O come, all ye faithful

"God of God, Light of Light,

lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb;

very God, begotten not created."

’O come, all ye faithful’- Popular Carol

Since this is the season during which the majority churches commemorate the 'incarnation' of 'God the Son', maybe it would be a good time to share a few of my own thoughts regarding this.

For starters, don't try looking for the title 'God the Son' in the Bible. You won't find it, neither can you expect to discover this version of Jesus anywhere between Genesis and Revelation. He is a product of the thinkers who sprang up after the deaths of the apostles and set about redefining the faith. These men were schooled in Greek philosophy and their aim was to make the Jesus of the gospels fit their preconceived ideas.

The Jesus of the Bible is described as the man who "indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you." (1st Peter 1.20) This dramatic change, from being an idea in the mind of God, the cornerstone of his foreordained plan, to actually being manifested as a real, flesh and blood human person, took place when he was made in the womb of Mary.

The story of the Trinitarian Jesus begins very differently. Before time he was 'eternally begotten'. This strange phrase means a sort of beginningless beginning. It became necessary for 'orthodoxy' to invent it because they insisted, contrary to the New Testament, that it is heresy to believe that there was a time when the Son did not exist. The Bible clearly says he was both made (Matthew 1.1 & Galatians 4.4) and begotten (Psalm 2.7, John 3.16, Hebrews 1.5)

So, long before he ‘assumed flesh’ and ‘became a man’, 'God the Son' was already a heavenly being. He had been the second person in a godhead of three forever. Hence words of the Christmas carol above, straight out of the Athanasian creed. The virgin birth then becomes the point at which something was added to him- a human nature. Yet, in spite of this transformation, he did not cease to be what he was before.

Is it not reasonable to ask where this doctrine is clearly expressed in scripture? Certainly none of the terminology used to describe it is found in the Bible. Indeed the fact that the individuals who developed this dogma had to resort to extra-biblical language in order to articulate their creed would seem to indicate that the beliefs it expresses are themselves extra-biblical.

It results in some glaring contradictions between the statements Jesus makes about himself in the Bible and what that same Bible says about God. Indeed it carries those contradictions into the very being of the Triniarian Jesus himself. It is not possible to be both mortal and immortal, to have limited knowledge and yet know all things, be superior and inferior to yourself, tempted but also utterly unable to be tempted all at the same time.

The solution orthodoxy offers to this dilemma is the theory that Jesus had a 'dual nature' (AKA the hypostatic union for all you lovers of long words). It is something like the attempt to mix oil and vinegar. The result is a potent and colourful mythological dressing for Trinitarian Christology but the trouble is that the ingredients simply will not hold together. It is neither biblically correct nor logically possible to say that a person can be both truly God and truly man. The proposition raises more problems than it solves.

In fact, this teaching even manages to turn the fundamental premise of the Trinity itself on its head. The triune God is supposed to consist of 3 persons in 1 nature. Yet the dual nature states that 2 natures dwell in 1 person! As a result, not only is the godhead divided but Jesus as well.
It makes the prayer life of Jesus irrelevant to believers. After all when he prayed to God saying, for example, 'My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?' it was really a matter of one aspect of his nature communicating with the other. But is this really consistent with the way the scriptures define prayer? Certainly, it is very different from what happens when everyone other than ‘God the Son’ prays.

Not only that but the very biblical affirmation that Jesus is exactly like us- an authentic human being whose struggles we are encouraged to relate to, is also jeapordised. This is because the addition of a divine nature to the Son also adds the slight exception that he was, whilst being a man like us, at the same time (and for a considerable period before), God Almighty, as though the one statement need not have any impact upon the other.

But I ask you, in such a being how could the God-nature not entirely overwhelm the mere human nature? How can we who are only human relate to a person who is also fully divine? How could he genuinely relate to our struggles? Surely the greatness of what Jesus achieved would be diminished if he had such an enormous hidden advantage.

What example could Jesus’ faith in God be to us if all he was doing was trusting in another aspect of himself?

