v.2 n.8 Quotes and Claims

Claims of revival are unfounded: “There does not seem to be a revival taking place in America. Whether this is measured by church attendance, born-again status, or theological purity, the statistics simply do not reflect a surge of any noticeable proportions” (Barna Research Group, State of the Church, 2000).

Making up the faith as we go along: “The Christian Church has never succeeded in defining the Kingdom of God, for each different age of Christianity has given to the expression that meaning which harmonizes with the aspirations of the time” (A.C. Headlam, D.D., Jesus Christ in History and Faith, William Belden Noble Lectures, Harvard University, 1924, p. 92).

Why is the teaching of Plato alive and well in Christian circles? “‘The wicked will go away into eternal punishment.’ This passage has often been cited in support of the doctrine of endless torment. But it may be questioned whether it implies more than the finality of judgment…Jesus did not teach, like Plato and others, that the soul is immortal and that it would necessarily go on after death…The phrase ‘endless sin’ does not mean an endless sin, but one which has dimensions and ramifications beyond the present life” (Professor Colin Brown, New International Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 3, p. 99).

The fact is that “eternal punishment” is a grave mistranslation of the original Greek. It gives comfort (if that is the right word) to those who believe that the wicked are going to be tortured in hell for endless eternity. The Bible, however, does not present God as presiding over a perpetual torture chamber, a kind of cosmic Sadist. The point can be made very simply that in Jude 7 Sodom and Gomorrah underwent “eternal fire” (exactly the same word in the original as found in Matt. 25). That fire, if it was eternal, would now still be burning. But it is not. Therefore “eternal fire” conveys quite the wrong meaning to English readers. Colin Brown is right to point out first that man in the Bible does not possess an immortal soul. Since he is innately mortal he can go out of existence. Thus the wicked will be subject to a final death, the cessation of consciousness and existence. The punishment they will incur is “aionion” (Greek aionios). It will be a punishment to be meted out “in the age to come” (aionian). It is the penalty which excludes a person from the age to come or the Kingdom of God. The wicked will therefore go away into “the punishment of the age to come,” while their counterparts, the righteous, will be invited to take part in “the life of the age to come” (aionian life). That life is indeed a life of immortality as well as being life in the future age of the Kingdom of God on earth. Immortality is to be conferred on the true believers at the resurrection (I Cor. 15:50-52). At that time they will enter “the life of the age to come,” while the wicked who are alive at the return of Jesus will suffer the appalling fate of being burned up, the “destruction, punishment of the age to come.”

From John the Baptist onwards Christian preaching placed before man two destinies: the “barn” of the Kingdom of God or to burn up as chaff (Matt. 3:12; 13:30). The righteous who will at that future day shine like the sun in their Father’s Kingdom are those who now “understand the Message of the Kingdom” (Matt. 13:23) and bear fruit from that essential saving seed (Luke 8:11-12).

Building on any seed but the seed of the Kingdom is likely to produce the wrong fruit. Such are the laws of nature which operate with the same inexorable logic on the spiritual plane.

Using the word “word” correctly. “The Bible is not infrequently referred to as ‘the word of God’ by Christians. It is important to note, however, that the expression ‘word of God’ in Scripture does not usually refer to the written word at all but to God’s or His emissaries speaking and inspiration” (“Word,” Harper’s Bible Dictionary).

The point here is a simple one with enormous implications. The “word of God” in the New Testament refers to the Gospel as Jesus preached it. “Word of God” is not just a synonym for the Bible. The Bible calls itself generally “the Scriptures.” “Word of God” by contrast is the technical term for the saving Gospel preached by biblical evangelists, of whom John the Baptist and Jesus were the first. It is first defined as “the word about the Kingdom” (Matt. 13:19) and on many later occasions abbreviated by a kind of shorthand to “word of God” or “word,” “word of salvation,” “word of life,” etc.

“The Old Testament’s standard way of envisaging dying and coming back to life is by speaking of lying down and sleeping, then of waking and getting up. The former [dying] is an extreme form of the latter [lying down] (see II Kings 4:31; 13:21; Isa. 26:19; Jer. 51:39, 57; Job 14:12). Further, dying means lying down with one’s ancestors in the family tomb…So coming back to life would mean leaving such a ‘land of earth’ (cf. also Ps. 49, 73). The image presupposes a restoring to life of the whole person with its spiritual and material aspects” (Word Biblical Commentary on Daniel, Goldingay, p. 307).

Unfortunately this biblical view of life and death has collapsed in the minds of churchgoers, who are constantly fed a different view. Under the all-pervasive influence of the Greek philosopher, Plato, they have been indoctrinated with an idea which confuses the teaching of Jesus and the Bible. They have been told that they possess innately an “immortal soul” which, since it cannot die, must continue to exist consciously the moment the body ceases to function. This analysis of the nature of man is pagan and found in most world religions, but not in biblical Christianity. According to Jesus and the Bible the whole person ceases to exist consciously at death and he must therefore be called back to life. This is resurrection. Resurrection has happened to one man only, Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is the pattern for our own. Just as Jesus went down to the place of death (Hades/Sheol), so the Christian who dies goes to Hades/Sheol and expects to be rescued from there at the future resurrection destined to occur at the seventh trumpet to be sounded at the return of Jesus in power and glory to take over the rulership of the world (Rev. 11:15-18; I Cor. 15:23; I Thess. 4:13ff.; Luke 14:14; 20:35; Matt. 24:29-31).

Jesus is the Son of God and the Father is the Lord and God of Jesus. “We are not to suppose that the Apostles identified Christ with Jehovah: there were passages which made this impossible — for example Psalm 110:1” (International Critical Commentary on I Peter, Charles Bigg, D.D., Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Oxford, T&T Clark, p. 99).

One of the most remarkable pieces of misinformation is found in the Bible Knowledge Commentary produced by the staff of Dallas Theological Seminary. In an effort to promote the “deity of Jesus” they assert that the title “Lord” used of Jesus means that he is God.

Commenting on Matthew 22:43-45, Luke 20:41-44 and Acts 2:36, they say:

“If the Messiah were simply an earthly son of David, why did David ascribe deity to Him? Jesus quoted from a Messianic psalm (Ps. 110:1) in which David referred to the Messiah as ‘my Lord.’ ‘Lord’ translates the Hebrew adonay, used only of God (e.g. Gen. 18:27; Job 28:28)…David must have realized that the Son, who was to be the Messiah, would be divine, for David called Him Lord…The noun ‘Lord,’ referring to Christ, probably is a reference to Yahweh…This is a strong affirmation of Christ’s deity.”

The problem is that the facts are misstated. The Hebrew word to designate the Messiah in Psalm 110:1 is not adonay. If it were adonay, the commentary would be entirely correct. Adonay appears 449 times in the Old Testament and invariably refers to the Lord God. If the Messiah were addressed as adonay, he would indeed be God.

In fact, the inspired text gives us a designation of the Messiah which proves the exact opposite of the Dallas Theological Seminary commentary. The word for the Messiah in Psalm 110:1 is adoni. The word certainly means “lord” but in every one of its 195 appearances it refers to a lord who is not God. Adoni tells us that the one addressed is not in the category of deity but in the lesser class of human (or occasionally angelic) superior. Adoni is a title of non-deity. The exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God makes him the uniquely and supremely elevated human being, “the man Messiah” as distinct from the one God, the Father (I Tim. 2:5; I Cor. 8:4-6).

Asserting the “deity of Jesus” is most unwise. Scripture teaches us that “there is One God, the Father,” which is a very different proposition from the banner under which currently most churches gather: “There is One God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” There is only one who is Yahweh in the Bible. That One God of the Hebrew Bible and of Jesus claims His unique and unrivaled position when He speaks with singular personal pronouns thousands and thousands of times. This monumental evidence has not prevented the emergence in post-biblical times of a perversion of monotheism known as the Trinity. A learned professor at Harvard described the appalling verbal contortions which proponents of the non-scriptural concept that God exists eternally in three Persons found necessary. The problem was to state how Jesus was both God and Man at the same time:

“The doctrine of the Communication of Properties, says LeClerc, ‘is as intelligible as if one were to say that there is a circle which is so united with a triangle, that the circle has the properties of the triangle and the triangle those of the circle.’ It is discussed at length by Petavius with his usual redundancy of learning. The vast folio of that writer containing the history of the Incarnation [how Jesus can be fully God and fully Man] is one of the most striking and most melancholy monuments of human folly which the world has to exhibit. In the history of other departments of science we find abundant errors and extravagances; but Orthodox theology seems to have been the peculiar region of words without meaning; of doctrines confessedly false in their proper sense, and explained in no other; of the most portentous absurdities put forward as truths of the highest import; and of contradictory propositions thrown together without an attempt to reconcile them. A main error running through the whole system, as well as other systems of false philosophy, is that words possess an intrinsic meaning not derived from the usage of men; that they are not mere signs of human ideas, but a sort of real entities, capable of signifying what transcends our conceptions, and that when they express to human reason only an absurdity, they may still be significant of a high mystery of a hidden truth, and are to be believed without being understood” (A Statement of Reason for Not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians, 1833, Section 5).

v.2 n.8 Where Did You Get Your Gospel?

