First off - welcome to Grease Spot, afriendinJesus! By the time you took PFAL in 87, I had already left TWI – after 12 years of involvement – and was reexamining just about everything I absorbed from them. I got into systematic theology, reading & comparing commentaries and checking out the biblical languages – outside of TWI's material of course.
My process & motive was and still is at a very basic beginner's level – checking out certain details that I feel are important to my faith. The depth of a particular study being determined by my level of curiosity. So ain't no scholar or theologian here – maybe just a layman who had the wool pulled over my eyes - but now determined to never let anyone jack me around over the nuts & bolts of my faith!
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Your remarks about wierwille's handling of "pros" made me laugh and recall how puzzling I found it too as I reviewed stuff. He had a real knack for "redefining" words one way or another to suit his theology – whether it was the biblical languages or even our own English. His twisted handling of the Greek word "pros" is a dandy. He sticks to the accepted definition alright – but it's in his elaboration where the "redefining" happens.
Behind his argument is an assumption that there's no way possible for Jesus Christ to have literally been with God in the beginning – so he asserts there's only one way to understand the passage. Christ was with God in the sense of being in His foreknowledge – in the mind of God. I guess in my TWI mindset I used to think of it as Christ being just a gleam in the Father's eye.
In post-TWI thinking, I found a big problem with his "logic". How can someone's thought be independent of them? If I'm thinking about having children – that thought does indeed exist within me – heck, it's part of me – MY thoughts - but it's certainly not distinctly independent of me! After I checked out the usage of "pros" elsewhere in the Bible and seeing it was consistent with the accepted definition in Greek lexicons – I felt it was underhanded of weirwille to NOT refer to other passages where this key word appears.
I mean – wasn't that a big deal - doing that for certain other words in PFAL? It's like he forgot about all that stuff he said on how the Bible supposedly interprets itself . I dunno – chalk it up as the quintessential plagiarist's dilemma I guess: when stealing other folks' ideas, occasionally you may have to pull an answer out of your a$ $ if you can't figure out which idea is applicable.
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Oh and to answer your question – yes, I now believe Jesus is God.
Huh? There's a non-TWI source that includes "...but distinctly independent of" to the definition of pros?
To conclude from the whole context of John chapter 1 that Jesus = God makes sense. A plain reading from beginning to end leads to the logical conclusion that the author of John is saying that Jesus is God in the flesh. I understand the contradictions, apparent, actual or otherwise in other parts of the bible, but Wierwille's biblical gymnastics make little sense and are facile attempts to make this section "fit".
My favorite "he pulled it out of his @$$" explanation is where he defines "name" as "namesake" where John talks about salvation being for those who call on his name. There's no evidence for the word for "name" to be translated "namesake"...oh wait! there must be a text...there must be, or the whole bible would just fall to pieces.
Hello, everyone, I took PFAL, back in 1987 and being a Trinitarian as I was at the time and Weirwille's use of the Greek word "with" = Pros, Together with but distinctly independent of. I was surprised at this, I was equaly surprised that Trinitarian theolgians as well state that this is a an accurate definition for the Greek word Pros- meaning that the word was with the God. Have any of you since came to believe that Jesus is indeed God since leaving the Way?
I believe and confess that Jesus Christ is God.
In confessing that Jesus Christ is God, I am affirming that the Lord Jesus is God ontologically. Jesus Christ is an eternal, divine person who possesses that singular, undivided being/essence which alone is God.
I deny, with all orthodox and functioning Trinitarians, both that Jesus Christ is the Father (a heresy of modalists) and that Jesus Christ is declared by Scripture to be God only in some metaphorical, non-substantial sense (one of the heresies of Wierwille).
Huh? There's a non-TWI source that includes "...but distinctly independent of" to the definition of pros? .. .
Funny you should say that – but good thing – I looked up a couple of references and now I'm thinking wierwille fudged it on the initial definition too – these guys I cite below speak of pros as having a much more intimate connection – not the impersonal and somewhat vague rendering wierwille offered.
The New English Translation, 2nd Beta Edition notes of the preposition "pros" used in John 1:1
"The proposition pros implies not just proximity, but intimate personal relationship. M. Dods stated, 'pros.. .means more than meta or para, and is regularly employed in expressing the presence of one person with another' ("The Gospel of St. John", The Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:684). See also Mark 6:3, Matt 13:56, Mark 9:19, Gal 1:18, 2 John 12."
End of excerpt
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And from The New International Commentary on the New Testament: The Gospel of John Revised by Leon Morris, footnote # 14 of page 67 commenting on the use of pros in John 1:1 Morris also cites Dods' work and a few others too
".. .Dods maintains that the preposition 'implies not merely existence alongside of but personal intercourse'.. . According to A.T. Robertson, ''the literal idea comes out well, 'face to face with God' '' (Robertson p.623). He also says, 'face-to-face converse' is in mind (p.625). MacGregor thinks that the preposition 'expresses nearness combined with the sense of movement towards God, and so indicates an active relationship. The Logos and God do not simply exist side by side, but are on terms of living intercourse, and such fellowship implies separate personality.' It is hard to see less.. ."
End of excerpt
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After thinking about this a little more – I'd like to revise what I said of wierwille starting off with the accepted definition of pros. It looks to me like he conveniently left out a few details from the get-go. But maybe that's just me. Folks are gonna haggle over the meaning of something anyway – it happens all the time – why, it wasn't too long ago I remember someone noteworthy saying "It depends on what your definition of "is" is."
Have any of you since came to believe that Jesus is indeed God since leaving the Way?
I've come to believe that Jesus is just another - and likely entirely fictitious - in a looooong litany of superhuman God/men that have been espoused in just about every culture known in history. I can see nothing either unique or compelling in the so-called "witness" of the "scriptures". It strikes me that one must spend an incredible amount of effort explaining away the obvious if one is to keep his "faith". I tired of the game, eventually...
I think you're wrong. I believe there's enough evidence to conclude he existed. Oh, all that stuff about his being one of the gods or Messiah or what not is all nonsense of course but his existence? I mean you have Josephus and Pliny the Younger and.. and.. hmmmm. Well if he didn't exist it makes a dang good story, huh?
I am pretty doubtful that Greek prepositions had the precision of meaning that not only Wierwille, but just about any theologian who tackles their usage, attaches to them. Language, no matter how hard the grammarians among us try, is an imprecise tool for rendering our thoughts and feelings into forms that can be understood by others.
I am pretty doubtful that Greek prepositions had the precision of meaning that not only Wierwille, but just about any theologian who tackles their usage, attaches to them. Language, no matter how hard the grammarians among us try, is an imprecise tool for rendering our thoughts and feelings into forms that can be understood by others.
Agreed.. . just think about the communication challenge folks experience within their own language - whether face to face, through a letter or on a website. Your sentiment is something I do think about once and awhile [and probably something I should remind myself of more often] when I get into the biblical languages - realizing there's a few "obscuring" layers I'm trying to peer through:
1. I am not familiar with the biblical languages nor their cultural & historical context
2. I am sifting through another person's knowledge/interpretation of the biblical languages
3. - and probably the most significant point imho, the biblical languages are somewhat dead - not sure if that's an accurate way to put it - you've got the Koine Greek of the New Testament, biblical Hebrew is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, and I don't know anything about the portions written in Aramaic if that is equivalent to the present-day dialect.
Hello, everyone, I took PFAL, back in 1987 and being a Trinitarian as I was at the time and Weirwille's use of the Greek word "with" = Pros, Together with but distinctly independent of. I was surprised at this, I was equaly surprised that Trinitarian theolgians as well state that this is a an accurate definition for the Greek word Pros- meaning that the word was with the God. Have any of you since came to believe that Jesus is indeed God since leaving the Way?
Welcome! Settle in with cake and coffee. Enjoy the debate around here.
In answer to your question: I never believed Jesus was God before; it never made sense. And it doesn't make sense now.
The idea of "killing" God is too bizarre for words. Killing the creator of the heavens and the earth? :wacko:
Why would anyone want a mortal "God"?
And how could a different - being, for want of a better word - be the perfect sacrifice of a "lamb of the first year"? Wouldn't that be like sacrificing an elephant and calling it a lamb?
Or calling a turtle dove, a genuine substitutionary sacrifice, a "lamb"?
It's not even sacrificing a goat in substitution for a lamb.
Hello, everyone, I took PFAL, back in 1987 and being a Trinitarian as I was at the time and Weirwille's use of the Greek word "with" = Pros, Together with but distinctly independent of. I was surprised at this, I was equaly surprised that Trinitarian theolgians as well state that this is a an accurate definition for the Greek word Pros- meaning that the word was with the God. Have any of you since came to believe that Jesus is indeed God since leaving the Way?
Hi,
I hope you stay around awhile.
Yes, I have come to see that Jesus is God. Fully human and fully divine. . . . not a mortal God.
God has revealed Himself to mankind in many ways. . . . but, the final and greatest way is in the person of Jesus. He is the "word" because He is God's complete revelation of Himself to us.
