Divinity of Jesus: Christian Philosophical Problems
My wife was talking with a friend about Jesus. She told her friend, “Well, Jesus couldn’t have been just a good man, as you suggested, because he claimed to be God. Good people don’t think of themselves as God or claim to be God.” “He didn’t claim to be God,” her friend responded.
If Jesus claimed to be God:
He perhaps was playing a tremendous con job, if he knew he wasn’t God or
He was seriously mentally ill, if he believed he was God or
He was seriously misunderstood by his followers, and never claimed to be God
The friend was prudent to deny the divinity of Christ. The implications of his divinity are really profound and extraordinarily inconvenient. If the goal is to avoid the profound and inconvenient implications of believing that Jesus is real, why not go right to the heart of the matter and deny his divinity? If, however, indeed Jesus is divine and the Bible is true, the abundant, eternal life that Jesus offers is not merely wish fulfillment—it’s real! If on the other hand Jesus is not real and the Bible isn’t true, faith in Jesus is an exercise in futility. Much depends on the reader’s decision about the veracity or spuriousness of the premise “Jesus is real and the Bible is true.” Rejecting or ignoring the reality of Jesus is potentially costly on an eternal scale.
If the goal is to try to penetrate the truth about Jesus, we need to ask ourselves the question, “What if Jesus really is God?” Christians sometimes are accused of being intolerant, because they often claim that belief in Jesus is the only true religion. Believers sometimes base the outrageous claim that belief in Jesus is the only true religion on his statement in the gospel of John: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). If there is only one God, and Jesus is the only God as he claims in that passage and as his early followers claim throughout the New Testament, there’s nothing particularly intolerant about claiming that he is the only way to have a relationship with God, because he is the only God. A good question for the skeptic is “In how many Gods do you believe?”
On the up side, another implication of Jesus’s divinity is that our material, bodily existence is noble and holy because Jesus was both divine and human. If God came to earth in the flesh, then he ennobles and affirms both our material existence and our spiritual reality.
Regardless of the implications, the question remains: was Jesus God? Based on the New Testament, the answer would have to be yes, he certainly thought so. A simple way of explaining that the Jesus of the New Testament considered himself to be God is pointing to the fact that he went around forgiving people’s sins. This behavior enraged the religious authorities, because in his culture, only the one, true God could forgive sins, and here was this mere man taking on the role of God. This behavior is not a one-time action on the part of the Jesus of the New Testament. It was frequent and led to his death for blasphemy.
The notion that God alone could forgive sins had its root in the fact that for hundreds of years Jesus’s people, the Jews, considered God to be the primary one offended by sin. When we sin, they thought, we primarily sin against God, since he is the one who created us and we owe him everything, even our very existence (see, for example, Psalm 51:4). To illustrate how scandalous it was for Jesus to claim to forgive sins, consider this metaphor: imagine that you and I are talking and someone else walks up and slaps you in the face. I respond by saying, “Oh, that’s OK. I forgive you,” as if I was the primary one offended. That is what Jesus was doing every time he forgave sins.
A famous passage from C. S. Lewis illustrates Christians’ passion about Jesus’s divinity.
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: 'I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." (Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1945, pp. 55-56)
In some circles this paradox is called the “trilemma,” summarized conveniently as Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.
What if, however, as my wife’s friend asserted, Jesus never claimed to be God. He was simply a good man who, over the centuries was deified by his followers. It’s happened before with other great leaders, from Gilgamesh to Buddha to George Washington (People-who-have-been-considered-deities). After all, isn’t our only source for these supposed claims of Jesus’s deity the New Testament, which was written by his zealous followers many years after his death?
New Testament scholar and Oxford University senior research fellow N. T. Wright argued that the Jesus of the New Testament both claimed to be God and also claimed to possess the attributes of the Jewish God, Yahweh. Further, he maintained that the widespread belief among early followers of Jesus—including followers as early as 10 years following the death of Jesus or even less—was that Jesus believed he was God. The Jesus of the New Testament, Wright claims, is the historical Jesus.
The claim of deity is no trivial matter. Jesus was not claiming, and his earliest followers did not believe, that he was one among many gods, or that anyone could attain to deity the way he did. On the contrary, Jesus’s culture believed and he claimed that there is only one God. Jesus claimed to be that God.
The five characteristics of the one, true Yahweh God Wright observed were:
The Word of God (God spoke and it was done)
The Wisdom of God (almost a “second self” in the Hebrew scriptures)
The Glory of God (dwelling in the Temple, making his home among the Jews)
The Law of God (“an ontologically existing force and presence through which God makes himself known”)
The Spirit of God (“indwells humans so that they can do extraordinary things for God’s glory”) (Flew, There Is a God, 2007, p. 213)*
Wright found that Jesus’s immediate followers, while not understanding very well at first that Jesus was the embodiment of Yahweh while Jesus was with them as their rabbi, had to think it through in the light of Jesus’s resurrection:
"Jesus, very quickly after his death and resurrection… was recognized by his followers as being, all along, the embodiment of Israel’s God. Faced with his resurrection, they then went back in their minds to all the things that they had seen, heard, and known about Jesus and, as it were, slapped themselves on the side of their heads and said, 'Do you realize who we have been with all this time? We have been with the one who embodies Israel’s God.' And they then told and retold the stories of Jesus with awe and wonder as, with hindsight, they reflected on what had been happening all along." (Flew, 2007, p. 194)
My sense is that the major difficulties with the divinity of Jesus are not so much intellectual as volitional. We’d rather not, thank you very much, believe that the only God, the Creator God, appeared on earth as a human being. It just doesn’t seem decent somehow and if Jesus thought that he was God, and even if the disciples thought that way, too, they clearly were wrong. We know a priori that it couldn’t be true. Anyone who thinks he is God must be crazy. And yet we are left with the dilemma: how could a crazy person do the things and say the things that Jesus did and said; how could he be a “great moral teacher” and truly believe that he was the one true God?
We are, after all, talking about the Almighty God. Surely he is not bound by our a priori assumptions. Surely he could do more than we think!
*N. T. Wright for Antony Flew, There Is a God, New York: Harper One, pp. 187-192. Flew asked Wright to contribute an essay on the self-revelation of God and included it in his book There Is a God. Flew called the resulting discourse “absolutely wonderful, absolutely radical, and very powerful.” (p 213)
This article is an excerpt from my book Five Languages of Evidence: How to Speak about Reasons for Christianity in a Post-truth World. Not yet published; available upon request.
Next post: Jesus solves the problem of meaning