The central question in any investigation of salvation is the issue of the Gospel. The Gospel is offered in the Bible as the unique vehicle for gaining immortality. Nothing, as Paul argued passionately in Galatians 1, must be subtracted from the saving Message and nothing must be added. Distorting the Gospel means an inevitable loss of saving Truth, an unparalleled disaster.

Amazingly, churchgoers seem confident that the Gospel involves belief simply in the death and resurrection of Jesus. It seems not to have occurred to them that Jesus preached the Gospel for a large portion of his ministry without any mention at all of his death and resurrection. Jesus, in other words, laid the foundation of the Gospel with the Good News about the Kingdom of God which is coming. This fact can be investigated and verified easily. Simply take a Bible and start at Mark 1:14-15 or Matthew 4:17, 23 or Luke 4:43, where it is plainly stated that Jesus urged repentance and belief in the Kingdom of God as the primary item on his saving agenda.

There are some 26 chapters of Gospel preaching by Jesus, the twelve and the seventy, in which the sole subject is the Kingdom of God and how it may be entered in the future (not at death), when Jesus comes back to inaugurate the promised Kingdom on the renewed earth. Only later were the death and resurrection of Jesus incorporated into the existing Kingdom Gospel. This completed Gospel gives us, for example, the early creedal statement in Acts 8:12 where belief in the Kingdom of God is still the first and fundamental element in the Gospel.

But today things are different. No one speaks of the “Gospel about the Kingdom” and the historical Jesus seems thus to have been deprived of his own saving message. What counts today is almost exclusively a decision in favor of the death of Jesus for sins. The shift is part of the confusion which began to overtake the faith in the second century. At that time the Kingdom of God began to lose ground as the term to describe Jesus’ own Gospel preaching. “Kingdom of God,” rather than being the objective of world history — a real government (Dan. 2:44; 7:18, 22, 27; Micah 4:1-8; Zech. 14:9) to be established in Jerusalem with the Messiah present as world-ruler — was replaced by “heaven” as a place removed from the earth and the destination of departed “souls.” “Heaven” has ever since maintained an unshakable dominance in the language of churchgoers, though Jesus never spoke of “heaven” as the objective of faith. By contrast he promised his followers the inheritance of the earth (Matt. 5:5; Rev. 5:10).

It is remarkable that the earliest church fathers (whatever degree of clarity they lost in their definition of God and His Son) did manage to maintain the Kingdom of God on earth as the goal of salvation, but with Origen, who imported a heavy dose of philosophy and mysticism into the faith, “heaven” at the moment of death overwhelmed the “concrete” hope of a renewed earth about which the Bible has so much to say.

Later with Constantine a further development made the Bible less and less comprehensible. Constantine’s followers actually equated the Kingdom of God with the Roman state, although there was no evidence of worldwide peace in the presence of a returned Messiah! A final stage in the collapse of the Kingdom of God as the term to describe the event of the future connected with Jesus’ return occurred when the Roman Catholic Church appropriated Jesus’ favorite term to designate the Church worldwide. Bishops were then “enthroned” to give the impression — very false to the New Testament — that they were already reigning with Christ on earth.

It seems to us that most churchgoers are not actively studying and analyzing the Bible. This task is not an impossible one. One may start with the term “Kingdom of God” and trace it through the Gospel of Mark. It will quickly become clear that Jesus had in mind a new world order based in Jerusalem to be initiated only when he returned in power and glory to suppress opposition to his rightful rule on the restored throne of David, as all the prophets of Israel had foreseen. The crowds knew well what was entailed in the explosive term Kingdom of God. They cried out with enthusiasm for the one they recognized as the Messiah:

“Blessed is the coming Kingdom of our father David” (Mark 11:10).

Jesus spoke of his ministry and thus of the Christian faith as “the preaching of the Kingdom of God” (Luke 16:16). He urged the young convert to “go and proclaim the Kingdom of God everywhere” (Luke 9:60). Jesus was the destined Davidic ruler of the coming Kingdom (Luke 1:32) He opened his ministry with the call to repentance and commitment to belief in the Kingdom (Mark 1:14-15). He spoke of the Kingdom as the pearl of great price, the field which must be purchased at all costs. He described his followers as “disciples of the Kingdom” and products of the Kingdom Gospel. A Christian scribe is one who is apprenticed to the Kingdom and brings to his understanding insights from both Testaments. Jesus prayed for the Kingdom, looked forward to reunion in the Kingdom with his disciples and inspired others to be waiting for the Kingdom. Finally, Jesus expected Abraham and Isaac and Jacob to be assembled at the banquet in the Kingdom (Matt. 8:11). In view of this “magnificent obsession” with the Kingdom Jesus gave daily seminars, after his resurrection, to his body of followers: the topic was invariably the Kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). The burden of his teaching obviously involved the prospect of a restored Davidic empire in Jerusalem (Acts 1:6). He and his followers anticipated ruling the world (I Cor. 6:2; Rev. 2:26; 3:21; 20:1-4; 5:10; Matt. 19:28).

The mind of Jesus was Kingdom-centered. It was to the worldwide spread of the Kingdom of God Gospel that he directed all his efforts (Luke 4:43), before commissioning his followers to continue with the same work (Matt. 28:19-20). With the return of a clear proclamation of the Kingdom of God there will come a corresponding unity amongst now divided believers.

v.2 n.8 What Went Wrong

The writers of the New Testament could not have imagined the contemporary chaos of differing Christian groupings which we now somewhat complacently take for granted.

For Paul there is one faith, one hope, one Gospel, One God and One Lord: In a solemn exhortation the Apostle speaks to us: “I implore you, my brothers, on the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all say the same thing, that there be no divisions among you, and that you be perfectly harmonized in the same mind and the same mode of thought” (I Cor. 1:10). Paul in the same letter made it clear that the essence of the Christian life is the possession of the mind of Christ. “Who,” he asks, “knows the mind of the Lord God or who has instructed Him? We have the mind of Christ” (I Cor. 2:16). The thinking of Jesus is indistinguishable from the thinking of God the Father of the Lord Jesus, and Christians are those who have learned to think like Jesus. The bracelet slogan “WWJD?” would better reflect the wisdom of Scripture if it read “WWJT?”—“What Would Jesus Think?” Christian thinking precedes Christian action.

It is significant that Paul calls on a quotation from Isaiah 40:13 where the original Hebrew text reads “Who has known the spirit of the Lord?” Paul gave the right sense when he rendered “spirit” (pneuma) by “mind” (nous). Spirit and mind are on this occasion exchangeable terms for Paul. How very important that equation is as a corrective for the wild activity sometimes claimed as evidence of the spirit of God. The holy spirit means the mind and activity of God operative among believers.

A lack of unity amongst Christians points to lack of receptivity on the part of those aspiring to be Christians. What we need is the “mind/spirit of Christ” among us. Paul urged his congregations to “let the word of Messiah live in you richly” (Col. 3:16). History shows that a significant departure from the Messianic mind of Jesus occurred soon after Apostolic times. A recognition of the scope of this shift away from the thinking of Jesus will enable us to put things right. A grasp of the development of ideas in the centuries following the Bible is essential for an intelligent assessment of the validity or otherwise of contemporary forms of Christianity.

Modern denominationalism and the broad division of Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Protestants stem from a major paradigm shift which began to occur as early as the second century. Most churchgoers seem to have little interest in knowing the roots of their faith. They seem comfortably satisfied that what they have received as the faith really is “the faith once and for all delivered” to God’s people (Jude 3).

When the faith left the confines of Palestine, and after the death of the Apostles who had known Jesus (we include Paul amongst these heroic leaders, since his ministry was on a par with that of the twelve), Christianity passed into the hands of Gentile leadership. This was an event with ominous consequences. Experts on the writings of early post-biblical believers point to a definite loss of inspiration. The so-called church fathers are unable to match the apostolic writings. They have become legalistic as well as philosophical and speculative. And they have lost precious truth:

“Every reader of early Christian literature, unless wholly prejudiced by his dogmatic views of Christianity, must recognize the inferiority, as exponents of Christian thought, of the literary productions known to have come from the post-Apostolic age. This inferiority is not merely in literary power but of grasp on Christian ideas. When we turn from the NT to Ignatius, to the Epistle of Barnabas or Justin Martyr, we pass manifestly from the teaching of masters whose hold on Christian truth is firm and whose view of it is pure and clear to the teaching of disciples whose hold trembles and whose view is partial and dim… Their teachings are mixed with other ideas foreign to apostolic Christianity. The points of view from which the NT authors presented their religion had been, it would appear, frequently lost by their successors, so that apostolic phrases were often repeated with changed meanings” (G.T. Purves, “The Influence of Paganism on Post-Apostolic Christianity,” Presbyterian Review, 36, Oct., 1888).

