Is it Really “Orthodox” to Believe That God Can Die? Or Has Christianity Gone Wrong?
A colleague of mine recalled an interesting
moment during class discussion at a wellknown theological college: “I remember one
day in a theology class at Wheaton College the
professor said, ‘Mary really is the mother of God,
even though we as Protestants have not liked that
term very well.’ ” The students were shocked at his
admission, but he went on to explain that in a real
sense Trinitarianism has to view Mary as the mother
of one who was in essence and in fact a “person” of
the “Godhead”!
The proposition “Jesus is God” appears to be the
unquestioned watchword of most American churches.
Any doubt about that amazing statement is likely to
be greeted with suspicion that the questioner may
have deviated from a belief absolutely vital for
salvation. C.S. Lewis confronted all skeptics with his
famous dictum that Jesus was “either mad, bad or
God.” We shall see later that he unfortunately
omitted from his multiple choice options the New
Testament category for Jesus, namely “Messiah, Son
of God.” That is who Jesus claimed he was (John
10:36), and insisted that his key executives in the
propagation of the Gospel understood him to be
(Matt. 16:16-18). In the same passage Matthew
records that Jesus founded his church on the solid
rock conviction that Jesus was the Son of God. He did
not, of course, say “God the Son”!
Why, if Jesus is God, as the historic creeds have long claimed as dogma, would anyone have qualms about Mary being God’s mother? Roman Catholics who share with Protestants belief in the Trinity — that the One God exists as three Persons in one essence — have no such qualms. A Roman Catholic priest declared without flinching that “God one day came to Mary and said, ‘Mary, will you please be My mother?’”
In view of the upcoming season which celebrates
the core of traditional Christianity — the Incarnation
of the preexisting God the Son, second member of an
eternal Triune God, as God-Man — how do you react
to the following unpacking of that central doctrine
from leading Protestant evangelicals? Charles
Swindoll, chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary,
writes, “On December 25th shops shut their doors,
families gather together and people all over the world
remember the birth of Jesus of Nazareth…Many
people assume that Jesus’ existence began like ours,
in the womb of his mother. But is that true? Did life
begin for him with that first breath of Judean air? Can
a day in December truly mark the beginning of the Son of God? Unlike us, Jesus existed before his birth,
long before there was air to breathe…long before the
world was born”
(Jesus: When God Became Man, pp.
1-2).
Swindoll goes on to explain: “John the Baptist
came into being at his birth — he had a birthday. Jesus
never came into being; at his earthly birth he merely
took on human form…
Here’s an amazing thought:
the baby that Mary held in her arms was holding the universe in place! The little newborn lips that cooed and cried once formed the dynamic words of creation. Those tiny clutching fists once flung stars into space and planets into orbit. That infant flesh so fair once housed the Almighty God…As an ordinary baby, God had come to earth…Do you see the child and the glory of the infant-God? What you are seeing is the Incarnation — God dressed in diapers…See the baby as John describes him ‘in the beginning’ ‘with God.’ Imagine him in the misty precreation past, thinking of you and planning your redemption. Visualize this same Jesus, who wove your body’s intricate patterns, knitting a human garment for himself…Long ago the Son of God dove headfirst into time and floated along with us for about 33 years…Imagine the Creator-God tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes” (pp. 3-8, emphasis added).
Dr. Swindoll then quotes Max Lucado who says of Jesus,
“He left his home and entered the womb of a teenage girl…Angels watched as Mary changed God’s diaper. The universe watched with wonder as the Almighty learned to walk. Children played in the street with him” (p. 10).
Dr. Jim Packer is well known for his evangelical writings. In his widely read Knowing God, in a chapter on “God Incarnate,” he says of the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation: “Here are two mysteries for the price of one — the plurality of the persons within the unity of God, and the union of Godhead and manhood in the person of Jesus. It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and the most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. ‘The Word was made flesh’ (John 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew, the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the incarnation. This is the real stumbling block in Christianity. It is here that the Jews, Muslims, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses…have come to grief…If he was truly God the Son, it is much more startling that he should die than that he should rise again. ‘’Tis mystery all! The immortal dies,’ wrote [Charles] Wesley [in a famous hymn]…and if the immortal Son of God really did submit to taste death, it is not strange that such a death should have saving significance for a doomed race. Once we grant that Jesus was divine, it becomes unreasonable to find difficulty in any of this; it is all of a piece and hangs together completely. The Incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains” (pp. 46, 47, emphasis added).
