The Son of God
Three Views of the Identity of Jesus
A Trinitarian View by Charles Lee Irons
An Arian View by Danny André Dixon
A Socinian View by Dustin R. Smith
Foreword by James F. McGrath
The Son of God
Three Views of the Identity of Jesus
Copyright © 2015 Charles Lee Irons, Danny André Dixon, and Dustin R. Smith. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Foreword
The study of New Testament Christology—the depiction(s) of Jesus articulated by the authors of the New Testament—has never ceased to be of interest. But if it may not be true to say that there has been more interest in the subject in recent years, the past several decades have at the very least witnessed a burst of creativity in the field, with significant new and interesting proposals being offered by a range of scholars. This work has been stimulated in turn by an increased amount of attention to ancient Jewish sources, sparked by the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient literature that was previously neglected or unknown. This has allowed scholars to get a sense as never before of the Jewish context within which Jesus and his earliest followers reflected on who he was.
The New Testament sources are full of affirmations of the sort that one also finds in non-Christian Jewish sources: “Jesus answered, ‘The first [commandment] is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”’” (Mark 12:29), “there is no God but one” (1 Cor 8:4), “there is one God” (1 Tim 2:5), “the only true God” (John 17:3), “You believe that there is one God. Good!” (Jas 2:19). And yet Christians have typically coupled such references to the one God with references to Christ as “one Lord,” “one Mediator,” “the one whom [the only true God] sent.” Much of the first few Christian centuries were spent trying to work out how these statements were best to be understood, and what their implications might be. The present day has seen not only an increasing awareness of the ancient Jewish context of the New Testament, but also the fact that views which were in the past dismissed as clear heresies were—whether one judges them to be right or wrong—sincere attempts to make sense of the range of New Testament evidence.
So much has been written on New Testament Christology in recent years and decades, that it is simply impossible to summarize it all in a preface and do it justice. Fortunately, the pages of this book will survey and engage the key issues, highlighting key points of disagreement among scholars in the process. But it may nevertheless be worth listing here a few of the important points about which there is ongoing debate:
• Did the earliest Christians think of Jesus as a human being singled out and sent by God, or as a preexistent angelic or other celestial figure subordinate to God, or as the incarnation of one who was fully God?
• Did different early Christian authors have different views of Jesus, corresponding to those listed above?
• Was there a development in early Christology, from the view of Jesus as a special human being to the view of Jesus as a preexistent celestial figure, or was the latter view held from the very beginning?
• Did Christians, in formulating their view of Jesus, include him within the nature, or the identity, of the one God, or did they view him as distinct from the one God, however closely related to him?
• In viewing Jesus as they did, did the earliest Christians depart from Jewish monotheism as it existed in their time?
On the pages that follow, you will find most of these points engaged directly; and where any are not addressed explicitly, reading the scholarly literature that is cited will bring you into contact with discussions of the remaining issues. These are points about which there is ongoing vigorous disagreement among scholars, and this disagreement, however much it has progressed, mirrors debates which have been going on for nearly 2,000 years. And yet many Christians may not even be aware either of the diversity of views held among Christians, or of the scholarship that brings historical knowledge to bear on these questions.
There has been a delightful trend in recent years towards the production of multi-author volumes offering three (or in some cases four or even five) different views on a particular subject. In the present volume, three views of Jesus are presented. Each of these views is attested in very ancient Christian sources (often in the process of the one being denounced by a proponent of another view). Each view is one that significant numbers of scholars are convinced is reflected in at least some of the writings of the New Testament. The authors who have contributed to this volume each seeks not only to engage with this New Testament scholarship, but also to formulate a convincing portrait of Jesus on that basis.
Scholarship is a conversation, and the wider public often has only the vaguest sense of how central interaction between viewpoints is to the scholarly endeavor. On the one hand, every scholar seeks to break new ground, to come up with new ideas and interpretations. It is a requirement as part of our jobs, since we are expected to publish, and no scholarly periodical is likely to publish an article which simply says things that have been said before. On the other hand, the scholarly community evaluates our new proposals, looking at them with critical scrutiny. Only rarely do our new proposals overturn a prevailing consensus. And that is as it should be. Both these two poles are conversational in character. The individual scholar interacts with the scholarly community through the literature that has been published previously, trying to see just a little bit further standing on our shoulders. And then the scholarly community responds in turn with feedback and evaluation, and with acceptance or rebuttal.
I still recall a friend who was, like me at the time, both a Christian and a PhD student, saying that the process of trying to earn a doctorate pushes you towards heresy. The truth has supposedly already been established, and so new ideas can only represent departures from them. This viewpoint is not uncommon, and is a reason why ordinary people in churches often view scholars and scholarship with suspicion.
However, it ought to be clear in our internet age, if it was not clear well before that, that the notion of the “truth established once for all” has never reflected the reality. Churches use Bibles the contents of which differ. And churches which share the exact same Bible, and the exact same view of the Bible as without error, may disagree radically on what the Bible means. Christians have always been engaging in conversations which involved not only the Jewish Scriptures and the life and teaching of Jesus, but the world around them. Some have claimed to be doing otherwise, but the claims do not reflect the reality. Tertullian famously asked “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—suggesting that there is a huge gulf between biblical religion and Greek philosophy. And yet it seems clear that Tertullian’s thinking—for instance, in applying the term “Trinity” (threeness) to God—was indebted to his background in Stoic philosophy. We cannot ignore the ancient context of the Biblical texts, nor can we ignore the context within which we interpret them. And when we do both those things, we come to see just how it is possible for people with the same shared Scriptures and the same shared Jesus to nonetheless have drawn different conclusions.
More than a century ago, an editorial in the periodical The Biblical World addressed this very point:
The duty of Christian thinkers in the present generation is to address themselves consciously