Fair enough. My reply will have to wait though, since your big reply has finally arrived. Boyarin’s Border Lines is coming in the mail to me (and I received another book a few days ago) and so now it’s my turn to take a bit off. It could be two weeks before I organize a reply. I just wanted to highlight a single thing you wrote so I can clarify a bit before moving forwards:
I do not believe the Spirit and the Father are the same person.
(First of all, I didn’t skim read you at all, that was just my interpretation of what you said). Well, this takes me off guard a bit. If we both agree that the Holy Spirit and Father are different persons (I do not remember you expressing this before), then, at the very least, aren’t you stuck with binitarianism? As I view the Trinity, it’s pretty simple. One God, three persons. You seem to be at one God, two persons if they are not “the same person”. Is that correct?
I don’t know if I would jump the gun on using Trinitarianism to define who is/is not a Christian. It’s possibly valid although I’d need more certainty before throwing Unitarians off the cliff.
In my humble estimation, none of us has an inherent right to deny the recognition of “Christian” to someone who, at minimum, recognizes the Bible to be God’s written, revealed Word; allots Jesus the central role in God’s plan of redemption for humankind and regards himself/herself to be Christian.
Admittedly, unity in essentials and confraternity in faith is hard when the very nature of God itself is deeply in dispute and cannot be at least, in a basic sense, agreed upon like it is among all Trinitarians (our other differences in doctrine aside)…but your intuition that this does not give one leave to throw people off the cliff of Christian “inclusion” simply for being Unitarians or other, seems right to me.
Trinitarian incarnationalism (i.e. that Jesus is the bodily incarnation of the pre-existent Second Person of the Holy Trinity) strikes me as the gold-standard for (small-“c”) orthodox Christianity as opposed to “Christianity” in a looser sense. I don’t view Unitarians as “orthodox” (orthodoxía – “right opinion”) Christians but I do still view them as Christians, personally, and would hope they view me in a similar light as a brother in Christ (albeit with the “wrong opinion” )
I am not familiar with all aspects of Unitarians to make a comment; my point is with the question, “Does the Bible really say Jesus was/is God”. That Jesus is God is clearly shown in the Gospel, and this is so central to the Christian faith (with His death and resurrection, and forgiveness of our sins, and so on), that to deny this imo simply removes any notion of Christianity from the discussion.
As I said before, the Trinity is a formalism that was adopted by the Church in response to various errors brought into the faith. I suppose that some may wish to avoid adopting the wording of the Trinity (I cannot fathom why they would), but to deny the Son of God brings us to God is to deny Christianity.
I naturally concur with you @GJDS that the Bible does affirm Jesus’ pre-existent divinity (i.e. that He is God) and I similarly recognize the centrality of this belief to orthodox (“right opinion”) Christianity.
I think where we may differ is that I am willing to differentiate between Christians of orthodox (right-thinking) convictions, and Christians with seriously erring (i.e. heterodox) convictions in a central point of the faith. I don’t view the latter - heterodoxy - as being outside the pale of Christianity, even though I do see where you are coming from.
I agree with you in your response to me. And I must greatly thank you for your response to Jonathan’s comment, I think it really put into perspective an important number of points and some places where I think and see Jonathan has gotten wrong. My fuller reply to him will expand greatly on this.
Heretics are actually considered to be Christians. How heretical one can be to still be considered Christian is the question! Monophysites (e.g. Armenian Apostolic Church) I would consider to be Christian. Maybe even Arians to some degree, who come in many flavors. But a line has to be drawn somewhere, right?
My “working scenario” is that the Received Text of the New Testament reflects various paradigm changes since the days when Jesus lived physically on Earth!
Jesus was “full of the Holy Spirit” and led by him into the desert (Luke 4:1). Luke’s implication is clear that Jesus’ ministry is saturated with the power of the Holy Spirit, and Luke affirms that, at the beginning of Acts (i.e., "Luke, Part 2), this same Spirit is the empowerer and guide for the early church.
Further, the honorific “Messiah” (or, “Christ”), the “Anointed One,” implies the power and presence of the Spirit.
I agree. But the original argument was that the New Testament frequently and intimately connects the Holy Spirit with both God and Jesus in a way which shows that all three of them are persons and all three of them are God. I am disputing this. I don’t even see the New Testament frequently and intimately connecting the Holy Spirit with Jesus.
