Jesus as Lord in Mark

I think the Greeks were doing what they had to do as a consequence of the success of the apocalyptic narrative. They had to answer Greek questions, and they devised many hermeneutical strategems to give the appearance at least that they were answering those questions biblically.

Maybe you don’t mean it this way Andrew, but that statement comes across as if you are saying that those folks that hammered out what has been accepted as correct/orthodox theology for centuries now were not being entirely honest.  To “devise stragems” to “give the appearance at least” of being “biblical” sounds like a very pragmatic attempt at coming up with an answer they thought would work—and would even give an “appearance” of coming from Scripture itself and thus correct.  It doesn’t sound like you think they were really interested in the truth—only an answer that worked at the moment.

Andrew, have you ever read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s classic “The Prophets”? I became acquainted with him years ago when the Mennonites used his book at a pastoral seminar. I sat in and was astounded by this man’s insights. Over the years, I’ve re-read this book with its ability to penetrate the prophet’s understanding of God and what is revealed by it. I have to say I’ve learned more from this Jewish theologian than pretty much any Christian theologian.

Why I bring him and this book to your attention is that he is constantly dealing with the contrasts that occur in history as the biblical God gets revealed in relationship to everything else. By the end of the first volume (both volumes are now combined into one for a text that is a little under 500 pages), one is confronted with God’s pathos, something Heschel indentifies as that which sets the biblical God apart and over against everyone else. In the second volume he delves further into a theology of Pathos and demonstrates the contrasts by showing how the Greek gods went about their business. He also has an excellent paragraph concerning the Muslim conception of Allah, and he does NOT place this within the Greek understanding. That caught my attention.

Here is what I wanted to get to, a quote that begins his chapter on the Philosophy of Pathos:

“The Repudiation of the Divine Pathos: For more than two thousand years Jewish and later Christian theologians have been deeply embarrassed by the constant references in the Bible to the divine pathos. What were the reasons for that embarrassment? Why did they oppose the idea of pathos? The opposition, it seems, was due to a combination of philosophical presuppositions which have their origin in classical Greek thinking.”

He then goes on with his “task”:

“It will be our task to set forth these presuppositions, to examine their validity, to show that these presuppositions represent a particular philosophical perspective, and to inquire whether that perspective is the only way to truth, or whether an alternative way may not disclose a more plausible view of ultimate reality.”

For me, Heschel is doing for theology what you are attempting to do with the biblical narrative in a historical way. However, he is showing how ideas can distort something and making it so obvious to us since we’ve been inundated with it for so long. His contrasts were a revelation to me when I first picked up this book. I found I needed these contrasts to “see.” In one sense I needed to walk in the shoes of the “other” to do this — not to bring my apologetics to bear — as much as to gain understanding of something new to me. Putting aside the apologetics of what was familiar allowed me to learn from Heschel.

It is this exposure that makes me feel that your statement “I think the Greeks were doing what they had to do as a consequence of the success of the apocalyptic narrative. They had to answer Greek questions…” needs to be challenged. I have actually been more accepting of your challenges in the Trinitarian posts than those that see the triumph of Christ over paganism in the empire and therefore allowing the “success of the apocalyptic narrative.” I see this more as a “false start” with tremedous consquences to the understanding of the church in the world than anything else. It most certainly affects the current discussion. Could Heshel’s “task” be used here as well to suggest “whether an alternative way may not disclose a more plausible view of ultimate reality”?

The question I have about Heschel, with his theology of pathos, is why he never came to see God acting in Jesus — doing Messiah in the way of pathos. It might just be that he did not see in Jesus’ followers the way of his God. He is also a corrective to the Protestant understanding of Judaism, the basis of so much misunderstanding of Paul.

Mark

Hi Cherylu,

I didn’t respond to you immediately because I needed to understand what you were asking in the second part of your response, which I see is two questions. I also knew that any response would require some context. I hope you will bear with me in my endeavor to answer you.

