Is/was Jesus God or the Son of God? Yes, and No!

7/30/2019 Is/was Jesus God or the Son of God? Yes, and No!

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15 March 2013 Reverend Michael J. Watts

Interfaith Presentation Adjunct Instructor of Biblical Studies

East Carolina University 1986-1995

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Yes, and No: One Christians Confession

Greeting

My greetings to our Muslim friends tonight: As-salaamu alaikum, wa

rahmatul lahi , wa barakaatuhu,Peace, and the mercy of God, and Gods blessingsbe upon you all. My greetings to our Jewish friends tonight: Shalom aleichim!

Peace be upon you all. My greetings to our Christian friends tonight, in the wordsof the Apostle Paul: Char is humin, kai eir ene, apo theou, patros hemon,Grace toyou all, and peace, from God, the Father of us all. I am greatly honored to stand withthese distinguished speakers tonight, and to be invited to share with you some of

my Christian understandings about Jesus.

Introduction to Topic

The various writers of the New Testament, especially in the Gospels, use

many different titles for Jesus in order to suggest to their readers different aspects ofthe Being or the works of Jesus during the saga of His life, death and Resurrection.

The most important of these titles include: The Prophet, the Servant of God (or the

Lord), the great High Priest, the Messiah (GreekChristos= Christ), the Son of David,

the King of the Jews, the Son of Man, the Second Adam, the Lord (Greek: Kyrios), the

Savior, the Word (Greek: Logos), the Son of God.

In the interest of time tonight I will speak about only the most contentious of

these titles, the Son of God. Among our Jewish and Muslim friends, there is usuallyan objection to speaking of Jesus as the Son of God, or as being God. And we

Christians ourselves often differ among one another about this very issue. A dearJewish Rabbi friend expressed the matter well to me, The one sticking point that Ihave with you Christians is your belief that Jesus became God. Its arrogant for anyone

to think that any human being could become God. If the question is put that way, I

agree with him.

A short word about Trinity

Furthermore, we Christians also speak of a concept called Trinity, and

when we do, the explanation usually sounds to Jews and Muslims as if we actually

believe in three gods, not one. So we need to deal briefly with that matter also.

Whenever any person of any religion attempts to speak about God and theworld of the Divine, that person actually is attempting an impossible task. The reason

is simple: ourthis-worldly, human language is totally inadequate to do justice toother-worldly matters. There are just no human words capable of describing what

we human beings understand that we encounter from the Heavenly world. At best wemust speak in analogies, parables, similes, metaphors, and myths. For example we


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may note in the Hebrew Bibles introductory chapter to the Book ofthe prophet

Ezekiel, where after attempting to describe what he saw in his initial vision, theprophet can only summarize by saying: hu mareh demuth kevodh-YHWH, . . .Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD (Ezekiel 1:28b).

All of our metaphors and similes used to describe God and Jesus are only partialand inadequate. But they cannot affect Gods reality. When we pray, we may addressGod in terms of the inadequate human understanding that we each have, but in the

back of our minds we are (or, at least, we always should be) addressing God, not as webelieve God to be, but as only God knows Himself/Herself to be. (And of course I

realize as you do that God is not male or female. God has no genitalia. But that is a

metaphor that indicates we can have a person-to-person relationship with God.) In any

case, Almighty God cannot be threatened by our various wrong opinions and beliefsabout Him/Her and does not need humans to defend Him/Her. God, in all of Gods

manifestations, can take care of Himself/Herself without our feeble human help.

So we Christians, in discussing the Trinity, will continue to insist that we are

speaking of only one God, even when our descriptions seem to suggest otherwise.Our Muslim friends often speak ofthe ninety-nine beautiful names of God. Now of

course, Muslims do not actually believe in ninety-nine separate gods. In a similarway, we Christians use three names for three different ways of experiencing Gods

Presence and activity, yet we also still believe in only one God. My only problemwith the Trinity concept is that it is far too limiting, since in my lifetime I have

experienced the Presence and the activity of the One God in farmore than onlythree ways, and even in far more than only ninety-nine ways.

Jesus of Nazareth

As for our understanding of the Person of Jesus, we should first remindourselves that none of the writers of the Gospels, as far as Christian scholars can

tell, were actual eyewitnessesto the events of Jesus life, death, and resurrection.(The names for the Gospels were given to them many years after their writing.)

