Transcription
In this video, we're going to look at the question, did Jesus know he was God? And I often discuss this, uh, with Christians. And we're going to look at an exchange between two very well-known Christian New Testament scholars on YouTube recently, and I'm going to make some comments, uh, about what they say. And at the end, I'm going to offer, uh, an Islamic, uh, perspective, inshallah.
Um, so just to introduce, uh, the people concerned, uh, one is called, uh, Tom Wright. Uh, he's a very well-known, famous, prominent New Testament scholar. Uh, he is a former bishop of Durham in the Church of England. He's now a professor at Aberdeen University of Early Christianity and the New Testament and currently living in Oxford. And the other chap is, uh, Dr. Michael Bird, who is an Australian New Testament scholar, uh, based in Melbourne, I think. And, uh, their their latest joint work is, is this actually, um, called "The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians." And this is a huge, weighty tome, and I've not read it all the way through. It's not really that kind of book. It's more like a, a reference work going through the various New Testament, uh, texts.
Um, but that's their latest one, and you can tell by the font size there. NT Wright, as he's technically known, a slightly larger font than, uh, poor Michael Bird, who gets a smaller billing there. But anyway, um, so I'm going to share, uh, with you. Here we go. Um, I'm just going to, uh, rewind this to the beginning, and, uh, what we're going to see is an interesting debate or discussion, uh, between these two, and it's, uh, pretty self-evident what's going on. So, about sacred places. So let's kick off. We've got a question from Bill Kum in Dubai about, "Did Jesus know he was God?" Bill asks, "I do not think that Jesus knew he was divine in the same way that we know we are cold or hot, happy or sad, male or female. It was more like a kind of knowledge we associate with vocation." Now, that's a quotation from "Simply Christian." Your own words there, Tom. And he asked Tom. Tom notes this, plus the paragraph that follows, brings us to, again quoting you, "the borders of language as well as theology. Reading this was simultaneously thought-provoking and unsettling for me. It would be helpful to have Tom unpack it a bit further."
Now, by, why is, why is this question even come up? Because I, I, I've read most of Tom Wright's books. Uh, especially as a Christian, I was a big fan of his. Uh, he is not a fundamentalist, but he is very conservative. And so for me, as an evangelical Christian, you know, he was someone one could read and, and not feel threatened by. But he did have some slightly off views. And this was one of the questions about Jesus allegedly being God. When he addresses this, he seems to say, "Yes, he was." But the way he says it is really, um, to many people odd and a little unsettling, as it was for me, too. And it's interesting in the way it's unsettling and, and, uh, and what the Bible actually says. So, let's listen to a bit more.
I can say, Tom, I've had the exact same question asked to me about your writings. People have said to me, "Does Tom think that Jesus really believed he was God, or did Jesus believe he was God in the same way that someone Paul could, or in the same way they might think they're in love with someone?" And some people wonder whether the knowledge of being God that you attribute to Jesus, is it a little bit too light and indecisive, or should Jesus have known he was God in the same way that he knows he's a human being? Uh, Tom, in what way, in what sense did Jesus understand his divine identity and his divine vocation?
Good question. Well, this could be the subject for a string of seminars, indeed. Um, just recently in Oxford, there was a paper given at a seminar on, "Did Jesus know he was divine?" Which was kind of amusing because when my son, who was at the seminar, came home and said at supper what the seminar had been about, his son, my grandson, uh, didn't hadn't met the word "divine" before except in one context, which was when he was with my wife, his grandmother, making a delicious dessert, and my wife's comment on the, on the delicious dessert was, "That's divine." And so Leo, who was then, I don't know, seven, I think, this was the only meaning he knew of divine. So when Oliver, my son, came home and said, "We were discussing, 'Did Jesus know he was divine?'" And Leo said, "Wait, did Jesus know he was yummy?" And of course, the whole family just cracks up. This is a classic Christian humor, by the way, if you're not used to this, where you know that this kind of, uh, jokey theology about God is, is seen as quite acceptable. For other people, uh, it's not quite so tasteful, but, um, nevertheless, this is, this is pretty characteristic of kind of evangelical humor or Christian humor.