The crux of the matter is to be found in a progressive departure from the mind of Jesus in Scripture. A heavy influx of Greek philosophical, speculative thinking overwhelmed the original Hebraic, Messianic teachings of Apostolic Christianity. This unfortunate “evolution” resulted in the historic creeds of the fourth and fifth centuries. These creeds then set the pace for the faith ever since. Today many are unable to recognize how deeply ingrained in our thinking is that post-biblical deluge of pagan, Greek ways of thought, sheltering under the Christian umbrella.

It surely ought to be of the greatest interest to modern seekers after truth to know what went wrong. Scholars of the history of ideas know. Their writings are beginning to impact the public. Their findings, we suggest, call for massive soul-searching and reformation. Churchgoers should adopt the role of “private investigators,” eager in their pursuit of original truth (Acts 17:11).

A recent publication by a professor of religion at the University of Michigan (see quotations below) echoes a long-standing theme of historians of Christianity: “Christianity today is not what it was” — that is, what goes under the name of the Christian religion today comes to us through the wringer of subtle but profound changes which began to occur shortly after the ink of the New Testament documents had dried. While Dave Hunt in an interesting book entitled The Occult Invasion deplores the contemporary influx into the church of paganism and gnosticism, he seems unaware that just such an invasion long ago affected and produced the very “orthodoxy” which he is at pains to defend. “Orthodoxy” in fact is not truly such. Rather, “orthodoxy” is what prevailed as a majority opinion, not necessarily, if church history is examined, reflective of the biblical orthodoxy of Jesus.

What we must face squarely is a “switch of labels.” Imagine looking back through centuries of time. Imagine seeing a train entering a tunnel and then visualize it emerging some centuries later. Apparently what you see emerging is the very same train you saw enter the tunnel. Unknown to you, however, is the fact that there were two tracks within the tunnel and the emerging train, though appearing to be the same, was in fact different. One train had replaced the other. What emerged was not the train which entered the tunnel, despite apparent identity.

The effects of paganism on the original faith gradually produced another form of Christianity. The reworked faith, now heavily endowed with the Greek spirit, managed to assert itself as the dominant party and after much struggle suppressed its rivals and claimed to be official as well as apostolic. Evidence for the loss of the pristine form of belief may be detected, if we consider what happened to Jesus’ central and favorite topic “The Kingdom of God.” Jesus’ own Gospel suffered, in the scramble and shuffle of ideas, an almost complete eclipse. From that disaster, we suggest, it needs urgently to be recovered.

Listen first to the words of a distinguished Roman Catholic Professor of New Testament writing on The Kingdom of God in History:

“The impulse to write this book came from two sources. On the one hand, as a teacher of New Testament literature, especially of the synoptic gospels [Matthew, Mark and Luke], it early became obvious to me that the central theme of the preaching of the historical Jesus of Nazareth was the near approach of the Kingdom of God. Yet, to my astonishment, this theme played hardly any role in the systematic theology I had been taught in the seminary. Upon further investigation I realized that this theme had in many ways been largely ignored in the past two thousand years, and when not ignored, often distorted beyond recognition. How could this be?” (B.T. Viviano, The Kingdom of God in History, Glazier, 1988, p. 9, emphasis added).

This candid statement makes our point beautifully. Jesus preached the Gospel: It was obviously always the Gospel about the Kingdom of God. This is a patent fact available even to a superficial inquirer. But what clergy have learned in the seminary included almost nothing about the Kingdom of God, the heart of the Gospel as Jesus preached it. In fact, for two thousand years the church claiming to represent Jesus has almost entirely ignored Jesus’ central concern and teaching. If on occasion it has used his phrase “Kingdom of God,” it has distorted it by giving it a meaning which Jesus would not have recognized.

These facts, we think, display the “problem” of contemporary Christianity. Demonstrably the faith has undergone a radical change for the worse. The loss of Jesus’ key teaching and Gospel means the loss of the mind of Jesus and the loss of his spirit. The result is a “Christianity” which in important ways has lost touch with its founder. It is sailing under false colors. The casualty in this unfortunate process is nothing less than the historical Jesus himself.

The Christian label has now been attached to a system of theology which is significantly different from the theology of Jesus. This baneful situation came about when a vast, but gradual paradigm shift caused a movement away from the Hebrew thought-world of the Bible in favor of the thought-world of second-century Hellenistic, speculative and largely Platonic, philosophical theology.

Professor Ellens of the University of Michigan deals with another and no less central issue of faith: the matter of who God and Jesus are. He describes the source of the creeds now almost universally assumed to be Christian. He maintains that a major shift in the meaning of centrally important New Testament terms occurred:

“Unfortunately what the theologians of the great ecumenical councils [Nicea and Chalcedon] meant by such terms as Son of God was remote from what those same titles meant in the Gospels. The creeds were speaking in Greek philosophical terms. The Gospels were speaking in Second Temple Judaism terms. The Gospels were talking about God visiting us in the man from Nazareth in a special and unique way; the creeds were talking about this man having the being of God [i.e. “the Messiah was God Himself, God the Son”]. The bishops of the councils had shifted the ground from Hebrew metaphor to Greek ontology [theory of being] and in effect betrayed the real Jesus Christ” (“From Logos to Christ,” letter to Bible Review, June, 1997).

This shift from one thought-world to another affected the heart of the Christian faith. The God of Jewish monotheism, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, had to give way to the God of Greek speculation:

“To describe a theological connection between the text and message of the NT, on the one hand, and the fourth and fifth century formulations of trinitarian doctrine on the other, is a precarious and circuitous enterprise at best and, in the worst case scenario one might devise, it is patently impossible to demonstrate any authentic connection whatsoever…One might persuasively argue, I believe, that, taken for face value and on its own merit, independent of later philosophical developments, the text of the Bible does not make the Trinity of Chalcedon possible…The synoptics have no divine Trinity…One is still at a loss to find in Scripture a personalistic Trinity.”

A careful reading of the earliest “church fathers” shows a marked tendency to redefine God and the Son of God in terms of alien Hellenistic concepts:

“The perplexity of this problem, for a scholar who stands in the scriptural tradition of the Protestant Reformation, is greatly increased by standard patristic studies. It becomes readily apparent upon any diligent reading of the Church Fathers, both Greek and Latin, that they believed that they were struggling with more than epistemological issues. They believed that, as they pursued the slowly developing formations of trinitarian thought and divine Logos theory through the unfolding of the early Christian centuries, they were not simply dealing with issues of rhetorical metaphor and symbolic language. They understood that their quest for understanding God had to do with describing an ultimate and objective reality. The formulators of the conciliar tradition theology, in all of its ramifications, intended to provide the Church with a description and definition of the nature of God’s existence and of God’s historical reification and manifestation in Jesus of Nazareth. They appealed to Scripture to accomplish this, but neither their largely allegorical exegetical method nor the integrity of their motions of evidence or documentation are persuasive. Obviously they came to their task with a predisposed theological or philosophical bias and with arbitrarily determined method, in consequence of which the just claims of the scriptural documents themselves were not given objective force” (emphasis added).

The process by which the loss of a biblical understanding of God and Jesus took place can be traced to the pervasive influence of Greek philosophy upon the Mediterranean world:

“The very atmosphere of the ancient world was filled with the thought forms of Greek philosophy and religion…One could not ask significant questions about life, history, knowledge, and meaning without taking into account and reflecting the thought-frames of Hellenistic method and perspective…It was the theology of Africa, particularly of Alexandria with its historic library, university center, and Catechetical School which most directly influenced the theological formulations of the councils from Nicea to Chalcedon. Not only are the towering figures of Tertullian and Athanasius significant in this regard, but the influential role of such figures as Eusebius of Caesarea and the Cappadocian Fathers at Nicea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), was shaped by the doctrinal tradition of Alexandria. The philosophical and theological force of Clement and Origen and their Catechetical School molded the perspective of such key figures in Africa as Tertullian, Cyprian and Athanasius, as well as the Asians: Eusebius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianz.”

