
divisions.” (Oration 31, 14)
Dr. J. S Whale,
Christian Doctrine. 1952
• “Christian
thought, working with the data of the NT and using Greek philosophy as its
instrument, constructed the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. It acknowledged
in the Godhead, not one Individual, nor three Individuals, but a personal unity…
• The
systematic thought of the church
inevitably involved a further definition
of monotheism [goes beyond], an elaboration of the unitary conception of
the Godhead, not in terms of Tritheism but of Triunity
Dr. Gromachi
• “Nor did
Jesus ever use ‘we’ or ‘us’ in reference
to his theanthropic [God-Man] person. He
always used ‘I’ or ‘me’ because he was just one person.” )(The Virgin
Birth: A Biblical Study of the Deity of Jesus Christ)
• [God also
described himself as ‘I’ and ‘Me’ ‘He’ because He was one Person. Thousands of
singular personal pronouns tell us that God is a single Person. This elementary
fact of language known to all has been submerged and drowned out by the massive
counter-power of ecclesiastical authority]
Dr. Harold O.J. Brown, Heresies,
1984, p. 341
• There was
a transition within biblical monotheism, itself: from the unitary monotheism of Israel to the Trinitarianism of the
Council of Chalcedon. The difference was symbolized by the transition from the
prayer ‘Hear O Israel the Lord our God is one Lord’ to the confession of the
Athanasian Creed, ‘we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.’
• “Was the transition from the personal
monotheism of Israel to the tripersonal theism of Nicea a legitimate
development of OT revelation? Christians affirm that it is, holding that Nicea
represents a fuller unfolding and not a distortion of the self-disclosure of
the God of Israel… a valid and necessary interpretation of the claims of Jesus
Christ.”
Me on Harold Brown
• If the
Trinity was a valid interpretation of the claims of Jesus Christ, how is it
that Jesus’ own claim was that he fully believed in the Shema of Israel (Mark
12:29) which Brown admits was unitary monotheism.
• The
evidence shows that Christians have ‘progressed’ beyond Jesus and II John 7
warns against going beyond the teaching of Jesus. Jesus’ teaching—his affirming
of the unitarian creed of Israel—remains as a witness against Trinitarianism.
Why don’t Christians follow Christ?
Luther on Isa. 48:16, used by
some to support the Trinity
• “This
passage has been amazingly darkened. The Jews understand it of the prophet and
this opinion I adopt…. It will not validly support the mystery of the Trinity.”
Dr. Joseph Klausner on
Messiah
• Paul the
Jew did not go so far as to call Jesus “God” (Messianic Idea, p. 528).
Klausner on the false development
• “The
second step was to identify Jesus with the Word [losing the message behind the messenger] by which the
world was created acc. to Judaism Aboth
5:1), or with the Logos which for Philo is a sort of angelic being, This
identification we find in John [no]. It
was natural that Gentiles whom Paul brought
into Christianity should take the third and final step and make Jesus a
God-Man, one Person with two natures, God and man at the same time. Thus Jesus’
Messiahiship was gradually obscured. Jesus the Messiah gave way to Jesus the
God-man or the God Jesus. And matters finally reached such a pass that the name Christ became the
essential cognomen of Jesus (Jesus Christ and not Jesus the Messiah) The
Messiahship of Jesus became secondary to his deity (p. 528)
Dr. W. A. Brown, Outline of Christian
Theology
• Steps to the
Trinity: The first is the
identification of the preexistent Christ
with the Logos of Greek philosophy. 2) Origen’s doctrine of eternal generation
of the Son. 3) the victory at Nicea of the Athanasian formula “of the same
substance.”
The Fatal Shift under Justin Martyr (Brown)
150 AD
• In the
theology of Justin and the apologists we note a change of emphasis. Here the
preexistent Christ is identified with the Logos of Greek philosophy, and
whatever the philsophers have attributed to the latter is affirmed of Christ.
The human Jesus falls into the background and the marks of limitation in his
life [he is ignorant of the day of his return] are either overlooked or explained
away. The Catholic fathers vindicate the orthodoxy of the Logos and against the simple Messianic christology
[Matt. and Luke give this in detail] and so determine the lines of the later dogmatic development.
• Finally
note the brilliant testimony of the three young men about to be burned alive by
Nebuchanezzar for refusing belief in other than the God of Israel. The LXX of
Dan 3:17 (cp John 17:3!) reads “our one Lord... will save us.”
• One Lord
is one Person! Three can never make one.
The
One God, the Father, One Man Messiah Version
A
Pre-Trinitarian Translation of the New Testament, Restoring Clarity on the One
God, the Messiah and the Gospel of the Kingdom
Introduction
“The
Deity of Jesus is inherently un-Jewish. The witness of Jewish texts is
unvarying belief that a second being in God involves departure from the Jewish
community.”
“According
to the New Testament witnesses, in the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles
relative to the monotheism of the Old Testament and Judaism, there had been no
element of change whatsoever. Mark 12:29 recorded the confirmation by Jesus
himself, without any reservation, of the supreme monotheistic confession of
faith of Israelite religion in its complete form.”
This
translation has as its premise the conviction that the Church today, in its
preaching, teaching and tradition, generally gives you a strongly Greek
philosophically-influenced version of the NT. This unfortunate departure from
the original faith of Jesus and the Apostles dates from the second century AD,
that is, after the canon of the NT closed with the book of Revelation. A full
reformation and return to the beliefs of the NT Church did not occur in the 16th-century
Reformation under Luther and Calvin.
The
tragic lapse from apostolic truth leads you away from the original NT
community’s essentially simple account of the faith — “the faith once and for
all delivered to the people of God” (Jude 3). Voices of protest and alarm,
among many, may be cited in support of our thesis, Eberhard Griesebach, Canon
Goudge, Dean Farrar, and Dr. E.F. Scott and Dr. Martin Werner.
Griesebach
wrote: “In its encounter with Greek philosophy Christianity became theology.
That was the fall of Christianity.”
Anglican Canon Goudge: “When the Greek and Roman mind instead of the Hebrew
mind came to dominate the Church there occurred a disaster in doctrine and
practice from which we have never recovered.” Anglican Dean Farrar was frank
enough to concede that the Church has constantly made a mess of its attempt to
interpret the Bible. He notes that “Holy Scripture contains everything
necessary for salvation” (6th Article of the Church of England) and
that “the plain teachings of Christ are the sole infallible guide.” He then
laments the evident failure of expositors to agree on what the Bible says.
“Truly, if over the whole extent of what we call ‘religion’ men have an
infallible guide, they have — and that to all appearances inevitably — regarded
it worse than useless by fallible expositions.”
Then this
marvelous insight from E. F. Scott, D.D. “Christianity, in the course of the
Gentile mission, had changed into another religion. The Church…had forgotten or
refused to know what Jesus had actually taught.”
If the
Bible is taken at face value within its brilliant, Jewish apocalyptic setting, “sooner
or later the time will come when the simple and natural will be recognized as
the true.”
Dr.
Martin Werner’s summary of the early chaos which overcame the Messianic Jesus
and his teaching deserves the widest possibly hearing:
“The
cause of the Trinitarian-Christological problem, which so perplexed
Post-Apostolic Christianity, lay in the transition from the apocalyptic
Messiah-Son of Man concept of the Primitive Christian eschatological faith,
with its sense of imminence, to the new dogma of the Divinity of Jesus. There
was certainly no need nor justification… to substitute for the original concept
of the Messiah, simply a Hellenistic analogy, such as that of redeeming Divine
Being…Indeed it was wholly invalid. It was a myth behind which the historical
Jesus completely disappeared…”
Christian
Becker in Paul’s Apocalyptic Gospel points
out that the shift from Jesus’ and Paul’s apocalyptic Gospel of the Kingdom
“constitutes something like a fall of Christendom.” He calls this rightly “a
fall from the apocalyptic world of early Christianity to Platonic categories of
thought.’ This had “a tremendous impact on the history of Christian thought,”
bringing about “an alienation of Christianity from its original Jewish matrix.”
Translations,
particularly some modern ones like the NIV (New International Version), “help”
the reader to see things in the New Testament which reinforce his or her
impression that later “orthodoxy” is solidly biblical. But this involves
“pushing” the Greek text beyond what it actually says. This unfair process is
an attempt to justify the later departure from the original faith. It
smoothes over the embarrassing difference between the original Greek Scripture
of the original community of faith and what from the 2nd century
developed as a tragic departure from the biblical orthodoxy of Jesus and Paul.