No, Leo, that's not what... So, what are we talking about? That, as often with children, the, the follow-up question really gets you to the heart of things. I, I struggled with this a lot when I was working on "Jesus and the Victory of God," which is 30 years ago now, because I was very much aware that for many people, particularly in more conservative Christian circles, the word "God" is a kind of a given. And often it goes with, um, a sort of, uh, the moral therapeutic deism, which some sociologists have said is the default mode of much Western Christianity, that the idea of, um, the omnipotent being in the sky who runs everything and does everything, etc., etc. Did Jesus know he was that being?
And I've heard now, this is a very interesting point, actually, uh, and kind of a sociological and psychological point, that in, in his view, for many, many Christians in the West, they have a kind of a moral therapeutic deistic understanding of God. Now, this is not necessarily the God of the prophets, by the way, but this is his backdrop, uh, against which he then presents his own understanding of who Jesus was. But what's missing from this, very interestingly, is the, the Jewish Bible's own understanding of God. Uh, say, we find in Isaiah, where God is one, the creator, uh, of the universe. Besides him, there are no gods. And where there's a great criticism for idolatry, or that, that's not the backdrop that Tom Wright chooses to, uh, present his case. It's the Western kind of slightly secularized Christian understanding of a therapeutic deity. Um, so that's an interesting move he's making intellectually. I just wanted, just, just to just to mention that people talk about Jesus's self-consciousness in terms of that being, um, as though actually Jesus is just that being, by the way, is not the God of the Bible, but the God of Western moral therapeutic deism, which so again, anyway, pretending to be human, he's pretending to be hungry or thirsty, um, and maybe even goes through the motions of being killed on the cross, even though actually he knows perfectly well it's going to be all right, etc., etc.
Now, when I read the New Testament, I do not see that. I see this human being, Jesus, weeping at the tomb of his friends, saying, "My soul is troubled. Should I say, save me from this hour?" Um, in, in paroxysms of anguish on the ground in Gethsemane. "Have I come the wrong way?" And then on the cross, saying, "My God, why did you abandon me?" No, this is very true. Uh, how can that person possibly be God? Because we know from the Jewish Bible that God is eternal, immortal, supreme, the creator, uh, unlike, there's nothing like him. There are no, no rivals. So to suddenly narrow it down on this man, Jesus, who the gospel presents him as someone who is suffering and in anguish and pain and so on, is, is an interesting move. So somehow I have to fit that biblical datum into the same, um, total package as when I say in the Nicene Creed, "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten."
So, so now he introduces the Nicene Creed as the backdrop. Firstly, we had the, the therapeutic moral deism of Western Christians, as he, as he puts it, rather perceptively, I think. Then he brings in the Nicene Creed from the 4th century. This is not something that Jesus wrote, of course, or anyone from the first century had any hand in. He presents that as a backdrop. So I'm still trying to, you know, can we have the, the, the God of the Old Testament, or the God of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, peace be upon them all? But it doesn't quite, you don't quite get around to doing that. "Not made, being of one in being with the Father," etc. All of which I, I believe. But in a sense, it's a lifetime's hard-won wrestling with who Jesus really was, and simply short-circuiting that by saying, "Yeah, Jesus knew he was God." Meaning by that, the God that Western culture assumes is God. I mean, actually, you could again, you know, the backdrop, the counterpoint to his presentation, is the Western understanding of God. And I'm coming, well, can we have the understanding of God that we find on the Jewish prophets in the Torah? And we, we don't have that. It's, it's a strange omission because that, that's the benchmark. It's revelation. It's not what some people, some Christians in, in California may think, or what some church fathers, not all, in the 4th century, because the Council of Nicaea was hotly contested by many in the church, both bishops, priests, and lay people, for years afterwards. So it's again, an interesting way he's, he's setting up the discussion here.