Professor Ellens calls for a frank investigation of these facts with a view to “coming clean” about the real origins of much which is believed to be apostolic and Christian:

“It is time, therefore, for the Christian Church to acknowledge that it has a very special type of material which constitutes its creedal tradition. It is not a creedal tradition of Biblical Theology. It is not a unique inspired and authoritative word from God. It is, rather, a special kind of Greek religio-philosophical mythology. It should be candidly admitted by the Church, then, that its roots are not in Jesus of Nazareth…nor in the central tradition of Biblical Theology…Its roots are in Philonic, Hellenistic Judaism and in the Christianized NeoPlatonism of the second to the fifth centuries. Since this is so, the Church should acknowledge to the world of humans seeking Truth and to the world of alternate religions, that the Christian Church speaks only with its own historical and philosophical authority and appeal and neither a divine authority nor a unique revelation from Jesus Christ nor from God.”

[His point is that what developed as orthodoxy is nothing more than a Christianized paganism whose roots are not truly biblical.]

“I am claiming that to ground the Christian faith in Greek philosophical speculation is fatal to the traditional formulations of the essence and warrant of the faith itself. It separates the faith from its biblical, historical foundation and from any substantial grounding in the authentic realities of the historical Jesus…It is fatal to attempt to create an ultimate footing for the traditional formulations of the Christian truth in a comprehensive Biblical Theology. What interests me here, therefore, is the fact that such early Christian theologians as Origen especially, after the example of Philo, wanted to build a biblically-based Theology and Christology but separated their theological enterprise substantially from the imperatives of Scripture to achieve the objective of systematizing their theological Weltanschauung [worldview] in the language and categories mandated by their cultural milieu and its Neo-Platonic philosophical imperatives and possibilities.”

Our hope is that readers will take seriously the challenge to investigate whether the alleged damage to the faith really did take place. It seems to us and to many historians of the development of Christianity that churches are less than candid with their members when they fail to point out that the Bible and traditional understanding are often poles apart.

Personal investigation in the Berean manner (Acts 17:11) is well within the reach of every churchgoer. Simple take a Bible and begin to read again the accounts of the ministry of Jesus. Ask the question: What did Jesus put before the public as the Gospel which must be believed for salvation? Was it just an acceptance of his cross and resurrection? Indeed was there even a mention of Jesus’ death and resurrection as Jesus put the Gospel to his audiences?

Such an investigation can be eye-opening and there is a certain risk attached to the discovery that Jesus’ definition of the Gospel was far removed from what today is offered by way of tract or evangelistic preaching. These facts should sound the alarm that all is not well with contemporary versions of the faith. The path to unity may well lie first in the recognition that Greek philosophy is unacceptable in the Hebrew Gospel of the Messiah. We must return to the Jewish roots of our faith and to the Messianic teaching of the Messiah.

v.2 n.7 The Challenge

Jesus gave his most severe warning to the public when he stated that “many will say, in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not delivered inspired preaching in your name, in your name exorcised demons and in your name done many miraculous works?’” Jesus will respond to these claims by saying: “I never recognized you” (Matt. 7:22, 23) Paul is often cited with these words:

“Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved…If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9, 13, New Jerusalem Bible).

Paul neither contradicted nor watered down Jesus’ sayings. The key to reconciling these passages is to note that calling Jesus Lord implies obeying his commands, the first of which is to believe the Gospel about the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:14-15).

Secondly, Paul did not necessarily say everything about salvation in one passage. A classic example of twisting Paul is to use I Corinthians 15:1-3 to show that the Gospel consists of belief only in the death and resurrection of Jesus and not in his Kingdom. But Paul said that he had preached the facts about Jesus’ death as “amongst things of first importance” (I Cor. 15:3). It was not the whole of his Gospel. If Paul had not preached the same Gospel about the Kingdom as Jesus always did, he would have put himself under his own curse for preaching another gospel! (Gal. 1: 8-9).

Jesus had preached the Gospel and called it the Gospel about the Kingdom for years without at that stage including a word about his death and resurrection. Thus the biblical Gospel is more than facts about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus did not come “to do three days work.” He came to preach the Gospel about the Kingdom for some three years (Luke 4:43). This preaching of the Kingdom of God is throughout the New Testament called the preaching of “the word” (see Luke 5:1).

Christians should cling to that “word” of Jesus, the Gospel of the Kingdom, not excluding, of course, belief that he died and rose again.

v.2 n.7 John 1:1-14

Readers of standard translations are frequently unaware that their version of certain key passages of Scripture may hide a strong bias on the part of the translators. John 1:1-2 is the classic example of “loaded” translation. Paraphrase versions of Scripture can be most vivid and helpful as they draw out further depths of meaning from the original text. But they can also be disastrously misleading. Take for example the version which reads:

“Before anything else existed, there was Christ with God. He has always been alive and is Himself God. He created everything there is — nothing exists that He did not make” (John 1:1-3, Living Bible).

This rendering forces on the text what is not there. John, echoing Genesis, spoke of the “word of God” in the beginning. The word of God had appeared in the Hebrew Bible, John’s sacred text, 1455 times and never on any occasion did it mean a Person distinct from God. Never did it mean the Son of God. John therefore did not open his account of the faith by saying “In the beginning [i.e., before the Genesis creation] there was the Son of God.” To jump from word to Son at this stage of John’s prologue is to assume what needs to be proved — that John believed in the “eternal Son” of later Trinitarian, conciliar theology.

A scientific, open-minded approach to John’s meaning must not begin by reading the later theology into John. John had never heard of the Councils of Nicea (325 AD) or Chalcedon (451 AD) at which the Trinitarian dogma was formulated and enforced.

Here are our reasons for suggesting that John had no knowledge of a Jesus who was the eternal, uncreated Son of God.

First, none of the other gospel writers (John’s brothers in the one faith) show any evidence at all for believing that the Son of God existed before his conception in the womb of his mother. Luke quite deliberately (1:35) defines the Son of God as the person created supernaturally by God around 2 BC. Nothing in the words of Gabriel to Mary could possibly have suggested that Mary was taking into her womb a previously existing, non-human Son of God. Neither Mary, nor Gabriel who spoke to her, could have subscribed to the doctrine of the Trinity, which requires the existence in eternity of the Son of God who is coequal with his Father.

Matthew also gives a detailed report on the origin of Jesus — his genesis (Matt. 1:18). Many commentators point out that the best manuscripts, with the word genesis, present us not just with the birth of Jesus (in Greek gennesis, with double “n”), but with his origin, how Jesus came into existence as Son of God. All-important for Matthew is Jesus’ lineage from King David. Equally important is the supernatural creative act of God by which this lineal descendant of David, through Mary, was miraculously generated. Matthew records the angelic announcement to Joseph:

“What is begotten in Mary is from the holy spirit” (Matt. 1:20).

Notice specially that this is not just a commentary on Mary’s conception. More specifically the angel informs us that the Father supernaturally begat his Son, not in eternity, but in history and in Israel, and in the womb of one whose ancestry was traced to David.

Neither Luke nor Mary know anything about a Son begotten mysteriously in eternity. Their Jesus is a human person, originating as every human being does in the womb of his mother — yet by miracle under the direct creative intervention of God.

Common sense would dictate that John did not disagree so radically with his contemporary Christian brothers as to launch us into the speculative world of metaphysics, according to which the Son was not the product of a miracle in Mary, but of an “eternal begetting” by which he qualifies as an equal partner in the Triune Godhead. (Note how the Trinitarian account of the eternal begetting of the Son removes the event from history into endless eternity!) The Son of God of the Bible is not a prehistoric figure, but one born in due time, in the midst of human history.

Translators do not always make John a believer in an “eternally preexisting Son of God.” Take for example the Simple English Bible which reads “In the beginning was the Message…” That does not sound automatically as though there was a Son of God at the beginning. Equally valuable is the J.B. Philips paraphrase: “In the beginning God expressed Himself…” This also does not leave us with the impression that God produced a Son in eternity. It does, however, tell us that God spoke; God gave expression to His intention and promise. According to Philips’s paraphrase, God did not exist alongside a Son from the beginning. Rather He expressed Himself. A Son is obviously another “self.” But God merely expressed at the beginning His own thought, an utterance derived from Himself.

Some translations are cautious about how they deal with the opening words of John. They leave the word “word” untranslated as “logos.” This is a wise policy, which allows the reader to understand that John did not mean that the “logos” was at the beginning, in eternity, the Son of God.

The background to John’s treatise on Christianity is thoroughly Hebrew in its orientation. He wrote, in company with the other gospel writers, with one overarching concern:

“These things have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

The Messiah is a Hebrew concept, through and through. The pages of the Hebrew Bible give us the unfolding history of Israel. Running as a golden thread through that dramatic history is the divine promise that to Israel in the future (not to God in eternity!) there will be born a Son:

“To us [Israel] a child will be born, to us a Son will be given…” (Isa. 9:6).