The most
striking example of this embarrassing difference between Jesus and the beliefs
of those claiming to follow him is the unitarian creed affirmed with maximum
emphasis by Jesus in discussion with a colleague Jew (Mark 12:28ff.). On this
critical passage of scripture the Church has adopted an alarming posture of
silence! (Often it is what we do not say which gives away a flaw in our
thinking.)
In that
marvelously instructive passage of Scripture a Jewish scholar had asked Jesus
about what is the most critically important command of all. Jesus
replied by endorsing the monumentally significant creed of Israel’s heritage,
the core of all true religion: “The Lord our God is one Lord” (as read from the
NT Greek, citing the LXX, Greek version of the OT). This is a unitary
monotheistic and certainly not a Trinitarian creed. “One” is a quantifier, a
simple, mathematical numeral, and God is defined here, as innumerable times in
the Hebrew Bible and the NT as one single divine Lord, one Person, one
divine Self. One Yahweh. He is so described by thousands of singular personal
pronouns, which as we all know designate a single person. Malachi 2:10
encapsulates with delightful simplicity, the totality of the Bible’s view of
God as one Person: “Do we not all have one Father? Has not one God created us?”
The
importance of this point needs to be repeated: The clash between the original
teachings of Jesus and what later emerged as Christianity is most starkly
demonstrated by the failure of Bible readers to take with utmost seriousness
Jesus’ own unitarian, i.e. unitary monotheistic definition of God in Mark
12:29. In that classic passage Jesus is seen to be in total harmony with a
friendly Jewish Bible scholar. In John 17:3 Jesus proposed as the key to the
Life of the Age to Come (inadequately rendered in our versions as “eternal
life”) that we come to recognize and know the Father as “the only one who is
true GOD” (cp. John 5:44). In John’s writings the Father is equated with God
nearly 150 times and in the NT it is obvious that “GOD” (often “the GOD”
in the original Greek) means the Father and not Jesus. “God” means the Father
about 1300 times in our NT.
The creed
of Israel was never Trinitarian. Thus the fact that Jesus affirms and endorses
the unitarian creed of Judaism (Mark 12:28ff) ought to provide a provocative
and life-changing embarrassment to today’s Church, which has ceased to quote
and believe the creed of Jesus.
It has departed from Jesus at the most crucial level of all theological and
spiritual endeavor. Thus Christianity is distinguished by the remarkable
characteristic that it is the only world religion which begins by discarding
its own founder’s creed. Mark 12:29, and Jesus as our rabbi-teacher, not just
one who provided forgiveness by dying for us, must be reinstated, if Bible
study and preaching are to be honest with the Christian documents.
Well did
Professor Karl-Heinz Ohlig write: “There is no indication that Jesus would have
understood the ‘Father,’ from whom he felt himself to have been sent and to
whom he felt himself to be related in a special way, differently from the
monotheistic God of Judaism…This consensus of New Testament research need not
be more closely examined here.”
There are
places in some modern translations which plainly depart from the Greek in order
to give the impression that the later “orthodoxy” is biblically based. A
classic example is in Philippians 2:5 where the Son of God is described in the
NIV as “being in very nature God.” But this is a horrible imposition on the
text, which says not a word about Jesus being God. The word “nature”
here is meant to encourage the notion of a “GOD the Son” who is of the same
“essence” as the Father. But “essence” and “hypostasis” belong to a theological
vocabulary of post-biblical times, when the simplicity of the pristine belief
in God the Father as “the only one who is true God” (John 17:3) had been lost.
The NIV
commits a sort of treachery against the original text of Scripture when it
reports Jesus as “going back” or “returning” to the Father (John 13:3; 16:28:
20:17). Jesus said no such thing. He said he was “going to the Father,” not
going back to Him. We note too that in a very subtle way the NIV does
not want you to see that the Gospel (of the Kingdom) was preached equally by
Jesus and Paul. Introducing the ministry of Jesus, it reports him as preaching
“the Good News,” while Paul is said to be preaching “the Gospel.”
But
that distinction is absent from the original Greek and encourages a
discontinuity between Jesus and Paul. Both Jesus and Paul, who followed Jesus
faithfully, preached the same saving Gospel of the Kingdom. It is misleading to
translate evangelion for Jesus’ preaching as Good News and the same word
for Paul’s preaching as Gospel. It points to a dangerous systematic error —
that Jesus’ teaching has been discarded in favor of a misunderstood “Gospel of
Paul.” We have failed to call Jesus “rabbi and lord” (John 13:13) when he
everywhere urged us never to fall short of grasping and obeying his saving
words (John 3:36; 12:44ff. cp. Heb. 5:9). C.S. Lewis reflects this mistake when
he claims that “the Gospels are not the gospel, the statement of Christian
belief.”
It would be hard to imagine a more damaging blow to the saving words of Jesus.
Billy Graham was mistaken too when he claimed that “Jesus came to do three days
work, to die, to be buried and to rise.”
Using the
standard Greek manuscripts as base (i.e., the text edited by Bruce Metzger) my
hope is to bring into clear focus the very uncomplicated NT definition of God
as the Father of Jesus and certainly not as Triune. We want to emphasize
constantly the definition of the saving Gospel as the Gospel about the Kingdom
of God, of which Jesus was the original and authoritative preacher (Heb.
2:3; Luke 4:43). I have of course gained immensely from all of some 60 modern
translations, in various languages, available on the standard software used by
scholars. These translations mostly convey the sense of the Greek in varied but
entirely acceptable ways. However in certain key passages they misrepresent the
Greek text, in an effort to portray Jesus as God the Son, second member of an
eternal Trinity.
This
second major objective, to define the saving Gospel as Jesus defined it, means
restoring the voice and mind of Jesus to our Bible reading. At present the
public never gets a clear concept of what Jesus preached as the saving Gospel.
Our observation is that the “Gospel about the Kingdom,” with which Jesus laid
the foundation of all sound belief (Mark 1:14-15), is virtually absent from
contemporary tracts, books and websites and blogs offering “salvation.” The
voice of Jesus, at the most fundamental level of defining the Gospel, has been
silenced.
In place
of the Gospel as Jesus preached it to the public we hear offered a very “washed
out” version of the Gospel, geared largely to psychological self-improvement,
or as Dallas Willard calls it, “gospels of sin management.”
Popular evangelicalism has been emptied of its vivid, apocalyptic flavor,
announcing the future of human society and warning of the future return of
Jesus in judgment and to rule on a renewed earth. The Gospel announces God’s
future revolutionary government which will put an end to all war!
Without
grasping the proper starting point, following Jesus himself, Bible readers are
left with a hazy conception as to the definition and content of the saving
Gospel. Paul is then often twisted by a selection of a few verses taken without
regard to context. Romans 10:9-10 is typical, and Jesus’ version of the Gospel
is bypassed in the process. Paul did not contradict Jesus’ insistence on the
necessity of believing the Gospel of the Kingdom (Mark 1:14-15). Paul concludes
Romans 10 (v. 17) by saying that faith comes by hearing and believing the “word
[Gospel] of Christ,” that is, the Gospel Christ himself preached. Paul
is misunderstood (with the NIV, not the more accurate NASU) when he is made to
say that one needs only to “hear of” Jesus, i.e. about him, when in fact
one must “hear Jesus,” that is, hear and respond intelligently to his own
Gospel of the Kingdom message.
In 1
Corinthians 15:1-3 Paul should not be pitted against Jesus! Paul did not say
there that the death and resurrection of Jesus comprise the whole
Gospel. Those facts were items “amongst things of first importance.” After all
Jesus had preached the Gospel for years without, at that stage, so much as a
mention of his death and resurrection, introduced first in Matthew 16:21.
My
conviction about the absence of the center of the saving Gospel from popular
preaching, as the Kingdom, is trenchantly stated by a professor of missiology.
Dr. Mortimer Arias observed:
“We seem
to be faced with an eclipse of the Kingdom of God from the apostolic age to
the present particularly in our theology of evangelism. The Kingdom of God
is God’s own dream, His project for the world and for humanity. He makes us
dreamers and He wants us to be seduced by his dream. It is not we who dream but
God who dreams in us…When I left the seminary I had no clear idea of the
Kingdom of God, and I had no place in my theology for the Parousia (Second
Coming). I had no concerns about the future. Thousands of books are printed
and circulated every year on evangelization. Most of these fall into the
category of ‘how to’ manuals for churches (devising plans, strategies,
methodologies, goals)…Our traditional mini-theologies — ‘the plan of
salvation,’ ‘four spiritual laws’ — do not do justice to the whole Gospel. Not all this activity or
activism is a sign of health or creativity. The Good News of the Kingdom is not
the usual way we describe the Gospel and evangelization. The Kingdom of God has
practically disappeared from evangelistic preaching and has been ignored by
traditional evangelism.