But first, regarding your first paragraph: Yes, that you would defend something you think is truth, especially with its historical pedigree, and would put it forward when you see a challenge to it is certainly to be expected. C. FitzSimons Allison, in his book “The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy” would put it like this: “Who would ever claim one’s own currently held opinion to be false?” So, in one sense, you have confirmed his statement.

In your second paragraph I do indeed think you are asking legitimate questions. Maybe I can answer them by giving you my situation in life. I come out of the Reformed tradition, not because I saw anything wrong while within it, but because I got acquainted with, and therefore saw it in relationship to, how it treated those outside it. When I got acquainted with Anabaptism through a Mennonite friend of mine, I read about their interaction with the powers that be at the time. There is a standing bit of dark humor in Anabaptist circles that says “The one thing both Protestants and Catholics could agree on was that it was right and proper to murder Anabaptists for God’s sake.” It was how the Anabaptists responded to all this that caught my attention, and started me rethinking everything that goes with what is called the “Constantinian Shift,” including the orthodox doctrine that comes with it.

Anabaptists for the most part remained Trinitarian. Mennonites are to this day Trinitarian. So I certainly recognize that the doctrine itself does not make for “bad fruit.” It is that once I saw something not quite right between what Jesus calls his disciples to, and the justifications for subsequent behavior on the part of the Church to defend orthodoxy, I knew I would never fit back in that context again. So, when Jesus says “You will know them by their fruit,” it is his words right here in this context that come to mind, and therefore this is my reason for making the association. But I do also recognize that most groups will defend their self-preservation, violently if push comes to shove; so even Arianism could do the same given the opportunity. If it had won the day, I would still probably be trying to figure all this out. But the nagging questions that kept coming to mind is “Do I really need to figure all this out? Is this the onus of revelation?

Once you ask that question, you move into an entirely different frame of reference. And if you do that, you ask whether in previous history that kind of shift occurred with others. And, of course, it challenges one to try to understand something like what Andrew is doing. The only way I can do that is put aside the apologetics of my “received” frame of reference, get into his world, and understand it on its own terms. And if it is a better fit than what I have been taught, then there is where I will go. Just because a bickering group of powerful church leaders make a decision in their own frame of reference and enforce it on everyone they can does not mean Jesus had anything to do with it. I thought we would have learned this lesson in John the Baptist’s reponse to the religious leaders when they came inquiring about him.

For the past two years I’ve been in a Muslim community, invited in to learn about Islam where it lives, in a third grade class of their children for Arabic and Quran. My wife and I decided we must understand Islam on its own terms. When I told one of my Christian friends where we were, he asked if I thought I could possibly mend the 1400 year Christian/Islam divide by doing what we were doing. I responded, “Well, it certainly has more chance of success than starting the newest Crusade!”

Being a Christian in America right now lends itself to a certain responsibility and call to discernment in light this context.

It is an eye-opening experience — to me anyway — of what Muslims think of us. Not what the Christian textbooks say they say; what they say themselves. I was with a group of Muslim men at an Iftar dinner (the evening meal that breaks a Ramadan day of fasting), asking questions about their life together in America. Being the only Christian there, it was inevitable that someone would begin challenging me to the “pagan idea of trinity” that I believe about the one true God. Well, I was far enough along in my own question about where the onus of revelation lay that I realized this was just going to be a distraction rather than any clarification. So I proceeded to talk about the story of Messiah Jesus and what it meant for God to work through him in relationship to Israel, and then the world. This was entirely new to them (as it was to me as well!).

This has been lengthy, Cherylu, but I wanted to give you some idea of why I interact with Andrew the way I do. As I said in response to his response to me above, it is a Jewish Theologian that fills out Jesus for me better than most of what I get in Christian theology, simply because of that Greek world where most of what is considered paramount belief in Christianity was forged. Something is definitely wrong; it had and continues to produce a history in relationship to the rest of the world that seems to create the next muddled situation that I have to work through if I want to be faithful to relating Jesus. The kind of Christian parochialism that thinks it is presenting Jesus in a framework that even the outside world can show is problematic (Heschel above), especially when it fails time and again, is not something I can sit back and watch without attempting to remediate. It is the toughest thing I have ever attempted to do, mainly because I find myself alone in doing it. But I have no other alternative.