With the greatest respect for the sensibilities of our readers, we want to suggest that the above accounts of the pre-history and Incarnation of Jesus, the Son of God are severely mistaken. They are untrue to the Bible. The situation appears to us and many others in the history of Christianity to be akin to the story of the “Emperor’s New Clothes.” The fact that the emperor was naked was noticed by one small boy when the majority were tricked into thinking he was not. The mere fact of rehearsing, year after year, a story of “God being born as a baby” and the immortal God later dying on a cross does not make it true. Far from being a “mystery” it is rather obviously a mystification which results in a crucifixion of the fundamental Protestant principle that God has graciously revealed His purposes to us in Scripture and, in order for His revelation to be successful He has spoken to us in language which conforms to the universally accepted meaning of words and of logic itself. If that principle applies, then God cannot die. He is immortal (I Tim. 6:16).
To speak of Jesus as God and God dying is to dissolve the most basic understanding of the nature of Scripture as revelation to man. Surely we must plant ourselves on the famous maxim about how to read the Bible:
“I hold it for a most infallible rule in expositions of sacred Scripture, that where a literal construction will stand, the farthest from the letter is commonly the worst. There is nothing more dangerous than this licentious and deluding art, which changes the meaning of words, as alchemy does or would do the substance of metals, makes of anything what it pleases, and brings in the end all truth to nothing” (Richard Hooker, 1554-1600). [1]
In confirmation of the wisdom of this approach to Scripture, we may say that if God has really intended to make His will known to us humans, it must follow that He has conveyed His truth to us in harmony with the well-known rules of language and meaning. As a nineteenth-century theologian wrote: “If God’s words are given to us to understand, it follows that He must have employed language to convey the sense intended in agreement with the laws controlling all language…We are primarily to obtain the sense which the words [of the Bible] obviously embrace, making due allowance for the existence of figures of speech” (Peters, Theocratic Kingdom of Our Lord and Savior, Vol. 1, p. 47).
We must insist that if Christians are to love God with their hearts and minds, they should immediately abandon the impossible notion involved in believing and teaching that “the immortal God died.” The Bible does not expect us to believe sheer contradiction or encourage linguistic confusion. We fully grant that there are huge areas of information about God which we do not and cannot fathom, but we believe equally that what God has revealed to us is given in language which is not self-contradictory. This is the great truth of the so-called grammatical-historical method of getting at the meaning of the Bible. God cannot lie and according to Scripture He cannot die (I Tim. 6:16). This in itself requires that the Savior Jesus be a mortal man. Otherwise the Son of God cannot have died (Paul said the Son did die, Rom. 5:10) and there is no salvation and no death for our sins.
Protestants, however, are pledged to the idea that Jesus is God and that Jesus died. We propose that this is to utter words without meaning and to destroy the fabric of biblical revelation. Moreover, the teaching that the immortal God became a man and died is indeed the great stumbling block of Muslims and Jews — and for good cause. Jews know well that God cannot die, and they know that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the God of Jesus himself is not Three Persons. Muslims are equally committed to belief that the immortal God is strictly One Person. Islam accepts Jesus as the Messiah, even virginally begotten, but not as the One God.
What Went Wrong?
What then has happened to cause millions of seekers after God to be so hopelessly divided over who God is? The story is a most fascinating drama, an epic struggle between truth and falsehood, often accompanied by murder, banishment and excommunication. The fruits of the centuries-long disputes over who God and Jesus are suggest that something has gone terribly awry. Something happened to disturb the very straightforward creedal statements of Jesus and the Apostles. Some drastic undermining of original Truth resulted in the tedious, complex, hair-splitting, drawn-out arguments over the definition of God and His Son. History attests to an appalling catalogue of disputes, name-calling, and demonizing, amongst men claiming to be followers of Jesus and his teachings. The story of the development of the Trinity is brilliantly documented in When Jesus Became God by Richard Rubenstein. Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone describes the cruelty of Christian persecution of fellow believers. It documents the tragic judicial murder of the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus by the reformer John Calvin.