God . . . . in Christ. . . . reconciling the world unto Himself. Nothing in scripture makes sense without the identity of Jesus.
And most certainly, the mystery of godliness is great:
He was manifested in the flesh,
justified in the Spirit,
seen by angels,
preached among the Gentiles,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.
That is how we now know God. . .He is the fullness of Him who fills all and all. . . not someone to bypass on our way to God. . . HE is the way. . . . for all eternity. . . He is who we know. The bible points to a person. . . . cover to cover. Isn't scripture where we were all seeking God? Isn't scripture a revelation of God? Scripture is the revelation of who? Jesus Christ. . . front to back.
A knowledge outside of Him as God. . . . that . . . is another faith. The light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
In the OT people looked forward to His coming. . . they were searching for Him because God promised. . . they kept saying "How long?" "How long?". He finally comes after a 400 year period of darkness. . . shows up and is rejected by all but a few. . . . even after the resurrection there are only 120 waiting for Him . . . . a lot of them women. . over 500 had seen Him post resurrection. . . . they knew it was Him . . . Herod even knew He rose from the dead. . . he paid off the guards!
Even after being there and seeing these things people still denied who He was. . . . to this day people still deny it in various forms. . . . denying who He Himself claimed to be and calling Him someone else. . . . denying He ever existed or indifference to who He is. . . it is all the same thing.
It is also how we end up with the major and minor religions. . . . they all take Him in part.
In The Name Of The Father, Son And Holy Spirit: Constructing A Trinitarian Worldview
"It is part of the pathos of Western theology that it has often believed that while trinitarian theology might well be of edificatory value to those who already believe, for the outsider it is an unfortunate barrier to belief, which must therefore be facilitated by some non-trinitarian apologetic, some essentially monotheistic 'natural theology.' My belief is the reverse: that because the theology of the Trinity has so much to teach about the nature of our world and life within it, it is or could be the centre of Christianity's appeal to the unbeliever, as the good news of a God who enters into free relations of creation and redemption with his world. In the light of the theology of the Trinity, everything looks different. [Colin Gunton]"
In answer to your question: I never believed Jesus was God before; it never made sense. And it doesn't make sense now.
The idea of "killing" God is too bizarre for words. Killing the creator of the heavens and the earth? :wacko:
Why would anyone want a mortal "God"?
At the time the gospels were written, this was not a bizarre or even unusual concept at all. Gods manifesting themselves as humans and dying as sacrifices was pretty ordinary back then!
And how could a different - being, for want of a better word - be the perfect sacrifice of a "lamb of the first year"? Wouldn't that be like sacrificing an elephant and calling it a lamb?
Or calling a turtle dove, a genuine substitutionary sacrifice, a "lamb"?
It's not even sacrificing a goat in substitution for a lamb.
It's a figure of speech...Jesus is clearly called the lamb of God in the bible.
Oh, and to answer the original question, I am no longer a bible believer, but I do believe that there was an historical person on whom the biblical Jesus was based and that he wasn't divine. Although I think that there is truth in the bible it isn't TRUTH and that the various writers had different views and opinions of who Jesus was, what his role was and emphasized different things in their writings. Some presented him as a man, some as the avatar of the Old Testament God, some attributing pagan sacrificed god aspects to him. My opinion is that they couldn't agree and the disagreements got canonized as scripture which folks try to make fit. I think some parts of the bible clearly identify Jesus as God, some just as clearly paint him as a man and nothing more. Theologies have been constructed to reconcile the inconsistencies and contradictions and harmonize them, I resolve them by not attributing infallibility and internal consistancy to the bible
Hello, everyone, I took PFAL, back in 1987 and being a Trinitarian as I was at the time and Weirwille's use of the Greek word "with" = Pros, Together with but distinctly independent of. I was surprised at this, I was equaly surprised that Trinitarian theolgians as well state that this is a an accurate definition for the Greek word Pros- meaning that the word was with the God. Have any of you since came to believe that Jesus is indeed God since leaving the Way?
If you mean the Christian God who created the heavens and the earth.. I don't believe so. But you may have to explain what you mean.. Thomas called Jesus, "My lord and my god", and we're all aware how the word god or 'Theos' or 'Elohim' or 'El' (take your pick) can mean a man, judge, deity, angel, or 'other' as long as it is one with power and authority (if one were to define the Greek / Hebrew word).
en archE En (h)o logos
kai (h)o logos En pros ton theon
kai theos En (h)o logos.
Most everyone agrees on the first clause. The word was in the beginning, right??
But then "some" people disagree with the definition of Pros.. But seeing that greek prepositions are mostly detemined by their object's case, and "ton theon" being accusative (going from memory and could be wrong), and pros having the definition of 'near or in proximity" and with genitive objects adding action away from the proximity, dative not adding any more action than resting near the proximity, and accusative objects adding action toward the proximity.. And I think KJV can't be too far off with 'and the word was with God".. But then, I could be wrong! Wouldn't be the 1st, and I'm sure it has surpassed the millionth time since. And "together with but distinctly independent of" while it may be accepted, like Oakspear said, putting any type of exact detail to the precise meaning is just guessing.
The last clause of John 1:1 is actually the most hotly contested in this sentence, not the "Pros". Since we have Cowell's rule, and whether or not it applies. If you ask me, Colwell's rule, while mainly for deciding authenticity of writings rather than grammar itself, still has a great grammatical point as I think it is just a logical one at that and a rule of how pre-verbal anarthrous nouns especially for predicate nouns can be more than just adjectival in nature. But since the rule can't be used to determine the definitiveness of the noun, we are left up to speculation, and every person's whim or opinion.. So it can be as KJV says, "The word was God" and add the article silently in front of the anarthrous noun. Or we can leave it as be in the Greek, and translate it like you would normally translate a predicate nominative and thus The word, logos, no longer IS or WAS (En) God, but instead theos would be considered more an adjective and thus godly. But since only a few other verses did translaters translate theos as "godly" in other verses (as an adjective) and I think remembering looking at those, they could be translated differently, then whose to really say definitely whether The word is godly, or is God! Does it have the qualities and attributes (functions as an adjective) or is it because Colwell and even grammar itself says it doesn't HAVE to have a article to be translated the other way.
So we just can just go around and around with this one. I think.. Opinions, opinions..
My opinion.. Well, I think it is talking about God's word. And says what it says without changing meanings of the "word". Logos being different than rhema, and thus not just someone's spoken words but their intent and heart and this was all godly and in the beginning with God since the start. And it was via His words that all things became in existince. Isn't that what Genesis says?
So if you ask me, John 1 is like Genesis 1, and they both work together speaking of God and His word and will that created it all.
But as I said before, That's my opinion and I am human and thus could be WRONG!!
God to me is the one who has the power and authority over the world. (Man, angel, judge, deity.... Guesses.)..
If I had only VPW's writings to go by, I probably would have changed my views about the Trinity as I changed my views about many TWI doctrines. But there have been and still are many qualified writers who present the case much better than VPW did, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that the Trinity was developed long after Christ and the NT.
TrustAndObey has it right, IMO. The real issue in John 1:1 is not the meaning of "with" but the meaning of "word." If you begin with the assumption that logos is a person, then the whole chapter could seem to be saying something other than what it says. But the logos or "word" has to do with the heart and will and mind of God. Therefore God's Word was God in the same way my word is me. It was understood this way for hundreds of years, even after the doctrine of the Trinity was developed. In all English Bibles before the KJV in 1611, verse 3 of John 1 still read, "All things were made by it; and without it was not any thing made that was made."
Saying the word was "with" God is a Hebrew expression. The following is from John 1:1 Caveat Lector (Reader Beware) by Anthony Buzzard:
Allowance must be made for Hebrew idiom. Without a feel for the Hebrew background, as so often in the New Testament, we are deprived of a vital key to understanding. We might ask of an English speaker, “When was your word last ‘with you’?” The plain fact is that in English, which is not the language of the Bible, a “word” is never “with” you. A person can be “with you,” certainly, but not a word.
But in the wisdom literature of the Bible a “word” certainly can be “with” a person. And the meaning is that a plan or purpose — a word — is kept in one’s heart ready for execution. For example Job says to God (10:13): “Yet these things you have concealed in your heart; I know that this is with you.” The NASV gives a more intelligible sense in English by reading, “ I know that this is within you.” The NIV reads “in your mind.” But the Hebrew literally reads “with you.” Again in Job 23:13, 14 it is said of God, “What his soul desires, that he does, for he performs what is appointed for me, and many such decrees are with him,” meaning, of course, that God’s plans are stored up in His mind. God’s word is His intention, held in His heart as plans to be carried out in the world He has created. Sometimes what God has “with Him” is the decree He has planned. With this we may compare similar thoughts: “This is the portion of a wicked man with God and the inheritance which tyrants receive from Him” (Job 27:13). “I will instruct you in the power of God; what is with the Almighty I will not conceal” (Job 27:11).