This magnificent promise confirmed the covenant made with David which guaranteed that the distinguished descendant of that king would be also the Son of God. “I will be [in the future] a Father to him and he will be a Son to Me” (II Sam. 7:14; Heb. 1:5). Again, the birth of the Son is to be an event in the future of Israel. There is no “eternally begotten Son” here. Readers of this passage should not miss the point that a Son to be born in the future is not the One God of Israel. As reflecting his Father Jesus deserves divine titles, but this is because the spirit of God was uniquely in him, not because he was God.

It would be impossible for a Jew who understands the sacred oracles of the Hebrew Bible to expect a Messiah who was already in existence as the Son of God before Genesis. Such a Messiah would scarcely fit the description laid out for him in the sacred writings of Israel. A claimant to Messiahship who maintained that he had been alive as Son from eternity would have to be refused. Such a person could not be the Jewish Messiah. A genuine Messiah could indeed claim to have been appointed, foreknown, planned from eternity. His Messianic mission could have “existed” in typical Jewish ways of thinking within God’s sacred counsels from the beginning. But the Messiah’s actual existence as Son was clearly promised for a moment in the future (and realized around 2 BC).

Was John, then, launching into the uncharted waters of theological speculation when he described the word as existing from eternity?

Not at all. John was reflecting a central theme of his Hebrew Bible. The word of God had been mentioned constantly in the Hebrew Bible. Never once did “word” (davar) ever mean a Person distinct from God. Word in the Hebrew Bible refers exclusively to the utterance or promise of God or to His creative tool at work in the world. But God did not work through the Messiah in Old Testament times. In fact He created all things “unaided and by Himself” (Isa 44:24). There is not the faintest hint in the Hebrew Bible that the Messiah, Son of God was active in the Genesis creation. How could he be, when his birth — his entrance upon existence — was the great event anticipated by the faithful who knew of God’s promise in regard to the Son of David — who would also be the Son of God. The prophecy was perfectly fulfilled when, in history, God worked a creative miracle in the womb of Mary. It was then that God produced His unique Son. The Son dates from a time some 2000 years ago.

What John wrote in his prologue was: “In the beginning there was the word….” The word is the sum of all the Messianic promises. The word is the self-expression of God. The word is God’s design for the human race. The word is God’s blueprint. The word is God’s promise from the beginning to bring into being His Son. But God’s promise that He would beget a Son in the future is no promise at all, if the Son was already in existence.

According to John the word of God, His divine utterance, was “with God.” How can that be? Does not the fact that the word was “with God” tell us that the word must have been a Person?

Certainly not. The Bible was not written in English, and translations must be sensitive to the Hebrew thought-world and idioms of its writers. John was thoroughly steeped in Hebrew, Old Testament ways of thinking.

In English it makes very little sense to say that “your word is with you.” A literal translation is therefore useless and misleading. If we take note of the “wisdom literature” of the Old Testament and John’s Jewish environment we will find that the word’s being “with God” makes perfect sense. In Job 23:14 Job observed of God that “He performs what is appointed for me, and many such plans are with Him.” What God plans, in Hebrew idiom, is “with Him.” Lange’s commentary most helpfully brings out the sense of this Hebrew form of expression:

“Truly He will accomplish my destiny — what has been decreed, ordained by Him, that which lies in His purpose” — in the Hebrew, “with Him” (Commentary on Job, p. 499).

In Job 9:35 we discover that what a person has “with himself” is simply what he has “within himself,” “in his consciousness.” Again in Job 10:13 “God hid these things in His heart: I knew that this was in Your mind” — literally “with You.”

John, then, in describing the word as being “with God” (John 1:1) conveyed in a brief phrase the fact that the word was hidden in God’s heart. The word was God’s determination for the world, His decree which provides the ultimate meaning of life. As the index of God’s eternal counsel and wisdom, the word “was God,” meaning that it was a precise expression of Himself. “As a man thinks, so is he,” says the Proverb. In the same way God’s word is Himself. God’s word reveals His character and purpose. God’s word is the key to His heart and mind. The wisdom of God is very close in meaning to His word. In Proverbs 8 we read of God’s wisdom that it was “with God” (Prov. 8:30). Wisdom here, of course, is not a preexisting Son. Wisdom is a personification, not a Person, just as Lady Folly and Lady Prudence (Prov. 8:12, 9:13) are personifications, not literal persons.

John’s Hebrew background gives us another clue to his brief words about “the word.” We should of course remind readers that there is no justification in the Greek text for putting a capital W on word. Translations do this because they have already assumed (due to tradition) that the word is the Son before his birth. But the Son of God does not appear until John 1:14. At that point God’s wisdom/word/promise becomes for the first time fully and uniquely embodied in the human being, Jesus. “All things were made through IT,” says John, “and without IT [the word of God] nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3).

The translation we give here is the one which appeared in English versions of the Bible prior to the KJV in 1611. “Through IT,” not “through Him” is a perfectly possible rendering of the original. It is an assumption, unproved, that John meant the Son at that stage. What he wrote was the “word,” not yet the Son.

Jesus is the final embodiment of God’s word to the world. The Jews had thought of the Torah (which was not a Person!) as “lying on God’s bosom” (cp. “with him”) and as “divine” (cp. “the word was God,” in His self-expression). John takes this very Jewish theme and proceeds to tell us that this word of God, God expressing Himself, finally became a human person, finally became the Son of God, when Jesus was brought into existence (John 1:14). Jesus is “full of grace and truth,” not because he has been in existence from eternity, but because he is the fulfillment of God’s eternal promise to reveal Himself in a human being. “God was in Christ…,” Paul says (2 Cor. 5:19). But he did not say God was Christ or Christ was God!

The origin of the Trinitarian “God the Son” lies in philosophical mysticism. Note the words of a distinguished expert on the history of Christian thought:

“First we must see how the Trinitarian problem developed after Origen. Origen’s Christology [understanding of who Jesus is] was so impregnated with mystical piety that his statements could become the formula of a creed. We must not forget that when the Greek thinkers [the so-called Church Fathers] produced a confession or a creed, it may seem like abstract philosophy to us, but to them it was the mystical intuition of essences, of powers of being. For instance in Caesarea a creed was used in baptism which had added mystical formulae from Origen: ‘We believe in Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, God from God, Light from Light, Life from Life, firstborn of all creatures, generated out of the Father before all generations.’ This is both philosophy and mysticism. It is Hellenistic Greek philosophy. Hellenistic philosophy was united with the mystical traditions of the East. Therefore seemingly abstract philosophical concepts could become mystical confessions” (Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, p. 68).

There are many fine accounts available today of the way in which mystical tendencies are becoming confused with Biblical Christianity (see for example Dave Hunt’s Occult Invasion, Harvest House Publishers, 1998). What most churchgoers are unaware of is the fact that philosophical, mystical influences were responsible for bringing into being the doctrine of the Triune God. This has been called by churchmen an “awful mystery.” The Bible knows of no such incomprehensible doctrine of God. Thousands of churches meet under the banner of the doctrine of the Trinity (though the average congregation member has no idea as to how to explain this inscrutable creed). Churchgoers thus commit themselves to the belief that the Godhead exists as One Essence manifested in three coequal and co-eternal Persons. In an attempt to make this historic creed accessible to ordinary believers, one popular Christian apologist says that “God is One ‘What’ in three ‘Who’s.’” The “One what” of this definition is the One Essence (in Greek ousia) or Being of God. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the three “who’s.”

Sober reflection will reveal that this cannot possibly be the creed of Jesus and the Bible. God is presented in Scripture not as a “what” but as a single Person. The Single Person, who is the God of the Bible, is designated by singular pronouns and singular verbs thousands and thousands of times. When the Son appears (in the New Testament) he is always a separate and distinct Person. He speaks of his Father and himself as “us,” using the same universal laws of grammar by which the Father speaks of Himself as “I.” Jesus refers to his Father as “the only one who is truly God” (ho monos alethinos theos — John 17:3). When challenged, he denies that he is God, by arguing that he is the supreme example of a divinely commissioned agent of God. In his defense Jesus reminded the people that the judges of Israel were addressed by God as “gods” (theoi — John 10:35-36). In that case he, being the final accredited spokesman of the One God, was entitled to be called “the Son of God.” If Jesus had thought he was God, his argument from Psalm 82:6 would have been pointless.

v.2 n.7 Jesus — Son of God or God the Son?

