Christian theology is based on a divine Christ. Ultimately that is the reason for the belief. Christianity fail if Christ is simply human, no matter how obedient and submissive he might be.
The net result is that proof is no longer a factor. if it isn’t true then our faith is lost. (as yours is).
The Trinity or Trilema is nothing more than a logical explanation for an impossible situation whereby God is in two places at the same time, apparently talking to Himself. It sort of works and there is not really a good alternative (sound familiar?)
I will not explain it. It doesn’t matter.
The Trinity theology does not rely on whether Christ knew or claimed His Divinity. Nor whether Scripture indicates or suggests it.
I didn’t ask you to explain the trilemma. I don’t need you to explain the trilemma. I know what the trilemma is. I asked if you knew what the trilemma was.
You don’t.
Both your earlier comment and your reply above suggest that you think ‘trilemma’ is an alternative name for the Trinity. It isn’t.
If you don’t know what the trilemma is, you should abandon the thread and stop interrupting those who do know.
I do not agree. Submerged logs, ice, or whatever does no exegetical damage at all. Everything said in the text about faith and trusting in God still applies.
I am simply not impressed. We see more impressive magic shows on stage. Such magic shows have NOTHINIG to do with divinity. God is the creator of natural law NOT a magician!
Miraculous? Absolutely. The involvement of God is always miraculous whether it is a beautiful flower, a newborn baby, surviving a disaster, or recovering from illness. But I see absolutely no need for any woo woo magic or violation of the laws of nature. In fact, in my eyes/mind the reduction of miracles to a magic show trivializes and makes a mockery of it all – making it all look more like fantasy than reality… frankly more like a religious scam.
Magic tricks are tricks, everyone knows it and try and see through them, Slight of hand is similar. Commercial magic is for entertainment.
Miracles are no longer signs as in Scripture. They prove nothing. As long as people are trying to prove one way or the other they loose their integrity and potency. They are best when they go virtually unnoticed. Some of the greatest I have seen were unasked for and unexpected.
Attributing something to God is the ultimate sensation.
All a miracle is supposed to do is point to the involvement of God in our lives. It has nothing to do with saying how God accomplishes things. A magic show with God as the magician still points to the involvement of God. It is a miracle no matter how it was accomplished.
Magic shows are techniques to astound and impress, which is often what we see in miracles of the Bible (though not always). People approach them in many different ways exactly the same as the miracles in scripture. Just because someone claims it is a miracle of God doesn’t turn off people’s brain (certainly not this person’s) so they don’t look for how it was done. The point is not method but God’s involvement in our lives – that is all that really signifies.
Indeed. Certainly not any of the miracles in scripture. At most it is an advertising technique to get our attention and make us think – that is usually the hardest part anyway.
I certainly think the greatest miracles are everyday and right in front of us all the time no matter how much we take them for granted.
You have quite a discussion going! I have read some of the authors you refer to – Ehrman and others — and listened to debates on the topic. Boyarin, writing from a Jewish perspective, has quite specifically noted that Jesus claimed divinity…as well as Amy-Jill Levine in some of her works. I am sure you know this. I also await your “next installment.” There are lots of arguments and discussions on this matter. Good luck.
I have noted that a (growing?) group of professional trick perfomers do not call themselves ‘magicians’. They want to keep it clear that they are not doing any sort of ‘magic’, they are just entertainers. The words most commonly used are ‘illusionist’ or ‘mentalist’.
I do not know if that is a counterreaction to an increasing phenomenon that there have emerged people who are really trying to do magic - people who may call themselves witches.
Most of the new witches, (pseudo-)shamans or even ‘satanists’ do not really believe in personal evil (Satan), although they may believe in ‘spirits’, ‘guides’, etc. It is mostly an alternative lifestyle inspired by rituals and a possibility to do what they want without feeling guilty. There is also some amount of rebellion against the dominant culture.
Those who try to do real magic are a subgroup that believes in invisible powers or entities.
Instead of overreacting to such phenomena, this could be interpreted as one more sign that humans are ‘wired’ to believe in something. And such people need to hear about the real power and freedom (in God, through Jesus).