“The
evangelistic message has been centered in personal salvation, individual
conversion, and incorporation into the church. The Kingdom of God as a
parameter or perspective or content of the Gospel has been virtually absent.
Those interested in evangelism have not yet been interested in the Kingdom of
God. Why not try Jesus’ own definition of his mission — and ours? For Jesus
evangelism was no more and no less than announcing the Kingdom of God.”
My
translation attempts to restore to the Gospel of the Kingdom the central
prominence it always enjoys throughout the NT.
It is
clear that Jesus was a Jew as the descendant of David. The most spectacular of
his teachings — and all of his teachings will be our judge (John 12:44ff; Acts
17:32, etc) — is his impassioned affirmation of the Shema of Israel,
found in Deuteronomy 6:4. This belief in the one and only single-Person God,
the Father, is enthusiastically affirmed and agreed to by a Jewish scribe in
Mark 12:28ff. On no account should any reader of the NT in its own context
imagine that Jesus believed in the Trinity of post-biblical councils! In this
translation I make a concerted effort to remind readers of the unitary
monotheistic faith of the NT, the definition of the Son of God as the lord
Messiah, who was born (Luke 2:11), and not a second Person of a Triune Godhead.
God cannot be born and the immortal God cannot die.
A great
deal of refreshing simplicity and peace of mind results from reading the
writings of the NT community in their Jewish, first-century context. We are
touching base with the original roots of the faith, and the NT comes alive in a
brilliant way. Ignorance of the Bible produces a disastrous alienation from God
(Eph. 4:18).
Evidently
a lot of my fellow countrymen have abandoned the Bible entirely, since they go
to Church regularly in the UK only at the rate of about 5%, and the rest only
to be “hatched, matched and dispatched.”
The
confusion caused by the later (from the early second century) fall from the
original faith is gargantuan in its effects. It will take time to clear the air
and defog our minds. We have been drinking toxic theology and the church needs
to be decontaminated. But the effort is well worth it, although revolutions are
never without pain.
Religion
from the second century developed its own “improved version” of the biblical
drama presented in Scripture. The Bible itself is a gripping drama, portraying
the great Plan of God to bestow on human persons the gift of indestructible life,
immortality. There will be peace on earth when the nations are required to beat
swords into plowshares and learning to make war will never again be permitted.
No one will be permitted to take a gun and shoot his neighbor. This sounds like
good sense and Good News to me!
From the
second century, the emerging Catholic Church created its own embroidered
version of the Bible’s original plot and thus lost the plot for itself and its
billions of followers. At the same time the “improved version” created a powerful
and wealthy hierarchy designed to suppress the ignorant and guarantee a huge
prestige to its priest leaders. They capped this effort finally by declaring
the chief leader, the Pope, to be infallible when speaking officially.
The
spectacular drama of the origin of the unique Son of God, Jesus Messiah
(genesis, Matt. 1:18), provided in
the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke was given an additional tabloid twist
when Mary, a teenage virgin, was said to be herself always sinless (the
doctrine of “the immaculate conception”) and permanently a virgin, without
sexual experience for her whole married life. Jesus’ half brothers had then to
be denied that status and turned into cousins (or children of Joseph by a
previous marriage). Mary was said to have been assumed to heaven bodily without
dying.
The Roman
Catholic Church assumed power over the secular state as the Kingdom of God
coming in advance of Jesus at his future Second Coming. In Scripture the
nations of this present world system are never the Kingdom of God. The saints
are not ruling at present (though they will), and Jesus is the only
ultimately legitimate King and world ruler. The system of faith promoted by the
“new improved version” of the biblical drama elevated priests as the only ones
educated to minister the mysteries of the new faith.
The laity were put under
guardians.
The control of millions of minds was ensured and theological education was
denied to all but leadership. The permanence of this massively powerful
tradition was thus guaranteed.
The
Protestant reformation in the 16th century was provoked by the
obvious abuses of the inherited system, to call for change, but its reform was
partial. The same mysterious Triune God continued to replace the single God of
the Bible, the Father of Jesus. Jesus’ unitarian heritage and definition of
God, long suppressed by tradition, was not permitted in general to resurface
from under the rubble of tradition which held the minds of the masses under its
sway.
Heaven
(or eternal hell) at death for “immortal souls” continued to replace the
biblical vision of resurrection into the Kingdom of God on a renewed earth,
which was the heart of the Hebrew dream of peace on earth, as well as the heart
of the saving Gospel of the Kingdom announced by Jesus and the NT community.
A smaller
more radical wing of the Reformation was cruelly suppressed when it challenged
the theology of the major Reformation led by Luther and Calvin.
Englishman John
Biddle, a school-master who exposed the error of the Trinity, had the “honor”
of having an act of the British parliament passed against him and he died in
prison. His crime was merely to have pointed to the unvarnished simplicity of
Jesus’ own definition of God in the Shema, the “Hear O Israel” of Deuteronomy
6:4 and Mark 12:29. The brilliant Spanish scholar Michael Servetus was burned
at the stake at the instigation of Protestant reformer John Calvin, in an act
of mindless and unrepented brutality. Servetus’ “crime” was having shown that
the Trinity is not a biblical doctrine. Does the public know of this atrocity
in the name of religion?
The
emerging Church achieved an enormous success by adding a number of
show-stopping features to its version of the biblical drama. However the
casualty in this unfortunate development was the original divine drama of
Scripture in two acts, offering to suffering mankind the hope of immortality
and a place of responsibility in the future Kingdom of God on earth, when Jesus
returns to take up his position on the restored throne of David. The original
storyline and plot of the divine drama in the pages of Scripture was replaced
with a dazzling but perverted story, a mixture of paganism and Scripture. Once
we lose the plot of the astonishing drama, Scripture becomes confusing, Church
tradition takes over and intelligent Bible reading is obstructed.
Professor J. Harold Ellens makes our point, based on the clear
testimony to what the Church has done with its central figure:
“It is time therefore for the Christian Church to acknowledge that
it has a very special type of material which constitutes its creedal tradition.
It is not a creedal tradition of biblical theology. It is not a unique
inspired and authoritative word from God. It is, rather, a special kind of
Greek religio-philosophical mythology…It should be candidly admitted by the
Church, then, that its roots are not in Jesus of Nazareth…not in the
central tradition of biblical theology…Its roots are in Philonic Hellenistic
Judaism and in the Christianized Neo-Platonism of the second through the
fifth century. Since this is so, the Church should acknowledge to the world of
humans seeking truth and to the world of alternate religions, that the
Christian Church speaks only with its own historical and philosophical
authority and appeal and with neither a divine nor a unique revelation from
Jesus Christ nor from God” (The Ancient
Library of Alexandria and Early Christian Theological Development).
The “complication” of God through the addition of two other
Persons to the God known to Jesus led inevitably to the complication of the
Messianic personality of Jesus. Once he became God, true monotheism was
violated. The result: “Jesus Christ was now no longer a man of flesh and blood
like ourselves, but a [preexisting] heavenly being of supernatural origin in
human form. With the help of a metaphysical system taken over from Greek
philosophy, Christological dogma came into being, and an attempt was made to
describe the person of Jesus Christ in the form of the so-called ‘doctrine of
two natures.’ ‘Jesus Christ, true man and true God.’ So men said…From the very
beginning right up until the present day the Church has been tempted to stress
the ‘divinity’ of Christ so one-sidedly that his ‘manhood’ threatened to become
a mere semblance. In this Jesus Christ was made an historical abnormality…What
happened to this Christ was no longer the fate of a man, but the fate of a
remarkable shadowy fairy-tale figure, half man and half God…Man has woven a
golden veil of pious adoration, love and superstition and spread it over the
rugged contours of God’s action in history” (Zahrnt, The Historical Jesus, 1963, p. 29).