Now if Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and both of them are two persons in the Trinity, how can Jesus be “empowered” by the Holy Spirit? In what way does the God and creator of the universe need to be “empowered”? In what way does one person of the Trinity need to be “empowered” with another member of the Trinity? In the Bible, the Holy Spirit is God’s personal empowerment of humans, as His divinely appointed agents, to fulfill His will. If Jesus is God, why does he need to be empowered like humans do?
I know you’re not going to like hearing this, but this is simply further evidence that you are skim reading me. I do not believe that the Holy Spirit is a person at all. I have said this repeatedly in this thread, and this is the whole reason for the exchange between beaglelady and I.
Look at these statements that I’ve made.
“have you ever wondered why the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a name, if the Holy Spirit is a person?”
“I don’t see how you draw the conclusion that the Holy Spirit is a person”
“None of this requires the Holy Spirit to be a person”
“I also pointed out that just because the Holy Spirit is differentiated from God, does not mean that the Holy Spirit is necessarily a person”
They are all denying that the Holy Spirit is a person. It’s difficult to see how you could have missed me saying this, unless you have not been reading my posts in detail.
The whole point of issue in the discussion between beaglelady and I has been that I do not believe the Holy Spirit is a person, and she is presenting passages which she believes prove the Holy Spirit is a person.
I haven’t seen it used in that context, but it doesn’t make any sense. What’s the point of God deliberately somehow losing His omniscience and omnipotence, only to take it back again? How is it even possible for God to be God if He is no longer either omniscient or omnipotent or omnipresent?
If you had followed this discussion from the start you would have seen be already saying this. I specifically quoted Hurtado’s comment on this being a “mutation” in Second Temple Period monotheism.
If you read what I write you will find that I do not claim Hurtado’s view is the same as mine on all points. I believe Jesus is the uniquely appointed principal agent of God. Hurtado agrees with that, and says the same repeatedly, as he does here.
“But this perfectly illustrates my point that, characteristically, earliest Christian devotion to, acclamation of, and claims about Jesus are all framed with reference to the one God. They all have a clear monotheistic tone, although this unquestionably is a monotheism with a novel feature for which we have no genuine analogy elsewhere in Jewish tradition of the time: Jesus as the unique principal agent of God.” [1]
And here.
“The titles used here, “Lord and Christ,” convey in this context specific christological claims, but fundamentally they amount to descriptions of the risen Jesus as God’s chief agent who has been exalted to a position of superlative status, resembling the sort of status accorded to the chief agent figures in the Jewish tradition.” [2]
And here.
“Thus Rom. 1:3-4 is another indication that the earliest christological conviction was that the risen Jesus had been made God’s chief agent.” [3]
“Finally, because my use of the term “binitarian” to describe earliest Christian devotion has drawn so much misunderstanding, I’ve dropped it in favor of referring to the shape of earliest Christian devotion as a “structured dyad”: God (“the Father”) and Jesus, with Jesus defined and reverenced typically with reference to God (i.e., not as a second deity, but as the unique expression and agent of the one deity).”
I will spare you additional references; this is one of Hurtado’s most frequently repeated statements. Yes, Hurtado believes it is inadequate to say simply that Jesus is God’s agent. I agree with him insofar as he says that it is inadequate because Jesus, as God’s agent, holds a position which no other agent of God has ever held, and is placed in a position for which there is no complete analog in the biblical or Second Temple Period agency tradition. But Hurtado never says “It is inadequate to say simply that Jesus is God’s agent, because Jesus is not only God’s agent, he is also God”. As you quoted, Hurtado says that the decision to redefine God (in order to include Jesus), was a later development. He never says this was the belief of the earliest Christians.
I am fully aware of this. The idea that you think this is news to me, is baffling.
That does not concern me, since my aim here is not to convince you of anything.
I agree. Claiming that Jesus is both God and the divine agent of God, claiming that Jesus existed before he was born, claiming that Jesus was both 100% man and 100% God, claiming that God is three persons, and claiming that Jesus is one of those persons, are all extraordinary enough claims, but claiming that Jesus believed all this and that his earliest followers also believed all this, is quite another matter. Even you can’t bring yourself to make the claim that both Jesus and his earliest disciples believed he was God. You know that’s an extraordinary claim which is just too difficult to support.
Claiming that Jesus’ earliest followers did not believe he existed before he was born, and did not preach that he existed before he was born, and that this is a legitimate position for Christians to continue to hold, does not require extraordinary evidence because these are not extraordinary claims.
