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.