Theologians lost themselves in a maze of obfuscating language, and
indignation at this lamentable exercise was well expressed by Harvard Professor
Andrews Norton in 1833, in his Statement of Reasons for not Believing the
Doctrines of Trinitarians. He begins with a scathing attack on the complex
issue of how Jesus can be 100% God and 100% man at the same time: “The doctrine
of the communication of properties, says Le Clerc, ‘is as intelligible as if
one were to say that there is a circle which is so united with the triangle,
that the circle has the properties of the triangle, and the triangle those of
the circle.’ It is discussed at length by Petavius with his usual redundance of
learning. The vast folio of that writer containing the history of the
Incarnation [and Trinity], is one of the most striking and most melancholy
monuments of human folly which the world has to exhibit. In the history of
other departments of science we find abundant errors and extravagances; but
orthodox theology seems to have been the peculiar region of words without
meaning; of doctrines confessedly false in their proper sense, and explained in
no other; of the most portentous absurdities put forward as truths of the
highest import; and of contradictory propositions thrown together without an
attempt to reconcile them. A main error running through the whole system, as
well as other systems of false philosophy, is that words possess an intrinsic
meaning, not derived from the usage of men; that they are not mere signs of
human ideas, but a sort of real entities, capable of signifying what transcends
our conceptions, and that when they express to human reason only an
absurdity they may still be significant of a high mystery or a hidden
truth, and are to be believed without being understood.”
From Cambridge in recent years comes an impressive analysis of the
disaster that occurred when the Jewish Jesus was replaced by a pre-existing
Eternal Son. The consequences of the process of reinterpretation by which the
Son of God became identified with “God the Son” are far-reaching indeed.
Professor Lampe points out that when the Son was projected back on to an
eternally existing pre-human Son, and when the holy spirit was turned into a
third “hypostasis”: “The Christian concept of God then becomes inescapably tritheistic.
This is because three ‘persons’ in anything like the modern sense of the word
‘person’ means in fact three Gods…The effects especially in popular
piety have been even more far-reaching than this. The Nicene Creed speaks of
‘Jesus Christ’ in person, not the Logos as preexistent…It is thus the Jesus of
the gospels whom the imagination of the worshipper pictures as pre-existing in
heaven and descending to earth.” There is “the absurdity of the picture of
Jesus reflected in much traditional devotion which is essentially that of a
superman
who voluntarily descends into the world of ordinary mortals, choosing, by a
deliberate act of will, to be born as man…God the Son is conceptualized as
Jesus, Son of God; the obedience of Jesus, the Servant of God and Son of God,
the true Adam indwelt and inspired by God’s spirit, is attributed to God the
Son; God the Son becomes eternally the subject of Jesus’ self-dedication to his
Father’s will, and eternally the object of the Father’s love…This means in
effect the abandonment of
monotheism, for such a relation between God the Son and God the
Father is incompatible with the requirement of monotheism that we predicate of
God one mind, one will and one single operation.”
Professor
Lampe was a specialist in the post-biblical development of the Trinity and
observed also that “the interpretation of Jesus as preexistent Son and of the
Son as a pre-existent Jesus causes inconsistency and confusion…The doctrine
which follows from the identification of Jesus with a pre-existent personal
divine being is ultimately incompatible with the unity of God.”
Equally problematic for a true monotheism and a genuinely human
Messiah is the Trinitarian concept of the Son as “assuming human nature.”
Professor Lampe reminds us that “a person is created by his relationships with
other people and especially by his interaction with his parents and family.”
What happened then to the first-century Galilean Jew Jesus? He was lost and
replaced by a philosophical abstraction whose identity as the son of David, and
thus the true and only Messiah, became irrelevant.
The
Christological concept of the pre-existent divine Son…reduces the real, socially
and culturally conditioned, personality of Jesus to the metaphysical
abstraction “human nature.” It is this universal humanity which the Son assumed
and made his own…According to this Christology, the eternal Son assumes a
timeless human nature, or makes it timeless by making it his own; it is a human
nature which owes nothing essential to geographical circumstances; it
corresponds to nothing in the actual concrete world; Jesus Christ has not,
after all, really “come in the flesh.”
The observant reader will note that the professor rather obviously
assigns to the orthodox doctrine of Jesus the label of antichrist. It was the
Apostle John who late in the New Testament period warned that any reduction of
the human individual Jesus Christ to a personality not essentially human is a
menace to true faith (1 John 4:2-3). The Jesus to be confessed, as distinct
from other Jesuses, is the one who has truly “come in the flesh,” as a fully
human person. Luther set the pattern for reading into John’s “theological test”
the post-biblical definition of Jesus. Luther mistranslates 1 John 4:2 as
“Jesus Christ coming into the flesh.”[716]
The doctrine of the Incarnation was thus imposed on John.
Christianity
is defined by God’s purpose. The divine Plan is discovered in the purpose
statement of Jesus in Luke 4:43. There he stated that the One God had
commissioned him for the express purpose of announcing the good news or Gospel
about the coming Kingdom of God. The purpose could have a frightful negative
outcome. Jesus expressed this in Matthew 8:11-12. He warned his fellow
countrymen that they ran the risk of a colossal failure. “When you see Abraham
and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God and yourselves
being rejected there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” To avoid this
catastrophic negative outcome Jesus exhorted the people, and us all, to pay the closest attention to his
teachings, which provide the only route to rescue and salvation — living forever.
Jesus’
first and last words are critically important. He begins by issuing a first and
fundamental command, that we are to repent and believe the Gospel about the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:14-15).
Jesus’ last words summarize and reemphasize the all-important matter of
obedience to his teachings. These are found for example at the conclusion of
his public ministry in John 12:44-50. The words, Gospel of Jesus are the
criterion for our future judgment. We neglect them at our peril, since the
words of Jesus are the words of God who commissioned and inspired him:
“And
Jesus cried out and said, ‘Whoever believes in me, believes not in me
but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come
into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in
darkness. If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not
judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. The one
who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that
I have spoken will judge him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own
authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment — what
to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What
I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me’” (John 12:44-50, ESV).
Christianity
is based on our making a choice between two different ways. The principle is
beautifully encapsulated by John 3:36, where belief in Jesus is equivalent to
obedience, and unbelief with refusal to obey. These stark alternatives are laid
out for us in the introductory Psalm 1. Two contrasted lifestyles are depicted
here, the one leading to disaster, an extinction of life, and the other to
indestructible life, immortality in the future Kingdom of God on a renewed
earth. We all have to choose. (In Calvinism the word “choose” has been emptied
of intelligible content.)
As early as the second century would-be followers of Jesus began
to lose the central storyline of God’s great unfolding drama, embodied in the
Gospel of the Kingdom and the work of Jesus Christ. The influence of alien
Greek philosophy confused the drama of salvation. The person of Jesus Christ
was replaced gradually by an abstract “God the Son,” who by definition really
could not be a true human being, since his origin was antedated prior to his
actual origin as Son of God in the womb of his mother (Luke 1:35).
Once this
new form of belief, affecting the central creed of the Bible, had been worked
out over a period of centuries, it was enforced on pain of death and
excommunication. Dogma based on this new version of the faith dominated the
Church, and the laity were placed under the control of a clergy who learned
these dogmas and assumed that they corresponded to the original teachings of
Jesus and the Apostles. At the Council of Nicea in 325 anathemas were attached
to any who might question the Church’s central dogma.
Readers of English versions of Scripture sometimes express their
desire to have a “literal translation” of the original. What they really need
is one that conveys the sense of the original (in this case Greek) faithfully
into the target language. There are occasions when a “literal,” “word for word”
translation is the least desirable. In fact it can lead to nonsense! What if I
render the English “I am pulling your leg” literally, or “I have a frog in my
throat” word for word. The misunderstanding will be obvious. “I am mad about my
flat” can well mean in British English that “I am excited about my apartment.”
In the USA it pictures a person sweating at changing a flat tire. “Jane and
John have broken up” means in the UK that their school term is ended. In the
USA quite a different sense would be conveyed. The list could be multiplied.
“Bouncing off the wall” does not need to be translated literally into another
language. It will mislead.
More seriously, a literal word for word translation in John 17:5
is misleading. Jesus’ words translated word for word, “glorify me with the
glory I had with you” lead or mislead the reader to think that Jesus was with
the Father before he came into existence, was born! The Hebrew idiom “to have
something with someone” means to have a reward promised and stored up in
advance. Jesus warned that ostentatious performance of “good works” will mean
that we “have” (present tense) “no reward with the Father” (Matt. 6:1). This
means of course that if we do well we now have a reward stored up for the
future, a reward to be given at the return of Jesus. Jesus in the very same
discourse in John 17 spoke of having given glory to Christians who were
not even born when he made that promise! (v. 22). It was the same glory which
had been promised to Jesus by the Father. It is glory prepared and planned in
heaven with the Father ready to be bestowed in the future. Jesus asked in John
17:5 to be rewarded with the glory promised to him at the completion of his
ministry. It was a glory stored up and promised by God from the beginning. It
was not a glory to be “restored” to him, since he had never yet had it.