Equally, turn the question around the other way and say, "Did God know he was Jesus?" Um, and I mean, obviously, that would be hugely paradoxical, but it would kind of juggle the hearer into thinking, "Wait a minute." Because, of course, as in Pauline Christology, say, Philippians 2. So in the Gospels themselves, what we are seeing is, as it were, the redefinition of the very word "God." So that I want to say, so the very, the very, this is what he does, and it's a clever move. I give him that. It's clever. He redefines God, the concept of God. But notice where he gets his concept from. It's not from, as I keep on pointing out, the Jewish Bible so much. It's, it's from Western secular therapeutic deism or the Council of Nicaea.
Um, you know, if there's a lacuna here, yes, Jesus did know he was God, but he meant something quite different by that from what we might instinctively mean in the modern Western world by the word "God." And, and you can see this, say, at the beginning of the Gospels, when Mark quotes from Malachi and Isaiah, "The Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to his temple. He will send his messenger before your face." Um, and then the Isaiah passage, um, from Isaiah chapter 40, about the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Prepare the way of the Lord." Now, Malachi and Isaiah are both talking about what it will look like when Yahweh, Israel's God, returns to Zion. That's very clear. But what Mark does is he quotes those two and then shows us Jesus coming for baptism. And it's as though he's saying, "You need a whole other lens in your spectacles, guys, because you think you're waiting for Israel's God, and you might expect him to turn, return like the whirling wheels of the chariot in Ezekiel, because Ezekiel 43 says he'll come back looking like he did in Ezekiel chapter 1, etc., etc. But actually, let me tell you what it looks like when God comes back. It looks like a young Jewish prophet turning up for baptism at the Jordan."
Okay, so this is an interesting move. We finally actually quote some Old Testament passages, but really, uh, only when they're quoted, uh, in, in the New Testament, not directly themselves. So what is, what is Mark doing? Mark 1:2 and 3 does quote Isaiah 40, where the messenger prepares the way of Yahweh. "Prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God." And Mark applies this to Jesus. So the logic of what Tom, uh, Wright is doing is John the Baptist prepares the way not for God directly, but for Jesus. So there's an implicit identification. What was said of Yahweh is now applied to Jesus. So does this, does that equal, uh, divinity? So this is a common reading, actually, uh, throughout history, that Christians have often done this. But there are other ways of reading this passage. For example, the historical-critical way. Mark may simply be presenting Jesus as God's supreme agent, in whom God's own coming is manifest. The Isaiah promise of God's return is fulfilled through Jesus's mission. And I think it's important to note that the text never directly says Jesus is God, actually. And in Second Temple Judaism, this is the, the period that we're looking at, in Judaism up to the destruction of the temple in AD 70, it was common to speak of God acting through chosen figures, for example, wisdom or the angel of the Lord. It's possible Mark could be using that idiom.
So, does the passage suggest that Jesus was God? Well, for later Christian interpreters like Tom Wright and others, yes. Um, but a historical-critical reading, no. It shows Jesus as the eschatological agent through whom God returns to his people, not as God himself. Now, this is an alternative that Tom Wright fails to mention, and it is actually the dominant view in New Testament scholarship. Remember I said at the beginning, he's very conservative. So he's going to choose options that most closely align with traditional Christian theology. But, uh, historical-critical academics don't normally do that so much. So I think the best, best case we can say for Tom Wright is that the passage is ambiguous. It's open to interpretation. Uh, Mark uses, uh, some quotes in Jewish scripture that could be read, uh, as what's called divine identity language, but they could also very well fit in with Jewish categories of agency. Um, so I don't think he has established his case, uh, at all with great, with great force.
