James McGrath has one of those posts up today that invites either total incomprehension or a major book by way of responses: Did Jesus claim to be God? Judging by the initial responses he’s getting major incomprehension from those who believe John’s gospel settles the matter.
I can’t help feeling that the question is anachronistic in some ways, since it needs something like a fairly well developed doctrine of the Trinity to make sense of it. Presumably James is not expecting anyone to answer: “yes, didn’t you know Jesus was a modalist patripassian”?
One also has to ask, theologically, what on earth would it mean to “know you are God”? Could you possibly be a real human being (or at least a sane one) if you thought you were God?
What does “God” mean in a question like that anyway – divine? fully divine? the only deity there is? one of several deities? or even the second person of the Trinity?
It seems to me that what James asks is not only the wrong question from the point of view of inviting wrong answers, but the wrong sort of question to be historically comprehensible, never mind answerable.
Near the end of his post, James says:
It also needs to be mentioned that there are a significant number of Christians who have sought to reconcile the Gospel evidence with their creedal tradition by claiming that Jesus was God but did not necessarily know he was God while on earth. And so the question of whether Jesus was God is not precisely the same as the question of whether he made such a claim about himself.
I think this is a step in the right direction, but that it doesn’t go far enough in expecting some congruence between Jesus’ historical claims and the Church’s theological ones. That is to say, I think we should expect the Church’s theological claims, if valid, to be rooted in the claims Jesus made either explicitly or implicitly about himself, even if the framework of understanding has developed substantially.
The question “What did Jesus claim about himself?” is an important one that should not get itself short-circuited into the caricature of “Did Jesus claim to be God?”
So, for what it’s worth (and aware that seriously evidencing these claims is work for more than a blog post), I think Jesus believed himself to have the authority to renew Israel. I think Jesus believed that God was present in his actions to pronounce healing and forgiveness in at least the same way he was present in the temple through the priesthood’s actions and declarations. I think that Jesus believed that when people responded to his teaching, they were responding to God, in at least the same way that when they responded to Torah, they were responding to God.
As I said above, James’ question is at least anachronistic. In my view the better question to ask is “Is the belief that Jesus is the Son of God, the second person of the blessed Trinity, congruent with the ways in which Jesus thought about himself?”
And I think that’s a question to which I can answer “yes”.
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Personally, I think the right question is “What claims did the evangelists understand Jesus to be making about himself?”
In any case, I would point out that Dr. McGrath was responding to a question as it was asked of him. I am not sure whether he would say it was the “right” question.
I think that’s one right question. I do, however, think we can go behind that and attempt to reconstruct what claims Jesus was making about himself – but with both limited knowledge and limited value.
And FWIW it seems to me that James was accepting the question as the basis of a debate.
I tried out an interesting study using game theory to help flesh some of this huge question out. Check it out at my blog here.
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