Mark

Andrew,

I don’t know if I can do a very good job of expressing what I am thinking here in relationship to your last comment or not.

Your argument seems to be consistently resting on the fact that Jesus was given His authority by God.  That He was a man that God had delegated authority and Kingship to.

In this comment, I am referring specifically to your argument from Daniel 7:13-14.  I have just reread that chapter.

And you know, I can not see at all how the fact that the Son of Man came on the clouds to be presented before the Ancient of Days and receive dominion, etc, precludes Him being God from eternity past.

(As an aside, I see this reference to Him coming on the clouds as referring to His ascension into heaven, Acts 1:9, not as some reference to His being given authority while on earth as C. A. Evans seems to be stating.)

The fact that He was given “ruling authority, honor, and sovereignty,” is, in my understanding, something that He is given in His new position and being as the eternal God/man.  The fact that He was God from eternity past does not negate the fact that He has now taken on something He never had before—the additional nature of humanity.  It is in this capacity, and by virtue of what He accomplished for humanity in His earthly ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension, that He is now given this Lordship by the Father.  Not that He as God didn’t have it before.  But that He as the God/man didn’t have it before, because in fact before the incarnation there was no God/man to have this authority, and never before had He done what He did in that earthly capacity as God incarnate.

I believe that the Bible, the New Testament in particular, says way too much pointing to the fact that He was indeed the pre existent God to write that thought off and see this issue of Him receiving Lordship in any other way.

As I said, I don’t know if I was able to express that very well.  But I hope it made sense and got my thinking across.

John was not speaking of a status given to Jesus when he proclaimed Isaiah 40:3 in Mark 1:3, and neither was ‘Lord’ as a status something bestowed on Jesus in Philippians 2:11; it was a declaration of who he was.

The distinction between ‘to Jesus’ and ‘about Jesus’ in Philippians 2:6-11 also entirely misses the point. It is a credal hymn of praise to Jesus whichever way you look at it.

My comment on Son of Man in Mark 2:7 was not central to the issue, and some of the commentators you quote seem bizarre in the light of up to date critical work on ‘son of man’.

“It’s an astute comment, and I accept that there may well be subtle ways in which I am bending the evidence to fit my thesis.  We all do that.”

You know Andrew, that is the first time I have ever seen you  actually admit at all that you have any bias whatsoever in this discussion of who Jesus really was/is.

And after all of your insistence through the years that you were just going where the evidence leads, that was quite a statement indeed!

Hi Cherylu,

This is why I want to move Andrew toward the direction of defending his interpretive paradigm. It is, for all intents and purposes, a purely rationalistic approach to a text of divine origin. Only if Andrew can show that his intepretive paradigm can he proceed to draw inferences and make conclusions about the content of Scripture. I am not arguing that narrative theology is utterly bankrupt as one of many tools in the interpreters toolbox. What I intend to show is that it is not appropriate to use that method as an interpretive paradigm.

The fountainhead of this discussion and all discussions relating to Christianity is epistemic authority. Historic Christian orthodoxy has maintained that Scripture is our sole authority and that all knowledge is revelational. Andrew’s approach is a categorical denial of both of these claims. Hence, he approaches the Scripture as if he is the authority, and treats it as if he would any other piece of literature. THAT approach has never been commendable within the Christian community and even though many so-called Christian communities do endorse that attitude, they only show signs of apostasy with such commendations. Now I do not mean that last remark to be offensive, even though I realize it might be taken as such. I do intend it to be reflective of the Church’s attitude toward teachers who create confusion around basic issues like the nature of Scripture and the person of Jesus Christ.

I have a difficult time disciplining myself in conversations with people who claim to be Christian and even evangelical while denying the divinity of Christ and the true nature of Scripture. I do not know how long the conversation with Andrew will carry on, but I am under no delusion that I will desuade him from holding to his methods. That will only come if God extends special grace. However, there are others reading the threads and the comments and perhaps I might say something that is encouraging and uplifting to them. That is my sincere hope. God’s will be done.