And then the, I kept on referring to the backdrop of the, the Jewish, uh, prophets and which he doesn't mention in terms of their actual teaching. And the book of Isaiah, for example, is one of the most explicitly monotheistic bits of the, the Hebrew Bible. Um, particularly chapters 40 to 55. Um, I mean, there are amazing monotheistic statements. So you've got Isaiah 43:10: "Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the Lord, and besides me, there is no savior." Isaiah 43:10. Isaiah 44: "Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel. I am the first and I am the last. Besides me, there is no God." Isaiah 45: "I am the Lord, there is no other." It goes on. It goes on and on. Isaiah 46. So Isaiah's language goes way beyond henotheism. This idea that, well, Israel's God is the one true God, but, and you mustn't follow the other deities. He's moved, he's gone beyond that into clear monotheism. There's no other god. They're all idols. Um, and it's interesting when you compare that with, um, Quranic, uh, teaching about tawhid, the oneness of God. So in Isaiah 45, Isaiah says, "I am the Lord. There is no other. Besides me, there is no God." It's just one. Doesn't mention three. It's not, "We are the Lord," a trinitarian, but "I am the Lord." The Quran says, "Say, He is Allah, One. Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He is He neither begets nor is begotten, and there is none comparable to Him." This is Surah 112, of course. So both of these reject the existence of any divine rivals. No other gods exist. The Quran obviously says that, uh, and there's lots of polemic against idols in Isaiah and the Quran, and they're both universal about humankind. God creates everyone, and he, he is sent, uh, for to the ends of the earth. His message is to be sent to the ends of the earth, and so on. So, you know, this is the comparison here with, with Islam in, in many important ways, I think. Anyway, moving on.
And then the same thing in Luke 19, when Jesus talks about, "You didn't know the day of your visitation." What does it look like when God comes back? It looks like a young Jewish prophet riding down the Mount of Olives in tears, um, denouncing Jerusalem, and then going off to celebrate a meal with his friends and going off to die on a cross. So what we are seeing is the redefinition of the word "God." So we can't simply say, "Did Jesus know he was God?" where we know in advance what the word "God" means. But we do know what the word "God" means. And this is the, this is a peculiarity of Tom Wright's argument. I have a huge respect for him as a scholar, and he's a very good writer, I must say. And his library, by the way, behind me, I mean, makes makes mine look very puny, so I'm very envious of his great, great library. But anyway, um, but we do know what God is like. I've just quoted you passages from Isaiah. There are many other passages. Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema. This is something recited by pious Jews at least three times a day. "Hear, Shema, means Hebrew, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one." The oneness of God is stressed. This is aided, and it's reaffirmed in the same language in Surah 112, Ahad, uh, in Arabic. The Quran, God specifically chooses exactly the same word, the Semitic word for one. There are other words for one that could have been used to stress the divine monotheism. So we do know what God is like. We don't have to, uh, interrogate, uh, the Gospels for that. We have that's the Jewish Second Temple context. And we know in Mark's Gospel, for example, again, another reason why Mark chapter 1 is not talking about Jesus as God, because Jesus dies on the cross, he cries out in despair, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" This is not God speaking, you know. God, there's only one God. God is not addressing God. And also, why is God, in inverted commas, calling out "Why?" I mean, don't you know? I thought this was your whole purpose and mission, according to Christian theology, is to very, is to die in the first place. And when it actually happens, you have no idea what's going on, and you complain in despair about being abandoned. It doesn't make any sense. You see, if the story, if the narrative flow was consistent, you wouldn't have these kinds of anomalies, these strange ideas. Uh, so Jesus dies. Well, God doesn't die. God is immortal. The Quran says that. The Bible says that God is eternal. God is immortal. God doesn't die.