This issue is parallel exactly to the misleading idea conveyed by
the NIV in some places. In John it takes liberties with the text in the
interests of inherited dogma. It makes Jesus say what he did not say. The NIV
renders John 16:28, 13:3 and 20:17 “going back,” or “returning” to the Father.
But the historical Jesus had not been there yet! There is a world of difference
between “going,” which is what John wrote, and “going back.”
Another example of misleading translation is found in many
versions in Luke 23:43. It is a matter of punctuation. Since Jesus had not yet
been to the Father even on the evening of the Sunday of his resurrection (John
20:17), he could not have promised the thief a place in the presence of the
Father that day, the day of his death. The thief had asked to be remembered
when Jesus came back in the future, inaugurating his Kingdom. Jesus’ promise
goes beyond the request and assures him on that very day, that he would indeed
be with Jesus in that future Kingdom of God, the paradise restored (Rev. 2:7).
“I say to you today [you don’t have to wait until the future for this
assurance], that you will be with me in the future paradise of the Kingdom”
(cp. Acts 20:26). In this way one verse will not be made to contradict Luke in
14:14 and 20:35, where rewards are not given until the resurrection. Nor will
that one verse be made to contradict and confuse the rest of Scripture.
There are of course verses which in their sublime simplicity and
clarity ought to be definitive. Most striking of these is Luke 1:35 where the
words of the angel define with precision the meaning of the title “the Son of
God.” Very few verses come with their own “built in” definition, but Luke 1:35
does. No footnotes are needed, no special glossary. Luke 1:35 includes its own
lucid explanation. Gabriel defined how, why and where Jesus is to be Son of
God. Son of God is who he is “because of,” “precisely because of” (dio kai)
the miracle worked by God in the womb of Mary. It is “for that reason” and no
other that Jesus is the Son of God. This defining statement rules out at once
any possibility of an “eternally begotten” Son. Luke and Gabriel could not have
been Trinitarians, and nor was Jesus (Mark 12:29; John 17:3).
The celebrated commentary on Luke by Godet got it right when he
stated:
“By
the word ‘therefore’ the angel alludes to his preceding words: he will be
called the Son of the Highest. We might paraphrase it: ‘And it is precisely for
this reason that I said to you….’ We have then here, from the mouth of the
angel himself, an authentic explanation of the term Son of God, in the former
part of his message. After this explanation Mary could only understand the
title in this sense: a human being of whose existence God Himself is the
immediate author. It does not convey the idea of preexistence.”
Alas, the Church disregarded the explicit theology of Gabriel.
Alas, too, Godet did not, as he should have, provoke a complete rethinking of
Christology. Instead there has occurred a flurry of plain contradictions of the
text, to uphold beloved conciliar “orthodoxy.” One of the most striking of
these is the statement of Dr. John MacArthur: “I do not believe that the virgin birth alone proves that Jesus is the
Son of God. In other words, Jesus is not the Son of God because He was born
of a virgin. He was born of a virgin because He was the Son of God.
Jesus existed long before Mary.”
Note that MacArthur is in direct opposition to Scripture and Gabriel.
MacArthur: “Jesus is not the Son of God because he was born of a virgin.”
Gabriel and NT Scripture. “Precisely because of the miracle in Mary he will be
the Son of God.”
This alarming contradiction of Scripture dates from the candid
admission by early church fathers, architects of Trinitarianism, that the
Church rejected the Jewish “heresy,” the unitarian creed of Judaism and of
Jesus, and replaced it with a new concept of God as Triune. This was a middle
path, they claimed, between the rejected “Jewish” unitarian creed of Jesus and
the blatant polytheism of the Gentiles. The rather obvious problem is that in
this process Jesus was banished and his definition of God refused. The
simplicity of the unitary monotheistic creed was overlaid, suppressed and lost
by the fearfully complex theology of a Triune God. So brain-breakingly
complicated and abstract were the terms of what became the official creed that
unitarian scholar and poet John Milton was moved to lament the appallingly
confused language in which it was presented as dogma:
“Christ himself therefore, the Son of God, teaches us nothing in
the Gospel respecting the one God but what the Law had before taught and
everywhere clearly asserts Him to be, his Father. John 17:3: ‘This is eternal
life: that they might know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You
have sent.’ 20:17: ‘I ascend to my Father and your Father; to my God and your
God.’ If therefore the Father is the God of Christ and the same one is our God,
and if there is no God but one, there can be no God beside the Father…Though
all this is so self-evident as to require no explanation — namely that
the Father alone is a self-existent God, that a being which is not
self-existent cannot be God — it is wonderful with what futile subtleties, or
rather with what juggling artifices, certain individuals have endeavored to
elude or obscure the plain meaning of these passages; leaving no stone
unturned, recurring to every shift, attempting every means, as if their object
were not to preach the pure and unadulterated Truth of the Gospel to the poor
and the simple, but rather by dint of vehemence and obstinacy to sustain some
absurd paradox from falling, by the aid of sophisms and verbal distinctions,
borrowed from the barbarous ignorance of the schools.”
Sir Isaac Newton was no less scathing about the very non-Jewish
definition of God as Trinity:
“Newton became almost obsessed with the desire to purge
Christianity of its mythical doctrines. He became convinced that the a-rational
dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation were the result of conspiracy,
forgery and chicanery…[Newton maintained] that the spurious doctrines of the
Incarnation and the Trinity had been added to the creed by unscrupulous
theologians in the fourth century. Indeed, the Book of Revelation had
prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism – ‘this strange religion of ye west, the
cult of three equal Gods’ — as the abomination of desolation.”
Bible readers need a fresh reading of the NT, with some of the
encumbrance of later “orthodoxy” which now blocks a clear understanding,
removed. No translation is final, of course. There is no perfect translation. There
are scores of different ways of conveying the same propositions. Most of the NT
is perfectly intelligible in many of the different versions. Readers of the
Bible should avail themselves of various translations. No one translation
conveys all of the truth. Some do much better than others.
Some contemporary commentary on the traditional doctrine of the
Incarnation of “God the Son” becoming a man ought, we suggest, to shock readers
into the realization that something has gone terribly wrong.
Dr. Jim Packer is well known for his
evangelical writings. In his widely read Knowing God, in a chapter on
“God Incarnate,” he says of the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation:
Here are
two mysteries for the price of one — the plurality of the persons within the
unity of God, and the union of Godhead and manhood in the person of Jesus. It
is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the
profoundest and the most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie.
“The Word was made flesh” (John 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a
Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless baby, unable to do more than
lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and
taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in
this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about
it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is
this truth of the Incarnation. This is the real stumbling block in Christianity.
It is here that the Jews, Muslims, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses…have come to
grief…If he was truly God the Son, it is much more startling that he should die
than that he should rise again. “’Tis
mystery all! The immortal dies,” wrote [Charles] Wesley…and if the
immortal Son of God really did submit to taste death, it is not strange that
such a death should have saving significance for a doomed race. Once we grant
that Jesus was divine, it becomes unreasonable to find difficulty in any of
this; it is all of a piece and hangs together completely. The Incarnation is in
itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the
New Testament contains.
Had the lucidly simple description of the Son
of God proposed by Luke been allowed to stand as the official doctrine of the
Son of God, the course of the Christian faith and of church history would have
been vastly different: “the holy thing begotten in you will be called the Son
of God” (Luke 1:35) was easy enough. But when evangelicals rewrite the biblical
story and read into it an eternal Son of God, this is the result. Charles
Swindoll, chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary, writes:
On
December 25th shops shut their doors, families gather together and
people all over the world remember the birth of Jesus of Nazareth…Many people
assume that Jesus’ existence began like ours, in the womb of his mother. But is
that true? Did life begin for him with that first breath of Judean air? Can a
day in December truly mark the beginning of the Son of God? Unlike us, Jesus
existed before his birth, long before there was air to breathe…long before the
world was born.