Some of their material may have come from eyewitnesses, but there is still a strong

interpretive element involved in the Gospels, and the same thing would have been

true of the narration ofany actual eyewitnesses whose testimony was handed downand utilized in the writing of our Gospels. Oral tradition about what Jesus did, and

Who Jesus was, and what Jesus was like, has been filtered through the experiencesand the faith interpretations of those who handed down the traditions prior to the

setting-down of that material in books that we call Gospels. That would be onlynatural, and it is not necessarily a bad thing that this is the case.

It is probable that Jesus Himselfnever publicly proclaimed that He was God inthe flesh, and that He never used for Himself most of the titles that later Christians


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11 and every tongue should confessthat Jesus Christ is Lord,to the glory of God the Father.NRSV

The writers in the New Testament who are most insistent that Jesus was God

(namely, the writerof the Fourth Gospel, John, and of the Letters of John, and thewriter of the Book of Hebrews), are the very writers who are also most insistent on the

full humanity of Jesus. If pressed, they would probably insist that Jesus was both

fully Divine and fully human, and notjust God masquerading as a human being.

The writer of the Letters of John even insists that anyone who denies that Jesus camein the flesh as a human being is an Anti-Christ (1 John 2:22 ff., 4:2-3; 2 John 7)!

Backward Trend

In the New Testament there appears to be a backward trend in the variousunderstandings of Jesus. The earliest writer, Paul, seems to hold that God, in

raising Jesus from death, adopted Him as Messiah and Son of God. Forexample, at one point in his letter to Christians in Rome, about 54 CE, Paul speaks

of. . . the Gospel concerning His Son, Who was descended from David according tothe flesh 4and was declared to be Son of Godwith power according to the Spiritof

Holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, . . .Romans 1:3

NRSV

The earliest Gospel, Mark, from about the years 65-70 CE, apparently holds

that God adopted Jesus at the time of Jesus Baptism, when a voice from Heaven

declared to Him, You are My Son, the Beloved. In You I am well pleased. Mark 1:11

NRSV. But Mark indicates that Jesus disciples did not come to this understandinguntil His disciple Peter did so at Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asks, Who do you saythat I am? (Mark 8:29).

Both Matthew and Luke, perhaps a generation later than Mark, seem to

hold that Jesus was Son of God and Messiahat His birth, and each writer provides

a two-chapter birth narrative. Though the two narratives differ considerably from each

other, both agree that Jesus birth was a creative action of Gods Holy Spirit comingupon the Virgin Mary.

And then the latest Gospel, that of John, holds that Christ was the Logos, the

Word, with God from the creation of the world, Who became flesh in the Personof the Man Jesus of Nazareth (John 1:1, 14). It appears that, as people came to

experience the Christian faith, and sought to understand their experiences, and reflect

upon them, their understandings were enlarged.

As the Church moved out of Palestine into the world of Greek and Roman culturewith the message that God was fully present in the Human Being Jesus of Nazareth,

many skeptical people began to ask serious questions. In answer to those questions, the


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early Christians contended, in the words of Paul, that God was in Christ, reconciling theworld unto Himself (1 Corinthians 5:19). They were not contending that a man becameGod, but rather that the Eternal God actually had entered our human history in the birth,

life, death, and resurrection of the Human Being, Jesus of Nazareth.

Drawing on the stories of Jesus birth in the Gospels according to Matthew andLuke, the early Church in the second century CE began to summarize the meaning ofthis idea in two statements now found in the Apostles Creed: Conceived by theHoly Spirit and Born of the Virgin Mary. These phrases, in my view, are two equal andopposite statements expressing a paradox. They are intended to affirm that:

1. the man Jesus of Nazareth was One Who fully shared all aspects of our

human existence, but that

2. at the same time, God made Himself/Herself wholly present in the Person

and Work and Words of the Human Being Jesus of Nazareth.

These two phrases affirm that Jesus was born of a human mother, as is every

child, yet born ofGod as was no other child.