It is then just plain common sense to read an ancient text, written in an ancient language, in relation to its linguistic, literary, and historical context. That is what a historicalreading is, by definition. It is different from a theological reading, which operates largely without meaningful reference to linguistic, literary, and historical context.

And this is why your views are held by so few? It is because so few people possess plain common sense? That is a significant over simplification in my humble opinion. The grammatico-historical method, held by the overwhelming majority of evangelicals would agree that we must always examine the socio-historical setting, linguistics, genre, etc in our efforts to understand the text. But your definition is different, new, perhaps even radical. Hence, the new kid always must prove himself. Moreover, I am not saying the narrative approach has nothing  whatever to commend it. Like socio-science criticism, it has the ability to enrich our undersanding. But to elevate it to a place of prominence, to make it our interpretive paradigm is highly questionable, and seriously problematic in my view. Finally, theological readings do NOT operate without meaningful reference to these tools. That simply is not true. They are bound up together and it is a false dichotomy to create such a hard divorce between them. We have learned a similar lesson in philosophy with the problem of criterion and the relationship between ontology and epistemology.

I think of this as an “evangelical” program because it holds to a New Testament understanding of the “gospel” as an announcement to Israel and the nations about the coming eschatological transformation.

Fundamental to evangelicalism is a high view of Scripture and a high Christology. Your view rejects both. Hence, it is not evangelical. You are guilty of bifurcating on the term.

The quotation of Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1 raises the question, but as I pointed out, the answer provided is that Jesus as Son of Man is given the authority to forgive, judge, rule, etc. It is never asserted that he has such authority, that he is kyrios by nature.

Mal. 3:1-3 Behold I am going to send MY messenger, and he will clear the way before ME. And the Lord, WHO YOU SEEK, will suddenly come to His temple:

Now this is clearly Mark’s reference. And Malachi is clearly saying that God is coming to His temple. Adon is never used with the article where it does not refer to THE LORD GOD! He says the Lord whom you seek. Clearly Malachi is speaking for God Himself. Mark says this is that! In other words, Jesus is God come to His temple. The Son of Man is given authority refers to the servant, the human perspective of the Christ, not the divine. It also provides for human accomodation.  Surely you are aware of this understanding.

We are talking about Mark, but in my hermeneutic, it is illegitimate to look at any one document in a silo. The entire corpus of Scripture is viewed as a unified whole with one message to humanity. It is unsafe to divide the Word of God as if God is schizophrenic. We begin with an immediate text and work out from there in order to valdiate our understanding of the text using sound exegetical principles. In addition, there are no atheological readings of the Scripture. In other words, the attempt at a pure historical reading of the text, especially a religious text, and especially this religious text in particular is an unattainable goal. I will say more about that below.

As a blanket statement that is patently untrue. What about Jewish hermeneutical methods? What about the hermeneutics of a fourfold medieval exegesis? The theological reading of the New Testament which you apply is just as much a hermeneutical method as the historical method—arguably more so. The Bible is a collection of historical texts, and the hermeneutical starting point has to be to read them historically.

Do you mean the kind of Jewish hermeneutical methods that accused Jesus of being demon possessed, attempted to embarrass and stone him, and eventually lied about him and had him crucificed? Yes, I am confortable saying that all Jewish hermeutical methods that resulted in a rejection of Jesus’ claim to be the unique Son of God, the Messiah, God of very God, were in fact, and are in fact hostile to God. Jesus told them Himself that they were of their father the devil. He told them that they were clearly in error because they did not understand Scripture. In how many ways did Jesus rebuke Jewish interpretive paradigms of His day? I cannot count them. Is that the method we should adopt? The one the murdered the Christ? The one that Paul said considered the gospel to be scandalous? Jesus stood in front of the Jewish nation, the one whose hermeneutic you seem to think we ought to emulate, and turned from them because they rejected the Christ. It seems to me that if their hemeneutic was so spot on, they would have recognized and embraced their King. They did not. It seems to me to be highly problematic to affirm the very hermeneutical methods that rejected the Christ and were responsible for murdering Him.