Adolf Harnack, hailed by evangelicals as the 'prince of church history', has observed:
"The Catholic Church has learned but little from the Gnostics, that is, from the earliest theologians in Christendom, in the doctrine of God and the world, but very much in Christology; and who can maintain that she has ever completely overcome the Gnostic doctrine of the two natures, nay, even Docetism?" (Docetism is the mistaken belief that Jesus wasn't really human but only appeared to be) History of Dogma Volume 1 p.261


Our personalities are molded by the conditioning we receive from our experience of life here on earth. It would be hard to avoid the conclusion that Jesus was like other men only in appearance, if, at this very important point, he was entirely different. Harnack again:"The appearance of a Divine being on earth, but the person divided and the real history of Jesus explained away and made inoperative is the signature of Gnostic Christology".

Who could deny that, in the case of the dual-natured Jesus, the historical, physical, earthly life is eclipsed by the eternal, spiritual existence enjoyed by 'God the Son' in heaven. He already was what he was before he ever came to be a man. Then he assumed flesh for relatively brief moment, lived in it, and returned back to what he had always been.

Because of this every significant detail the scriptures give us about the historical Jesus fade into the background. His birth, ministry, crucifixion- none of these apply to the person he originally was but only to the temporary human form which he adopted for a time. Even the resurrection is merely a case of him reverting back to what he was before. His death on the cross, seen in this light, is less a sacrifice of total surrender and more like a liberation from the confines and limitations of his lower, temporary, self.

The God of the Bible knows all things, yet Jesus had limited knowledge. For example he was in the dark about when he would return. But surely if Jesus really had a dual nature the God part of him would have known. So how does this work then? Did he alternate between knowing and not knowing from one moment to the next, as the opposite sides of his double nature took turns to come to the fore? Or was it a case of him simultaneously both knowing and not knowing at the same time?

This poses a grave epistemological problem by implying that when, for example, Jesus said 'my Father is greater than I', he meant something other than the plain sense of those words because he was, in reality, his Father's equal. It calls into question whether Jesus can be taken at his word.

In conclusion, all this theological moonwalking isn't enough to get round the elephant in the room. The unavoidable truth that there is a difference between mystery and contradiction. The reality that, according to this formula, the qualities that made Jesus’ being what it was were incompatible with... what his being also was. Consequently, far from a fusion of two natures, the result is actually a juxtaposition of two complete and distinct beings of entirely opposite qualities.

Put another way, a person's nature is the sum of all that they are. So to speak of a double nature is rather like speaking of a double individuality. Amazingly, orthodoxy doesn't even flinch from this stating with brazenness of face that Jesus is '100% God and 100% man'. Such language only lays bare the contradiction at the heart of the issue.

If we want to celebrate the virginal birth of God’s only begotten Son Jesus let’s do it all year round, carefully studying the scriptures to make sure that we are doing so according to what they tell us about him.

"Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ"

We are so accustomed to seeing the title 'Christ' following Jesus' name that it is easy to make the mistake of reading it as though it was his surname! Joseph and Mary Christ had a baby called Jesus...

Let's try and see it through fresh eyes.

In this formula the Father is God. Jesus by contrast is not God but the 'anointed one' instead. This describes his role.

Anointing entails 2 things:
a) empowerment- which God does not need, since he is already all powerful
and
b) commission- which God would not need because he is sovereign,

So the title Christ would not be fitting for Jesus, if he was God Almighty.

This juxtaposition of God and his Christ appears in many places. Perhaps one of the most significant is 2Co 13:14:
"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen."

Ironically, this verse is often cited in support of the Trinity. Yet the word Father is nowhere in this verse! Instead we find Jesus distinguished here, once again, not only as someone other than the Father but also as someone other than the one God.

The miracle maker

Just how is it that Jesus was able to perform so many amazing miracles?

Was it because he was ‘of one being with God’ or was it simply by virtue of the fact that God had empowered him with that level of authority? If so, before that empowerment would he have been able to do any miraculous work?

Could it be that Jesus’ power is not by virtue of anything intrinsic to him? If it was, he would have had no need of the Father to confer anything upon him. Yet he performed no miracles prior to his baptism, when the spirit came on him.

This is because the bible tells us that it was not until then that “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him”- not for he was God. It also describes him as “a man attested by God by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him” (Acts 10:38 & 2:22).

This would seem to be what John 5:17-31 is all about. Jesus is unpacking his declaration in verse 19 about his own inability and the effect of the Father’s empowerment.