It makes perfect sense to me. Then the Word of God became flesh when His plan became reality - at the birth of His Son. It's all about God's plan of salvation coming into fruition, not God becoming a man. John even specifically states that the reason he wrote his Gospel is so that we might believe "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (John 20:31).
But there have been and still are many qualified writers who present the case much better than VPW did, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that the Trinity was developed long after Christ and the NT.
It seems to me that the doctrine of the Trinity was as much an attempt by early Christians to make the bible "fit together like a hand in a glove" as Wierwille's later attempts were. They were faced with the same "apparent contradictions" and had to reconcile somehow sections like John 1:1, which taken by itself sure seems to say that Jesus is God, and others that plainly indicate that Jesus is different and distinct from God. A lot of theological man-hours went into coming up with a theology that would harmonize seemingly contradictory passages. If you're going to maintain that the bible is inerrant, than you have to do something to tie it together. Giving it a label: "The Trinity" makes it look like these guys just pulled a concept out of the paganism of the day when in my opinion they were working overtime to try to make sense out of conflicting verses and viewpoints.
It seems to me that the doctrine of the Trinity was as much an attempt by early Christians to make the bible "fit together like a hand in a glove" as Wierwille's later attempts were. They were faced with the same "apparent contradictions" and had to reconcile somehow sections like John 1:1, which taken by itself sure seems to say that Jesus is God, and others that plainly indicate that Jesus is different and distinct from God. A lot of theological man-hours went into coming up with a theology that would harmonize seemingly contradictory passages. If you're going to maintain that the bible is inerrant, than you have to do something to tie it together. Giving it a label: "The Trinity" makes it look like these guys just pulled a concept out of the paganism of the day when in my opinion they were working overtime to try to make sense out of conflicting verses and viewpoints.
I believe that's sort of the agenda in any systematic theology. And kinda along the same lines - I've shared in doctrinal before of a botanical garden analogy for doctrine that I picked up in an Alister McGrath book .. . scripture as it appears in the Bible is analogous to flowers & shrubs in the wild - they don't appear grouped in any logical fashion other than the natural way they would sprout & thrive in a particular area.
Along comes the theologian [like the botanist] - who gathers up certain samples and then arranges them according to different categories to suit their particular study. Whereas in botany my layman brain assumes there would normally be objective, rigid, distinct categories [for ex. all perennials over here, all annuals over there, all poisonous there, etc.] - in theology there can be some debate over which passages have any relevance to a particular topic.. . then there's the whole thing of whether or not the topic is even valid - I'm thinking of the TWI's "law of believing" for example. But getting back to my point - "legitimate" topics that try to address the overt issues of theology [the nature & identity of Jesus Christ, the nature of man, the church, etc.] I can see valid points made by those on different sides of an issue - and the deeming of a certain passage as appropriate or supportive of a certain doctrine appears to me as hinging entirely on one's interpretation.
It seems to me that the doctrine of the Trinity was as much an attempt by early Christians to make the bible "fit together like a hand in a glove" as Wierwille's later attempts were. They were faced with the same "apparent contradictions" and had to reconcile somehow sections like John 1:1, which taken by itself sure seems to say that Jesus is God, and others that plainly indicate that Jesus is different and distinct from God. A lot of theological man-hours went into coming up with a theology that would harmonize seemingly contradictory passages. If you're going to maintain that the bible is inerrant, than you have to do something to tie it together. Giving it a label: "The Trinity" makes it look like these guys just pulled a concept out of the paganism of the day when in my opinion they were working overtime to try to make sense out of conflicting verses and viewpoints.
As T-Bone said, that's the agenda in any systematic theology. But in those early centuries of Christianity, they ended up with apparent contradictions because they lost sight of the understanding that did make things fit. In the original Hebrew mindset, a person could be called God in a representational sense and not mean he was THE God, the Creator. (Besides, only a small handful of verses call him God in any sense.) The idea of the Messiah being a man, the Son of God who would rule the world on God's behalf, was a simple concept for the Jews that was prophesied throughout their history.
When Greek thought started overshadowing Hebrew (as more and more Gentiles became Christians) this understanding was overshadowed by gnostic and philosophical ideas and that's where the apparent contradictions come from, which led to the dilemma: Is Jesus a god or a created being or a demigod or what? And if he's God and the Father is God, we'd have two Gods, which we can't have. Since Hebrew thought was looked down on by then, they had to come up with a solution from Greek philosophy, and the rest is history.
BTW, John 1:1 only seems to say Jesus is God if one begins with the assumption that "The Word" is a person rather than the mind and plan of God. And that idea was influenced by Greek philosophy too.
BTW, John 1:1 only seems to say Jesus is God if one begins with the assumption that "The Word" is a person rather than the mind and plan of God. And that idea was influenced by Greek philosophy too.
I disagree that one has to start with that assumption:
verse 14:"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth."
I don't have to assume too much, just read what's there.
I think that phrase says more then, and very different then, Jesus is or isn't God. Taking it and not even addressing that issue. Pointing more toward the 'glory'.
The 'only' begotten, there's never been more then one.
It seems to me that the doctrine of the Trinity was as much an attempt by early Christians to make the bible "fit together like a hand in a glove" as Wierwille's later attempts were. They were faced with the same "apparent contradictions" and had to reconcile somehow sections like John 1:1, which taken by itself sure seems to say that Jesus is God, and others that plainly indicate that Jesus is different and distinct from God. A lot of theological man-hours went into coming up with a theology that would harmonize seemingly contradictory passages. If you're going to maintain that the bible is inerrant, than you have to do something to tie it together. Giving it a label: "The Trinity" makes it look like these guys just pulled a concept out of the paganism of the day when in my opinion they were working overtime to try to make sense out of conflicting verses and viewpoints.
If you are really interested, N.T. Wright is really the one to read to put this is some kind of context for you. I know it is not your thing, but you are a bright guy and seem genuinely interested in certain things Christian without ascribing to them. At least having a decided opinion about them as is noted above.
Wright really illuminates the high Christology that is found within the first century church. . . . defined within scripture. . . . and explains it within the context of the pervasive Jewish thought of the day and in Jesus' self-awareness. He persuasively and in a scholarly manner really challenges your statements.
Since I know you are not wedded to a theology and I am not wasting my breath here. . . I thought you might enjoy mulling over a few of his thoughts. . . . otherwise, I would not bother . . . this thread is no different than anything else here. . . pick a corner and fight to the death! :)
Once we recognize, the "five ways" of speaking about God-at-work-in-the-world in first-century Judaism—something which, as I must stress, neither the study of the OT nor the study of the Fathers would have taught me—then it becomes obvious that the key central christological passages of the NT are all heavily dependent on precisely this way of thinking. They offer a very high, completely Jewish, and extremely early christology, something that is still routinely dismissed as impossible, both at the scholarly and the popular level.This was not a matter, as has often been suggested, of the early Christians haphazardly grabbing at every title of honor they could think of and throwing them at Jesus in the hope that some of it might make some sense, rather like a modernist painter hurling paint at a canvas from twenty paces and then standing back to see if it said anything to him. Rather, all the evidence points to serious and disciplined theological thought on the part of the very earliest Christians. Refusing to contemplate any god other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they found themselves drawn by the Spirit to use language of Jesus, and indeed of the Spirit, which was drawn from the Jewish traditions and traditional ways of reading scripture. This language fit so well and enabled them to say so many things by way of worship, mission, proclamation, and ethics that they must have been daily encouraged to pursue the same line of thought, to turn it into hymns and layers and creedal formulae, discovering and celebrating a new dimension of something they already knew like someone who had only known melody suddenly discovering harmony.
The result of all this explosion of exciting but, as I have suggested, focused and disciplined thinking about Jesus and the Spirit is that, in effect, the NT writers offer an incipient trinitarian theology without needing to use any of the technical terms that later centuries would adopt for the same purpose. What is more, when we understand how their language works, we discover that it actually does the job considerably better than the later formulations.
It will be noted that I have come as far as the last paragraph without mentioning the resurrection. Despite a long tradition, I do not regard the resurrection as instantly 'proving Jesus' divinity'. In such Jewish thought as cherished the notion of resurrection was what would happen to everybody, or at least all the righteous. It would not constitute those raised as divine beings. Nor would the 'glorification' of Jesus, his ascension to God's right hand have that effect: Jesus had, in New Testament theology, thereby attained the place marked out from the beginning not for an incarnate being but for the truly human one (note the use of Psalm 8 in e.g. 1 Cor, 15: 27). But this is not to say that the resurrection and ascension have nothing to do with the early church's belief in Jesus' divinity. We must not short-circuit their thought-processes, even though the time involved for such thinking may have been very short.