The goal of attaining a purely historical reading of the text is impossible. It should be abandoned for the utter folly that it is. No one approaches the Scriptures without some theological bias. To say we do is naive at best and disingenuous at worse. Scripture itself teaches us that men are hostile to God. The natural man is not able to discern spiritual matters. The divine revelation of Scripture is indeed a spiritual matter.

I applaud advances in hermeneutics that legitimately seek to enrich our understanding and build upon those things we have spent 2,000 years learning. I am by no means an advocate of uncritical approaches to the text. But when a new critical kid shows up, claiming he has found something that no one else before him ever thought of and it changes everything, I cannot help but subject that kid to heavy scrutiny. Many of these new kids on the block are children of discontentment, unhappy with the current state of affairs. Most of them do not like some aspect of the God that Scripture reveals, and they seek for ingenious ways to reinvent Him. The OT stories are just too bloody, unjust, and utterly incredible to be true. In short, many of these movements are the products of men who don’t like God very much and they desperately want to change Him into a being that they can adore and appreciate, while still hanging on their sinful desire for rational and moral autonomy.

The statements in John to which you refer draw on a different conceptuality—either Jesus as wisdom/logos or Jesus as a son in intimate relation to his Father. They are not interpretations or explanations of the lordship motif. The phrase monogenēs theos is also textually debatable and in context next to unintelligible.

I am not sure why you would say that it is “next to unintelligible.” The earliest and best manuscripts do not have υἱὸς. The earliest manuscript containing “the only begotten Son” is A. However, P66, P75, Aleph, Aleph(1), B, C, L, Syr(hmg.p), 33, and cop(bo) all have either one unique God or the one unique God. While the text is still debated, the textual evidence for NU (Nestle Aland/UBS) is very strong.

I am curious why you feel so free in overturning and disputing standard interpretations of a text like Jn. 1:1 without overing any justification whatsoever for your argument. It is either this way or that way you assert, but you offer absolutely no argument for your assertions. You simply make statements as if these statements provide ample proof and should be accepted without dispute. Well, I reject your position and request that you provide sound exegetical ground for your conclusion.

It is exceedingly clear that John is talking about Christ in 1-18 of his first chapter. He says that Jesus was in the beginning with God. He says that Jesus is God. He says that all things came into existence through Jesus. Jesus created all things. Paul said the same thing in Col. John tells us that God was made flesh and we beheld Him. He closes his prologue by saying  that no one has seen God at any time; the one unique God who is in the bosom of the Father, this one has explained Him. This one is Jesus Christ! The Son of God, the Son of Man, the Messiah, God of very God.

Ignatius, writing sometime between 98-117 said this commenting on Jn. 1:1 

Ignatius affirmed that “God appeared in human form to bring the newness of eternal life.”

Another proof of early worship of Christ involve the use of the Nomina Sacra in all second and third century MSS of the Greek NT. Making a name nomen sacrum desecularized the term, lifting it to sacred status.  (Comfort) 

The evidence, historical, exegetical, textual, and theological that Jesus burst onto the scene as God in human flesh is overwhelming. It is a settled issue in the Church and no settled issue ought to be reconsidered without compelling evidence. Your argument provides no such evidence. It seems to be the product of dissatiscation with current views of God that are offensive. Therefore, basic tenets of the ancient Church must be rejected in favor of rational, anachronistic arguments designed to recreate a story that does God better service. It reminds me of the Greek allegories of the offensive behaviors of the gods. It is a reaction to something in the text that the proponents find unsatisfactory.