The trouble began in the second century, as historians of church history well know. The doctrine of the Trinity, which demands belief that Jesus is fully God and that his personal existence did not begin in the womb of his mother but in eternity, was made dogma at the Councils of Nicea (325 AD), Constantinople (381 AD) and Chalcedon (451 AD). It became the official and only permissible understanding about God and His Son. Dissenters and objectors were removed from the church. In later centuries they were burned at the stake (the last case of burning was in 1612) and executed. Others were labeled heretics and pronounced to be non-Christian. It is an amazing story of bigotry, hatred and murder. There is not a word in the New Testament about killing theological opponents (or enemies of any sort). Paul on one occasion excommunicated a habitual sex offender, but required that he be readmitted to the church on repentance.
Despite these clear facts, church officials, including the celebrated John Calvin, famous for his near-fatalist doctrine that God has predestined some from eternity to eternal torment, ordered the burning, execution, imprisonment or excommunication of hundreds of Bible-loving believers, because they would not and could not believe that God was more than one Person, the Father, or that Jesus, if he were Deity, could die.
Little known to the public is the fact that the early Christians did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, which is now claimed to be the only correct view of God, traceable in an unbroken line to the New Testament.
It is a well-documented fact that many of the church’s “major doctrines” were not instituted until well after New Testament apostolic times. Christians in search of a vigorous biblical Christianity will find it refreshing to distinguish between what comes from Scripture and what many have unconsciously “canonized” from church tradition. ...
The early church continued persistently in the Apostles’ teaching (Acts 2:42) as well as in fellowship. Christians need freedom to explore all doctrines in the light of Jesus’ and the Apostles’ teaching. At present it is often assumed that early church councils faithfully relayed the Bible’s teachings. Many scholars know that this is not so.
Jewish Roots
To our friends in the various “Jewish Roots” movements we say: What sense is there in clinging to a doctrine of the Trinity which offends Jews and Muslims and which Jesus would not have believed?
Mark 12:28ff shows Jesus to be in line with the cardinal tenet of Judaism: God is a single Person, the Father of Jesus. Psalm 110:1 says it clearly. The One God, Yahweh, speaks in an oracle about ADONI, positively not ADONAI! God does not speak to God. He speaks to the Lord Messiah (adoni, “my lord, the King Messiah.”). ADONI is used only of superiors other than God. ADONI never refers to the One God, but always to human beings and occasionally to angels.
In Galatians 3:20 Paul said (according to the Amplified Bible) “God is [only] One Person.” There is no occurrence of the word “God” in the whole Bible which can be proved to mean “God in three Persons.” That is because the Bible writers had never heard of the Trinity and did not believe in it. Those espousing the Jewish roots of Jesus, an excellent way to get back to the Messiah of Israel, should avoid attaching themselves to Gentile distortions of the faith. [2]
...
“Jesus Died” and “Jesus is God”?
God only has immortality (I Tim. 6:16). How, if Jesus is God, can he have died? An immortal Person cannot die. That is a flat contradiction. Does it honor God to speak in such contradictions? How can Jesus, if he is God, not know the time of his Second Coming (Mark 13:32)? God is omniscient. Jesus did not know everything. Therefore Jesus cannot be God, unless language has ceased to have any meaning. God cannot be tempted (James 1:13). But Jesus was tempted. If he was not fully human, his temptation was a charade. Did Jesus give up being God when he did not know when he would return? Did he give up being God when he died? How can God give up being God? That would mean that Jesus was not God when he was on earth.
Trinitarians argue that only God could be the Savior. But if Jesus, as God, could not die, how can he have saved us? Cannot God appoint a sinless man to be the Savior (Acts 17:31; 2:22: “a man approved by God”)?