Conceived by the Holy Spirit

The phrase, Conceived by the Holy Spirit was first and foremost a

formulation of a vital aspect of the Gospel message: that Jesus stood in completeand unbroken relationship with God. In Jesus of Nazareth, those early Christians

confessed, they had encountered the activity of the living God. As they observedand received His ministry, heard His teachings, and received a kind of new life, a

sense of having been born again, resulting from His death and resurrection, thoseearly Christians experienced what they could only define as the Divine Presence.

For them only the indwelling Presence ofGod could explain Jesus. Whenthey looked at Jesus they understood that they were looking into the ultimate

depths of Gods eternal purpose for the world. In Jesus they came to believe thevery nature ofGod was reflected. So His followers came to believe that, although

he was a human being, he was not merely a human being. Those early Christiansunderstood Him to be a human being in Whom God was fully present, One Who

could have had His origin only in God.

Born of the Virgin MaryOn the other hand, the phrase, Born of the Virgin Mary was intended to put the

existence of Jesus of Nazareth into its setting in history. Was there such a Person?If so, when was He born and where did He live? The Church replied: Yes, there

was such a Person. He was born in Bethlehem during the reigns of the RomanEmperor Augustus and his appointed Ruler (Ethnarch) Herod, and His mother was


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for it also traces Jesus ancestry from David through Joseph. And in other passages in

his Gospel Luke seems to go out of his way to assert that Josephwas Jesus father(e.g., 2:48; 4:22). Elsewhere in the New Testament we find no mention of a virgin

birth/conception.

So ifthe virginal conception is such a very important doctrine in and ofitself, and ifit is to be made a test of Christian orthodoxy in our own time, then whyis the rest of the New Testament so completelysilent about it? My own conclusion

is simply that those other New Testament writers found other ways to express thesame spiritual truth that Matthew and Luke seem to be asserting in their use of the

concept of virgin birth/virginal conception.

The alternate concept that these other writers use to express their understanding

of Jesus is the concept ofincarnation. The New Testament writers do not actuallyuse that term, but the concept itself appears frequently. The Incarnation is the Christian

doctrine that God became flesh, and assumed a human nature, in the Person of JesusChrist, the Son of God.My contention is that virgin birth, or virginal conception is

just one ofmany ways in which New Testament writers express this concept ofincarnation. The Apostle Paul say in his second letter to Corinth says: :

2 Corinthians 5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from ahuman point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a humanpoint of view, we know Him no longer in that way. 17 So if anyone is inChrist, there is a New Creation: everything old has passed away; see,everything has become new! 18 All this is from God, Who reconciled us toHimself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19

that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, . . .NRSV

This is, of course, a confession of faith, and not a matter of biological

science or human history.For me, likewise,as a matter of objective human history,I do not believe that Jesus wasGod in the flesh or that he became God. But as a

confession of my personal faith experience, I must say that I do conclude, with theApostle Paul, that God was inChrist reconciling the world to Himself.(1 Corinthians

5:19).

The Significance of the Incarnation Concept for Christians

There was a time, according to the faith-witness ofall the New Testament

writers, when God somehow entered fully into the life ofa human being. Whatmight that idea imply for our human religious situation? Is it just a test of our

Christian orthodoxy, or is there a possibility for something more? John Claypool,until his death a few years ago, one of our more eloquent American preachers, called

attention to a thought originally expressed by the second century Christian writer,

Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (d. c. 200 CE): He became as we are, that we might


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become even as He Himself is. Claypool expanded that thought with two additional

propositions:

First, Claypool said, God became like us so that we might have a way ofbelieving that God understands what we are like . Part of the problem we have always

had with God is the feeling many in our modern world have that God is distant andremote from our lives. We often question whether God could possibly understand lifeas we have to live it. We humans plod along amidst the ambiguities and agonies of

history, but God dwells far away in unsearchable light, doesnt He?

But what ifwe believed that God willed to come out of that seeming

remoteness and into identification with our human situation? That might utterly

change the way we feel about God, because sharing a common experience as fellow

strugglers makes people feel closer to each other. Walking the same road together asfellow strugglers brings people closer together.

So suppose that, at His own initiative, God wills to become a baby born of awoman, with a hint of scandal about His birth at that, to grow up with poverty anddiscrimination and obscurity on the back side of nowhere, and to live being

misunderstood by even His friends and family. And suppose that God chooses to

experience human rejection and indifference, pain and betrayal, to experience being

illegally tried and convicted in a kangaroo court, being spit upon, tortured, and dyingthe long, slow death of a common criminal.