Firstly because there is a significant scholarly minority which departs from the consensus, and secondly because the current consensus on Jesus’ pre-existence is part of an overall position which used to be much stronger than it is at present, and has been gradually weakening over the years, and the specific consensus on Jesus’ pre-existence is weaker now than it has ever been. This is not a change of heart on my view of the importance of scholarly consensus, this is simply taking into account both the evidence and the scholarly treatment of the evidence. In this case we have a consensus which has been gradually weakening, so it’s perfectly legitimate to keep challenging it.
I will repeat what I said earlier. The “emerging consensus” concerns a “high Christology” which is a diluted form of the original “high Christology”. The emerging consensus is defined by Fletcher-Louis thus.
“In particular, there has been a long-running debate about the phenomenon that scholars traditionally call a “high Christology” (the belief that Jesus was somehow divine and was treated as such by his followers).” [4]
Note that this definition of “high Christology” is very broad. In Fletcher-Louis’ definition, high Christology just means believing that Jesus was “somehow divine”. He does not describe it as the belief that Jesus was understood to be God, or the belief that Jesus was understood to be one person in a multiple person Godhead. Under Louis-Fletcher’s definition of “high Christology”, even I believe in a high Christology, despite the fact that I do not believe Jesus is God…
This is a particularly curious definition given the fact that a high Christology has traditionally been defined as the belief that Jesus was specifically God, and claimed to be God, and was believed by his earliest followers to be God. Not “somehow divine”, but God (and typically not just “God” but specifically the second person of the Trinity). The “emerging consensus” is therefore clearly a rearguard position resulting from the relentless march of scholarship which has placed an increasing theological and chronological distance between the beliefs of Jesus and his earliest followers, and traditional Nicene Trinitarianism.
I don’t believe I’ve diminished the complexity and nuance of his argument at all. In my previous comments on Hurtado’s views (which you seem not to have read, though that’s understandable given how far back they are in this thread), I stated specifically that Hurtado’s views can get you to ontological binitarianism. In fact I also said they can even get you to ditheism.
However, even taking that step goes beyond the point at which Hurtado himself concludes. You have quoted one part of Hurtado’s exchange with Bauckham, but it is misleading outside the broader context of the post Hurtado wrote, and outside the context of his other comments.
Here are representative samples of what Hurtado said this blog post.
“We might also take account of statements such as Philippians 2:6, where Jesus is said to have been “in the form of God” (en morphe theou). But this expression seems to express a “godlike” similarity, not quite the explicit claim of “one substance” of later confession.”
“It appears that the “pre-existent” one who made himself a servant acquires a status and role that he did not exercise earlier. But, again, the focus seems to be on status, role, etc., and not on “ontology.””
“So, how can we say that “ontological” categories don’t appear to be operative in earliest Christological texts? Negatively, there is the absence of the sort of philosophical terms that make their appearance in subsequent Christian texts. Positively, the Christological statements that we do have in NT texts seem to me to express claims more of a relational and transactional nature. In various ways, Jesus is uniquely linked with God, and is conferred (by God) with a unique status and role in relation to God.”
I can categorically say that Hurtado is deliberately avoiding the claim that the New Testament writers identified Jesus ontologically as God. In the comments Bauckham presses him repeatedly to make such a claim, and yet Hurtado refuses to do so, to the point that Bauckham acknowledges “So we really are considerably further apart than I imagined before this discussion”.
You gave a quotation from one of Hurtado’s comments to Bauckham, but you didn’t even finish the quotation, you cut off Hurtado’s own qualification of his comment. Here’s the complete comment, with the relevant section highlighted.
Richard: As always, your posting is stimulating and thoughtful. A brief response: Where we may be “apart” is that my emphasis is (1) on the evident centrality of the risen Jesus in earliest Christian beliefs and discourse about “God”, and in their worship of God, Jesus constitutive for both; and (2) that the move to portraying Jesus in terms of God’s “essence/substance” seems to me a later development prompted by legitimate early Christian concerns to articulate their faith in terms of the then-dominant philosophical categories. I would say that all sides in the 3rd-4th century Christological debates were working in conceptual categories distinguishable from what we have in earlier texts such as the NT. Yes, in a number of NT texts, Jesus (and/or the Word/Son) is uniquely placed with God, such that Jesus is constitutive for adequate discourse about God and adequate worship of God. In that sense, Jesus is placed on God’s side of a line distinguishing creator and creature. But also, of course, Jesus is emphatically and crucially placed on the other side of that line, his genuine historical and mortal existence (and his continuing humanity) just as essential as his divine status.
