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Trinity

The God We Don't Know

Abingdon Press

The Son We Don't Know

How Can We say Jesus Is Divine?

Here's a hard question: why would we possibly want to say that Jesus of Nazareth is divine? This chapter will offer biblical and ancient church reflection on which we have based such a nearly blasphemous claim. It is commonly thought that Jesus was a simple-hearted do-gooder who accidentally got himself crucified, but who made no claim to be divine—that was later Christians heaping up untruth on his head. This chapter will argue that there is no earliest layer of the Bible that thinks Jesus is "just" a man. From our earliest moments we have blinked our eyes open to the startling truth that Jesus is identified with the God of the universe in a way that makes it impossible to think of one without the other. The Bible could be wrong, of course. But let's have no more nonsense about it being non- or antitrinitarian. Yet the Bible is enormously complex and multifaceted, and the church has lost familiarity with how our ancient forebears made some sort of sense of that complexity—enough sense to worship the God we don't know.

In our day, "liberal" and "conservative" Christians both have our stalemates, but we seem to have a sort of odd détente on not reading the Bible. Liberals are sure they know what it means and that it is bad news—for women, gays, those on the margins. Conservatives are sure they know what it means and so don't have to revisit or question anything already decided upon. The Bible means to be genuinely difficult for all of us, because it witnesses to a God vastly beyond any sense we can make. This chapter will invite us all to see the Bible in all its multifaceted strangeness again, and to wonder. "The mind that is not baffled is not employed," Wendell Berry said. "It is the impeded stream that sings."

The question of how we can say Jesus is divine is hard even to ask. We live in an age that serves "gods many, and lords many" (1 Cor 8:5 KJV). Americans' money has a reference to "God" on it. A "god," according to Martin Luther, is whatever you worship: "Wherever your heart is, there is your God," he said. By that definition, lots of us worship lots of gods: our favorite sports teams, our current love interest, the acquisition of money or power, resentment against our enemies. Why not throw one more god into the pantheon and say Jesus is God too, just like the Packers, my 401K, and my preferred political party?

Because of the Jews. Christianity began life as a Jewish sect. Some of our forebears tried to sever our link with Judaism, but we realized we'd be cutting off the branch we sit on (or, for Paul, the branch that we are —Rom 11:17-24). Scripture says the God of Israel calls the Jews, makes them his favored people in the world, and promises to bless and save the world through them (Gen 12:1-4). Not because they were especially good and certainly not because they were especially powerful (Deut 7:6-11). But just because God decided to choose them to make God's goodness known to all.

Israel was odd in the ancient world for its dogged profession of absolute loyalty to one God alone. All other gods are empty pretenders. Only the One whom Israel knows in the burning bush, the deliverance from Egypt, the giving of the law, the sending of the prophets—only that one is God. Jews would gladly extend their necks for the sword rather than give in to any tyrant who demanded recognition of other gods. Historians tell us that Israel came to realize this exclusive existence of only one God while in exile, far from the land of Israel, dominated by a foreign people, its God presumably conquered. It was then Israel wrote verses like these, "I am the LORD, and besides me there is no savior" (Isa 43:11). This is remarkably presumptuous. It is beyond arrogant to claim that your God is above all others when he has been recently conquered—it borders on delusional. And it is a claim of bedrock biblical importance, born in a place of desolation and exile.

Early Christians did not first follow Jesus because he claimed to be God. An initial claim of that sort would have been off-putting even more than Jesus already was! (See John 6:60-69.) The Gospels, John perhaps excepted, are marked by a remarkable reticence. Jesus will not come out and say clearly who he is. He doesn't claim more for himself than his people are ready for: he preaches a kingdom but does not announce his personal candidacy for the throne; he speaks often (and biblically) of God without naming his own equality with God. Instead he teaches "as one with authority" (see Mark 1:22; Matt 7:28-29). Jesus teaches beautifully, simply, attractively. He does miracles—multiplying bread, walking on water, casting out demons, healing the sick. Yet he has hesitations about this power. It can attract people for the wrong reasons. Others can do similar works. Sometimes Jesus flat refuses to do them (Matt 13:58). He also makes bold demands: Follow me. Go and preach. Give up all. Love your enemies. Jesus's teaching alone is rarely unique in terms of content. Most, if not all of it, comes from Israel's scripture, chapter and verse. Yet he gathers it up and presents it anew in surprising and demanding ways, poured through his own singular personality, that draw followers and enemies both. He winds up dead for it.

That's about as much as can be said about Jesus on modern historians' grounds.

