4-2 Genuine Intellectual Failure?

There was an element of genuine misinterpretation. As you read through the New Testament chronologically, it becomes apparent that the Lord Jesus is spoken of in ever more exalted language. For example, the term “son of man” is a favourite of the Gospel writers to describe the Lord Jesus. But it occurs only once in the later New Testament. Mark, the first Gospel, never calls Jesus “Lord”- but “Lord” is Paul’s most common title of Jesus some years later. John’s Gospel, clearly written after the other three, uses much more exalted language about the Lord Jesus than the earlier Gospels. The growth in perception of the greatness of Jesus is also perhaps reflected in the way that Revelation, the last inspired book of the New Testament, employs the most exalted language about Jesus. Both Paul and Peter show a progressive fondness in their choice of words for terms which exalt Jesus higher and higher. And presumably this trend continued after their death, as believers realized more and more that the carpenter from Nazareth had in fact been God’s Son, and is now the exalted King of Heaven and earth. The penny dropped that in fact “we can never exalt Christ too highly”, as Robert Roberts put it in the 19th century. But… and it’s a big but. The language of exaltation can reach a point where Jesus is no longer Jesus, but somehow God Himself. Further, it’s my observation that intellectual failure very often has an underlying psychological basis. To make Jesus God was one thing, but to accept the doctrine of three Gods in one, the trinity, was another. And I submit that this intellectual failure was rooted, even unconsciously, in a desire for an easier ride. It is after all extremely demanding to accept that a man, born into all our dysfunction, could be perfect; that from the larynx of a Palestinian Jew there could come forth the words of God Almighty. It’s a challenge, because we too are human; and if this was how far one of us could rise, above all the things that hold us down, that retard our growth towards the image of God Himself… then He is setting us an example so challenging that it reaches into the very core of our being, uncomfortably, inconveniently and even worryingly. To have a Jesus who was in fact not truly human, but just acting out, a Jesus who was really God and not man… this removes so much of the challenge of the real, human Christ.

- It has to be admitted that any attempt to use human language in order to somehow express the greatness of what the Lord Jesus has achieved, who He was and who He is, is somehow doomed to failure. I may break the rules of grammatical convention in my writings by writing the personal pronouns related to Jesus with a capital 'H' ("He... His... Him"), but this of course quite fails to express in language and under "the tyranny of words" all that I think of Him. I like to imagine that all genuine believers know something of my dilemma. As Robert Roberts said so well, "We cannot lift Christ too high". Perhaps it was in this spirit that men began to speak of Jesus as "God"- the problem is that by ending up with the "Jesus=God" equation, we are doing violence to God's word and also actually minimizing the colossal, unspeakable achievement of the human Jesus. The New Testament is full of very high adoration for the Lord Jesus. Since those words and phrases were chosen under the inspiration of God, His Father, we would be better advised to stick with them rather than try to invent our own terms and analogies in order to express His greatness. The structure of the original text of the prologue to John's Gospel regarding the word, and also Phil. 2:9-11 regarding the exaltation of Jesus, are arranged in such a way that they appear to be hymns which were sung by the believers. Pliny the Younger (Epistle 10.96.7) writes of the Christians "singing hymns to Christ as to a god"; surely he had in mind these passages. It can often be that we adopt the very position falsely ascribed to us by our critics; and perhaps that's what happened here. The critics of early Christianity wrongly claimed that the Christians thought of Jesus as God; and this eventually became their position for the most part, although it was not originally.

- It could be that some read [or heard of] the Biblical descriptions of Christ in glory now and assumed that this is how He must have been whilst on earth- and thus artists depict Jesus praying in Gethsemane which the kind of halo of glory around His head which we might assume He now has. That, however, is a really quite inexcusable misuse of the Bible text, taking a few verses and images from one part of it with no respect at all for the others. I'm being generous by categorizing this kind of thing under 'intellectual failure'. For the Bible is God's word to us, carefully and amazingly preserved by Him... and to treat it like this is rather like my hearing your earnest and passionate explanation of something to me, but my only bothering to listen to a couple of phrases, and then using these to totally misrepresent to others your whole message to me.