So what was the point of his miracles? According to Jesus’ words of prayer to his God at the tomb of Lazarus not
“that they may believe that I am God”
but, quite the opposite
“that they may believe that You have sent Me” (John 11:42).

The Cross of Christ

The majority church insists that,
a) in order to die for our sins, Jesus had to be ‘God’ and that
b) if he were anyone other than a divine person in the godhead, then God’s sacrifice is in some way diminished.

What follows are a couple of my views on these 2 points:

a) Did Jesus really have to be God Almighty in order to die for our sins?
The demand that God himself had to personally come and die for our sins comes from man, not God. From philosophy, not revelation. Otherwise it would be stated in the Bible. What the Bible does tell us is that God has dealt with sin by sending his Son to be the propitiatory sin-offering. God takes sin so seriously that he was prepared to sacrifice his own beloved Son in order to provide a solution to the problem.

According to Romans 5:12-21, it was by a man that sin entered into the world, therefore justification would also have to come by man- another Adam. This text shows that it is Jesus’ righteousness and obedience as a human being that qualify him to be the redeemer. What’s emphasised over and again is that the Messiah be a kinsman, closely related to those whom he must redeem. ‘Divinity’ is nowhere in the horizon.

Likewise, 1Corinthians 15:21 “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from the dead”, followed by another comparison between Jesus and Adam. This would hardly be fair one if Adam is a ‘mere man’ and Jesus is the Godhead incarnate.

In fact, the expression ‘mere man’ itself exposes a failure to understand the Biblical doctrine of man. Humanity should not be judged by the depths it has fallen to in Adam, but in the height and greatness of God’s design, as revealed through Christ. This comparison does much to expose the debilitating effects of sin. Our humanity is broken and stifled. In Jesus, humanity finds its full expression. So sin could not be taken more seriously than in John 3:16, yet it says that God gave his beloved Son, not himself.

Many loving parents would testify that this is the harder and more costly of the two sacrifices to make.

b) What did God sacrifice?
There is no doubt the cross is central to Christology, but I also think that the ‘orthodox’ (Trinitarian) view misses out something important here.

I would ask you-
When God forsook his Son, what was left on the cross? A complete man? Or a human body, minus the divine personal centre?

Was it a matter of ‘God the Son’ merely surrendering his human body and returning to the existence he enjoyed prior to being ‘incarnated’ into it?

Or did Jesus as a man and no more, really pour out all that he was, without remainder, trusting that he would not be left in Sheol, but that God would raise him again? Is this not the faith of the Son of God which Paul refers to in Galatians 2:20?

It would hardly take trust for an ‘eternal person’ to go back to being what he had been for far longer than he had been a man, indeed, for eternity. Far from being some great sacrifice, if this really were the case, might it not come as something of a relief to be freed once more from such burdensome and cumbersome human limitations?

Moments from death, Jesus cried out ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Jesus called on the Father as his God. So the Father therefore the God of the Son. Both Peter and Paul unashamedly call him not only the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but also his God (2 Cor 11:31; Eph 1:3; 1Pet 1:3). From this it would appear that Jesus is not just someone other than the Father. He is someone other than God.

What is more Jesus did not call out, as one person in the Triune godhead to another, “My Father, my Father…” Instead, he confessed to being forsaken by God. Yet, according to ‘orthodoxy’ ‘godness’ is the very basis of the ontological union of the godhead. How could Jesus both be God and forsaken by God?

Let’s not forget that the Bible clearly states in 1Tim 1:17 and 1Tim 6:16 that God is immortal. This means that (according to the Biblical definition of immortality in Luke 20:36) he cannot die. So to believe that Jesus is God, yet died, is incompatible with what the Bible so clearly tells us.

In this way if a Trinitarian Christology is rigorously applied to the Biblical record of the passion of the Christ, the supreme act of love and sacrifice by both Father and Son is reduced to a contradictory muddle.

Jesus- The 'divine' Son of God?

It seems to me that when Jesus referred to himself as possessing ‘divinity’ it was invariably in terms of the indwelling Father, not the incarnate ‘God the Son’. He never speaks of ‘the Son that dwells in me’. Instead, Jesus was indwelt by his God in the same way the ark of the covenant was. In John 17:3, Jesus clearly sets himself in contrast to ‘the only one who is truly God’, the Father (see also John 5:44).