All these complex questions are solved if Bible readers would observe some simple facts:
Thousands upon thousands of times in the Bible (someone has calculated over 11,000 times), God is described by personal pronouns in the singular (I, me, you, he, him). These pronouns in all languages describe single persons, not three persons. There are thus thousands of verses which tell us that the “only true God” (John 17:3; John 5:44, “the One who alone is God”) is One Person, not three.
There is no place in the New Testament (or Old) where the word “God” can be proved to mean “God-in-Three-Persons.” The word God, therefore, in the Bible never means the Trinitarian God. This would immediately suggest that the Trinitarian God is foreign to the Bible. The word “God” in the New Testament means the Father [3], ... If Jesus is as much entitled to be called God as his Father, why these extraordinary facts? The word “God” can be used of a man who reflects and represents the true God (see for example Ps. 82:6; Ex. 7:1).
Most Trinitarians rely heavily on one only of the four Gospels — John. They neglect not only the 77% of the Bible which is the Old Testament, but also most of the New Testament. Why did all translations in English before the King James render John 1:3: “All things were made by IT” (not HIM)? How do you know that Jesus was the eternal Son of God, when no verse of Scripture calls him that? What if the word or wisdom was with God (John 1:1) and was fully expressive of God and this wisdom became embodied in the real human being, Jesus (John 1:14)? Jesus would then be a human being who is the perfect embodiment and expression of the wisdom and creative activity of God (“the word became flesh,” not “the Son became flesh”).
If so, Luke’s statement would be exactly right. “Because of the supernatural begetting of Jesus in the womb of Mary, Jesus is entitled to be called the Son of God” (see Luke 1:35). Luke describes the supernatural coming-into-being of the Son of God, while Dr. Swindoll says that the Son had no beginning (quoted above). There is not a hint in Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts or Peter that Jesus preexisted his birth. He is according to Luke 1:35 the Son of God because of his miraculous begetting. Luke 1:35 was abandoned early in church history. A precious clue to the identity of Jesus was ditched. Luke 1:35 confirms the identity of the human Messiah predicted by the Old Testament. There is no indication in the Hebrew Bible that the Messiah was already alive before his birth in Bethlehem. God did not speak through a so-called preexisting Son in Old Testament times (Heb. 1:1-2).
Why does a leading Roman Catholic scholar admit that Luke 1: 35 (above) is an embarrassment to orthodox scholars? “Luke 1:35 has embarrassed many orthodox theologians, since in preexistence [Trinitarian] theology a conception by the Holy Spirit in Mary’s womb does not bring about the existence of God’s Son. Luke is seemingly unaware of such a Christology; conception is causally related to divine Sonship for him”? [4]
“Eternal Begetting”?
The Trinity relies on the idea of the Son having been “eternally begotten.” Does that make the slightest sense? How can someone who has no beginning be begotten? Why are there absolutely no verses which speak of Jesus being begotten by the Father in eternity? Why do all references to the begetting of Jesus refer to his conception and birth: Luke 1:35; Matt. 1:20; Acts 13:33 (describing the beginning of his life, while v. 34 refers to his resurrection)? Without an eternal begetting of the Son, there can be no doctrine of the Trinity.
The famous Methodist expositor Adam Clark felt it necessary to say: “The doctrine of the eternal Sonship of Christ is, in my opinion, antiscriptural and highly dangerous. I have not been able to find any express declaration of it in the Scriptures.” [5]
His complaint was against the incomprehensible language of one of the chief architects of the Trinity, Gregory of Nazianzen, who spoke of the Son as having a “beginningless beginning” (Oration 36).