Christians must respect historians' critical appraisals of "what really happened." Yet we are not bound by them. Reality is often more complicated than historians' reconstructions—as good historians are quick to admit. One historian told me about his teacher's hobby. He researched the ocean-floor locations of downed submarines. He often found these were remarkably far away from where the best historical accounts thought they must be. Good historians hold out space for the fact that they could be wrong, even as they do their best reconstruction.

The writers of the first three Gospels agree to a good deal more about Jesus than to suggest he was a wondering prophet who accidentally gets himself killed for no good reason. He does things that, in Israel's thinking, are God's job alone. He claims to be able to forgive sins (Mark 2:1-12). He claims an exclusive relationship to his Father that he can share with others at his own discretion: "No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matt 11:27). That language—Father and Son—would become integral to Christians' talk of the Trinity. It was not original to Jesus. Israel is spoken of as God's firstborn Son in scripture, among a handful of other references to God as "father" in the Old Testament (Exod 4:22; Hos 11:1). Jesus highly intensifies this language, referring to God as his "father" and himself as "son" with striking regularity, as though these titles belong properly to him. Jesus claims a role in the coming judgment: "Everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God" (Luke 12:8). Speaking of judgment, Jesus suddenly overcomes his reticence at his own trial in the Gospel of Mark, and when asked directly if he is the messiah and "Son of the Blessed One" replies directly: "I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and 'coming with the clouds of heaven' " (Mark 14:62). Most importantly for Christians, Jesus claims a central role insalvation. The angel tells his mother that's what his life is for—his very name echoes his biblical namesake Joshua, which means 'God saves' (Matt 1:21). Jesus can even award salvation to others (Luke 19:9-10). His cross affects the relationship to God of all people, and for the good. So when God redeems Israel, judges the nations, raises the righteous, and makes right all things, Jesus will be central to those divine acts of victory.

In short, Jesus does things that are only on God's business card.

Historians sometimes claim that the earliest layers of the New Testament assign a lesser role for Jesus than his later followers would ascribe to him. Jesus was an unremarkable prophet but his later followers got confused and thought he was God (a strange thing for a Jewish sect to do, but never mind). The passages cited above all come from the first three and earliest-written Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke share a remarkably high regard not only for Jesus as a man but also for his claims to divinity.

But don't let me mislead you. No fully worked out doctrine of the Trinity is present in the New Testament. We do have the first draft of trinitarian thinking—the Trinity in seed form, ready to flower forth in the further thinking and practice of the church. The books that make up the library that we call the New Testament have a remarkable synchronicity in their depiction of Jesus. He is "Lord," they often say, or kyrios in New Testament Greek. The word could just mean "sir," as in any polite address. It can also echo the biblical description of the God of Israel as the Lord. The ambiguity is delicious. Is this a mere man, one we would call "sir" politely but should never worship? Or is this Yahweh, the one Israel's scriptures say created everything and chose Israel, redeemed her from Egypt, blessed her with his law, and demanded obedience through his prophets? Unlike the way we Christians speak, Jews know wisely that you should never try to pronounce the proper name of the one true God. They substitute the word adonai, calling him simply "the Lord," rather than recklessly trying to pronounce the name "Yahweh." The New Testament suggests the same regard for Jesus. Or maybe it could just refer to him as "sir." Or both.

The Trinity itself is not fully worked out in the Bible, sure enough. But the Bible puts pressure on the church's thought and yields the doctrine of the Trinity. The seed of the Trinity is planted in the scriptures. Then it grows in the well-tended garden of the church. We also see in the Gospels plenty of places that insist on Jesus's mortality. He is ignorant or unaware at times (Mark 13:32; Luke 8:45). He speaks of the God of Israel as one he worships, prays to, trusts—"why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone" (Luke 18:19). Most important, Jesus weeps. He bleeds. He dies. He is placed in a tomb.

None of those things are in God's job description.

The problem is exacerbated when we look at the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, simply and clearly, "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). Some ancient interpreters of the Bible went further still. If Jesus is human, he does things every other human does: he not only bleeds and dies, he also digests food and defecates it, he goes through puberty and its various humiliations, he is even tempted to sin. What blasphemy to say such things could happen to God! Is this the God so holy we cannot pronounce his name without being annihilated?

Do you see what difficulties we land in if we speak of Jesus of Nazareth in divine terms?