Then what does this event of the incarnation mean on the emotional sideof our relationship with God? It means that God can say to us at every juncture, I

understand what you are experiencing because I have been there Mysel f. No longer isGod remote from us. God became what we are, so that we could realize that God

understands what we are like.

Claypools second proposition is that God became like us so that we might

have a way of knowing what God is like.Human beings are said to have been

created in the image of God, which means at least this, that we have a thirst toknow God and to have a relationship with God. Yet from the beginning all human

knowledge has been stifled at the point of Gods otherness. God is not what we

are. Do we as human beings have a capacity to understand a Being so radically

different from us?The idea of incarnation implies that at one point in time, out of sheer grace,

the One Who is utterly beyond us in nature dared to put Himself/Herself in a formwe humans could understand. We Christians have made the incredible assertion that

in the Person, the Words, and the Works of the One Who meets us in the pages of

the New Testamentthis Jesus of Nazarethwe encounterGodGod-come-to-us,

God-you-could-understand, God-in-a-form-that-humanity-could-comprehend. J. B.


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Phillips caught this implication well in his translation of John 1:1: In the beginningGod expressed Himself.

To be sure, we can never know allthat there is to know about God. Gods

totality lies beyond our comprehension. But in Jesus, we Christians have come to

believe, we can know something of what God is like, because somehow all of thelove of God, all of the God-ness that we human beings were capable ofcomprehending once entered into the Person of the Human Being Jesus of

Nazareth. Thus the writer of the Fourth Gospel can report Jesus as saying, The

person who has seen Me has seen the Father(John 14:9), and Paul can assert, For itis in Christ that the complete Being of God dwells embodied(Colossians 2:9).

In Jesus we Christians thus have come to believe in a God of love and grace

and forgiveness. And this coming was not like the Greek and Roman myths that

tell of Zeus or Apollo or others taking little tours of earth disguised as human

beings. In those stories the immortal gods risked nothing in taking the trouble tocome down from Mount Olympus.

But our Christmas story (or myth, as some might prefer) tells of One Who left

His base to join us in the front-line trenches, and to share with us the ultimate inforsakenness, the hells of human anguish, the agonies of human hunger and thirst and

grief and anxiety. Finally He opened Himself to temptationsthe temptation not todrink the cup of suffering but to seek out the painless way instead, and the temptation

to disengage Himself at the decisive moment from the crucial scene on Golgotha andwithdraw like Apollo or Zeus back to Olympus. But He would die rather than sin. And

He loved, literally, until it killed Him.

One of the foremost religious groups of Jesus time was a group calledPharisees. The name means, literally, the separatedones. They said and did manygood things for which the New Testament writers fail to give them sufficient credit,

and modern day Rabbinic Judaism owes its existence to them. But much of their

religious approach was one of holy segregation. They spared no effort in trying to

come out from among anything or anybody considered unclean or sinful.

In the coming of Jesus we find a totally different strategy for dealing with

evil. When Jesus was born God did not attempt to separate the history of the first

century into two pilesputting the angels and the shepherds and the baby in oneplace, and the Roman domination and King Herods brutality into another. Instead,

God placed His Son, not in some place remote from the evil that was there, butright in its midst. The Good News of Christmas is that the God Who came to

Bethlehem in the child Jesus was not designated Pharisee, a separated one, butImmanuel, God-with-Us.

A German preacher, Helmut Gollwitzer some years ago expressed well the


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idea of the incarnation as he preached to refugees from the Hungarian revolt in 1957:

Where are we if God lets Himself be laid as a refugee child in themanger, and be nailed to the cross, and laid away in the grave? One thing iscertain: everything is changed. There are no longer any holes without lightin which human beings go to pieces . . . For we are no longer alone and

dependent upon ourselves. Even in the worst loneliness there is One Whotakes His place beside us and is there with possibilities quite beyonddescription. . . . That God lay so humbly there in that stall means that Heshies away from no place. He goes into every night, and into every poverty,and no place is so dark or distant that He cannot find it.

Adapted from writings of Frank Stagg and John Claypool by the Reverend Michael J. Watts.

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Is/was Jesus God or the Son of God? Yes, and No!