When Jesus did ‘miracles’, that was not an attempt to use supernatural powers to influence events (one definition of magic) or ‘illusions’. He just acted from the role of the Creator, God. The acts he did spoke, telling what people were not ready to hear otherwise.
Humpty Richard has spoken. And, as always, his words mean what he thinks they mean. But really? I think so, he goes beyond the merely contrarian, who don’t believe what they say as a rule. The test would be if we all started agreeing with him. A mere contrarian would have to say the opposite.
This seems to be an underlying problem for today. The use of miracles in Biblical times had a different reaction and understanding to them. The existence of the spiritual realm was not even questioned. There was at least one God, but monotheism was not popular. Miracles were seen as a proof of being genuine rather than to exist at all.
The modern skepticism about the supernatural changes the emphasis. God is no longer seen as being probable. As soon as Gagarin said that God was not in space people began to doubt the old beliefs (probably before that in many cases). This turned the emphasis away from identity to proof.
We then get confronted with the question of whether God wants to be proven. Oh dear.
We have tossed that around more than once and there should be no need to go over it again. Suffice it to say that God would appear to not want to be proven in a scientific or actual way. This makes supernatural acts problematic as they become proofs not signs. In many ways it would make sense for the cessationist view to be accurate, but like many things that are either banned or seen as damaging they go underground, and become the religious equivalent of the Dark web.
Miracles can be signs in some situations or to some people but not to all. As Jesus told, even if dead would rise from death, that would not convince all people. That has been demonstrated to be true many times, as all those who return from death are treated as NDE cases, not as dead returning to life. The same with people that are healed when someone prays for them: those are treated as ‘spontaneous healings’, cause unknown, rather than acts of God.
Many ‘miracles’ may be acts of mercy, rather than signs. Even Jesus told to some he healed that do not tell what happened to others. The purpose was not to show power, it was to show mercy to a suffering person who was in a desperate need.
I don’t want to turn this whole thread into miracles so I don’t know if I will go back and forth a bunch of times but I wanted to offer one response about miracles.
I don’t think the account is just about faith and trusting God. it’s about the divinity of Jesus who tramples the waves and trust in Him as God. His message repeatedly mentions throughout the gospels that He is on par with God (more examples coming in part three). We see teachings from Him about following and trusting God and following and trusting Him as God. These are given to different people in different contexts and placed by the evangelists into their narratives.
I do not think the gospel authors and/or Jesus were tricksters or frauds or morons. Claiming Jesus trampled the waves like God in the OT without mentioning that he was just standing on rocks or logs does exegetical violence to scripture and the clear thrust of the narrative which is as much about the divinity of Jesus as it is faith and trusting in God. In the narratives (all of them), Jesus is unmistakably described as walking far out. One wonders how the disciples poor boat made it through all those icebergs or logs Jesus played hopscotch on to get there (a “miracle” in its own right!).
Anyone can believe Jesus gave some teaching by the shore and people mistakenly thought he was walking on the water. Sure. Anyone can make up anything they want and believe it about the gospels that is not actually in the text. Maybe Jesus was having a lovely stroll by the sea with His future wife Mary Magdalene, with whom he would have children and later accompany to India, and in the fog it looked like he was walking on water to some outsiders. This spread around and later authors who thought Jesus was God decided to make the whole scene up in the middle of the lake from this misconception. So we have a fictional scene made up from a misconception. If we want to just make stuff up not found in the text, there is no limit. But imaginative flights of fancy like this have nothing to do with what is in the text of the Gospels. I also don’t know how Jesus standing on rocks in the water could even be, in his mind, a reenactments of God trampling the sea. It is just a guy preaching from a rock in the water.
Jesus trampling the waves is not a magic show. It’s a statement of his divinity given to a small group of disciples to share with the rest of the world. What you have done, is turn the Jesus of the gospels into a charlatan, into a magician. He walks on rocks, logs or icebergs in the fog and people are tricked into thinking He can trample the waves like God.
[1] Correct, the involvement of God is always miraculous. Miracle is a word that carries different connotations that need to be distinguished. As an example, being that I am not a deist and I also do not subscribe to a mechanistic, Newtonian image of God who is “out there” and comes in to tinker with a universe over here like a mechanic fixing an engine, everything is a miracle. Creation ex nihilo and metaphysics leads me to believe God is intimately involved with every act of reality at all times. That is the role metaphysics gives to the prime mover. The current and continued existence of everything, every natural law and every physical object in the universe is a miracle. God upholds and sustains them all.