Anyway, let's hear some more from Tom Wright. "And then we're saying, did Jesus know he was that? Rather, the whole New Testament is saying in different ways, look hard at Jesus and see that everything he did and said was a reinterpretation of what the word God actually means." Now, that's why I've talked about, so you're reinterpreting, reinterpreting God. This is very fishy. If you imagine, if you're a first-century pious Jew, an educated Jew, you can read the Torah, uh, in its original language, and then you hear this argument, you're thinking, well, hang on, I know what God is like. God has been revealed to Prophet Moses, upon him be peace. Remember the Shema, and we know what God is like from Isaiah, those wonderful, chap, monotheistic chapters in chapters 40 onwards. Well, we're not, we don't have a blank slate here. We have our true understanding of God, the creator, the supreme. There is none like him. He is one. Never. It never, never says God is three. You see, there's an absence of three when it comes anywhere in the Jewish Bible. Um, so this is a strange move to say, well, now we must jettison all that, ignore all that, and and just, just pretend that Jesus is this God who suffers and dies and doesn't know things, doesn't know the date of the end, and says, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." In Mark 10 and so on. This is a very awkward, strange fit, I think. And I'm, I'm willing to give Tom Wright a lot of slack on this because I respect him as an academic. But is the argument a good one? And that's why I'm doing this video about this in terms of vocation, because I'm not sure that most of Jesus' contemporaries, um, were thinking like Jesus was, that maybe God will come back in some quite different way. Um, and especially this is about the humility. Yes, most of his contemporaries were not thinking like that. Why? Because if we're talking about his educated Jewish contemporaries, they were not expecting the Messiah to be God. The Messiah was a human being who would be victorious over his enemies. He is not, in the, in the Jewish Bible, ever seen as Yahweh, who's meant to come and die for the sins of the world. This is absent from the Jewish Bible. And the vulnerability of God, the God who comes to die on the cross, that is almost unthinkable in the first century, and in the 21st century. Yes, it is. Why is it unthinkable? Not because we have, you know, 40 limited, we don't really understand the brilliant Tom Wright answer. It's because the Bible is clear that God is not a man. God doesn't die. God is not, uh, God is, uh, not someone who suffers, uh, like, like a human being, like an animal who gets crucified. No one expected this because it's not consistent with this extraordinary teaching about monotheism. So this is the problem. So as long as we're prepared to say Jesus is constantly offering, and the early church in worshiping Jesus is constantly offering a redefinition of the word God, then I'm very happy to say, yes, Jesus did. But because it is such a radical redefinition, yes, it is a risk. It is a matter of vocation. Jesus must have known, again and again throughout his life, and especially going to the cross, that he might just be deluded. That it is failed messiahs.
So this is the bit that's, you can see, but poor, poor old Michael Bird there, think, yeah, it's a, so he actually said that Jesus, uh, might have thought that he was deluded, uh, on his way to the cross. And, and I think, uh, Christians are thinking, "How can Jesus think he was deluded? He was God. You know, he's clear sense of mission." This is where it's unsettling. This word, right at the beginning of this, uh, video, people are unsettled, uh, by, by Christians are unsettled by Tom Wright's words. Doesn't quite, it doesn't affirm the deity of Jesus unambiguously. It seems, it seems to fit rather lightly on Jesus's persona and his, his mission. It seems to me, anyway, to end up on crosses and so on. "Hence my God, why did you abandon me?" But of course, Psalm 22, which is there quoted, begins, "My God," and somehow we have to get our heads and our hearts around that. And actually, so much of this comes down to when we kneel at the foot of the cross, when we gaze in awe at the empty tomb, and thank God for the resurrection of Jesus, maybe we start to see who God really is. And until we see that, we can't simply trivialize or short-circuit the thing by saying, "Did Jesus know he was God?" as though God is unknown already, and we're fitting Jesus into that.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, I would argue that God is unknown already because we have many, many prophetic statements in the Torah telling us who God is and who God isn't. Um, and he's making out that we just don't know. We just look at Jesus, his death and resurrection. That's who God is. He's ignoring the whole Jewish context of Jesus's life, Second Temple Judaism, and the Jewish scriptures. This is very ironic, given that he is actually a Bible scholar. So I think this is a deliberate move to try and, you know, don't focus so much on what the Bible actually says about God being immortal, omnipotent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and so on. No, no, put that to one side. Let's just focus on the, the, the suffering Jewish prophet who was crucified and so on. Really? I mean, is that going to persuade a pious Jew? Or is it going to persuade a Muslim who, who is schooled in the truth of the Quran? I, I, I really think it's not going to work very well.