Swindoll
goes on to explain:
John the
Baptist came into being at his birth — he had a birthday. Jesus never came
into being; at his earthly
birth he merely took on human form…Here’s an amazing thought: the baby that
Mary held in her arms was holding the universe in place! The little newborn
lips that cooed and cried once formed the dynamic words of creation. Those tiny
clutching fists once flung stars into space and planets into orbit. That infant
flesh so fair once housed the Almighty God…As an ordinary baby, God had come to
earth…Do you see the child and the glory of the infant-God? What you are
seeing is the Incarnation — God dressed in diapers…See the baby as John
describes him “in the beginning” “with God.” Imagine him in the misty
pre-creation past, thinking of you and planning your redemption. Visualize this
same Jesus, who wove your body’s intricate patterns, knitting a human
garment for himself…Long ago the Son of God dove headfirst into time and
floated along with us for about 33 years…Imagine the Creator-God tightly
wrapped in swaddling clothes.
Dr.
Swindoll then quotes Max Lucado who says of Jesus, “He left his home and
entered the womb of a teenage girl…Angels watched as Mary changed God’s diaper.
The universe watched with wonder as the Almighty learned to walk. Children
played in the street with him.”
No one
opening a New Testament and reading the matchless story of the origin of Jesus
will be misled into thinking that “God was born,” or that as a Roman Catholic
priest said on television, “God came to Mary and said, ‘Will you please be my
mother?’”
We offer the following version with a view to restoring the truth
that God is one Person, that Jesus is the Messiah, Son of God by miracle and
that the saving Gospel is about the Kingdom of God, as Jesus preached it, and
about all that Jesus said and did to instruct in the way that leads to
indestructible life in the future Kingdom of God. Jesus of course spoke in Paul
too and the other writers of New Testament Scripture. And none of these writers
discarded the precious writings of the Hebrew Bible, but developed the truths
of the New Covenant working from a base in the Hebrew Scriptures which Jesus
had endorsed as inspired canon in Luke 24:44.
If we are seeking the mind of Christ the obvious place to start is
with Mark 1:14-15, Jesus’ opening first command to us all. Note the later
warning: “Why do you call me ‘lord’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46).
“Jesus came announcing the Gospel of God. He said, ‘The time
predicted has come. The Kingdom of God is coming soon. Repent and believe that
Gospel about the Kingdom’” (Mark 1:14-15). God’s Gospel is the Gospel of
salvation which originates in God. God’s saving Gospel about the Kingdom
was preached by all the NT writers and of course first by Jesus himself (Heb.
2:3). God issues the ultimate statement about the Kingdom, and His great
immortality program is modeled in the man Jesus and taught by him as saving
Gospel in addition of course to his substitutionary death and resurrection. The
“Testimony of Jesus” in Revelation, meaning Jesus’ own Gospel preaching which
one must hear to be saved (Rom. 10:14-17; Luke 8:12); “the Gospel of the age to
come” in Rev. 24:6; the Kingdom about to begin (Luke 21:31; Rev. 11:15-18, cp
Luke 19:11ff.).
“In Revelation the eternal messianic Kingdom is
placed on a renovated earth so that
Christ comes to his people on earth rather than gathering them to a heavenly
abode.”
In order to get off to the right start with Bible reading, it is
essential that Jesus’ saving Gospel of the Kingdom be understood. What better
place to define the Kingdom than with the Gospel of Matthew? The analysis of
Matthew’s phrase “Gospel of the Kingdom” offered by Professor W.C. Allen of
Oxford is lucidly clear. And since the Kingdom is the key term for
understanding all NT preaching, we offer the professor’s fine statement. To
misunderstand “Kingdom” is to misunderstand the whole NT teaching about the
Gospel which saves us, and leads to immortality.
W.C. Allen, MA, Prof. of
OT at Oxford, on the Kingdom of God:
The objective analysis of the Kingdom of God in Matthew, provided by the Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels,
ought to serve as a much-needed guide to all our thinking about the Kingdom.
The Gospel as Jesus and Paul preached it is about the Kingdom, and so an
inaccurate understanding of the Kingdom leads automatically to an inaccurate
Gospel:
“The Kingdom — the central subject of Christ’s doctrine.
With this he began his ministry (4:17) and wherever he went he taught it
as Good News [Gospel] (4:23). The
Kingdom he taught was coming, but not in his lifetime. After His
ascension he would come as Son of Man on the clouds of heaven (16:27, 19:28,
24:30; 25:31) and would sit on the throne of His glory…Then the twelve Apostles
would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (19:28).
In the meantime he himself must suffer and die and be raised from the dead. How
else could he come on the clouds of heaven? And the disciples were to preach
the Good News [Gospel] of the coming Kingdom (10:7, 24:14) among all
nations making disciples by [water] baptism (28:18). The body of
disciples thus gained would naturally form a society bound by common aims.
Hence the disciples of the Kingdom would form a new spiritual Israel (21:43;
[Cp. Gal. 6:16; Phil 3:3]).
The same authority goes on
to say:
“In view of the needs of this new Israel of Christ’s disciples,
who were to await his coming on the clouds of heaven, it is natural that a
large part of the teaching recorded in the Gospel should concern the
qualifications required in those who hoped to enter the Kingdom when it came…Thus
the parables convey some lesson about the nature of the Kingdom and the
period of preparation for it [sowing before harvest]. It should be
sufficiently obvious that if we ask what meaning the parables had for the
editor of the first Gospel, the answer must be that he chose them because…they
taught lessons about the Kingdom of God in
the sense in which that phrase is used everywhere in the Gospel of the Kingdom
which was to come, when the Son of Man came upon the clouds of heaven.
Thus the Parable of the
Sower illustrates the varying reception met with by the Good News [Gospel]
of the Kingdom as it is preached amongst men. That of the tares also deals
not with the Kingdom itself, but with the period of preparation for it.
At the end of the age, the Son of Man will come to inaugurate His
Kingdom…There is nothing here nor elsewhere in this Gospel to suggest that the
scene of the Kingdom is other than the present world renewed, restored and
purified.”
The last sentence of our
quotation makes the excellent point that Matthew (and the whole New Testament,
indeed the whole Bible) does not expect believers to “go to heaven,” but that
Jesus will come back to the earth to rule with them in a renewed earth
(Rev. 5:9, 10; Matt. 5:5; Dan 7:14, 18, 22, 27). The perceptive reader
of the New Testament will note the striking difference between the biblical
view of the Kingdom, and thus of the Gospel of salvation, and what in
post-biblical times was substituted for it: a departure of the faithful at
death to a realm removed from the earth. (Bishop Tom Wright tries to have both
systems when he speaks of “Life after
life after death.” Better to shed the philosophically-based life before resurrection
which always means coming not from life, but from death!). There can be
no resurrection from the dead, if a person is not really dead!
The popular idea that the Kingdom is mainly a
“spiritual” state of mind or life-style now, or social ethics expecting to bring the
Kingdom in now, is false to the New Testament.
Joseph of Arimathea, a Christian, was “waiting for the Kingdom” after the
ministry of Jesus (Mark 15:43). Luke 19:11ff. teaches us to connect the arrival
of the Kingdom with the future return of
Jesus. (cp., above: “The Kingdom He taught was coming, but not in His
lifetime.” “In Matthew [and in the NT] the Kingdom of God is conceived, first
of all, as something in the
future” (cited above). So say leading analysts of the Gospel records.
Luke 21: 31 presents the Kingdom of God as
the event to be introduced at the Second Coming. This is exactly Rev.
11:15-18 — the Kingdom of God beginning at the future, seventh, resurrection
trumpet (= I Cor. 15:23, Last Trumpet, vv. 51ff.).
We may add a further
statement from a recognized authority on Luke:
It cannot really be disputed that Luke means by the Kingdom a
future entity. The spiritualizing interpretation according to which the
Kingdom is present in the Spirit and in the Church is completely misleading…It
is the message of the Kingdom that is present, which in Luke is
distinguished from the Kingdom itself. He knows nothing of an immanent [i.e.,
already present] development on the basis of the preaching of the Kingdom.
The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
(1929), Vol. 4, p. 2667 gets the emphasis on the future right, and thus
clarifies the Christian Gospel, and thus the Christian faith:
“The Kingdom of God is at hand” had the inseparable connotation
“judgment is at hand” and in this context, ‘Repent,’ in Mark 1:14, 15 must mean
‘[to avoid being judged], lest you be judged.’ Hence
our Lord’s teaching about salvation had primarily a future content:
positively admission into [entrance into] the Kingdom of God and negatively,
deliverance from the preceding judgment [fire]. So the Kingdom of God is
the highest good of Christ’s teaching… Man’s nature is to be perfectly adapted
to his spiritual environment and man is to be ‘with Christ’ (Luke 22:30) and
with the patriarchs (Matt. 8:11). Whatever [?!] the Kingdom is, it is most
certainly not exhausted by a mere reformation of the present order of material
things.”
