GYM DEBATE COMMENTARY: Is Jesus God? (Joelkaki versus Godisoneperson)

[dizzle]

Okay this thread is for commentary on the debate between Joelkaki and Godisoneperson on the deity of Christ located here:

http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?postid=87882#post87882

Bottles are prohibited, face paint is encouraged.

Please note that debate participants are not permitted to post in the comments thread for their particular debates until such debate is over. At that time, they are free to post and address any spectator commentary that they choose.

[Jason Gastrich]

This sounds like an exciting topic!

Whenever something awesome happens in the gospels, the Pharisees usually don't let us down, but draw significant attention to it. They make it obvious. Right?

When Jesus said, "I and the Father are one," He was saying He was equal to God. Therefore, the Phrisees wanted to stone him for blasphemy. Bling, bling.

Jesus isn't literally God the Father. However, He is part of the triune God - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

It'll be interesting to see Jesus' divinity or Godhood argued from the Old Testament.

God bless and good luck!

JG

P.S. Only God can forgive sins . . . yet, Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins. :cheers:

[Joseph Alward]

Lord God declares that he is the only god, the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, but Jesus says he is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, so this means that Jesus and Lord God are one and the same beings. Here is the evidence:

Lord God Is the Alpha and the Omega


"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "the One who is and who was and who is coming, the Almighty." (Revelation 1:8)

"I am the first and the last, and besides me there is no God." (Isaiah 44:6)


Thus, there is only one Alpha and Omega, first and last, and it is Lord God.


Jesus Is the Alpha and the Omega


"'Look! I am coming quickly, and the reward I give is with me, to render to each one as his work is. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end…I, Jesus, sent my angel to bear witness to your people of these things for the congregations. I am the root and offspring of David, and the bright morning star.'" (Revelation 22:12-16)


Conclusion

Lord God says he is the only god, the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last. Jesus says he is the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. The only way for both of them to be right is for each of them to be one and the same person. Thus, Jesus is Lord God.

[Reasonable]

I'm a little disappointed in Dan's efforts so far. Joel's arguments are good but I expected a better stance from Dan. I'm not sure where he is getting his information but he needs to offer something more substantial. He might find some better material by reviewing "The Doctrine of the Trinity: Christianities Self-Inflicted Wound" by Buzzard. Or, better yet, since he is a JW, he may want to look at Holt's book, "Jesus-God or the Son of God?" I think he provides much better arguments against Joel's points then what Dan has so far. However, the truth always prevails and Holt's work is defeated once one understands the Jewish thought of Wisdom (see Phantaz's write up at Tectonics). But if Dan and Joel are going to play scripture tag, Dan may want to look into Holt's book for some ammo.

I'd like to see Joel get more into Wisdom but I know Dan and JP already went down that road so it may be pointless. Joel needs to keep playing up the worship of Jesus and make Dan provide an answer for it.

[doogieduff]

First question, how can Dan edit a post in the Boxing Ring? Second, Why didn't Dan answer Joel's question at the very end of joel's last post?

[phantaz sunlyk]

i think that Joel's point regarding the title "First and Last" (and its various equivalents) is sound. Dee Dee Warren has an excellent article on this subject at Tekton.

also, i find it unfortunate that Dan goes off on an unrelated tangent in the course of the debate. this seems to me to be characteristic of Dan. he did it several times in his debate with JP Holding, and his first response to me in our present debate was filled with nearly nothing but irrelevance. in Dan's first post, he asks Joel in what sense Joel understands Jesus (and the Father) to be "God".
Joel responds with several answers, one of them being--

4)The oneness of the Father and Son consists also in the fact that, according to us, the Father and Son share all the same monadic properties. (A monadic property, such as "blue" or "weighing 5 pounds" is something that many different things can have at the same time. The monadic properties of God are things such as "omnipotence" and "eternity" and "absolute goodness" and "omniscience". Polyadic properties, on the other hand, are properties that can only be had by one thing at a time. Thus "being three inches to the right of Joel's computer" or "being the only brother of Joel who is younger than Joel" are polyadic properties. The polyadic properties of the Trinity are these: the Father is uncaused/unbegotten, the Son is begotten, the Spirit is proceeding from the Father through the Son.

it is also worth keeping in mind that Joel specifically pointed out that this portion of his post wasn't intended as a point of departure for further discussion--it was simply an answer given to address Dan's question.

the answer is easy enough to follow: in what sense, asks Dan, do you (Joel) understand the Son to be God? Joel replies that one such way is his believing the Son to have all of the commonly called "God properties". it answers Dan's question. it is now time to move on.

but Dan, for some reason, thinks it necessary to discuss substance metaphysics--

Excuse me, but I'm thoroughly confused by the foregoing. Do you have monadic and polyadic properties reversed? Are not monadic properties one-place and non-relational while polyadic properties are multi-place and relational?

again, this has nothing to do with whether or not "Jesus is God". it doesn't even have anything to do with whether or not both Jesus and the Father actually have those properties--a point which would have been equally out of context, but atleast somewhat related to the debate. the comment is, in short, unwarranted in the context of the debate. it loses the focus of what the conversation is supposed to be about.

at any rate, i certainly believe Dan when he says that he is confused. but the fault is his, and not Joel's. monadic properties are indeed "non relational" and it is precisely because of that that they aren't "one-place". "weighing 160 lbs" can be true of many things: it can be true of me, and the person standing beside me, and the desk upon which my keyboard sits ... it can be true of any thing or person, atleast theoretically. it is therefore a monadic property.

polyadic properties, on the other hand, are "relational" and therefore they can't be "multi place". although Dan ought to have been able to figure out--merely from his own descriptions of the two classes of properties--that his understanding was incorrect, i'll use an illustration to show the difference.