Um, so, in conclusion, I want to share with you some words from this, uh, interesting tome, "Debating Christian Theism." Now, this is not a Muslim book. Uh, it's published by Oxford University Press. Um, it's an anthology of essays by some of the world's leading, uh, Christian, uh, scholars. But, but nestled in this is a wonderful chapter, chapter 26, "The Trinity is Incoherent," by none other than Tim Winter, or Abdul Hakim Murad, um, who is a Muslim. And so, rather interestingly, they've included him in this anthology on Christian theism. Everyone else in this book, I think, affirms Christian theism, but Tim Winter denies, or sees the error of the Trinity as incoherent. But why is it incoherent? And he touches on some of the themes that Tom Wright has mentioned, and that I've mentioned as well. So, I'm going to read a couple of paragraphs from this amazing book. I do recommend it, by the way. Um, an academic book full of interesting, uh, uh, discussions about all sorts of things. Anyway, he says, on page 348, "Despite the desire of many to interpret the disparate biblical data in compliance with classical creeds like the Nicene Creed that Tom mentions, it is evident the classical Trinitarian proof texts were identified only after centuries of disputation. It is significant that the best known, because there's a Trinity verse in the Bible, of course, look in the King James Version, the best known, 1 John 5:7-8, which is clearly the only Trinitarian passage, is also the best known instance of forgery in the Bible, being entirely absent from the oldest Greek manuscripts." This is true. Although he doubted its authenticity, Erasmus, Erasmus of Rotterdam, he's a great Renaissance scholar. Erasmus was obliged to include it for fear of undermining the doctrine of the Trinity. That wasn't the only reason, by the way, he was fearful. He was threatened by the Catholic Church. If he didn't put it back into his critical edition, edition of the New Testament, he would face consequences. And, and Thomas More, who he had met in England, was, uh, you know, executed, and Tindale was executed for having the temerity of translating the New Testament into English. So there's a real death threat implied here by the Christian authorities. Anyway, "with the exception of this interpolation, the text of the Old and New Testament never attributes threefoldness to God. God's only number is one." Isn't it interesting that this Muslim, in two simple sentences, slices through everything Tom Wright says about the Bible? And the Bible is Tom Wright's specialty. With the exception of this one verse, which is a forgery. By the way, no one disputes as a forgery. Now, nowhere in the Bible attributes threefoldness to God. It says that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God's only number is one. Absolutely true.
And then he quotes Emil, Emil Brunner, uh, he was a, a 19th, sorry, 20th-century Swiss Reformed theologian, very eminent Christian theologian, who said the following: "The mystery of the Trinity proclaimed by the church and enshrined in her liturgy from the fifth and sixth century onwards is a pseudo-mystery which sprang out, sprang out of an aberration of theological thought from the lines laid down in the Bible, not from the biblical doctrine itself." Now, Brunner was a Reformed theologian. In other words, he was very intensely focused on the Bible alone, and he seems to think that the Trinity was problematic as a doctrine. It's not there. It's not laid down in the Bible. He, he seems to be arguing. And then Tim Winter continues, "Whether Jesus himself was proposing a theology radically unfamiliar to the Jews is a question that continues to detain scholars." So Tom Wright is suggesting that Jesus is proposing a theology completely unknown to the Jews, that he was God. "Wright's evident, however, that he never preached this characteristic of church doctrines since he, New Testament authors and their first readers were solidly monotheistic in the Jewish sense. In the book of Acts, more than half of the debates concern Jews and their beliefs, but at no point do we do we suspect that belief in one God in three persons formed part of the fearless proclamation of the disciples." If you look at the book of Acts as their earliest kind of record of the preaching of the disciples, mainly Paul, actually, but also a few others, they never mention the three persons of the Trinity. Isn't that curious? If it was so central, why did they fail to mention it? Had they preached such a thing, Tim Winter concludes, the Jews would certainly have responded robustly. But, but this author, but of this, the author left no record. So that, that's very interesting.