There is another problem with this narrative-historical program. Namely, that only around 10-15% of the audiences in the Greco-Roman world were literate. The bigger problem is related to the percentage of NT writings that were directed toward an audience that would have even the foggiest idea of Jewish apocalyptic literature and Jewish interpretive paradigms, both necessary in order to understand the message. For instance while Matthew’s audience was Jewish, Mark’s was Roman. Luke was written to an individual Roman while John’s audience was universal. Of the four gospel accounts, only one is predominantly Jewish. The others were directed toward thoroughly helenized audiences. It is this helenization process that is supposedly the culprit of unwittingly turning Jesus into God and hence, commiting idolatry by worshiping Him. It only gets worse in terms of the audience for whom most of the NT documents were addressed. It is a list of predominately helenized communities. 

It is amazing to me that the NT writers knew the hermeneutical liabilities in these Gentile communities and did absolutely nothing to prevent them from inadvertingly and unwittingly turning Jesus into a deity. They should have know this was likely to happen given the nature of these highly religious communities. 

Ben Witherington III tells us that these writings were, for the most part, sermons with predominantly pastoral concerns. I think he is right. These were sermons written to the new communities in Christ about what each community must confess and how it must live. The writings were directed to mostly simple, poor, uneducated Christians. The purpose: sanctification of mind and body. Scripture is given to transform us into the image of Christ.

Narrative realism or narrative-historical interpretation commits the error of giving privilege to one specific literary form of Scripture. And it does so without much justification. It requires predominatly Gentile audiences with extremely pagan polytheistic backgrounds to be highly competent in the Jewish intepretive paradigm, you know, the one that murdered the same Jesus that these communties are being instructed to die for, and they will. We need to appreciate and respect the fact that there are a diversity of genres in the revelation of Scripture and our hemerneutical method must be robust enough to account for each them adequately.

But Andrew, if one “story” declares that He is not God, how can another story declare that He is—and both be true?

And for the record, Andrew, Jewish wisdom ideas about Jesus and creation, “which gets us much close to the idea that “Jesus is God”, is still a far cry from the orthodox belief that Jesus was pre existent as God and became fully God and fully man at the incarnation.

Hi Jaco,

I read your response and it is woefully inadequate. Your explaination of 1 John 5:20 indicates a complete lack of proficiency in koine Greek. Your denial of the deity of Christ is heresy, and places you on the outside you Christianity. You cannot be Christian and deny the divinity of the Son of God. Refusal affirm Christ as divine places your soul in great peril. I pray God will open your eyes to see and understand thet truth of the gospel. I have responsbilities with my local Church, am preparing for an apologetics event coming up in July, work full-time, and have a wife and a teenage son. I am also involved in teaching and discipleship. I have to spend my time wisely. I wish you the best in seeing the truth.

I do not discount the value of placing the NT events in their proper historical framework. At best, the current reaction is overblown in my opinion.

Dispensational theology does much to recognize the significance of Israel in its eschatological program.

It is hardly possible to emphasize divinity without inferring all that is bound up in lordship.

I am very familiar with the canons of grammatico-historical interpretation as well as standard exegetical rules involved in biblical theology. I am curious about the canons of narrative-historical interpretation and how they differ from traditional approaches. I would love some examples of how that method understands certain texts.

Hi Jaco,

“Evangelical” is a term that is generally used to encompass some very specific beliefs.  So, when one hears that term used, you would assume that those beliefs are a part of what is held.  Do you not agree?

What is very sad about folks who want to shut down authority is that they seem oblivious to the fact that such a task is impossible. The reformed principle of sola scripture contends that Scripture must interpret Scripture and that Scripture is by nature self-attesting. All other approaches to Scripture place man on the bench and the Word of God in the dock. In other words, we have  disjunctive syllogism. Either Man or God is the judge. The elevation of any interpretive paradigm that sits in judgment of God’s word is hopeless subjective. If man is the measure, which man? That is the point! Those who argue in this way, also have essentials in mind as well. Otherwise, Christianity is such a free-for-all that it ceases to exist. That there was excommunication in the ancient Church over doctrinal and moral failure is indisputable. This and this alone is PRROF enough to demonstrate that the idea of essentials is rooted in biblical Christianity.