And yet, the New Testament does precisely that. Jesus in John also says that he and the Father are one (10:30). He is described in that Gospel's first chapter as the Logos, the wisdom or word through whom all creation comes into being. He and the Father cooperate in their actions, according to John 5:17, 19, 21. They always work in concert. What mere human could say such a thing about himself or herself? And when Jesus's resurrection conquers the grave, that is the God of life at work. Who else could do it? Other narrative hints in John go farther. In John 18:6 when soldiers come to arrest Jesus, he tells them "I am he" in most English translations, or in Greek, ego eimi. This is an echo of Exodus's description of the God who calls Moses as "I Am" (Exod 3:14). The soldiers bear witness despite themselves to the greatness of this name: "they stepped back and fell to the ground," as all creatures should (John 18:6). John is commonly acknowledged as the latest written Gospel, one with a more highly developed view of Jesus's power (his " Christology," as we call all reasoning about Christ). Yet it retains an unmistakable insistence on Jesus's humanity: he weeps (John 11:35), he worries (John 12:27), he suffers and dies.

And yet after his resurrection, St. Thomas offers the highest Christology imaginable, "My Lord and my God," he exclaims (John 20:28). What about the rest of the New Testament besides the Gospels? Weren't those letters written even earlier than the stories we have of Jesus's life and ministry, as every sophomore who has taken a Bible class knows? Sure enough, and they suggest as high a view of Jesus's divinity as the Gospels. The resurrection of Jesus is the clearest reason for their insistence on his divinity.

Jesus was "declared to be Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead," Romans 1:4 argues (in a verse that would later offer comfort to heretics, but never mind). Romans later ties our own salvation to confession of Jesus's lordship and of God's action in raising him from the dead (10:9). Elsewhere Paul is well aware that many nations have their so-called gods. "Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Cor 8:6). Here Paul, a loyal Jew, exalts Jesus in his thinking to a position alongside the one true God as creator and Lord. Elsewhere Paul insists that all creatures will bow the knee before Jesus's lordship (Phil 2:9-11). This is all the more impressive in that he is riffing off of Isaiah 45, "I am the LORD, and there is no other" (Isa 45:5) and "To me every knee shall bow every tongue shall swear" (v. 23). Within just a few decades of Jesus's death and resurrection, Paul has taken a verse that states clearly the uniqueness of Israel's God and has identified Jesus uniquely with that God: "at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil 2:10-11).

Other New Testament texts deepen and expand upon these descriptions of Jesus's divinity. Hebrews speaks of him as mediator between the most high God and the rest of us (Heb 1:3, 8-9). Colossians speaks of him as the pattern according to which God has made everything that exists (Col 1:1). And though several of the following verses have text critical problems or are later books in the New Testament, they seem to say explicitly that Jesus is God (Rom 9:5; Titus 2:13; John 1:18; 2 Pet 1:1, 1 John 5:20, 1 Cor 15:28). The New Testament makes promises about the future and Jesus's reign—we will be judged by how we have related to his beloved poor (Matt 25:31-46), God will give us all things in him (Rom 8:32), and one day he will make all things new (Gal 1:4; 3:13; 1 Thess 1:10). Until then, Jesus is the one to whom we pray and to whom we offer our praise (Rev 5:6-14; 22:20).

Our scriptures make seemingly irreconcilable claims: that Jesus is as human as us, that he is as divine as God. What sense can we make of this seeming nonsense?

The Word, Son, and Wisdom of God

Several New Testament images became especially important for early Christian reflection on the divinity of the Son, as seed of Trinitarian thought breaks through the ground and becomes a tender seedling. They are these three: Jesus is the Word of God, the Son of God, and the Wisdom of God. Each of these are mutually interpreting. The more we unfold the meaning of one, the deeper the meaning of the others becomes. In this way they are different from other biblical metaphors for Jesus like a door or a rock or even a shepherd. Those are rich and allusive metaphors, appropriately celebrated in the church's speech and song. But as the church marveled about these three—Word, Son, and Wisdom—new depths were opened up that each pointed in the same direction. Jesus must be divine, not less than God.

First, the Word or Logos of God. It is hard to know precisely how to translate John 1's Greek word logos (John 1:1; 1:14). It is something like the "reason," the "word," the "pattern" according to which God creates everything, like a blueprint builders use to make a house. Logos certainly suggests Christ's presence with God in the beginning, as a pattern according to which all creation was made ("all things came into being through him" John 1:3—similar to Col 1:16, "In him all things in heaven and on earth were created"). This is quite similar to Paul's description of Christ as the "wisdom" of God (1 Cor 1:24). Sometimes logos is translated as the "word" of God. Tertullian, another great African church father, suggested this: we humans are made in God's image. And we often deliberate within ourselves to see what we think. This deliberation reflects, at an infinite remove, the way God deliberates. When we wonder to ourselves, that is like God and his Word, carrying on a conversation.

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Excerpted from Trinity by Jason Byassee, William H. Willimon. Copyright © 2015 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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