Equally
clear is the Good
News According to Mark, Eduard Schweizer:
“Mark
1:14, 15: Mark gives a brief summary of the preaching of Jesus. Preaching and
Good News (Gospel) are Mark’s favorite expressions. The Gospel call of Jesus is accurately summed up in 1:15,
where the association of repentance and faith reveals the language of the
church (Acts 5:31; 11:18; 20:21). Mark’s concern is to make clear that in this
preaching Jesus continues to go forth into the world and this call, therefore,
is being directed also to the one who reads this Gospel today. Consequently
this section serves as a caption to the whole Gospel (cp. the epilogue).
“The Kingdom of God.
When Jesus proclaims that the Kingdom of God is near, he is adopting a concept
which was coined in the OT. Although it denotes God’s sovereignty over creation
(Ps 103:19; 145:11ff.) it refers primarily to God’s unchallenged sovereignty
in the end time (Isa 52:7)…Judaism
spoke of the reign of God which comes after the annihilation of every foe [Isa.
24:6] and the end of all suffering…. In the NT the Kingdom of God is conceived first
of all as something in the future (Mark 9:1, 47, 14:25; Matt. 13:41-43;
20:21; Luke 22:16, 18; 1 Cor. 15:50. Luke 21:31, et al) which comes from
God (Mark 9:1; Matt. 6:10; Luke 17:20; 19:11). Therefore it is something man
can only wait for (Mark 15:43), seek
(Matt. 6:33); receive (Mark 10:15; cp Luke 12:32) and inherit (1 Cor. 6:9f; Gal
5:21; James 2:5), but is not able to create it by himself… In the acts and
words of Jesus the future Kingdom has come upon him already. It is decided at
that very moment whether or not he will ever be in the Kingdom…. Repentance is nothing less than a
whole-hearted commitment to the Good News [of the Kingdom]” (pp. 45, 46,
47) .— that is, the Gospel of the Kingdom to come, a downpayment of which can
be tasted in the spirit received now.
Ernest
Scott, D.D. Prof of NT, Union Theological Seminary, The Kingdom of God in the NT, NY, 1931, pp. 11-21,
on the other hand reveals the hopeless confusion into which the church has
fallen in regard to Jesus’ Gospel and thus of the Christian faith. He seems
uncertain about the Gospel, but gives us a good sense of what it meant to Jesus
and his followers:
“It seems almost
impossible to define the Christian ‘Gospel.’ Sometimes it is identified with
our religion as a whole, sometimes with some element in it which is regarded as
central. To accept the Gospel is to believe in the atonement or the love of
God, or the revelation in Christ or the fact of human brotherhood [!].
“Yet it is well
to remember that the word which is now used so loosely had, at the outset a meaning which was clearly
understood. “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of the
Kingdom of God and saying, The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at
hand.” The Gospel underwent a marvelous development… but the Good News has always been essentially what it was at the first
— the announcement of the Kingdom. It is evident from the manner
in which Jesus made the announcement that he took up an idea which was already
familiar. [Luke 19:11ff. is a brilliantly clear place to start in defining the
Kingdom.]. He did not explain what he
meant by the Kingdom, for he
could assume that all his hearers were looking forward to it. Their hope
for it had been newly stimulated by John the Baptist… They had long been
thinking of the Kingdom and wondering when it would come and a prophet had now
arisen who declared that it was close at hand…. In the religion of Israel we
must seek for the immediate origin of the Kingdom idea of Jesus… The idea
persisted long after the royal house was firmly established that the reigning
king was only the vice-regent of the invisible King…. Israel had been chosen by
a unique God who was known as yet only by His own people, but was nonetheless
King of the whole earth. The day was coming when all nations would own his sovereignty….
On the higher levels of prophecy the purified Israel of the future is conceived
as attracting all nations by its high example, to the service of the One God.
More often it is assumed that Israel when fully disciplined will be restored to
God’s favor and advanced by Him to the sovereign place (Acts 1:6). As King of
this preeminent people God will reign at last over the world…. On the one hand
God is already King. On the other hand it is recognized that the Kingship lies
in the future… They look for a coming day when He will overcome all usurping powers and assert Himself as King.
So the prophets keep before them the vision of a new age when the Kingdom of God will be fully manifested. In
that happy time Israel will be exalted, the cause of justice will be
established, the earth full of the glory of the Lord. Nature in that day will
be restored to its pristine glory and the wolf will lie down with the lamb and
cattle will feed in large pastures, the light of the moon will be as the light
of the sun. He [and His Messiah] will reign from Mount Zion and all nations
will serve Him. King over a righteous nation he will extend his dominion over
the whole earth.
The admission of today’s
leading evangelical scholar confirms the chaos into which the Gospel had
fallen:
Prof. and Bishop NT Wright (Jesus
and the Victory of God, 1996, xiv): “In one sense I have been working on
this book on and off for most of my life. Serious thought began, however, when
I was invited in 1978 to give a lecture at Cambridge on ‘The Gospel in the Gospels.’
The topic was not just impossibly vast; I did not understand it. I had no real answer, then, to the question of how Jesus’
whole life, not just his death on the
cross in isolation, was somehow ‘gospel.’ 15 subsequent years of teaching at
Oxford. Montreal and Cambridge have convinced me that this question… is worth
asking.’”
But the question is just
as mystifying to millions of Bible readers. This ought not to be so.
Further
authorities point us in the right direction: “In the Book of Acts the Kingdom
of God was still the general formula for the substance of Christian teaching” (Hastings
Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. II, p. 855). This formula is absent from
evangelical tracts promoting salvation.
On the lips of Jesus the term Kingdom of God
unquestionably summarized the very heart of his Message. “The Kingdom of God is
the central theme of the teaching of Jesus, and it involves his whole understanding of his own person and work.”.
Luke 4:43 is repeated by Paul in Acts 20: 24, 25 where Paul defines his own
ministry course given by Jesus, Gospel of the grace of God = the preaching
of the Gospel of the Kingdom, v. 25.
“The Kingdom announced by the Messiah who is
the Son of Man is possible only through his death and will be finally and fully
realized on earth only at his
glorious return. This is indeed
the heart of the Gospel.” (Donald Hagner, PhD, Word Biblical Commentary on Matthew, 1-13, p. 214.
The
essential understanding conveyed by Jesus teaching is captured by these propositions
about Messiah: “The Son of God came to give us an understanding so that we might know God” (I John 5:20). Isa. 53:11,
“By his knowledge my Servant will make many righteous.”
The New
Testament is based on the Old. Jesus came to:
1) Proclaim the Gospel about the Kingdom of God (Luke
4:43; John announced the same Gospel of the Kingdom, Matt. 3:1). This is the
whole reason for Christianity, including, of course, the death and resurrection
of Jesus. Jesus commands the believers to continue announcing the same Gospel
of the Kingdom (Matt. 28:19, 20)
2) Confirm the
Abrahamic and Davidic promises made to the Fathers (Rom 15:8; Gal. 3:8)
3) To give us an understanding that we might know
God (I John 5:20)
4) To make
people righteous, right before God, not only by his death but by his knowledge
(Isa. 53:11; Dan 12:3).
5) To invite
whoever will believe in God’s plan for themselves and the world to prepare now
to rule the world with Jesus when he returns “Don’t you know the saints are
going to manage the world?” (I Cor. 6:2, Moffat, see also Dan. 7:14, 18, 22, 27;
Rev 3:21; 2:26; 5:10; 20:1-6; Matt. 5:5; 19:28; Isa. 16:5; 32:1).
6) Luke 8:12,
Mark 4:11, 12, in the parable of the seed: An intelligent reception of the
Gospel of the Kingdom is the necessary condition for repentance and
forgiveness. Without a clear statement about the Kingdom how can anyone repent
and believe Jesus?
In post-biblical
times the original faith in the Gospel of the Kingdom suffered massive
alteration, turning the Gospel into something quite different. Greeks rather
than Jews became leaders in the church, and they imported alien Greek
philosophy into the church’s teachings. Gal. 3:8 which defines the Christian
Gospel as the content of the promises made
to Abraham, about land, progeny and blessing, is missing from contemporary
versions of the “Gospel.”