And then there's the next section about New Testament Christology, which I'll just read a few verses, a few, uh, sentences from. "In the Bible, Jesus sometimes appears explicitly to deny that he is divine. Texts include, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.' Mark 10, I mentioned before. Another verse, 'The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.' John 5:19. Similarly, Jesus is frequently depicted as having non-divine qualities, including temptation, fear, indecision, lack of knowledge, as, uh, Gethsemane, where he is intensely afraid, so that God sends an angel to strengthen and reassure him. Luke 22. Jesus does not know the date of the second coming in Mark 13. Again, God knows everything. The New Testament says that God knows all things, and yet Jesus didn't. So it's again, he's explicit and implicit denial of his divinity. Again and again, he is portrayed as obedient to God, as sent by him, learning obedience. Hebrews 5:8. Since such qualities conflict with what is logically known of God, the gospel writers are here clearly presenting him as a non-divine being." So Tim, what Tim Winter is saying here is directly opposite of what Tom Wright is claiming as well. "Later generations seeking to harmonize this with the evolved doctrine of his fully divine nature." That's what Tom Wright does. He cites the Nicene Creed, developed on the basis of Philippians 2:5, the idea of kenosis, as a Greek word whereby God, as the second person, emptied himself of aspects of his godhead during the three decades of his existence on earth. The consequence of this was a double paradox, and this is where Tim's eloquence comes in. Not only can a single entity be fully divine and fully human, i.e., infinite and finite simultaneously, but that same entity can disengage aspects of deity at will without becoming less fully divine and thereby impairing the perfection of the incarnation or the atonement." Very, I like the way "disengage aspects of the, of the deity." So, uh, Jesus can, uh, disengage his omniscience, doesn't know the date of the end. He can disengage or detach, uh, his all-powerfulness, alleged powerfulness, because Jesus is clearly weak and vulnerable, uh, and so on and so on. So that he, but I asked a Christian the other day, and I didn't actually get an answer. It was actually on YouTube. I won't mention which, which program it was, and I said, "What is the essential deity that can be left after you take away, you know, Jesus knowing everything, or Jesus being all-powerful, or, or Jesus being immortal?" You know, what is this, this rump of deity? It's a very blasphemous kind of question, in a way, to put. And he didn't have an answer to that. Because if God is not all his attributes, what is God? What's left? This kernel of deity left? And they had no answer, because it's an obsession. Third question. Of course, God doesn't change like that, uh, completely change from being all, all knowledgeable to being ignorant, to being all-powerful to being weak, to be immortal, eternal, to be someone who dies, etc. This is not coherent. Is that, hence an incoherence? The Trinity is incoherent, according to, um, Tim Winter here. Um, and I could go on, actually. There's some marvelous stuff. I say in this book, the essay, by the way, uh, uh, Tim Winter's essay, "The Trinity Is Here," is worth, if you want to read that essay, get this book. It's worth every, uh, every penny.
So, I guess this is kind of my response. So I think Tom, Tom Wright is a clever man. Uh, he's an excellent, brilliant biblical scholar, but his theology, his Anglican traditional evangelical theology, because he is, as I say, he was a bishop in the Church of England, means that he reads the, the scriptures, uh, his script, Christian scriptures, in a particular way, which is often not historical, which takes them away from their Jewish context, means he has to ignore the elephant in the room, which are the prophets of the Jewish Bible and what they teach about God clearly, repeatedly. He has to ignore all that and focus, uh, as an, I don't mean to be rude, but focused like an idol on Jesus. And if Jesus suffers and dies and doesn't know things, and is weak, and is tempted, and is fearful, and so on, that is what God is like. And I'm saying, "Oh, please, what about all the other things in the Bible? Why are you ignoring them and focusing?" Wouldn't it be easier? Wouldn't it be more convincing? Wouldn't it be more spiritually, uh, authentic to actually accept what the prophets taught about God and to understand that Jesus is not what they are talking about? Yes, love Jesus all you wish. Uh, you know, give, give him all the praise, but do not worship him. I think that would be the Jewish and the Islamic response, because he himself, Jesus himself, upon him be peace, is portrayed in the Gospels as worshiping God. So we should be like Jesus and do as he did, have a theocentric, God-centered life, and worship God, and not worship the messenger. As the famous, um, 20th-century, uh, scholar Rudolph Bultmann said, and he was probably the greatest New Testament scholar of the 20th century in his insight into Christianity, is that the proclaimer became the proclaimed. The proclaimer became the claim. It's actually a quote. The proclaimer became the claim. So the one who proclaimed the message of the Kingdom of God, he became the message itself. He became the one that was proclaimed. And that's the switch that you see in Christianity. Um, the gospel of Jesus becomes a gospel about Jesus. And what Islam does is it gets it back in its right form. So we follow the gospel of Jesus, not the one about him. The idea that he is God and died and rose again, and so on. That's not the message of Jesus, according to even the earliest Gospels that we have, curiously enough.
Anyway, I think that's enough for now. Until next time.