Adoni Messiah: Interesting Quotes

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Interesting Quotes - Series 1

"Jesus is not God but God’s representative, and, as such, so completely and totally acts on God’s behalf that he stands in God’s stead before the world…The gospel [of John] clearly states that God and Jesus are not to be understood as identical persons, as in 14:28, ‘the Father is greater than I’"
(Jacob Jervell, Jesus in the Gospel of John, 1984, p. 21).
"In his post-resurrection heavenly life, Jesus is portrayed as retaining a personal individuality every bit as distinct and separate from the person of God as was his in his life on earth as the terrestrial Jesus. Alongside God and compared with God, he appears, indeed, as yet another heavenly being in God’s heavenly court, just as the angels were — though as God’s Son, he stands in a different category, and ranks far above them"
(Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 1967-68, Vol. 50, p. 258).
"What, however, is said of his life and functions as the celestial Christ neither means nor implies that in divine status he stands on a par with God Himself and is fully God. On the contrary, in the New Testament picture of his heavenly person and ministry we behold a figure both separate from and subordinate to God" (Ibid., pp. 258, 259).
"The fact has to be faced that New Testament research over, say, the last thirty or forty years has been leading an increasing number of reputable New Testament scholars to the conclusion that Jesus...certainly never believed himself to be God"
(Ibid., p. 251).
"When [first-century Christians] assigned Jesus such honorific titles as Christ, Son of Man, Son of God and Lord, these were ways of saying not that he was God but that he did God’s work"
(Ibid., p. 250).
"When the New Testament writers speak of Jesus Christ, they do not speak of Him nor do they think of Him as God"
(J.M. Creed, The Divinity of Jesus Christ, pp. 122-123).
"Jesus is never identified simpliciter [absolutely] with God, since the early Christians were not likely to confuse Jesus with God the Father"
(Howard Marshall, "Jesus as Lord: The Development of the Concept," in Eschatology in the New Testament, Hendrickson, p. 144).
The Trinity "is not directly and immediately the Word of God"
(New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967, Vol. XIV, p. 304).
"Nowhere in the Old Testament do we find any clear indication of a Third Person"
(The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1912, Vol. 15, p. 49).
"The Old Testament clearly does not envisage God’s spirit as a person…God’s spirit is simply God’s power. If it is sometimes represented as being distinct from God, it is because the breath of Yahweh acts exteriorly…The majority of New Testament texts reveal God’s spirit as something, not someone; this is especially seen in the parallelism between the spirit and the power of God"
(New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967, Vol. 14, pp. 574, 575).
"The Jews never regarded the spirit as a person; nor is there any solid evidence that any Old Testament writer held this view…The Holy Spirit is usually presented in the Synoptic gospels (Matt., Mark, Luke) and in Acts as a divine force or power"
(Edmund Fortman, The Triune God, pp. 6, 15).
"It is exegesis of a mischievous if pious sort that would find the doctrine of the Trinity in the plural form elohim [God]"
("God," Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics)
"The fanciful idea that Elohim referred to the Trinity of persons in the Godhead hardly finds now a supporter among scholars. It is either what the grammarians call the plural of majesty, or it denotes the fullness of divine strength, the sum of the powers displayed by God"
(William Smith, A Dictionary of the Bible, ed. Peloubet,
MacDonald Pub. Co., 1948, p. 220).
The Encyclopedia of Religion: "Theologians agree that the New Testament does not contain an explicit doctrine of the Trinity."
The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology: "The New Testament does not contain the developed doctrine of the Trinity."
Jesuit Fortman: "The New Testament writers…give us no formal or formulated doctrine of the Trinity, no explicit teaching that in one God there are three co-equal divine persons…Nowhere do we find any Trinitarian doctrine of three distinct subjects of divine life and activity in the same Godhead."
Yale University professor E. Washburn Hopkins: "To Jesus and Paul the doctrine of the Trinity was apparently unknown…they say nothing about it." – Origin and Evolution of Religion.
The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge: "The doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity received their shape from Greek Fathers, who were much influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Platonic philosophy. That errors and corruptions crept into the church from this source cannot be denied."
The Church of the First Few Centuries: "The Doctrine of the Trinity was of gradual and comparatively late formation. It had its origin in a source entirely foreign from that of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It grew up, and was ingrafted on Christianity, through the hands of the Platonizing Fathers."
"Anyone who can worship a Trinity and insist that his religion is monotheistic can believe anything."
– Robert A. Heinlein.