Feser: Properly understood, then, miracles are in no way comparable to magic, nor to a kind of advanced technology. For God is not merely an especially powerful cause alongside other natural and preternatural causes. Rather, he is altogether outside the order of natural and preternatural causes, as the metaphysical precondition of there beingany causal power at all. That is the manner in which he is the First Cause—“first” in the sense of primary or fundamental, that from which all other, merely secondary causes derive their causal power.
Hence, it would be a sheer mistake to think that the difference between ordinary events and miracles is that whereas the former happen on their own, God causes the latter. The world is not Hke an airplane on autopilot, with God interfering from time to time to perform a course correction. God is the ultimate cause of all things, the natural and preternatural as much as the miraculous. Indeed, as the arguments of his book show, it is the ordinary,natural course of things, and not miracles, which is the most direct evidence of God’s existence and action as First Cause.
But if everything is a miracle then I suppose nothing is a miracle in the special sense of the word. So I think we need to go beyond “mere involvement by God” to understand what people mean in normal discussions where a miracle is often understood to be God doing something impossible from our perspective. This is the dictionary definition, and to be quite frank, what most people mean when they talk about miracles:
a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.
Obviously, the word is much more rich in meaning and nuance than that. But my point is we need to be using the word the same way to have a meaningful conversation about it.
[2] God cannot violate nature anymore than God can intervene in nature. Brian Davies writes:
Some people would say that God can intervene so as to bring it about that changes occur in the world. On the classical theist’s account, however, such changes cannot be literally thought of s divine interventions since they and what preceded them are equally the creative work of God.
Nature is upheld and run by God at every instant, from nothing. How do you interfere in what you are already doing? It makes no sense. Rather, miracles are God going beyond nature, or beyond how He ordinarily runs things. Kind of like a jazz musician improvising and adding to the score or going beyond it – that is the music he is already playing.
Ramelow: “What defines a miracle is not merely that it is an exception to what is natural (which would be true for defects as well), but that it elevatesthe nature of a thing to a power that cannot be accounted for by this nature. Unlike said defects, miracles are exceptions that are super-natural rather than sub-natural. As such, then, miracles are not violations of the laws of nature. Even though they would have to be called “physically impossible,’ yet they are not contrary to nature; rather, they are beyond nature … in the sense of elevating it to a higher power.”
McCabe: It is clear that God cannot interfere in the universe, not because he has not the power but because, so to speak, he has too much. To interfere you have to be an alternative to, or alongside, what you are interfering with. If God is the cause of everything, there is nothing that he is alongside.
Also of importance here is understanding what a “natural law” is. We often discuss this word here but many people do not carefully consider what that means and there are numerous understandings. Here is a Fermilab lecture by Feser on why the laws are not fundamental:
Here is a second implication. As I have said, the Aristotelian view takes a law of nature to be a description of the powers and capacities a thing will tend to manifest given its nature or essence. That entails that laws of nature are not the fundamental level of reality, because they presuppose something else, namely the existence of the physical objects and systems that the laws of nature describe. This reverses the order of things that appears to be taken for granted by many scientists. The assumption seems to be that ultimate explanation will involve tracing all of physical reality down to some set of laws of nature, where the laws will in some sense be what exists fundamentally or primordially. On the Aristotelian view, this gets things backwards. No matter how far down we take laws of nature, the existence even of the most fundamental laws will itself always necessarily presuppose the existence of something else, namely the physical system that the laws describe.
[3] It seems we have significant underlying agreements on miracles (every flower, every baby etc) but also some differences. For me, the only fantasy here is believing “supernatural” miracles can’t happen and that Jesus walking on rocks is somehow not fraudulent and consistent with the scene where the Gospels use this to depict Him as trampling the sea just as Creator. You have set up a straw man of evaluating miracles from a deistic or mechanistic perspective and are knocking them down based on “natural law” which is not clearly defined.When God performs a miracle and improvises and goes beyond the score of the music He is already playing, he is not violating anything:
Feser: The musician hardly has to force the music to go in some way it wasn’t already going; every note, including the written ones that precede and follow the improvised ones, is produced by him. Still, the improvisation definitely adds to the score something that wasn’t already there, just as, in Ramelow’s words, a miracle goes “beyond nature” and “elevates it to a higher power”.