Chyrl is correct. The Trininty and divinity of Christ have been, from the beginnings of the church, required confessions for continuation in the Christian group. One the Church had established herself, she immediately began dealing with the more developed view of the triune God. Once she settled this matter, all opponents were dealt with harshly if they refused to recant the heresy. Excommunication is the biblical principle for those who deny the fundamentals of the faith. I do not say this to be offensive in any way. I say it because it is historically undeniable, and also because it is clearly what the Scriptures instruct.

To be fair to Cheryl, Andrew, the best way to NOT “absolutely refuse to affirm” the full divinity of Christ and the truine nature of God is to state your affirmation positively and clearly which your comment technically does not do. You are a skilled writer, surely you know this. And that begs the question why you stated this the way you did. From my perspective, it is more than a little puzzling.

Andrew, as I remember it, you have said many times that you haven’t set out to prove that Jesus isn’t God.  That is hardly the same thing as affirming your personal belief that He is when asked many times by various people about what you personally believe.

And please don’t accuse me of libel in this situation.  Unless I have missed your stating somewhere that you personally believe He is—and I have read a lot of your material—that simply is not the fact.

I’m sure you know that one of the definitions of “refuse” is:

2  a : to show or express unwillingness to do or comply with <refused to answer the question>  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/refuse

If you haven’t been the epitome of that definition of “refused” in this discussion, I don’t know who ever has!  And since it has happened repeatedly, over a period of time, and to questions asked by various people, I would say this definition of “absolutely” also applies, at least in the context of ongoing discussions here:

“adverb

1.  without exception; completely; wholly; entirely: You are absolutely right.  http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/absolutely

So if you do believe that He is/was God, why is it that when asked repeatedly about it, you “show unillingness” to answer the question?  Again, there is an old saying, “Silence speaks louder then words.”  And your silence on this subject is quite deafening!

Andrew

I have had the privilage of chatting with you off and on . Theissue here now seems to be if what you are teaching can be regarded as ‘evangelicalism’. Sadly I dont believe it can.   As I lock back o posts, you have always sought to deny/remove/minimise or re interpret  any ‘trinitarian’ prrofs and to talk up anything which supports socinian or adoptionist views.  I haveno issues talking bout these matters in this way with those ‘outside’ who dont have a platform in Evangelical Churches  (like Jaco) but I have really serious ssues when someone is ‘inside’ and expresses these views (like you).

Whatever you may feel the primary focus would be the ‘bottom line’ when dealing with Jehovahs Witnesses, Islam, Christadelphians, all other religions, Mormons, uncle tom cobbleyites and all is ‘is Jesus God’.  We may notl ike that question,we may wish to rewind the clock to pre christoogical debates but we cant.  We may like the question is Jesus the promised messianic King   but get this…no one is now asking this question.

We may like to re interprete the NT in this ‘new’ (its not new) way but we cant. The ‘cat’ is out of the bag.  Your narrative/hist thelogy simply hasnt ‘got it’ when it comes to facing up to heresy or other religions. This isnt because itdoesnt represent some of theteaching of scripture but its because it doesnt go to the full degree of rigorous examinaton and conclusion. If you did you wouldnt be so ‘two minded; about Jesus being God and man.

I can see myself embracing much of what you say (already have) but there is no way I would let go of the expressions of  belief like Nicene creed or even the EA satement of faith.

It seems to me you have …..please prove me wrong and then engagewith  Jaco n disagreement like you do Ed Cheryl myself and others.  You don’t though, the silence is deafening.

Exegetic ingenuity, eloquence and skill cannot deny Jesus as Lord and God (Jn 20v28) as ‘equal with God’ Php 2v6-7  the one who has never been ‘created’ Jn 1v3 or the one who shares the titles ,throne, attributes and worship of the one who will not give his glory to another. Jesus  pre existed ‘the glory I had with you before the world was’.

Prove me wrong, don’t leave us hanging, be an honest provoker or an honest false teacher  bt I realy hope you prove me(us) wrong Andrew.