We have in our possession a family Bible dating from 1869, presented to a great grandmother of mine by her grateful Sunday school class on the occasion of her wedding. Such tomes remain as ornaments rather than study Bibles. But I pulled it down (it weighs 15 lbs) and glanced at the notes to Psalm 110:1. It reminds us that Luther called this Psalm “the true high, main Psalm of our beloved Lord Jesus Christ.” It points out also that “no portion of the Old Testament is so often quoted and echoed in the Christian volume and applied to the great Redeemer of our race.”

This is very true. Psalm 110 finds a citation or echo in the New Testament about 33 times, and its first verse appears in quotation or allusion no less than 23 times. These statistics should alert us to the tremendous value of the revelation provided by this remarkable “divine oracle” (as the opening of verse one reads). Jesus argued brilliantly from Psalm 110:1. He confounded the opposition by demonstrating that as Messiah he was both the son of David and his lord. The Pharisees, unlike David, had failed to accept him as the Messiah and lord. Jesus’ argument was a stinging rebuke. His opponents were silenced (Matt. 22:41-46).

This Psalm, when accurately translated and read, has explosive implications today for our understanding of who Jesus is in relation to the Father.

Amazingly in contemporary preaching and teaching Psalm 110:1 receives almost no attention. There may be good reason for this: the information contained in verse 1 provides a bombshell sufficient to shock readers into the realization that the proposition “Jesus is God” is fundamentally false to these precious words of David — as well as to the rest of Scripture.

I am convinced that Psalm 110:1, which holds the record for the most frequently quoted verse in the New Testament, announces that the Messiah is a distinct, separate, subordinate, individual person — clearly distinguished from Yahweh who addresses him. If ever there were a passage of Scripture which might demonstrate the Trinity, this verse would be it. One member of the Godhead, it has been proposed by many, is seen talking to another person. But who is addressed? No one disputes the fact that the “my lord” addressed is prophetic of the coming Messiah (Jesus and the rabbis so recognized it, Matt. 22:41ff.). No one disputes that the person addressed is elevated to a position uniquely supreme, next to God Himself. But who is this Messiah in relation to God? Here, if ever, Trinitarians might expect Yahweh to be addressing another who is coequal and coeternal with Himself. Here, if ever, the Trinity would find its support in a verse in which Yahweh addresses someone else who is also Yahweh. (Let it not be forgotten that this is what the Trinity, written into the creeds of nearly all contemporary churches, proposes: Jesus is Yahweh!).

The fact is that we find no such proposition in this divine oracle. The “lord” who is both David’s son and his “lord” is carefully distinguished from God and categorized as a member of the human race. Our Jewish friends will concur that the idea that the Messiah would be “God the Son” (a member of a Triune Godhead), clothing himself with humanity and coming to earth, is entirely alien to their thinking — and with good cause. The Hebrew Bible on which Jesus was reared positively excludes and forbids the notion that God was to be born as a baby, much less that the immortal God could come and die.

It is a rather simple matter of investigation to establish that the masoretic text of the Bible painstakingly distinguishes between the Lord God and all human or angelic “lords.” There is an important biblical word to describe the Supreme Lord God. It is adonai (rhyming with El Shaddai). This word occurs alone or in combination with the Divine personal name Yahweh. Adonai Yahweh or Yahweh adonai thus describe the One God of biblical monotheism. In all the word adonai, meaning the Supreme Lord, is found 449 times in the Old Testament. In English versions the word adonai appears with a capital L, followed by lower case “o-r-d.”

Psalm 110:1, the verse to which every part of the New Testament alludes, gives us a brilliant account of the destiny of the Messiah. He is to be installed at the right hand of the Father until the time comes for his enemies to be subdued. (Psalm 2 provides a companion and equally valuable prediction of the Messianic program.)

Who then is this “lord” in relation to the One God, Yahweh? Certainly not Yahweh, and certainly not His coequal. Quite deliberately the word in the Hebrew text which identifies the Messiah is a word which in none of its 195 occurrences ever means “God.” The word for David’s lord, the Messiah, is adoni, “my lord.” With characteristic meticulousness the Hebrew Bible provides a special form of the word for lord to distinguish it from the Divine reference, adonai. The sacred and the secular, the divine and the human lords, are non-confusable categories in Scripture. God is never addressed as adoni (my lord). However much an angel or a chosen human being may reflect the Deity, he is nevertheless never to be confused with the Deity Himself, who is the unique, uncreated personage commanding our ultimate respect and worship as LORD (Yahweh).

Jesus the Messiah is elevated to the position of supreme human ruler, but he is not God Himself.

The fullness of the divine spirit resides in Jesus, but he is distinct from the one God who brought him into existence as the Son of God (Luke 1:35; Acts 13:33, where the begetting of the Son refers to his entrance upon life and existence). Gabriel’s words should have blocked the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Gabriel declared that the Son of God is so called because of the creative miracle wrought in Mary. Jesus is not, according to Luke and Gabriel, an eternal Son of God becoming human. Gabriel spoke with crystal clarity as well as conciseness.

“The power of the Most High will overshadow you [Mary], and that is precisely the reason why [dio kai] the one being begotten in you will be called the Son of God.” Luke 1.35

There is no eternal Son in this description of the creation of the Messiah and thus no Trinitarian Jesus. (Note that the KJV is very slightly misleading with its “therefore also.”)

Psalm 110:1 prevented (or should have prevented) a binary or Triune doctrine of God. The Messiah was to be “lord” not “the Lord God.” The pressure of doctrinal tradition has unfortunately weighed too heavily on the editors of modern Bibles. Although adoni (“my lord”) appears 194 times correctly in English as “sir,” “master,” or “my lord,” readers are misled when in Psalm 110:1 they encounter “my Lord” (with capital L) in many of their translations. The RV, RSV, NRSV and NEB corrected the misleading capital letter which confused the reader into believing that the Messiah was God Himself (adonai, which everywhere appears as Lord). Remove the capital from “my lord” and the non-Trinitarian Christology of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament shines out with brilliance. The whole point, after all, of Jesus is that he is the Son of Man, mortal man. Being man, he is capable of death, death for the sins of the world. Were he God, he could not by definition die: there would be no Savior. If Jesus had come into existence first as a created angel (Arianism, and currently the teaching of Jehovah’s Witnesses), he would likewise be incapable of death. Immortal, holy angels do not die (Luke 20:36). The transformation of the human Messiah into a “Second Member of the Trinity” is responsible for a theological chaos from which we need to recover with urgency.

The rather elementary information we are providing here has been available for centuries. A distinguished Lutheran professor of the Bible was writing on Matthew’s and Jesus’ use of our Psalm. (Incidentally, Jesus’ quotation of this Psalm 110:1 put an end to his opponents objections, Matt. 22:46.) In his Notes on Difficult Passages of Scripture (1666), Theodore Hackspan observed of Trinitarian apologists that “some found an argument for the Deity of Christ in Psalm 110:1 because Christ is here called Lord, equally with God the Father…But it ought to be known that when the Hebrew word is used for the true God, it is written adonai, with the vowel kametz; but here in Psalm 110:1 it is simply adoni, from which nothing can be concluded in favor of Christ’s Deity….” He wrote as a believer in the Trinity.

The celebrated International Critical Commentary provides one of the most comprehensive guides to the words of Scripture. Charles Bigg of Christ Church, Oxford, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, noted that Paul and all the Jewish Christians of New Testament times speak of Jesus as the “one Lord” (I Cor. 8:6; Eph. 4:5). He then says:

“We are not to suppose that the apostles identified Christ with Yahweh. There were passages of Scripture which made this impossible, for instance Psalm 110:1…It was God who gave Jesus the ‘Name which is above all names’ (Phil. 2:9) and who ‘made’ Jesus Lord (Acts 2:36)” (Commentary on I Peter, p. 99).

Jesus could not therefore possibly be the Lord God.

The professor demonstrates the impossibility of identifying the Messiah as Yahweh Himself. He thus pronounces the Apostles as incapable of Trinitarianism, unable to make the confession “Jesus is Yahweh.” The professor’s point is simply that Psalm 110:1 places the Messiah in the category of human person, not the Divine Lord God.

In modern times, commentary is awakening to the fact that the proposition “Jesus is God” falsifies the Bible. The highly respected British scholar James Dunn asks the question as to whether in earliest Hellenistic Christianity Jesus was confessed as God.