My own reading of the process goes like this. The resurrection and ascension proved, first and foremost, that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. This meant, at once, that his death had to be regarded in some fashion as a victory, not a defeat, whereupon all Jesus' cryptic sayings about the meaning of his death fell into place. Within that, again very quickly, the earliest Christians came to see that what had been accomplished in Jesus' death and resurrection as the decisive climax to his public career of kingdom-inauguration, was indeed the victory of YHWH over the last enemies, sin and death. And with that they could no longer resist the sense, backed up again by Jesus' cryptic sayings, that in dealing with him they were dealing with the living—and dying—embodiment of YHWH himself, Israel's God in person. From that it is a short step—not a long haul, involving abandoning Jewish categories and embracing those of the pagan [61] world—to speaking of 'that which was from the beginning, which we heard, which we saw with our eyes, which we beheld, and which our hands touched, concerning the word of life' (1 John 1:1). The worship of Jesus in early Jewish Christianity, a worship which was not perceived as flouting monotheism but as discerning its inner heart, was indeed, as is now more regularly seen, the beginnings of Christian thinking about Jesus. But that worship was simply discerning, in the Jewish categories that he had himself made thematic, what lay at the heart of the vocation and self-understanding of Jesus himself.
Question: You say Jesus did not know he was God in a straightforward, propositional sense, and he would not have described his relationship to the rest of the Trinity in the terms used in the early creeds. Jesus instead "knew" his standing/role in a non-propositional sense, in terms of vocation and calling.
Answer: I don't think I use the word 'propositional'; nor do I say 'non-propositional'. These are your terms to try to summarize what I say and I do not think they help.
The point is this. There is of course nothing in the gospels that suggests that Jesus uses the key terms from the Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds (such as homoousion etc). All the evidence suggests that when Jesus uses 'son of God' language of himself this is rooted in his firm belief that he was Israel's messiah and that he understood, within this, his sense, which he must have known was unique, of close relation with the one he called 'abba'. But there is no evidence that the notion of 'trinity' as later developed was something he reflected on or spoke about. Even in the 'trinitarian' formula at the end of Matthew we don't, of course, have any developed language about 'person', 'substance', and so on. That is what I mean by 'didn't describe his relationship to the Father or the Spirit in the terms used in the early creeds'.
The question of whether 'know he was God' is even the right way of expressing the problem is itself puzzling. The later Trinitarian theologians might have said 'know he was divine' or whatever, but -- 'God' without remainder? Peculiar in such a context. Yes, I do think Romans 9.5 predicates theos of Jesus, but everyone knows that's unusual and -- in a typically Pauline way -- challenging, terse and demanding further exploration.
Question: If this is the case, the(i) I wonder on what grounds the apostolic (or later) church came to believe in a high christology. If Jesus didn't have a justified, true, belief that he was in fact God, how could anyone else? One can, of course, posit that the Holy Spirit filled in the details post-resurrection in a fully propositional form, but some evidence of this would be desirable.
Answer: This is very odd, very rationalistic. I am not absolutely sure I know what you mean by 'justified, true belief' (and again note the apparently non-trinitarian 'that he was in fact God'). I have said, again and again, that Jesus did indeed believe he was the one who had to do and be what in scripture YHWH says he alone can do and be. This was a justified belief -- because he really did have that vocation and really did act on it and it really did work out the way one might have expected -- the way, I think, Jesus expected – if and only if it was true; and I of course think it was indeed a true belief.
But the problem seems to be that some people expect a sequence like this:
(i) Jesus believed he was divine (let's not say 'God' simply; I'm too Trinitarian for that!)
(ii) This belief of Jesus about himself was the reason why the early church believed similar things about him.
(Already we seem to be off the point which is about knowledge, rather than belief, but still...)
Whereas I have argued that when the early church -- the very early church, already well before Philippians was written! -- used language about Jesus which indicated its belief that he was somehow identified with Israel's God without denying an interplay of roles between him and the creator -- i.e. the prototrinitarianism we find not only in Phil 2 but also eg Gal 4.1-7 -- this was a way of drawing out, reflecting on the significance of, the entire work which Jesus accomplished, and the Creator's verdict on it all in raising him from the dead, coupled with the early church's mulling over Jesus' own 'sonship' language and its meaning for him and for them. In other words, it isn't a matter of Jesus believing and teaching a doctrine about himself and the early church learning this doctrine from him. That is impossibly rationalistic (again!) and cerebral and bypasses all the really important things that the NT seems to be telling us were going on...
Question: (ii) If Jesus got by without this sort of propositional knowledge, on what grounds do we take it to be so important?
Answer: Are you equating 'justified, true belief' with 'propositional knowledge'? If so, I think I want to shift the terms of the debate quite radically. I want to ask, do you hold some kind of hierarchy of knowledge, whereby some kinds of things are the 'real' or 'deep-level' knowledge and others less so? As you may know, I have come to the view, following Lonergan, that love is the highest mode of knowing; and love, notoriously, is difficult to tie down in propositions. That doesn't mean it isn't knowledge, or that it isn't true, or that it isn't justified, or that it isn't real. I think vocational knowledge -- knowing, in prayer, what God is saying about who you are called to be and become and do -- is quite close to love. I think knowing that two plus two equals four, while fully justified and true and real, is ultimately less significant than knowing I love and am loved, and knowing that God really is calling me to do and be certain things. And my frustration with the debate that swirls around this whole topic of 'Jesus' self-knowledge' is that people often seem to talk as though 'did Jesus know he was God' is more like 'knowing two plus two equals four' whereas I think it's much more like love or vocation.
In other words, I guess I have been driven, by my years of immersing myself in the gospels and in their Jewish context, to rethink all sorts of things about knowledge itself. I'm not claiming that the way I currently put it is correct. I just know (in several senses!) that it makes very good historical sense, theological sense (within a very high Christology and full Trinitarianism), and that it does NOT (against the comment immediately below) mean in any way a 'weakening' of Jesus' self-knowledge but rather a strengthening of it. I'm grateful for the question but I would urge those who are puzzled by all this, not to give up or back off but stick with the question and consider whether their ideas of knowledge might need to be pulled about a bit. Or, if they don't want to do that, whether they are prepared to argue against the ideas of knowledge I'm finding myself driven to.
Unless we have that debate, what's happening is that some people are putting my rather careful statements onto the Procrustean bed of their own late-western epistemologies -- like trying to play a Beethoven quartet on a guitar...
He has a great book called "John for Everyone" in which he addresses the initial question posted on this thread along with numerous other writings. He is fun to read . . . but have a dictionary close by!
Studies of Corinth have abounded recently, and for our purposes amount to the obvious and major conclusion: Corinth was a thoroughly pagan city, typical of many in the ancient world.3 This did not, of course, mean merely that most of the inhabitants went from time to time to worship at pagan shrines and temples. It meant that the world view of the entire town was dominated by pagan assumptions, that the visual appearance of the town was dominated by pagan symbolism, that the normal mind set of the average Corinthian was dominated by pagan ideas, pagan hopes, and pagan motivations, and that the normal life style was dominated by pagan practices. Although the modem Western world is, I believe, moving towards a rediscovery of paganism at quite an alarming rate, it still requires something of a mental effort to reconstruct the picture of a city such as Corinth.4
There was, of course, a sizeable Jewish population in the town, as was true pretty well all around the Mediterranean. How influential this community was we have no means of knowing. Nor is it clear to what extent the Jewish community in Corinth would have clung to some kind of Pharisaic orthodoxy in their belief and behavior, or to what extent they would have been open to new, perhaps Hellenistic, ideas. It is clear, though, that their twin beliefs, monotheism and election, cut clean across all the normal assumptions of paganism. It is in this clash between Judaism and paganism that we find the true background to Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians, not least in chapters 8-10.
Jewish monotheism in this period was not a speculative doctrine about the inner being of the one true god.5 It was the polemical belief that there was only one god, the creator of the whole world, and that all other gods were simply idols, human inventions with possible demonic associations. This belief is to be clearly distinguished from other ancient varieties of monotheism, notably Stoic pantheism. There is all the difference in the world between saying that there is one god because everything that exists is god, and saying that there is one god who made everything that exists. And this Jewish creational monotheism was linked closely with the belief that this one creator god had called Israel to be his special people. Israel's central theology thus equipped her to face the ravages of pagan oppression in the period between the Babylonian exile and the first century, and indeed the events of this period served to strengthen her grip on the belief in her god as the one true god, who would eventually vindicate his name and his people against all other gods and their adherents.
The choices facing Jews in the pagan world were therefore quite stark. One option was to withdraw from contact with the world, to retreat into the ghetto. The problem with this was the strong Jewish belief in the goodness of creation: treating large areas of the world as off limits went against the grain (for instance) of the Psalms with their celebration of the created order. Retreat into dualism, though it often happened, could never represent a wholeheartedly Jewish solution. The other option was of course to assimilate. Jews from that day to this have faced this possibility, and we may presume that then as now some would lose their identity completely, while others would find various compromise solutions. But at the heart of the whole issue we will always find the theological and ethical questions which serve as shorthand for these large socio-cultural issues. Questions of monotheism versus polytheism, questions of the identity of the people of the one God, and questions of behavior with respect to food, drink and sex: these are not merely matters of an abstract theology or ethics, but relate to the entire world view, the entire way of being-in-the-world, of people in the ancient, and I believe the modern world.