In what sense is Jesus placed on God’s side of a line distinguishing creator and creature? Not in an ontological sense, but in a relational and transactional sense. This is why Hurtado says that Jesus is functionally divine, and says that it is not proper to say the New Testament views Jesus as ontologically divine.
I know he does. I have never represented him as saying anything else. That’s precisely why I have said that Hurtado’s views can get you to ontological binitarianism. You have to push further than Hurtdao does, but you can extrapolate that position from his views, even though you end up arriving at a conclusion which he does not attribute to the sources.
I already said this. I have no idea why you are repeating something I said, and telling it to me as if it was something I didn’t know. I said that Ehrman does not believe that the prologue of John depicts Jesus as personally pre-existent, but I also said that Ehrman believes that Jesus is represented as pre-existent in other parts of the New Testament. Here is what I said.
“Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord—in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors.” [5]
Furthermore I stated specifically that Ehrman believes that the view of Jesus as personally pre-existent preceded the gospel of John. I said this.
The only change in Ehrman’s view is that he now believes that the view of Jesus as “a preexistent divine being who is equal with God” did not originate with John’s gospel. He believes it preceded John’s gospel, and that John was drawing on this tradition.
So I have no idea why you are telling me something I already said.
“As should be clear to any serious reader, in the NT Jesus is not worshipped “as God” (whatever that may mean) but, instead, with reference to God, as the Son of God, as the Lord appointed by God, as the “image” of God, etc. To be sure, Jesus is referenced as sharing the divine name and glory, and OT texts originally referring to “God” (YHWH) are interpreted with reference to Jesus, and, most importantly, in earliest Christian circles Jesus is accorded the sorts of reverence that are otherwise reserved for deities in the Roman era. So, there can be no question whether the exalted Jesus is treated in the NT as “divine.” But, at the same time, the NT (and early Christian writers generally) also distinguish God and Jesus, while also relating them uniquely to each other.”
With which part of the statement “As should be clear to any serious reader, in the NT Jesus is not worshipped “as God”” do you disagree?
You quote Hurtado saying this.
Jesus is portrayed as included within discourse about God, and is included within the worship offered to God, and as sharing/given divine glory and throne. To judge what that means in “ontological” terms is a fair question.
Again, you don’t link to the actual comment, but it’s from the discussion with Bauckham quoted previously. And again you cut off the last part of what Hurtado wrote. Let’s see the full comment.
Richard: As I judge the early texts, Jesus is portrayed as included within discourse about God, and is included within the worship offered to God, and as sharing/given divine glory and throne. To judge what that means in “ontological” terms is a fair question. But it seems to me that the question involves an inferential step beyond simply noting what the NT texts say.
Yes that’s right, to judge what Jesus’ portrayal in the New Testament means in ongological terms is a “fair question”, but at the same time it involves an “inferential step beyond simply noting what the NT texts say”. The New Testament texts cannot bring you to that point; in order to reach ontological claims about Jesus being God, you must go beyond the texts.
There was a spectrum of praise, veneration, and worship in Second Temple Period Judaism, which could encompass humans, angels, and God Himself. The line which Second Temple Period Judaism drew was between worshipping God, and worshipping anything else as God. Hurtado has helpfully made that very clear in his own research. If the earliest followers of Jesus had worshipped Jesus as God, this would stand out very clearly in the New Testament, and the response to it from the local Jewish population would have been extraordinarily vehement.
This is precisely why Hurtado and others have to explain why there is no evidence for the earliest followers of Jesus worshipping Jesus as God, and why the Synoptics in particular (which record Jesus traditions pre-dating Paul), contain no evidence that Jesus or his followers believed he was God or worshipped him as God, even after his resurrection.
[1] Larry W Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2005), 44.
[2] Larry W Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Edinburgh: T & T Clarke, 1998), 94.
[3] Larry W Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Edinburgh: T & T Clarke, 1998), 95.
[4] Crispin H. T Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism: Christological Origins. Vol. 1, Vol. 1, (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co Ltd, 2015), 3.
[5] Bart D Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2014), 199.
I am intrigued - perhaps I may ask, what is the criteria by which we may decide between a Christian and a non-Christian? This is a question without preconceived notions,
Because Jesus, “giving up his status of divinity and all that it entailed” (see Philippians 2:7, in stark contrast to the “grasping for divinity” that began with Adam), was the person of God made fully man. The God of the Bible is not defined Platonically.