Furthermore, where the title ‘god’ is applied to Jesus by others, it harmonises far better with the Hebrew Bible to read it in terms of a functional equality, as opposed to an identity of substance. Moses was made a god to Pharaoh (Exodus 7:1) because he acted as Yahweh’s stand-in for his dealings with Egypt. In the same way, Paul describer the Satan as ‘the god of this age’ in that he occupies the dominion, usurped from Adam, that the Son will enjoy in the age to come. At any rate, this certainly seems to be the sense in which Jesus understood himself to be ‘god’ since, in John 10:34-36 it is Psalm 82 and not Deuteronomy 6:4 that he chooses to cite by way of explanation.

Of course, the distinction between ‘small-g’ and ‘big-G’ in our English translations is arbitrary, since there was none in the original Hebrew or Greek manuscripts.

Jesus functions as God towards humanity in that he did and spoke of himself as doing things which up to that point only God was thought of as doing (the general resurrection and judgment, the forgiveness of sin etc.)

Yet for all this, I would insist that there is no evidence that the apostles ever deviated form the strict unitary monotheism of the Jewish forefathers. There is still only one Creator God, the Father, in spite of the addition of a vice-regent, Jesus. Surely it is significant that the only clearly articulated ‘incarnation’ theology in the New Testament is found in the mouths of mistaken pagans (Acts 14:11). According to 1Tim 2:5, God is one and his Son is a man (wouldn’t this have been the perfect place to introduce the ‘god-man’?).

Holding the concept of Jesus being ‘god’ in a ‘homoussian’ sense (being of the same substance as God the Father- a Greek term not found anywhere in the Bible, but introduced during the patristic period to articulate the relationship between persons in the Trinity) has a double effect:
Firstly it divides the godhead, violating what according to Jesus was the first and greatest commandment (Mark 12:29-30- this is where Jesus does choose to quote Deuteronomy 6:4!). This is borne out in the contradictory Athanasian creed that ‘the Father is God, the Son is God and the Spirit is God, yet there are not three Gods, but one’.

Secondly, it eclipses Jesus’ humanity- an aspect upon which the most heavy scriptural emphasis is laid. Evidence of this is found in the Chalcedonian declaration that the Son possessed an ‘impersonal’ human nature. Hence he is ‘man’, but not ‘a man’. Read in the light of 1 John 4:3 this statement should cause alarm bells to ring.

What about the holy spirit?

In the development of patristic thought, the spirit didn’t become a person in the godhead until long after the Son. Strictly speaking, the spirit of God would appear to be his operational presence, as opposed to another person in the godhead. It is God’s dynamic, reaching into the world to create, inspire, work miracles etc.

Furthermore, it would seem to connote the ‘inner life’ of God, often being used synonymously with his thought and by extension, his expressed word. Of course, the same could be said of our human spirits. They too can be vexed, grieved etc. without being another person ‘subsisting’ within our ‘essence’.

It may even be that ‘spirit’ is not an ontological category at all but instead, a metaphor. The literal meaning of the words ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek are in both cases ‘wind/breath’. This has been obscured by their transliteration into English from the Latin ‘spiritus’ as opposed to straight translation. So ‘spirit’ may not be anything in and of itself, but rather a term, acting as a stand in for various functions.

Some confusion has arisen due to Jesus’ personification of the spirit in the later chapters of John, as the ‘paraclete’ who would take over his role subsequent to his ascension. But this is standard Hebraism. One of the best examples would be Solomon’s personification of ‘lady wisdom’ in Proverbs chapter 8. James Dunn’s excellent ‘Christology in the making’ offers many examples from the Judaism of Jesus’ day of the widespread use of this device in relation to God’s attributes.

Even today we would say of a ship, “God bless her and all who sail in her”. But, though we often personalise inanimate objects, we would never refer to a person as an ‘it’ unless we wanted to insult them. Yet throughout both Testaments, God’s spirit is referred to in almost exclusively impersonal terms.

In conclusion, it seems to me that the huge emphasis placed on believing that 'Jesus is God Almighty' by majority Christianity is simply not a reflection of anything found in either Old or New Testaments.

If anything, it has the potential to undermine those things that the Bible does rank as being of first importancem, namely the oneness of Israel's God and the humanity of his unique Son, Jesus.