III. THE HEART OF PAUL'S RESPONSE: CHRISTOLOGY
With this, we turn to the substantive issue that faced Paul. Should Christians in Corinth eat meat that had been offered to idols? We should be clear how far-reaching the question actually was. Though there is some debate about details, it seems likely that almost all the meat available in a city like Corinth would have been offered at some shrine or other; and idol-temples served not only as butcher's shops but also as restaurants.6 To avoid idol meat altogether might, then, mean de facto vegetarianism (an option forced on some in any case by economic circumstances). For a Jew, facing this question would pose quite sharply the options we just noted. One major Jewish position regarded pagan worship as idolatry, and insisted that genuine monotheists must not flirt with it. Another major Jewish tradition said that idols were non existent and irrelevant, and that the one creator god claimed as his own all that idols have usurped. This second way may well have been helped by the kind of speculative Jewish gnosis according to which one's relationship to the one true god elevated one above the problems of the pagan world.7 The first way could lead to dualism, the second to assimilation. Paul carves out a way which avoids both.
He refuses to discuss the question in terms merely of a practical agenda. He goes (much more readily than some of his commentators) to the substantive issue that lies behind it all, that is, monotheism and idolatry. He does not work with the categories of a post-Reformation agenda, asking whether the "law" is a good thing or a bad thing, debating earnestly about whether "ethics" and "morality" somehow compromise the gospel of free grace. And, despite some recent writers who have suggested that he is simply shooting from the hip, offering haphazard and inconsistent solutions to problems as they come up, I suggest that his solution is actually clear, theologically grounded, and strikingly relevant.8 He offers the church a redefinition of monotheism and election, both achieved by means of his central Christology; and he shows how this redefinition of fundamental Jewish theology enables the church not merely to survive and maintain its identity vis-a-vis paganism but to take on paganism and, in a sense, beat it at its own game. He offers, in short, an incarnational theology for a church in a pagan environment.
This helps to explain the beginning of the argument (8:1-3). Paul responds to the claim to gnosis by insisting on the primacy of Jewish style allegiance to the one true god, as expressed in the central Jewish prayer, the Shema ("'Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God.");
Concerning idol meat, we know that "we all have gnosis." Gnosis puffs you up, but love builds you up. Anyone who claims to "know" something does not yet have the necessary "knowledge"; but anyone who "loves God" is known by God. (vv. 1-3)
Paul is about to quote the Shema explicitly, in v. 4, but he clearly has it in mind already. The question at stake in the discussion of idol meat is, who are the people of God? The Jewish answer is: who says the Shema? Paul begins by affirming this answer, before introducing a striking new dimension:
Concerning meat offered to idols, then, we know that "there is no idol in the world," and that "there is no god but one" (v. 4).
Monotheism is what matters. But this credal statement by itself hardly addresses the situation on the street in Corinth, so he co. . . . . . . .
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cman
Hi and welcome to Greasespot!
A question always brings up more questions....
Do I believe Jesus is God?
No more then I believe myself to be God.
What difference does it make anyway.
A bunch of words supposing to mean something.
One's direct experience with God should not be interpreted lightly.
Or jump the gun, so to speak, and form a set judgment.
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T-Bone
First off - welcome to Grease Spot, afriendinJesus! By the time you took PFAL in 87, I had already left TWI – after 12 years of involvement – and was reexamining just about everything I absorbed from them. I got into systematic theology, reading & comparing commentaries and checking out the biblical languages – outside of TWI's material of course.
My process & motive was and still is at a very basic beginner's level – checking out certain details that I feel are important to my faith. The depth of a particular study being determined by my level of curiosity. So ain't no scholar or theologian here – maybe just a layman who had the wool pulled over my eyes - but now determined to never let anyone jack me around over the nuts & bolts of my faith!
~~
Your remarks about wierwille's handling of "pros" made me laugh and recall how puzzling I found it too as I reviewed stuff. He had a real knack for "redefining" words one way or another to suit his theology – whether it was the biblical languages or even our own English. His twisted handling of the Greek word "pros" is a dandy. He sticks to the accepted definition alright – but it's in his elaboration where the "redefining" happens.
Behind his argument is an assumption that there's no way possible for Jesus Christ to have literally been with God in the beginning – so he asserts there's only one way to understand the passage. Christ was with God in the sense of being in His foreknowledge – in the mind of God. I guess in my TWI mindset I used to think of it as Christ being just a gleam in the Father's eye.
In post-TWI thinking, I found a big problem with his "logic". How can someone's thought be independent of them? If I'm thinking about having children – that thought does indeed exist within me – heck, it's part of me – MY thoughts - but it's certainly not distinctly independent of me! After I checked out the usage of "pros" elsewhere in the Bible and seeing it was consistent with the accepted definition in Greek lexicons – I felt it was underhanded of weirwille to NOT refer to other passages where this key word appears.
I mean – wasn't that a big deal - doing that for certain other words in PFAL? It's like he forgot about all that stuff he said on how the Bible supposedly interprets itself
. I dunno – chalk it up as the quintessential plagiarist's dilemma I guess: when stealing other folks' ideas, occasionally you may have to pull an answer out of your a$ $ if you can't figure out which idea is applicable.
~~
Oh and to answer your question – yes, I now believe Jesus is God.
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Oakspear
Huh? There's a non-TWI source that includes "...but distinctly independent of" to the definition of pros?
To conclude from the whole context of John chapter 1 that Jesus = God makes sense. A plain reading from beginning to end leads to the logical conclusion that the author of John is saying that Jesus is God in the flesh. I understand the contradictions, apparent, actual or otherwise
in other parts of the bible, but Wierwille's biblical gymnastics make little sense and are facile attempts to make this section "fit".
My favorite "he pulled it out of his @$$" explanation is where he defines "name" as "namesake" where John talks about salvation being for those who call on his name. There's no evidence for the word for "name" to be translated "namesake"...oh wait! there must be a text...there must be, or the whole bible would just fall to pieces.
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Cynic
I believe and confess that Jesus Christ is God.
In confessing that Jesus Christ is God, I am affirming that the Lord Jesus is God ontologically. Jesus Christ is an eternal, divine person who possesses that singular, undivided being/essence which alone is God.
I deny, with all orthodox and functioning Trinitarians, both that Jesus Christ is the Father (a heresy of modalists) and that Jesus Christ is declared by Scripture to be God only in some metaphorical, non-substantial sense (one of the heresies of Wierwille).
*****
Link:
“A Brief Definition of the Trinity” (James White)
http://vintage.aomin.org/trinitydef.html
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cman
to be one as Jesus said about himself and the rest of us
i don't doubt that
one is not singular
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T-Bone
Funny you should say that – but good thing – I looked up a couple of references and now I'm thinking wierwille fudged it on the initial definition too – these guys I cite below speak of pros as having a much more intimate connection – not the impersonal and somewhat vague rendering wierwille offered.
The New English Translation, 2nd Beta Edition notes of the preposition "pros" used in John 1:1
"The proposition pros implies not just proximity, but intimate personal relationship. M. Dods stated, 'pros.. .means more than meta or para, and is regularly employed in expressing the presence of one person with another' ("The Gospel of St. John", The Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:684). See also Mark 6:3, Matt 13:56, Mark 9:19, Gal 1:18, 2 John 12."
End of excerpt
~~
And from The New International Commentary on the New Testament: The Gospel of John Revised by Leon Morris, footnote # 14 of page 67 commenting on the use of pros in John 1:1 Morris also cites Dods' work and a few others too
".. .Dods maintains that the preposition 'implies not merely existence alongside of but personal intercourse'.. . According to A.T. Robertson, ''the literal idea comes out well, 'face to face with God' '' (Robertson p.623). He also says, 'face-to-face converse' is in mind (p.625). MacGregor thinks that the preposition 'expresses nearness combined with the sense of movement towards God, and so indicates an active relationship. The Logos and God do not simply exist side by side, but are on terms of living intercourse, and such fellowship implies separate personality.' It is hard to see less.. ."
End of excerpt
~~
After thinking about this a little more – I'd like to revise what I said of wierwille starting off with the accepted definition of pros. It looks to me like he conveniently left out a few details from the get-go. But maybe that's just me. Folks are gonna haggle over the meaning of something anyway – it happens all the time – why, it wasn't too long ago I remember someone noteworthy saying "It depends on what your definition of "is" is."
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George Aar
I've come to believe that Jesus is just another - and likely entirely fictitious - in a looooong litany of superhuman God/men that have been espoused in just about every culture known in history. I can see nothing either unique or compelling in the so-called "witness" of the "scriptures". It strikes me that one must spend an incredible amount of effort explaining away the obvious if one is to keep his "faith". I tired of the game, eventually...
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Sudo
George,
I think you're wrong. I believe there's enough evidence to conclude he existed. Oh, all that stuff about his being one of the gods or Messiah or what not is all nonsense of course but his existence? I mean you have Josephus and Pliny the Younger and.. and.. hmmmm. Well if he didn't exist it makes a dang good story, huh?
sudo
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Oakspear
T-Bone:
Thanks for the look-up.