I love science and make a living off it but I do not worship at its altar. It is a magnificent tool for discovering truth–scientific truth–truth that is capable of being mathematically modeled. One type of truth. I also do not understand “natural law” in such a rigid sense (they seem conditional to me) that I have a problem with Jesus–God in the flesh–going beyond the natural order of things that He upholds and sustains at every instant–and doing something ordinarily (physically) impossible from my perspective. I would certainly have a problem with anyone else allegedly doing that by their own power.
Does Levine trace it back to Jesus? I know she attributes it to his original followers and Paul.
Does Jesus stay completely within the Jewish context or does he depart from it at some point?
Levine: In first-century Judaism one can find the idea of God as manifested as the Word, the Logos. Judaism has the idea of the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God descending to earth and dwelling among human beings. The prologue of the Gospel of John makes perfectly good sense in that context.
First-century Judaism was sufficiently fluid to allow even the idea that an individual could embody divinity. We know that because the earliest followers of Jesus who recognized him as divinity incarnate—such as Paul or James, the brother of Jesus who’s running the Jerusalem church—still called themselves Jews. Everybody recognized them as Jews
Which ties into what I said. Jesus left behind no writings of his own.If we want to know about him the only thing we have are stories and accounts of those who followed him and all the evidence we have suggest they saw him as divine and making divine claims from the earliest moments. Either the Jesus of history is completely unknowable via traditional historical methodology because our sources are that unreliable, or he claimed divinity. I see no way to parse between what the earliest followers of Jesus believed he did, said and claimed, and what he actual did, said and claimed. They are the only source we have for reconstruction,
It is true that the hypostatic union means Jesus has two natures, human and divine. The human nature had limitations (didn’t know the day or hour, who touched his garment, expresses surprise etc.) but the divine nature did not and could not. God can’t stop being God. That is metaphysical nonsense. SO you are correct in that the human nature of Jesus did not need a full understanding of divinity or the Trinity for us to believe this but we are Christians. That is Christ-ians. Followers of Christ, The trinity did not fall from heaven as a divine revelation by God to the Church a hundred or hundreds or years later. It could have. I do not doubt this as a possibility. But I think there is strong continuity between what Jesus thought and believed and what the early Church thought and believed. The earliest literature we have declares Jesus to be the Creator.
And that honestly, a human Jesus who increasingly viewed Himself as divine makes the most sense of that data and the earliest belief of monotheistic Jews.. Why would we sever Jesus and the early Church from, honestly the most important doctrine and creedal confession we have? There is no need to and that is exactly the purpose of this topic. Jesus claimed to be God. Call him crazy like Hitchens or call him Lord. The idea that Jesus being God is alate theological development is terrible scholarship all around.
And of course, trilemma and Trinity are different. This is not a thread about the Trinity itself but whether Jesus claimed to be God and trilemma as formulated by CS Lewis and others:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” [Mere Christianity]
Klax brought up the trilemma in another thread and since I have been working on this the last month or so, I thought I would share for discussion.
I have always found scholarship and religion too be poor bedfellows. Scholarship is, by definition, human knowledge, learning and understanding. In the context of religion it is putting humanity on a par or even superior to God.
So this is the criticism of science that people here are finding hard to either understand or accept. It is the difference between a working knowledge and full understanding. Science understands what it needs to. Even pure theoretical science has broader practical applications, but to claim full knowledge and understanding is arrogance and vanity. Evolutionary theory can never be more than that: a theory. To claim pinpoint accuracy and truth is beyond the remit of science or scientists. (regardless of scientific definitions of theories) The practicalities remain. Science has a place, but it is not on a par with God, nor can scientists claim their knowledge to be so.
But, to revert to the OP. Whether people saw and recognised Jesus as divine, or think that He claimed it is not the point. The point is, there are strong theological reasons for Him to be so, and enough indications from Scripture that He was/is so, that whether the Gospels concur or deny becomes irrelevant.
