Is Jesus God? To most Christians for the past 1700 years, the answer has been a firm Yes. To them, the question was settled in the fourth century at the Council of Nicea, which proclaimed Jesus to be “God of God, Light of Light…of one essence with the Father” in its Christological creed (Christology being the study of the Messiah’s nature). Not everyone agreed and, to this day, many people dissent. We dessenters, of course, are in that minority. As a result, we unitarians are frequently accused of demeaning Jesus by disagreeing with the creed established in the 4th century.
In fact, many of us were not always unitarians; we may have been raised in a Trinitarian household. When we first learn that Jesus is not the Supreme Being, we can indeed easily come to think less of him, and this is what happened with the unitarian movements that later became Transcendentalism and Unitarian Universalism. Nevertheless, the first unitarians in America were all passionate Christians; open-minded and liberal to be sure, but all were deeply devoted to the Messiah Jesus and the only true God - Yehovah. Undeniably, it was this intense devotion that led them to unitarian affirmations: to reject the doctrine of the Trinity and the dual nature of Jesus.
Scholarship has come quite a long way since the unitarian “Enlightenment.” We have learned things about Jesus and his times that were unknown to the early unitarians. And we have learned much more about what God has revealed to us in the scriptures - His word.
So how can we, as unitarian Christians, say scripturally correct things about Jesus? Clearly, we have to get back to what the scriptures have to say about Jesus the Messiah. Such a study is beyond the scope of this paper. For the time, we will simply focus on the works of Paul whose beliefs represent the beliefgs of the original called-out Assemlies of God.
For Paul, Jesus is not God, but he is God’s Son; reflecting God’s image. As such, the Messiah Jesus reveals God to us [John 14:9. He has also revealed God’s will for humanity in an unprecedented way. These are things the early unitarian pioneers all affirmed. But only tangentially did they touch on another extremely important aspect of Paul’s Christology: the fact that the Messiah, as the agent of God, accomplished what only God gets to do.
This is the womb from which Trinitarian theology emerged; but this is also where we can most easily see the mistakes made by Trinitarians. For when we study what God did through His anoited one in his crucifixion and resurrection. When we study what he currently does, filled with the fulness of God's nature, seated at God's right hand, can we find the Messiah’s staggering significance woven together with his clear inferiority to God. This is what we must now explore.
Throughout the Old Testament, God promised that one day, He would renew His covenant with Israel, forgive their sins, and defeat evil. (Though the number of passages that discuss this are far too many to list, Deuteronomy 24 is a good place for the reader to look to get these ideas firmly implanted mentally.) But throughout Paul, and in the Synoptics, we see that all these things occurred in the Messiah Jesus. Jesus by his shed blood ratified the new covenant. Jesus’ death, offering himself to His God and Father Yehovah as a sin-offering sacrifice, and accomplished the saving act that allowed God to reconcile all of humanity to Himself. By opeing up the way for the sins of the the people. who believe in the one whom He sent. to be forgiven of their sins and at their baptism recieve the power of His spirit and become new creations in the Messiah Jesus. How glorious is God's amazing grace!
His saving act the Messiah accomplished on earth; but currently he is in heaven at the right hand of the Father. What’s he doing now? The answer is striking, breathtaking, and amazing: the Messiah has been made Lord over all with only the Father excluded and now currently functions God agent, so whatever he does as God's agent it is as if God were doing it. Many of the Messiah’s functions are duties God fulfilled as the Creator of all things that exist. We begin with Philippians 2:9: “For this reason [the Messiah’s humility and faithful obedience], God highly exalted him and gave him a name that is above every name.”
Two main questions stem from this verse: What is “the name,” and what does its bestowal on Jesus mean? First, “the name that is above every name” would undoubtedly be understood as a euphemism for God’s own name, YHWH (pronounced Yehovah). That is to say, Jesus has received God’s own unique name in his name Yehoshua - Yehovah saves. But second, this does not mean Jesus changed his name to God’s, as when my wife changed her last name to mine. In ancient Jewish culture, when someone was bequeathed a new name, this meant his function or status had changed. The point of the verse, therefore, is that Jesus now functions accordingly with anything associated with the name, YHWH - Yehovah; he is functioning as God's agent. He functions for God without of course being God - Yehovah, because God is only One [Dueteronomy 6:3]. Simply put, God exalted Jesus to His right hand and bestowed on him, His own unique Lordship and Office.