I am pretty doubtful that Greek prepositions had the precision of meaning that not only Wierwille, but just about any theologian who tackles their usage, attaches to them. Language, no matter how hard the grammarians among us try, is an imprecise tool for rendering our thoughts and feelings into forms that can be understood by others.
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T-Bone
Agreed.. . just think about the communication challenge folks experience within their own language - whether face to face, through a letter or on a website. Your sentiment is something I do think about once and awhile [and probably something I should remind myself of more often] when I get into the biblical languages - realizing there's a few "obscuring" layers I'm trying to peer through:
1. I am not familiar with the biblical languages nor their cultural & historical context
2. I am sifting through another person's knowledge/interpretation of the biblical languages
3. - and probably the most significant point imho, the biblical languages are somewhat dead - not sure if that's an accurate way to put it - you've got the Koine Greek of the New Testament, biblical Hebrew is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, and I don't know anything about the portions written in Aramaic if that is equivalent to the present-day dialect.
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Twinky
Welcome! Settle in with cake and coffee. Enjoy the debate around here.
In answer to your question: I never believed Jesus was God before; it never made sense. And it doesn't make sense now.
The idea of "killing" God is too bizarre for words. Killing the creator of the heavens and the earth? :wacko:
Why would anyone want a mortal "God"?
And how could a different - being, for want of a better word - be the perfect sacrifice of a "lamb of the first year"? Wouldn't that be like sacrificing an elephant and calling it a lamb?
Or calling a turtle dove, a genuine substitutionary sacrifice, a "lamb"?
It's not even sacrificing a goat in substitution for a lamb.
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geisha779
Hi,
I hope you stay around awhile.
Yes, I have come to see that Jesus is God. Fully human and fully divine. . . . not a mortal God.
God has revealed Himself to mankind in many ways. . . . but, the final and greatest way is in the person of Jesus. He is the "word" because He is God's complete revelation of Himself to us.
God . . . . in Christ. . . . reconciling the world unto Himself. Nothing in scripture makes sense without the identity of Jesus.
And most certainly, the mystery of godliness is great:
He was manifested in the flesh,
justified in the Spirit,
seen by angels,
preached among the Gentiles,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.
That is how we now know God. . .He is the fullness of Him who fills all and all. . . not someone to bypass on our way to God. . . HE is the way. . . . for all eternity. . . He is who we know. The bible points to a person. . . . cover to cover. Isn't scripture where we were all seeking God? Isn't scripture a revelation of God? Scripture is the revelation of who? Jesus Christ. . . front to back.
A knowledge outside of Him as God. . . . that . . . is another faith. The light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
In the OT people looked forward to His coming. . . they were searching for Him because God promised. . . they kept saying "How long?" "How long?". He finally comes after a 400 year period of darkness. . . shows up and is rejected by all but a few. . . . even after the resurrection there are only 120 waiting for Him . . . . a lot of them women. . over 500 had seen Him post resurrection. . . . they knew it was Him . . . Herod even knew He rose from the dead. . . he paid off the guards!
Even after being there and seeing these things people still denied who He was. . . . to this day people still deny it in various forms. . . . denying who He Himself claimed to be and calling Him someone else. . . . denying He ever existed or indifference to who He is. . . it is all the same thing.
It is also how we end up with the major and minor religions. . . . they all take Him in part.
My thoughts anyway.
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geisha779
Interesting article for those who struggle with trinitarian theology.
http://bible.org/art...arian-worldview
In The Name Of The Father, Son And Holy Spirit: Constructing A Trinitarian Worldview
"It is part of the pathos of Western theology that it has often believed that while trinitarian theology might well be of edificatory value to those who already believe, for the outsider it is an unfortunate barrier to belief, which must therefore be facilitated by some non-trinitarian apologetic, some essentially monotheistic 'natural theology.' My belief is the reverse: that because the theology of the Trinity has so much to teach about the nature of our world and life within it, it is or could be the centre of Christianity's appeal to the unbeliever, as the good news of a God who enters into free relations of creation and redemption with his world. In the light of the theology of the Trinity, everything looks different. [Colin Gunton]"
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Oakspear
Oh, and to answer the original question, I am no longer a bible believer, but I do believe that there was an historical person on whom the biblical Jesus was based and that he wasn't divine. Although I think that there is truth in the bible it isn't TRUTH and that the various writers had different views and opinions of who Jesus was, what his role was and emphasized different things in their writings. Some presented him as a man, some as the avatar of the Old Testament God, some attributing pagan sacrificed god aspects to him. My opinion is that they couldn't agree and the disagreements got canonized as scripture which folks try to make fit. I think some parts of the bible clearly identify Jesus as God, some just as clearly paint him as a man and nothing more. Theologies have been constructed to reconcile the inconsistencies and contradictions and harmonize them, I resolve them by not attributing infallibility and internal consistancy to the bible
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TrustAndObey
If you mean the Christian God who created the heavens and the earth.. I don't believe so. But you may have to explain what you mean.. Thomas called Jesus, "My lord and my god", and we're all aware how the word god or 'Theos' or 'Elohim' or 'El' (take your pick) can mean a man, judge, deity, angel, or 'other' as long as it is one with power and authority (if one were to define the Greek / Hebrew word).
en archE En (h)o logos
kai (h)o logos En pros ton theon
kai theos En (h)o logos.
Most everyone agrees on the first clause. The word was in the beginning, right??
But then "some" people disagree with the definition of Pros.. But seeing that greek prepositions are mostly detemined by their object's case, and "ton theon" being accusative (going from memory and could be wrong), and pros having the definition of 'near or in proximity" and with genitive objects adding action away from the proximity, dative not adding any more action than resting near the proximity, and accusative objects adding action toward the proximity.. And I think KJV can't be too far off with 'and the word was with God".. But then, I could be wrong! Wouldn't be the 1st, and I'm sure it has surpassed the millionth time since. And "together with but distinctly independent of" while it may be accepted, like Oakspear said, putting any type of exact detail to the precise meaning is just guessing.
The last clause of John 1:1 is actually the most hotly contested in this sentence, not the "Pros". Since we have Cowell's rule, and whether or not it applies. If you ask me, Colwell's rule, while mainly for deciding authenticity of writings rather than grammar itself, still has a great grammatical point as I think it is just a logical one at that and a rule of how pre-verbal anarthrous nouns especially for predicate nouns can be more than just adjectival in nature. But since the rule can't be used to determine the definitiveness of the noun, we are left up to speculation, and every person's whim or opinion.. So it can be as KJV says, "The word was God" and add the article silently in front of the anarthrous noun. Or we can leave it as be in the Greek, and translate it like you would normally translate a predicate nominative and thus The word, logos, no longer IS or WAS (En) God, but instead theos would be considered more an adjective and thus godly. But since only a few other verses did translaters translate theos as "godly" in other verses (as an adjective) and I think remembering looking at those, they could be translated differently, then whose to really say definitely whether The word is godly, or is God! Does it have the qualities and attributes (functions as an adjective) or is it because Colwell and even grammar itself says it doesn't HAVE to have a article to be translated the other way.
So we just can just go around and around with this one. I think.. Opinions, opinions..
My opinion.. Well, I think it is talking about God's word. And says what it says without changing meanings of the "word". Logos being different than rhema, and thus not just someone's spoken words but their intent and heart and this was all godly and in the beginning with God since the start. And it was via His words that all things became in existince. Isn't that what Genesis says?
So if you ask me, John 1 is like Genesis 1, and they both work together speaking of God and His word and will that created it all.
But as I said before, That's my opinion and I am human and thus could be WRONG!!
God to me is the one who has the power and authority over the world. (Man, angel, judge, deity.... Guesses.)..
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Mark Clarke
If I had only VPW's writings to go by, I probably would have changed my views about the Trinity as I changed my views about many TWI doctrines. But there have been and still are many qualified writers who present the case much better than VPW did, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that the Trinity was developed long after Christ and the NT.
TrustAndObey has it right, IMO. The real issue in John 1:1 is not the meaning of "with" but the meaning of "word." If you begin with the assumption that logos is a person, then the whole chapter could seem to be saying something other than what it says. But the logos or "word" has to do with the heart and will and mind of God. Therefore God's Word was God in the same way my word is me. It was understood this way for hundreds of years, even after the doctrine of the Trinity was developed. In all English Bibles before the KJV in 1611, verse 3 of John 1 still read, "All things were made by it; and without it was not any thing made that was made."
Saying the word was "with" God is a Hebrew expression. The following is from John 1:1 Caveat Lector (Reader Beware) by Anthony Buzzard:
It makes perfect sense to me. Then the Word of God became flesh when His plan became reality - at the birth of His Son. It's all about God's plan of salvation coming into fruition, not God becoming a man. John even specifically states that the reason he wrote his Gospel is so that we might believe "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (John 20:31).