“That would be to claim too much. The emergence of a confession of Jesus in terms of divinity [he does not mean Deity] was largely facilitated by the widespread use of Psalm 110:1 from very early on (Mark 12:36; Acts 2:34ff.; I Cor. 15:25; Heb. 1:13): ‘The Lord says to my lord, “Sit at my right hand…”’

Its importance here lies in the double use of kyrios, lord. Paul calls Jesus lord but he seems to have marked reservations about calling him ‘God’… Similarly he refrains from praying to Jesus. More typical of his attitude is that he prays to God through Christ. For at the same time that Paul affirms ‘Jesus is Lord,’ he also affirms that ‘God is one’ (I Cor. 8:5-6; Eph. 4:5-6). Here Christianity shows itself as a developed form of Judaism, with its monotheistic confession as one of the most important parts of its Jewish inheritance; for in Judaism the most fundamental confession is ‘God is one,’ ‘There is only one God.’ Hence also Rom. 3:30; Gal. 3:20; I Tim. 2:5 (cf. James 2:19). Within Palestine and the Jewish mission such an affirmation would have been unnecessary — Jew and Christian shared a belief in God’s oneness. But in the Gentile mission this Jewish presupposition within Christianity would have emerged to prominence, in face of the wider belief in ‘gods many.’ The point for us to note is that Paul can hail Jesus as Lord not in order to identify him with God, but rather, if anything to distinguish him from the One God, cf. particularly I Cor. 15:24-28” (Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, p. 53).

It seems to us a tragedy that fundamentalist Christians continue to insist on a confession of Jesus as God — as identified with Yahweh. This is plainly to ask more than the Bible asks. It is to disrupt and deform the first principal of true religion as Jesus taught it: that God is one Person (John 17:3; 5:44; Mark 12:28ff.) and that the Messiah is to be distinguished from that One God as the adoni, “my [human] lord” of Psalm 110:1.

For the great cardinal truth of monotheism to be reestablished we encourage our readers to see that there has been an extraordinary carelessness in reporting the significance of the title “lord” as applied to Jesus. Mesmerized, as it seems, by a fear of any departure from belief in Jesus as “God,” authorities with otherwise impeccable credentials have consistently misrepresented the awkward fact that the Messiah is not God, according to Psalm 110:1. Gordon Fee discusses Paul’s creedal statements in I Corinthians 8:4-6 (New International Commentary on the New Testament, 1987, p. 375):

“Although Paul does not here call Jesus God, the formula is so constructed that only the most obdurate would deny its Trinitarian implications. In the same breath that he can assert that there is only One God, he equally asserts that the designation ‘Lord,’ which in the Old Testament belongs to the One God, is the proper designation of the divine Son.”

Professor Fee fails to observe that the title “Lord” is a Messianic title drawn from Psalm 110:1. It is true that Lord refers to God, but it is equally true that “Lord” is the title par excellence which belongs to Jesus as the Messiah of Psalm 110:1 where the Lord Messiah is carefully distinguished from and subordinate to the One God. Jesus, for Paul, is not to be confused with the Lord God, who is one, not two or three. Jesus is by contrast the Lord Messiah. Paul’s traveling companion and student, Luke, introduces the Savior by giving him precisely the same royal, messianic title “The Lord Messiah” (christos kurios — Luke 2:11) and reports that Elizabeth rejoices with Mary who is “the mother of my lord,” the Messiah of Psalm 110:1 (see Luke 1:43). (Contrast the unbiblical title given to Mary by Roman Catholics, “the mother of God.”) Luke with an eye for precision and detail also reminds us that Jesus is “the Lord’s [Yahweh’s] Messiah” (Luke 2:26). Jesus is not God, but God’s unique Son.

It is a major tragedy that in today’s America such a confession of Jesus as the unique Son of God and Messiah, but not God Himself, is enough to have one removed from the books and branded as a cultist! Truly Canon Goudge assessed the degeneration of theology as it departed farther and farther from the Bible:

“When the Greek and Roman mind came to dominate the church, instead of the Hebrew mind, there occurred a disaster in doctrine and practice from which we have never recovered” (Essays on Judaism and Christianity).

v.2 n.6 Believing Impossible Things

It appears that large sections of the church-going public have a capacity to believe what they are told, on the unexamined authority of the church and because of long-standing tradition. Those who sit in pews are committed to a baffling definition of God. It is called “the Trinity.” This means that the One God of the Bible is actually three Eternal Persons. God is “one Essence and three Persons.” A well-known “Bible Answer Man” defines God as “One What and Three Who’s.”

This orthodox view of God suffers from a number of difficulties. To explain it one has to alter the dictionary definition of words: For example, to believe the Trinity one must accept the teaching that Jesus is the “eternally begotten Son.” The problem here is that if someone is begotten, it means he has a beginning. Beget and begin are related terms and to “beget” means to bring into being and existence. However, according to the Trinity, the Son of God was begotten, but had no beginning. He is “eternally begotten.”

One wonders if such verbal obfuscation should not be abandoned and replaced by the sane words of Matthew and Luke, both of whom treat in detail the origin of the Messiah, Son of God. Matthew says that the Son of God was begotten in history (around 3 BC) in the womb of his mother (Matt. 1:20, note that the original Greek refers to the begetting of the Son, not just his conception). Luke says that Jesus is entitled to be called the Son of God precisely because (dio kai) of the historical (not eternal) miracle in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:35). All that is plain and simple. Not so the doctrine of the Trinity, which is fearfully complex and, according to many of its promoters, ultimately incomprehensible. It was President Jefferson who, objecting strenuously to the church’s doctrine of the Trinity, said that it was impossible for him (or anyone else) to assent to a proposition which carries no identifiable meaning.

Many distinguished biblical scholars readily admit the obvious fact that Matthew and Luke show no sign at all of believing in the “eternal generation” of the Son. They could not therefore have been Trinitarians. Raymond Brown in his celebrated investigation of the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke (The Birth of the Messiah) emphasizes that the begetting of the Son of God is, according to these two inspired theologians, not in eternity but at the beginning of the first century AD. It should be evident that neither Matthew nor Luke could have subscribed to the very non-Jewish doctrine of the Trinity. No “eternal Son” means no Trinity.

Do Trinitarians realize that they are committed to this sort of unfathomable language? One of their leading exponents wrote: “Jesus is God only begotten, proceeding by eternal generation as the Son of God from the Father in a birth that never took place because it always was” (Dr. Kenneth Wuest on John 1:18).

Clear?

It appears that enthusiasm to defend tradition makes it hard sometimes for proponents of the Trinity to examine the biblical text accurately. Thus Robert Sumner in his Jesus Christ is God refers in proof of his thesis to Psalm 110:1. He claims that in this passage “King David called the Christ ‘my Lord’ using one of the names of deity, Adonai” (p. 321).

He makes an unfortunate mistake with the language, because in fact the word used in the text is not adonai, the divine Lord, at all. The Bible in Psalm 110:1 actually gives the Messiah the title which never describes God. The word is adoni and in all of its 195 occurrences in the Old Testament it means a superior who is human (or occasionally angelic), created and not God. So Psalm 110:1 presents the clearest evidence that the Messiah is not God, but a supremely exalted man. This verse holds the record by far as the most popular verse quoted in the New Testament from the Old. Jesus and the rabbis acclaimed it as an infallible divine oracle (see Matt. 22:42-45).

The uniqueness of the Father of Jesus is beautifully sustained by the careful distinction between God and exalted man depicted by Psalm 110:1. Yahweh, the One God, is distinguished from “my lord.” The Hebrew word should not be capitalized in English here. In the remaining 194 passages it has no capital. The Revised Version of the Bible corrected the error of capitalization because with a capital L the reader suspects that the Hebrew word is adonai, the title of God. But the word is not adonai. It refers to a person who is expressly not God, but distinguished from the One God. The Hebrew Bible is very careful not to muddle God and man. The whole point of the Messiah whom it predicts is that he belongs to the category of mankind, not God and certainly not an angel.

These facts about Psalm 110:1 have not prevented the Jerry Falwell Commentary and numerous other writers from stating that the Messiah is here called adonai and claiming a victory for the idea that Jesus is God. It is a victory won at the expense of misreporting (no doubt without careful examination) the original words of Scripture.

The Bible does not confuse Jesus with God. It says that Jesus is like God, God’s image, not that he is the supreme God. A scholar examining the relationship of Jesus to God says that in the New Testament “devotion to Jesus did not involve confusing him with God or making Jesus a second God…Early Christians maintained firmly the overarching superiority and uniqueness of God and their traditional [Jewish] orientation to Him” (Dr. L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord, pp. 121, 123).

Take a few moments to think like a Jew who has the Hebrew Bible, which is replete with inspired prophecy about who the Messiah is to be. In Genesis the coming Messiah will be the “descendant of the woman” (3:15). Nothing in that statement would lead a reader to think that the Messiah would be the eternal God Himself. In Numbers 24:17 the Messiah is to be “a star arising from Jacob, a scepter arising from Israel.” This portrait of the Messiah puts him squarely in the category of humankind. Again, in the all-important Davidic Covenant in II Samuel 7 the Messiah is to be the future descendant of David who at the same time will be the future Son of God (II Sam. 7:12-17). Observe carefully that God will be the Father of this coming seed of David. There is not a hint here that the Son of God is already existing!