It is not surprising, then, to find the Messiah Jesus acting correspondingly. Clearly, there is a “functional union” between God and His anointed one, who now exercises divine prerogatives. There are many examples of this, but a few will do for our purposes:
In Romans 10:13, Paul says that “everyone who calls upon the nname of the Lord will indeed be saved.” This verse is a direct quotation from Joel 2:32 which envisioned “It will happen that whoever will call on the name of Yahweh will be saved. This accomplishment, though, Paul now attributes to Jesus, who is the lord [over all, acting as Yehovah's agent] of Romans 10:13. Clearly, the Messiah stands in loco Dei; that is, in the place of God as His agent. Similarly, Paul can speak of the “judgment seat” of God and the Messiah Jesus [2 Corinthians 5:10: For we must all appear and be exposed before the judgment seat of Christ,a so that each one may be repaid for the things done in the body, according to what he has made a practice of doing, whether good or evil]. Even more striking, he takes up the well-known Old Testament theme of the “Day of the Lord,” which envisioned God coming to earth to bring divine judgment, and understands the lord in question as the Messiah Jesus who acts as God’s agent. Again, we can see an arresting functional union.
Equally significant is another passage, 1 Corinthians 15:45: “the first Adam became a living soul…the last Adam (the Messiah) became a life-giving Spirit.” Paul’s readers could hardly have failed to notice the obvious: that he has just attributed the function of “life-giving Spirit” to the Messiah Jesus. To “give life” was always the job of God's Holy Spirit in His outreach to humankind. And yet, in Paul’s thought, this task has been given to the one who sits at God's right hand.
Notice John 5:19-27: So Jesus answered and said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son is not able to do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing, for whatever he does, the Son also does in the same way. For the Father is a friend to the Son, and shows him all the things that he is doing. And he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be amazed.
For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he wants.
For the Father does not judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to the Son so that all will honor the Son just as they honor the Father.
Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.
Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour comes, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who heard will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so He has also given to the Son to have life in himself. And he gave him authority to execute judgment because he is the Son of Man.
Therefore, whether it was in his existence on earth or his post-existence at the right hand of God, the Messiah as Lord over all, does what God can do. Yet, he is constantly distinguished from God. Never is the title “Yehovah” given to him, the title "Elohim - god" is given to him as one who represents Yehovah, and he has the name Yehoshua - Yehovah saves, that was bestowed on him by God. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 8:6 that there is “one God…and one Lord [Jesus, whom Yehovah has made Lord over all].”
There are two choices we can now make. We can say that the reason Paul can attribute divine functions to the Messiah Jesus because he is the second person of a triune god, thereby ignoring the Messiah Jesus' essential inferiority to Yehovah, or we can resolve the tension the way Paul does:
The Messiah Jesus functions in the way he does precisely because he was authorized by God to do so as His agent. To be sure, the Messiah Jesus functions in ways in which he is clearly aligned with - in union with, the one God Yehovah. Nevertheless, our Christology never says more than that the Messiah Jesus is Yehoah’s agent; His representative. This is an exalted way of speaking about the Messiah Jesus; to say he is functioning as God, because he is God's agent.
Earlier I mentioned what no intermediary could do; only “the arm of Yehovah” could accomplish for God what only God could do. This is undoubtedly true. Here we see the heart of the unitarian controversy.
Unitarians wished to dispute the claim that God was a Trinity and that the Messiah was dual-natured, so-called 100% God and 100% man.
We put forth Paul’s Christology, and can add more to the unitarian debates, things that hitherto were unknown to our spiritual pioneers. The Messiah Jesus was and is a man; his existence began when he was begotten by God's Spirit in the womb of Mary. He worshipped, loved, and prayed to his God and Father Yehovah, and notice Philippians 2:6:
Have this mindset in you that was also in the Messiah Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, considered being equal with God not something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men;
Jesus completes the tasks which only God can do as His agent. This is because it was always God’s intention that He, in and through the Messiah, would complete the grand work of salvation prophesied millennia ago.
As unitarians, knowing and believing this, we cannot add more to Scripture by affirming the words of the Nicene Creed; but as unitarian Christians, neither can we ever be accused of demeaning our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Messiah by holding fast to the revelation Yehovah has given in His word.
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