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Oakspear
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cman
probably kill another thread but what the hell...
it should be apparent that John speaks of things not seen
how would the word or god become flesh?
if they are the same or not, don't matter
the general point, yeah in general not specific like hand/glove stuff
what is being communicated here in John 1?
it's not- who's who -
but an activation of Christ
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T-Bone
I believe that's sort of the agenda in any systematic theology. And kinda along the same lines - I've shared in doctrinal before of a botanical garden analogy for doctrine that I picked up in an Alister McGrath book .. . scripture as it appears in the Bible is analogous to flowers & shrubs in the wild - they don't appear grouped in any logical fashion other than the natural way they would sprout & thrive in a particular area.
Along comes the theologian [like the botanist] - who gathers up certain samples and then arranges them according to different categories to suit their particular study. Whereas in botany my layman brain assumes there would normally be objective, rigid, distinct categories [for ex. all perennials over here, all annuals over there, all poisonous there, etc.] - in theology there can be some debate over which passages have any relevance to a particular topic.. . then there's the whole thing of whether or not the topic is even valid - I'm thinking of the TWI's "law of believing" for example. But getting back to my point - "legitimate" topics that try to address the overt issues of theology [the nature & identity of Jesus Christ, the nature of man, the church, etc.] I can see valid points made by those on different sides of an issue - and the deeming of a certain passage as appropriate or supportive of a certain doctrine appears to me as hinging entirely on one's interpretation.
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Mark Clarke
As T-Bone said, that's the agenda in any systematic theology. But in those early centuries of Christianity, they ended up with apparent contradictions because they lost sight of the understanding that did make things fit. In the original Hebrew mindset, a person could be called God in a representational sense and not mean he was THE God, the Creator. (Besides, only a small handful of verses call him God in any sense.) The idea of the Messiah being a man, the Son of God who would rule the world on God's behalf, was a simple concept for the Jews that was prophesied throughout their history.
When Greek thought started overshadowing Hebrew (as more and more Gentiles became Christians) this understanding was overshadowed by gnostic and philosophical ideas and that's where the apparent contradictions come from, which led to the dilemma: Is Jesus a god or a created being or a demigod or what? And if he's God and the Father is God, we'd have two Gods, which we can't have. Since Hebrew thought was looked down on by then, they had to come up with a solution from Greek philosophy, and the rest is history.
BTW, John 1:1 only seems to say Jesus is God if one begins with the assumption that "The Word" is a person rather than the mind and plan of God. And that idea was influenced by Greek philosophy too.
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Oakspear
verse 14:"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth."
I don't have to assume too much, just read what's there.
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cman
I think that phrase says more then, and very different then, Jesus is or isn't God. Taking it and not even addressing that issue. Pointing more toward the 'glory'.
The 'only' begotten, there's never been more then one.
Started long before the gospels records.
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geisha779
If you are really interested, N.T. Wright is really the one to read to put this is some kind of context for you. I know it is not your thing, but you are a bright guy and seem genuinely interested in certain things Christian without ascribing to them. At least having a decided opinion about them as is noted above.
Wright really illuminates the high Christology that is found within the first century church. . . . defined within scripture. . . . and explains it within the context of the pervasive Jewish thought of the day and in Jesus' self-awareness. He persuasively and in a scholarly manner really challenges your statements.
Since I know you are not wedded to a theology and I am not wasting my breath here. . . I thought you might enjoy mulling over a few of his thoughts. . . . otherwise, I would not bother . . . this thread is no different than anything else here. . . pick a corner and fight to the death! :)
http://www.ntwrightp...
Once we recognize, the "five ways" of speaking about God-at-work-in-the-world in first-century Judaism—something which, as I must stress, neither the study of the OT nor the study of the Fathers would have taught me—then it becomes obvious that the key central christological passages of the NT are all heavily dependent on precisely this way of thinking. They offer a very high, completely Jewish, and extremely early christology, something that is still routinely dismissed as impossible, both at the scholarly and the popular level. This was not a matter, as has often been suggested, of the early Christians haphazardly grabbing at every title of honor they could think of and throwing them at Jesus in the hope that some of it might make some sense, rather like a modernist painter hurling paint at a canvas from twenty paces and then standing back to see if it said anything to him. Rather, all the evidence points to serious and disciplined theological thought on the part of the very earliest Christians. Refusing to contemplate any god other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they found themselves drawn by the Spirit to use language of Jesus, and indeed of the Spirit, which was drawn from the Jewish traditions and traditional ways of reading scripture. This language fit so well and enabled them to say so many things by way of worship, mission, proclamation, and ethics that they must have been daily encouraged to pursue the same line of thought, to turn it into hymns and layers and creedal formulae, discovering and celebrating a new dimension of something they already knew like someone who had only known melody suddenly discovering harmony.
The result of all this explosion of exciting but, as I have suggested, focused and disciplined thinking about Jesus and the Spirit is that, in effect, the NT writers offer an incipient trinitarian theology without needing to use any of the technical terms that later centuries would adopt for the same purpose. What is more, when we understand how their language works, we discover that it actually does the job considerably better than the later formulations.
http://www.ntwrightp..._Jesus_Self.htm
It will be noted that I have come as far as the last paragraph without mentioning the resurrection. Despite a long tradition, I do not regard the resurrection as instantly 'proving Jesus' divinity'. In such Jewish thought as cherished the notion of resurrection was what would happen to everybody, or at least all the righteous. It would not constitute those raised as divine beings. Nor would the 'glorification' of Jesus, his ascension to God's right hand have that effect: Jesus had, in New Testament theology, thereby attained the place marked out from the beginning not for an incarnate being but for the truly human one (note the use of Psalm 8 in e.g. 1 Cor, 15: 27). But this is not to say that the resurrection and ascension have nothing to do with the early church's belief in Jesus' divinity. We must not short-circuit their thought-processes, even though the time involved for such thinking may have been very short.
My own reading of the process goes like this. The resurrection and ascension proved, first and foremost, that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. This meant, at once, that his death had to be regarded in some fashion as a victory, not a defeat, whereupon all Jesus' cryptic sayings about the meaning of his death fell into place. Within that, again very quickly, the earliest Christians came to see that what had been accomplished in Jesus' death and resurrection as the decisive climax to his public career of kingdom-inauguration, was indeed the victory of YHWH over the last enemies, sin and death. And with that they could no longer resist the sense, backed up again by Jesus' cryptic sayings, that in dealing with him they were dealing with the living—and dying—embodiment of YHWH himself, Israel's God in person. From that it is a short step—not a long haul, involving abandoning Jewish categories and embracing those of the pagan [61] world—to speaking of 'that which was from the beginning, which we heard, which we saw with our eyes, which we beheld, and which our hands touched, concerning the word of life' (1 John 1:1). The worship of Jesus in early Jewish Christianity, a worship which was not perceived as flouting monotheism but as discerning its inner heart, was indeed, as is now more regularly seen, the beginnings of Christian thinking about Jesus. But that worship was simply discerning, in the Jewish categories that he had himself made thematic, what lay at the heart of the vocation and self-understanding of Jesus himself.
http://www.ntwrightp...id_June2007.htm
Question: You say Jesus did not know he was God in a straightforward, propositional sense, and he would not have described his relationship to the rest of the Trinity in the terms used in the early creeds. Jesus instead "knew" his standing/role in a non-propositional sense, in terms of vocation and calling.
Answer: I don't think I use the word 'propositional'; nor do I say 'non-propositional'. These are your terms to try to summarize what I say and I do not think they help.
The point is this. There is of course nothing in the gospels that suggests that Jesus uses the key terms from the Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds (such as homoousion etc). All the evidence suggests that when Jesus uses 'son of God' language of himself this is rooted in his firm belief that he was Israel's messiah and that he understood, within this, his sense, which he must have known was unique, of close relation with the one he called 'abba'. But there is no evidence that the notion of 'trinity' as later developed was something he reflected on or spoke about. Even in the 'trinitarian' formula at the end of Matthew we don't, of course, have any developed language about 'person', 'substance', and so on. That is what I mean by 'didn't describe his relationship to the Father or the Spirit in the terms used in the early creeds'.
The question of whether 'know he was God' is even the right way of expressing the problem is itself puzzling. The later Trinitarian theologians might have said 'know he was divine' or whatever, but -- 'God' without remainder? Peculiar in such a context. Yes, I do think Romans 9.5 predicates theos of Jesus, but everyone knows that's unusual and -- in a typically Pauline way -- challenging, terse and demanding further exploration.
Question: If this is the case, the(i) I wonder on what grounds the apostolic (or later) church came to believe in a high christology. If Jesus didn't have a justified, true, belief that he was in fact God, how could anyone else? One can, of course, posit that the Holy Spirit filled in the details post-resurrection in a fully propositional form, but some evidence of this would be desirable.
Answer: This is very odd, very rationalistic. I am not absolutely sure I know what you mean by 'justified, true belief' (and again note the apparently non-trinitarian 'that he was in fact God'). I have said, again and again, that Jesus did indeed believe he was the one who had to do and be what in scripture YHWH says he alone can do and be. This was a justified belief -- because he really did have that vocation and really did act on it and it really did work out the way one might have expected -- the way, I think, Jesus expected – if and only if it was true; and I of course think it was indeed a true belief.