This alteration
of the original faith led finally in the 1500’s to the Reformation which was a
plea to go back to the Bible. But these reformers did not fully recapture the
Gospel of the Kingdom. Luther disparaged the synoptic gospels and CS Lewis
wrote that “the Gospel is not in the Gospels”! Billy Graham announced in 26
languages that “Jesus came to do three days work.”
This dictum
would render the Gospel preaching of Jesus virtually unnecessary. A fatal
“dispensationalism” underlies much popular preaching. I Tim 6:3, II John 7-9,
Heb. 2:3; John 3:36 are fair warning.
The process of
restoration is furthered when people earnestly seek the original meaning of the Kingdom of God as preached by the original
(human) Jesus. The Gospel itself is all about the Kingdom of God, as well
as the death and resurrection of Jesus, and “Gospel” should never be divorced
from the Kingdom. The pagan notion of “heaven” for “souls” at death has
replaced the hope of the Kingdom coming on earth. That paganism must be
banished from the Christian vocabulary if the Bible is to be understood.
Harper Collins’ Bible Dictionary states:
“The Gospel is the proclamation of the Kingdom announced by Jesus (Mark 1:14,
15) and now proclaimed by the church.” [but is it?]
Do churches preach the Gospel of the
Kingdom of God?
Gary Burge, NIV
Application Commentary doubts the modern gospel: “The Gospel as most of my church friends and
I have known it in the past is so small a part of the whole deal, that it is
hard to call it an accurate Gospel at all. Perhaps this limited Gospel
message as proclaimed by modern Christians explains the limited impact it is
having on America today.” Exactly.
One might say that the churches are playing golf with the club held upside
down. A complete restructuring is needed. No cosmetic alterations will solve
the problem. There is a fatal flaw in the foundation of what we know as the
faith. The Kingdom Gospel is missing or at best hopelessly vague.
Revisioning Evangelical Theology. “Stanley Grenz has reviewed the failed attempts of
evangelical theology to fire the imagination of the modern world. He argues for
the Kingdom of God as the new organizing center of what we say and do.”
It ought to be, and must be if Jesus in Luke 4:43 is really heard. And Paul in
Acts 20:24, 25; 19:8; 28:23, 31 (cp. Acts 8:12).
Do
seminaries understand the Gospel?
Theology, News and Notes
(Fuller Theological Seminary, Spring 2004:
“Over the
course of the past year, faculty from each of Fuller’s three schools have met
together to discuss the question: What is the Gospel? A dozen years ago,
the late Robert Guelich made the question the topic of his inaugural address,
noting that years of professional work has returned him again and again to this
fundamental subject. Guelich told the story of an encounter with the founder
Charles Fuller after a seminary forum, with the “inspiration of Scripture” as
its topic. Fuller commented that he longed for the day when the seminary
would host a forum on the question: ‘What is the Gospel?’”
This is an amazing and instructive admission.
The fact is that they really are not sure what the Gospel is, and yet they say
they are saving people by preaching “it.” The plain fact is that the Gospel of
the Kingdom, including of course the covenant-ratifying and atoning blood of
Jesus and his resurrection, is the Gospel. Until the “heaven” at death
teaching, which is Plato’s and not Jesus,’ is dropped, how can progress be
made? And how can we be sure that anyone is saved by believing the teaching of
Plato and calling it the teaching of Jesus? Is God as sloppy as we are with our
thinking?! Is He so indulgent that He really does not care as long as we are sincere, although ignorant, — of the
nature of man, his destiny, the identity of God and Jesus? And Jesus’ own
definition of the Gospel?
Shailer Matthews, D.D., Professor of Theology, Chicago Seminary, The
Messianic Hope in the New Testament (University
of Chicago Press, 1005, pp. 144, 155) saw how essential a part is played in the
teaching of Jesus, by the Kingdom:
“It is a serious error to hold that the Kingdom of God plays no important role in apostolic
Christianity. Such a view both lacks historical perspective and is at variance
with the entire thought of the literature of apostolic Christianity. The very
name of the new movement, Christianity, would suggest the contrary
opinion. So far from the eschatological Kingdom of God being a secondary
element in the early church, it is its great conditioning belief.
The preaching of the first evangelists was not a call to ethical ideals or an
argument as to certain truths. Rather it was the proclamation of a Message
[about the Kingdom]…. As regards the person of the Messiah, there is of course
no question that the early church believed that Jesus was the Christ who had
gone to heaven, whence he would come to introduce the new age and the new
Kingdom. This was the very core of the
entire Christian movement.” “To
think of Jesus as deliberately using a term [Kingdom of God] with a meaning
different from what it would have been for others is not only to raise a
question as to his morals, but as to his capacity as a teacher.”
How very much unlike
popular evangelism the NT data on the
Gospel of the Kingdom sounds!
I make no apology for repetition. Churchill
said: “If you have an important point
to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point
once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time — a tremendous
whack.”
I have adopted in this translation what I admit is a somewhat
shocking practice of placing a small, non-capital letter on “lord” when the
reference is to Jesus. The point is to remind readers of the fundamental
distinction between the Lord God (YHVH) and the lord Messiah (Luke 2:11). This
is based on the Bible’s favorite umbrella text in Ps. 110:1 where YHVH, the one
GOD addresses an oracle to the predicted Messiah who is David’s son and also
his lord (adoni, “my lord,” not Lord). In I Cor. 8:4-6 Paul echoes the
unitarian creed of Jesus in Mark 12:29. He defines God as the Father from whom
all originates, and then adds his definition of Jesus as the one “lord
Messiah.” Ps. 110:1 and its very easy distinction between the One LORD YHVH and
the non-Deity lord (adoni, “my lord,” all 195 times not Deity!) lies
behind Paul’s thinking as it does behind all the thinking of Jesus (Mark
12:28-37). On no account should the two lords of Ps. 110:1 be muddled,
resulting in two who are “LORD GOD,” an obvious violation of monotheism. Adoni,
my lord, is the deliberate and unambiguous non-Deity title for Jesus, the Man
Messiah (I Tim. 2:5, etc.).
Sometimes the NT text does not make it clear whether the Lord God
or the lord Messiah is intended. This affects nothing of vital importance,
since Jesus and God are working in harmony, Jesus being the supreme agent of
God his Father, who is also Jesus’ God (Heb. 1:8). The point of using lower
case for the lord Jesus is to remind readers over and over again of the central
truth provided by the oracle of YHVH in Ps. 110:1. The relationship between God
and Jesus is firmly established by the contrast between YHVH, the One God of
the Bible, and the non-Deity figure now appointed to sit at the right hand of
YHVH, pending his return to the earth to rule in the future Kingdom. Jesus is
the adoni, “my lord” of Ps. 110:1 and his relation to the Father is
repeated continually in the NT, summarized by Paul’s un-complex creed in I Tim.
2:5: “God wants everyone to come to the knowledge of the truth, namely that
“there is ONE GOD, and one mediator between God and man, Messiah Jesus, himself
man.”
This is the task of a Church desiring to be faithful to Jesus and
Scripture.
For those readers of this translation who might be skeptical that
the long-held, cherished traditions of Christianity could be radically
mistaken, the words of the leading Christologist, Dr. James Dunn are
suggestive:
“There is of course always the possibility that ‘popular pagan
superstition’ became popular Christian
superstition, by a gradual assimilation and spread of belief at the level of
popular piety (we must beware of assuming that all developments in Christian
thought stem from the Paul’s and Johns of Christianity).
It may well be that “orthodoxy’s” massive dependence on John and
Paul ought to raise our suspicions that the Bible is being used selectively and
thus misleadingly to bolster the status quo.
The reader is invited to assess this issue with a Berean attitude
(Acts 17:11). Luke in that verse commends a searching, noble-minded approach suitable
to all those invited to rule the world with Jesus in the coming Kingdom on
earth.
"No responsible NT scholar would claim that the doctrine of
the Trinity was taught by Jesus, or preached by the earliest Christians, or
consciously held by any writer in the NT" (A.T. Hanson, The Image of the
Invisible God).
Compiled by Anthony Buzzard
Visit our website at www.restorationfellowship.org
See our video "Jesus Is Still a Jew!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQe7WBXpufI
J.I. Packer, Knowing God. Intervarsity Press, 1998,
46, 47, emphasis added.
W.C.
Allen, MA, Prof. of OT at Oxford, on the Kingdom of God, Vol. II, p. 145