Daniel 7 provides another classic passage for the identity of the Messiah. “Son of Man” (Dan. 7:13) means “member of the human race.” Note that the Messiah is not to be an angel. An angel in Daniel is called not “bar enash” (Son of Man) but “member of the divine race,” i.e., of angels (Dan. 3:25, 28). The theory that the Messiah was a pre-human angel is without foundation in the Hebrew Bible.

Proverbs 8 is sometimes advanced in support of the Messiah as an “angel/man” but “Lady Wisdom” here is a personification of God’s attribute, not a separate Person, certainly not the Messianic Son of God. The fact that Wisdom is a personification, not a Person, is very clearly proven when Wisdom says: “I, Wisdom, dwell with Prudence” (Prov. 8:12). If Wisdom (a feminine noun) is the Son of God, who is Prudence? If anyone is in any doubt about this point, Hebrews 1 categorically and deliberately announces that the Messiah never was and never will be an angel. The whole point of the Christian faith is that the virginally conceived human Son of God (Luke 1:35) replaces the supreme angels as God’s chosen ruler and representative: “God did not subject to angels the inhabited earth of the future [the Kingdom of God] about which we are speaking” (Heb 2:5). It is, however, to be under the dominion of the Son of God and the saints.

Another centrally important passage from the Hebrew Bible confirms our findings. This is the fascinating prophecy granted to Moses, and it provides exact information about who the Messiah would be. The text is in Deuteronomy 18:15-19. Both Peter (Acts 3:22) and Stephen (Acts 7:37) understand these verses as a direct statement about the promised Messiah. The remarkable thing about this portrait of Messiah is that no one reading it could possibly imagine that the Savior would be God Himself. Deuteronomy 18:15-19 positively excludes the notion of an Incarnation, either of God or an angel, in the traditional sense. “A prophet from among you, from your brothers, like me [Moses] God will raise up for you.” Now everyone knows that a prophet is not God. He is God’s human spokesman. This is the category of being into which the Messiah is to fit. Verse 16: On the day of the assembly Israel had pleaded: “Let us not hear again the voice of the Lord our God.” The Lord agreed to this request (v. 17), and on that basis promised to send them a mediator from the Israelite nation, similar to Moses, definitely one of the human race. This human person would be uniquely enabled to mediate for God. The individual appointed to this supreme task could not, according to the terms of Deuteronomy 18:15-19, possibly be God Himself. The idea, then, that the Messiah would be God is completely excluded from this classic Messianic passage. A “Trinitarian” Jesus is alien to the Hebrew Bible, the Bible in which Jesus was trained from early childhood.

It would be impossible to expect the Jews to accept a Messiah who is God Himself. Such a Messiah would be evidently out of harmony with the sacred predictions about who he is. The true Messiah must, according to Deuteronomy 18, belong to the category “human being.” He must be a descendant of David (II Sam. 7) and he must be uniquely the one in whose mouth God puts His own words (Deut. 18:18). He is the perfect prophet, but he could not according to the picture of the Messiah drawn by the Old Testament actually be God Himself.

A contemporary commentator, Alan Cole (Tyndale Commentary on Mark, p. 199), makes the statement that worshipping a Jesus with mistaken ideas about him means worshipping a false Jesus. No doubt this is why Jesus in a lengthy Bible study “beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, interpreted for them in all the Scriptures the things written about him” (Luke 24:27). It was important for the disciples, as it is also for us, to match our conception of the Messiah with the data provided about him in the Bible. In searching out the identity of the Messiah, it is essential to start “from behind,” from the Old Testament, not from later church councils and creeds.

Israel could not, and still cannot, accept a Messiah who is actually God Himself. Such a Messiah would not fit within the model provided by their own Scriptures. A first-century Christian would be baffled by the words of a speaker on television in recent times: “God came to Mary and said, ‘Will you please be my mother?’”

The true Messiah was not the creator of heaven and earth, though he is fully involved with the new heavens and earth. Yahweh had declared in no uncertain terms: “I am the Lord who makes all things, who stretched forth the heavens alone and who spread abroad the earth by myself” (Isa. 44:24). Such a declaration surely excludes the idea that the Son of God, another person, was the active agent of the Genesis creation. It was “Wisdom” who assisted at the creation of the universe (Prov. 8:30), but since the Lord God acted, as He says, alone, it follows logically that Wisdom was not at that stage a Person other than the One Lord God. Thus also in John 1:1-4 it cannot be the Son who was “with God” at the original creation. English translations of the Bible — eight of them — were correct when they rendered John 1:1-4 “It [the word] was with God. All things were made through it [the word] and without it nothing was made that was made.” Again, Isaiah 44:24 prevents us from imagining that there was a Second Member of the Trinity, the Son of God, active in the Genesis creation. God’s word in John 1 is simply the word of God, His creative wisdom and plan. That expressive activity of God was later embodied in the human Messiah who arose in due time, and by miraculous intervention, from a family in Israel just as Moses had predicted (Deut. 18:15-19).

The Simple English Bible New Testament (1978) pioneered a return to a better understanding of the first verses of John’s gospel: “In the beginning there was the Message….” John positively did not write: “In the beginning was the Son of God.” Notes to a well-known German translation of the New Testament point out that the “‘word’ discloses the inner thought of the speaker. Thus the Son reveals the inner being of the One God…In the Old Testament the word of God is often called God’s revealer and to it is ascribed a creative and enlightening activity (Ps. 33:6; 119:105). Both God’s word and His wisdom are sometimes spoken of as if they were a Person (Ps. 107:20; 147:15; Isa. 55:10, 11)” (Albrecht, Das Neue Testament, p. 237). Jesus had “seen” the Father, meaning that he had an intimate knowledge of the Father’s will (John 6:46). John’s Gospel is dedicated to the proposition that Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah (20:31) and that the Messiah’s words provide a marvelous revelation of God’s heart and mind. This is exactly what we would expect of the “prophet like Moses” in whose mouth God has placed His own words (Deut. 18:15-19). Jesus is what God’s logos, His creative plan, became (John 1:14)

The simple truth about Jesus’ identity as the revelation of the mind of the One God, his Father is easily thrown into confusion, if one supposes that the Son was actually a person before his begetting/birth. Such a mistake arises when one fails to understand that “Wisdom” in Proverbs 8 is not a person distinct from God, but a personification (like Prudence, Prov. 8:12) of the self-revealing Plan of God. The New Testament recognizes this fact. In Luke 11:49 we read that “the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets…’” Matthew 23:34 reports the same saying with “I [God] will send them prophets.” Wisdom and God are interchangeable. We can speak of God or the wisdom of God. Though Wisdom speaks, neither in Proverbs nor in Luke 11:49 is she a separate person from God. Wisdom, in fact, is “the mother” of Jesus and John the Baptist! Wisdom was vindicated by the actions of her two distinguished sons (Matt. 11:19). This figurative language is misunderstood when one tries to make Wisdom into a real individual. Identifying Wisdom as a pre-human Son of God has been the cause of no end of theological confusion and strife.

In post-biblical times a fundamental problem over the origin of the Messiah arose. This happened only when the Hebrew Bible’s portrait of the Messiah was abandoned and (to the Gentile mind) a more congenial, but paganized model of a preexisting second Being was promoted. The notion of a second Being gave rise to frightful controversies about the nature of God. Under this new scheme the unity of God was compromised. Jewish monotheists were antagonized — and quite unnecessarily, since Jesus had plainly affirmed the Jewish unitary monotheistic creed (Mark 12:28ff.). In the interests of promoting the Son as a separate Person before his birth, the church fathers actually demoted the Supreme God and compromised His unique position as sole, unaided creator of the universe (Isa. 44:24). It is a sad fact that those early developments, after Bible times, gave rise to unnecessary and often devastating controversy. Those ugly conflicts, which led in some cases to the death of objectors and dissidents, could have been avoided if the biblical teaching about God and His Son had been maintained. After all there is “one God, the Father” (I Cor. 8:4) and one (human) Lord Messiah, the adoni of Psalm 110:1 and the unique, sinless man, mediator between ourselves and the One God (I Tim 2:5). In the words of Jesus the words and wisdom of the One God are revealed. In Jesus we hear God’s final word to the dying world (Heb. 1:1-2).

It is worth reflecting seriously on the fact that God, being immortal, cannot die. Nor indeed can an immortal angel. There is only one category in which the Messiah can be placed: that of mortal, human being. It is the glory of the Messiah that he maintained a sinless existence, though tempted in every way like the rest of humanity.