But the problem seems to be that some people expect a sequence like this:
(i) Jesus believed he was divine (let's not say 'God' simply; I'm too Trinitarian for that!)
(ii) This belief of Jesus about himself was the reason why the early church believed similar things about him.
(Already we seem to be off the point which is about knowledge, rather than belief, but still...)
Whereas I have argued that when the early church -- the very early church, already well before Philippians was written! -- used language about Jesus which indicated its belief that he was somehow identified with Israel's God without denying an interplay of roles between him and the creator -- i.e. the prototrinitarianism we find not only in Phil 2 but also eg Gal 4.1-7 -- this was a way of drawing out, reflecting on the significance of, the entire work which Jesus accomplished, and the Creator's verdict on it all in raising him from the dead, coupled with the early church's mulling over Jesus' own 'sonship' language and its meaning for him and for them. In other words, it isn't a matter of Jesus believing and teaching a doctrine about himself and the early church learning this doctrine from him. That is impossibly rationalistic (again!) and cerebral and bypasses all the really important things that the NT seems to be telling us were going on...
Question: (ii) If Jesus got by without this sort of propositional knowledge, on what grounds do we take it to be so important?
Answer: Are you equating 'justified, true belief' with 'propositional knowledge'? If so, I think I want to shift the terms of the debate quite radically. I want to ask, do you hold some kind of hierarchy of knowledge, whereby some kinds of things are the 'real' or 'deep-level' knowledge and others less so? As you may know, I have come to the view, following Lonergan, that love is the highest mode of knowing; and love, notoriously, is difficult to tie down in propositions. That doesn't mean it isn't knowledge, or that it isn't true, or that it isn't justified, or that it isn't real. I think vocational knowledge -- knowing, in prayer, what God is saying about who you are called to be and become and do -- is quite close to love. I think knowing that two plus two equals four, while fully justified and true and real, is ultimately less significant than knowing I love and am loved, and knowing that God really is calling me to do and be certain things. And my frustration with the debate that swirls around this whole topic of 'Jesus' self-knowledge' is that people often seem to talk as though 'did Jesus know he was God' is more like 'knowing two plus two equals four' whereas I think it's much more like love or vocation.
In other words, I guess I have been driven, by my years of immersing myself in the gospels and in their Jewish context, to rethink all sorts of things about knowledge itself. I'm not claiming that the way I currently put it is correct. I just know (in several senses!) that it makes very good historical sense, theological sense (within a very high Christology and full Trinitarianism), and that it does NOT (against the comment immediately below) mean in any way a 'weakening' of Jesus' self-knowledge but rather a strengthening of it. I'm grateful for the question but I would urge those who are puzzled by all this, not to give up or back off but stick with the question and consider whether their ideas of knowledge might need to be pulled about a bit. Or, if they don't want to do that, whether they are prepared to argue against the ideas of knowledge I'm finding myself driven to.
Unless we have that debate, what's happening is that some people are putting my rather careful statements onto the Procrustean bed of their own late-western epistemologies -- like trying to play a Beethoven quartet on a guitar...
He has a great book called "John for Everyone" in which he addresses the initial question posted on this thread along with numerous other writings. He is fun to read . . . but have a dictionary close by!
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geisha779
Oakspear. . . a little more. . . . http://jmm.aaa.net.a...icles/18656.htm
Studies of Corinth have abounded recently, and for our purposes amount to the obvious and major conclusion: Corinth was a thoroughly pagan city, typical of many in the ancient world.3 This did not, of course, mean merely that most of the inhabitants went from time to time to worship at pagan shrines and temples. It meant that the world view of the entire town was dominated by pagan assumptions, that the visual appearance of the town was dominated by pagan symbolism, that the normal mind set of the average Corinthian was dominated by pagan ideas, pagan hopes, and pagan motivations, and that the normal life style was dominated by pagan practices. Although the modem Western world is, I believe, moving towards a rediscovery of paganism at quite an alarming rate, it still requires something of a mental effort to reconstruct the picture of a city such as Corinth.4
There was, of course, a sizeable Jewish population in the town, as was true pretty well all around the Mediterranean. How influential this community was we have no means of knowing. Nor is it clear to what extent the Jewish community in Corinth would have clung to some kind of Pharisaic orthodoxy in their belief and behavior, or to what extent they would have been open to new, perhaps Hellenistic, ideas. It is clear, though, that their twin beliefs, monotheism and election, cut clean across all the normal assumptions of paganism. It is in this clash between Judaism and paganism that we find the true background to Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians, not least in chapters 8-10.
Jewish monotheism in this period was not a speculative doctrine about the inner being of the one true god.5 It was the polemical belief that there was only one god, the creator of the whole world, and that all other gods were simply idols, human inventions with possible demonic associations. This belief is to be clearly distinguished from other ancient varieties of monotheism, notably Stoic pantheism. There is all the difference in the world between saying that there is one god because everything that exists is god, and saying that there is one god who made everything that exists. And this Jewish creational monotheism was linked closely with the belief that this one creator god had called Israel to be his special people. Israel's central theology thus equipped her to face the ravages of pagan oppression in the period between the Babylonian exile and the first century, and indeed the events of this period served to strengthen her grip on the belief in her god as the one true god, who would eventually vindicate his name and his people against all other gods and their adherents.
The choices facing Jews in the pagan world were therefore quite stark. One option was to withdraw from contact with the world, to retreat into the ghetto. The problem with this was the strong Jewish belief in the goodness of creation: treating large areas of the world as off limits went against the grain (for instance) of the Psalms with their celebration of the created order. Retreat into dualism, though it often happened, could never represent a wholeheartedly Jewish solution. The other option was of course to assimilate. Jews from that day to this have faced this possibility, and we may presume that then as now some would lose their identity completely, while others would find various compromise solutions. But at the heart of the whole issue we will always find the theological and ethical questions which serve as shorthand for these large socio-cultural issues. Questions of monotheism versus polytheism, questions of the identity of the people of the one God, and questions of behavior with respect to food, drink and sex: these are not merely matters of an abstract theology or ethics, but relate to the entire world view, the entire way of being-in-the-world, of people in the ancient, and I believe the modern world.
III. THE HEART OF PAUL'S RESPONSE: CHRISTOLOGY
With this, we turn to the substantive issue that faced Paul. Should Christians in Corinth eat meat that had been offered to idols? We should be clear how far-reaching the question actually was. Though there is some debate about details, it seems likely that almost all the meat available in a city like Corinth would have been offered at some shrine or other; and idol-temples served not only as butcher's shops but also as restaurants.6 To avoid idol meat altogether might, then, mean de facto vegetarianism (an option forced on some in any case by economic circumstances). For a Jew, facing this question would pose quite sharply the options we just noted. One major Jewish position regarded pagan worship as idolatry, and insisted that genuine monotheists must not flirt with it. Another major Jewish tradition said that idols were non existent and irrelevant, and that the one creator god claimed as his own all that idols have usurped. This second way may well have been helped by the kind of speculative Jewish gnosis according to which one's relationship to the one true god elevated one above the problems of the pagan world.7 The first way could lead to dualism, the second to assimilation. Paul carves out a way which avoids both.
He refuses to discuss the question in terms merely of a practical agenda. He goes (much more readily than some of his commentators) to the substantive issue that lies behind it all, that is, monotheism and idolatry. He does not work with the categories of a post-Reformation agenda, asking whether the "law" is a good thing or a bad thing, debating earnestly about whether "ethics" and "morality" somehow compromise the gospel of free grace. And, despite some recent writers who have suggested that he is simply shooting from the hip, offering haphazard and inconsistent solutions to problems as they come up, I suggest that his solution is actually clear, theologically grounded, and strikingly relevant.8 He offers the church a redefinition of monotheism and election, both achieved by means of his central Christology; and he shows how this redefinition of fundamental Jewish theology enables the church not merely to survive and maintain its identity vis-a-vis paganism but to take on paganism and, in a sense, beat it at its own game. He offers, in short, an incarnational theology for a church in a pagan environment.
This helps to explain the beginning of the argument (8:1-3). Paul responds to the claim to gnosis by insisting on the primacy of Jewish style allegiance to the one true god, as expressed in the central Jewish prayer, the Shema ("'Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God.");
Concerning idol meat, we know that "we all have gnosis." Gnosis puffs you up, but love builds you up. Anyone who claims to "know" something does not yet have the necessary "knowledge"; but anyone who "loves God" is known by God. (vv. 1-3)
Paul is about to quote the Shema explicitly, in v. 4, but he clearly has it in mind already. The question at stake in the discussion of idol meat is, who are the people of God? The Jewish answer is: who says the Shema? Paul begins by affirming this answer, before introducing a striking new dimension:
Concerning meat offered to idols, then, we know that "there is no idol in the world," and that "there is no god but one" (v. 4).
Monotheism is what matters. But this credal statement by itself hardly addresses the situation on the street in Corinth, so he co. . . . . . . .
Edited by geisha779Link to comment
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