- Suetonius records that there were frequent "disturbances caused by Chrestus among the Jews of Rome" (Claudius 25.4). 'Chrestus' meant 'slave'- this was how Jesus was known, as the slave who was King. But those ideas didn't fit together well in the Mediterranean world, where the image of a humble King was somehow a contradiction in terms. For me, the significance of Suetonius' record is that the Lord Jesus was initially popularly known as Chrestus, the glorified slave, rather than Christos, the Christ. Of course it's quite Biblical and correct to call Jesus "the Christ"; but in early Christianity He was glorified for His humility, as a slave of all who was thereby exalted. The trinity seems to have partly arisen from a forgetting of this factor in His exaltation, and focusing instead solely on the titles of His glorification until the primitive and incorrect equation "Jesus=God" was reached.

- Christianity was and is radically counter-cultural. The very terms used by the Roman empire regarding its Kingdom and Caesars are all applied to the Kingdom of God and to His Son. I have exemplified this at length elsewhere (1). Thus 'Caesar is Lord' became 'Jesus is Lord' in early Christianity (2). I suggest that there may have been an element of genuine intellectual failure amongst some illiterate early Christians, who noticed this feature of Christianity, and wrongly inferred from it that therefore all that is true or claimed to be true of Caesar must therefore be true of Jesus- when the fact they shared the same verbal titles doesn't imply that at all. Thus when it was claimed that Caesar was a pre-existent God who on death returned to Heaven, those illiterate [and other] folks may have been tempted to assume that this was therefore also true of Jesus. But maybe I'm being too generous here. The early Christians virulently rejected the Emperor-cult; but as Christianity came to merge with the Roman world, it became modelled on the Emperor-cult in a way which the earliest Christians would've fiercely rejected. By the Middle Ages, icons were depicting Christ appearing like the Emperor, and God rendered as the Pope- Van Eyck and Botticelli presented God the Father as wearing the same triple crown which the Pope wore (3). In this we see the full mixture of apostate church and worldly state, and the Trinity was just a convenient means to that end.

On balance, whilst I accept that the trinity may have arisen from an element of genuine intellectual failure, being honestly mistaken in Bible study, it seems to me that this doesn't really excuse the huge and basic ignorance of God's word as the source of truth about Himself and His Son. It seems that the early church 'fathers' began desperately grabbing any Bible verse which would justify their position, as we have commented so many times. Thus commenting on the Hebrew and Septuagint of Mic. 5:2, James Dunn concludes: "In neither instance does the Hebrew suggest the idea of pre-existence... it was not until Justin took it up in the middle of the second century AD that it began to be used as a prophecy of Christ's pre-existence" (4). In this observation, which Dunn documents at length, we see how once the ideas of Christ being God and pre-existing were accepted and assumed, the church 'fathers' started casting around for Biblical evidence to support those positions. This, sadly, is typical of the inductive reasoning that has plagued Christian thinking. An idea is seized upon, often because it is acceptable to the surrounding world, and then Bible verses are appended to it, regardless of their context.

Notes

(1) See 'The Objections To Christianity' in my Bible Lives section 16-4.

(2) Adolf Deissmann gives very many examples of how the titles of Caesar used in the Imperial Cult were applied to Jesus- see his Light From The Ancient East (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927) pp. 342 ff.

(3) See F.E. Hulme, Symbolism In Christian Art (Blandford: Blandford Press, 1976) pp. 43 ff.

(4) James Dunn, Christology In The Making (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980) p. 71. A similar conclusion concerning Mic. 5:2 is to be found in J. Klausner, The Messianic Idea In Israel (New York: Macmillan, 1956) p. 77.

 

 

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