Church History
Writers of standard encyclopedias tell us this fact about church history:
“Unitarianism [belief in the Father as the ‘only true God’ (John 17:3) and in Jesus as the Son and Messiah] as a theological movement began much earlier in history; indeed it antedated Trinitarianism by many decades. Christianity derived from Judaism and Judaism was strictly Unitarian. The road which led from Jerusalem to Nicea was scarcely a straight one. Fourth-century Trinitarianism did not reflect accurately early Christian teaching regarding the nature of God; it was, on the contrary, a deviation from this teaching.”[6]
How can the Trinity be traced back through the church fathers when the father of Latin Christianity was clearly not a Trinitarian? Tertullian wrote: “God has not always been the Father. For He could not have been the Father previous to the Son. There was a time when the Son did not exist.” [7]
The Creed of Israel, of Jesus and of Original Christianity
It seems to us incredible that Jesus, who recited the great creed of Israel (Mark 12:28ff) and was a Jew, could possibly have believed in the Trinity. There is no Trinity in the Old Testament (as scores of modern scholars admit [8]). Jesus confirms and perpetuates the creed of Israel which described God as One Person, the Father. He then defined himself as the Lord Messiah of Psalm 110:1 to whom the One Lord God spoke in an oracle about the future. The word adoni (my lord) is never a title of Deity (Mark 12:35ff).
No Jew could possibly have expected his Messiah to be God in the Trinitarian sense. In fact Moses had predicted the arrival of the Messiah by saying that God would not speak to the people directly, but through a person “like Moses” who would be raised up from among the people of Israel (Deut. 18:15-18; see Acts 13:33). To say that the Messiah is God Himself contradicts this prophecy, which announces that this person is not God but a human prophet! Both Peter and Stephen teach that it was fulfilled in the human Messiah (Acts 3:22; 7:37), who perfectly reflects the will and the words of his Father and who is the “visible image” of God, but not God Himself. Here is the biblical picture of the Messiah as described by the Hebrew Bible, the Bible of Jesus himself and confirmed by Paul: “To us [Christians] there is One God, the Father and one Lord Jesus Messiah” (see I Cor. 8:4-6).
Clearly, the One God is the Father and in close association is the one Lord Messiah (Luke 2:11).
The Christian confession that Jesus approved is the belief that “Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.” On that truth he promised to found his church (Matt. 16:18). John labels as “the liar” anyone who deviates from the confession that Jesus is the Messiah, or that he is “the Messiah, Son of God” (I John 2:22; John 20:31). He worked against the error that Jesus was something less than human. He advocated belief in the genuinely human Jesus (I John 4:2; II John 9). When churches teach that Jesus is “man” but not “a man,” would they have the approval of the Apostle John?
It is time for the Church to insist, with the Bible, on the creed which describes Jesus as “the man Messiah” (I Tim. 2:5) and stop condemning as heretics those who confirm belief in Jesus as the sinless Messiah and Son of God (Luke 1:35), God’s unique and virgin-born agent, but not actually God Himself.
A return to the creed of Israel and of Jesus, the Jew, will enable Jews today and Muslims to consider more sympathetically salvation through Jesus, the Christ, the “only name given under heaven by which we may be saved” (Acts 4:12).
[1] The Ecclesiastical Polity and Other Works, Vol. 2, p. 211.
[2] For some serious reading, see Martin Werner, The Formation of Dogma, Harper, 1957 (though he wrongly attributes “angel Christology” to Paul); J.A.T. Robinson, The Priority of John, SCM Press, 1985; J. Kuschel, Born before All Time? The Dispute over Christ’s Origin, Crossroad, 1992; James Dunn, Christology in the Making, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1996, 2nd ed. The latter sees that Paul did not believe in a preexisting Son of God.
[3] My comment: Except in Hebrews 1:8 where “God” refers to Jesus in a secondary sense.
I disagree with the writer's assertion that John 20:28 is another exception.
Rather, regarding John 20.28, please see Did Thomas Call Jesus “My God” in John 20.28?
Watch also this video: John 20:28 – Did Thomas Confess that Jesus IS God?
[4] Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, p. 291.
[5] Commentary on Luke 1:35.
[6] Encyclopedia Americana, 1956, Vol. 27, p. 294L.
[7] Against Hermogenes, ch. 3.
[8] See our article, “Does Everyone Believe in the Trinity?” ...
The above article was taken from here.
Some editing has been done.