Richard
I agree in a large sense. Historians employ tools and criteria that are largely naturalistic and probability based. If God became flesh, I do not expect this methodological net to adequately capture that image anymore than I expect a metal detector to find wood. But the point of this thread is to show that sound scholarship can show that Jesus claimed to be divine.
As you know, the gospels are scripture and in my mind, they the most important ones we possess (the penultimate canon within the canon).The last belief aside, if the chief source of information about Jesus denies His divinity, that is not irrelevant to most of us. The charge of it being a later theological development would be true. Us Christians would be accused of perverting the message of Jesus and believing something He never did.
You are claiming the trinity/divinity of Christ is correct and we can get there several ways. I concur but the straightest and most obvious path is Jesus, the early Church, all four first century gospels and Paul, whose corpus represents our earliest surviving material, all believed this. I mentioned a prominent theologian above in in the OP. Here is a fuller quote from him:
“The earthly Jesus . . . did not present himself as the pre-existent Creator of the world . . . Such claims surface in John’s Gospel (e.g., John 5:17, 8:58), but these are later theological reflections rather than historical traditions that reach back to Jesus himself.” Gerald O’Collins, Christology:A Biblical, Historical and Systematic Study of Jesus.
I have that book. I read it years ago but came across the quote again in reading Pitre. He most certainty defends full trinitarian belief. So I largely agree with the basic thrust of your argument but I disagree that its meaningful or relevant because Gerald O’Collins is regurgitating old scholarship from a time where it was even taboo just to consider what Jesus might have though of himself.
We don’t have anything written by Jesus. It’s debatable whether we have anything written by anyone who met Jesus. So surely the best that sound scholarship can ever show is that some people said that Jesus claimed to be divine.
Both your debatable points are true. Jesus wrote nothing which was part of the argument I made. And we can debate traditional authorship (my arguments here do not need assume it). Most critical scholars reconstruct Jesus fully believing the gospels are anonymous. We can reconstruct some of the earliest Church’s views through things like recurrent attestation of our source material, critically comparing Acts and Paul and and of course Paul, was coexisted with the original followers, met with them and knew them.
The best (sound) scholarship is that Jesus’s earliest followers believed he was divine no later than shortly after his death. We can argue it was all made up in the interim. That a purely human Jesus who taught only about God was and performed no actual nature defying miracles was completely divinized in a few years by his eyewitness followers or this was a natural extension of his own teachings and self view and vindicated by their belief in His resurrection. As part three will show, there are several non-miraculous sayings attributed to Jesus—that very few scholars would deny most likely go back to him—that teach this.
As a general rule, historical reconstruction can greatly benefit from autobiographical testimony, but it doesn’t require it to know things about a person.
This is what the well-regarded and esteemed Jewish scholar AJ Levine wrote in a link I quoted above:
What can Jewish readers get out of the New Testament?
The New Testament preserves for the Jewish community part of our own history that we don’t have. Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ mother, James, Paul— they’re all Jews.
The only Pharisee from whom we have written records is Paul of Tarsus. The first person in history ever called rabbi in a literary text is Jesus of Nazareth. If I want to understand Galilean life in the first century, other than archaeology, I have no better source than the gospels.
So by reading the New Testament, we Jews recover our common roots. To be sure, the New Testament is tendentious literature. All literature has an agenda. But Jesus is an interesting bridge between what we have in the shared scriptures—the Old Testament of the church and the Tanakh of the synagogue—and what we find in later Jewish literature, particularly in terms of storytelling and in his way of understanding Jewish law, the heart of Judaism, which has been debated since Moses came down the mountain. The Jewish system still does that, and Jesus takes his place within that tradition.
Most critical scholars who find the gospels anonymous still reconstruct quite a bit of history from them about Jesus, the early Christian church and the Judaism of the time (of which the first Christians more accurately were).
Now that is sound. We do have works written by Jesus’s followers, albeit in possibly modified form, and can determine what they believed from what they wrote. But going from what some-one believed happened to what actually happened is not sound scholarship. You could argue that Jesus probably said he was divine, but not that he definitely did.
Again, it’s not a case of confirming or denying - it’s more a balance of probability. Sound scholarship wouldn’t lead to more than that.