"having brown hair" is a monadic property. there can be three people standing in a row, each with brown hair. if i ask, "which one is Joel", and i'm told, "Joel has brown hair", that doesn't help much. if, on the other hand, i'm told that "Joel is the one in the middle", i can now pick him out. the person who tells me this describes him as he is in relation to the other two with brown hair: he is not the one on the far right; he is not the one on the far left; he is the one in between them--to the right of the one on the far left, and to the left of the one on the far right. this "in between" is a polyadic (relational) property. it picks something out by a specific property it, and it only, has. this property is constituted by its object's relation to other objects.

hence while Dan's confusion was justified, it is his own fault. Dan's understanding of the two types of properties was wrong.

on the side, Dan said something else--equally irrelevant within the context of his debate--that i feel like saying something about.

Joel, in explaining the sense in which we (Trinitarians) understand God, said --

5)In line with point three, the Father and Son are one because they mutually entail one another. Thus to have one implies having the other, just as to pull the first link in a chain with three links means pulling all three links.

again, the answer answers Dan's question. it is a decent analogy that describes the way we understand the persons who are the One God. Joel specifically pointed out that his response, on this issue, wasn't intended as a matter of debate. it wasn't a "proof" offered by Joel for the eternality of the Son, or any such thing. the appropriate response from Dan would have been something like, "oh, i see. moving along, then, ..."

but instead, Dan chimes in with--

This view, of course, assumes that the Father-Son terminology in Scripture is used literally and not metaphorically. It also takes for granted that language employed in the sensible realm is closely correspondent with realities in the celestial sphere. That may or may not be the case.

from substance metaphysics to language theory--anything but the actual point!

but to entertain Dan's various and wandering questions about the Trinity (which the participant in his debate has specifically mentioned not wanting to get side-tracked on), and since i'm not involved in the debate, i'll provide something by way of response.

Dan's claim that such talk on our part "assumes" that father-son talk is to be understood "literally rather than metaphorically" is false. it is indeed difficult to understand how Dan could even manage to jump to such a conclusion.

in such talk, the Trinitarian "strips away" all connotations that (according to most folk) can't apply to the divine realm, while at the same time retaining as many of the connotations as possible. when all of the "stripping away" has been done in this case, we are left with identity of nature, generation, and a loving relationship between two persons. in other words, something along the lines of the Logos, or the description of Wisdom given in Wis. 7:25f. it is every bit as much a metaphor as Plato's saying that God is "the Father of all" because God is, in some sense, the source and cause of all things. metaphors don't cease to be metaphors because they are capable of applying more connotations to their referents--indeed a metaphor has to have atleast some common connotations or else it stops being a metaphor and becomes nonsense. a metaphor only becomes literal when all connotations are applied to the referents, and Dan had no justification whatever in assuming this of Trinitarians.

Dan's further implying that such an understanding (the Trinitarian one) "takes for granted" a theory of language that sees a 1-1 correspondence between a word and a "thing", whether in the corporeal or spiritual realm, is therefore equally muddled. but as an interesting aside, Athanasius understood the "metaphorical" sense to be, in this case, backwards. that is, he understood the father-son relationship between God the Father and God the Son to be the "real" relationship from which all father-son talk gains its connotations, and our human relationships to be a rather imperfect copy of the divine prototype. the human referent is in this case the metaphor, rather than the divine!

hence Dan was more wrong than even seemed possible at first glance!

[John Powell]

joelkaki:
An analogy for this point might be the following: if you walk into a room with three lamps lit, you can't tell where the light of one begins, or the others end. they are perceived as one.


POWELL:
"No analogy is perfect" they say, but it is important that the best available analogies be used and that the "weaknesses" of the analogy (i.e., the important details which don't match) are recognized.

The total illumination at any point in the room is the superposition of the signals from all three lamps.

The same would be true for the total sound at any point in the room from three speakers. In the case of the speakers, however, you would be somewhat able to distinguish which part of the sound came from which speaker if their voices were sufficiently different in pitch (for example, a man, a woman, and a child). If three speakers of similar pitch were to speak different things or the same thing at different times you could tell this was happening, but might not be able to tell which person was saying which words at what time except perhaps by adding information about what their mouths were doing. Moving the speakers to different parts of the room should help.

For the lamps, this distinction might be achieved by strobbing at least two of the lamps in a detectable frequency range. Using monochromatic lights might be an even easier way, but our optic system would still merge the three signals together rather than try to separate them out as our auditory system tries to do.

My two questions to the trinitarians related to this are:

Q1: If God were to be standing in the room would the optical signal coming from Him look more like that coming from one person or from three persons?

Q2: If God were to be speaking in the room would the auditory signal coming from Him sound more like the voice of one person or the voice of three persons?

Perhaps the events surrounding the baptism of Jesus are helpful in this regard.

John Powell

[phantaz sunlyk]

**8** yo john, you're taking the analogy too far. Trinitarian knowledge of God comes via the proclamation of the Church and Scripture opening the door to, and conditioning, the experience (of God) of the believer. given the apophatic approach of (the majority of orthodox) Christians to God, it follows that several distinct analogies can and should be used, with each complimenting and modifying the others. so--

Q1: If God were to be standing in the room would the optical signal coming from Him look more like that coming from one person or from three persons?

**7** the first answer that comes to mind here is what Irenaeus said: the Son is the revealed of the Father, the Father is the hidden in the Son.
according to Jn. 1:18, the Son reveals God (="the Father") as expression or image (Col. 1:15f, Heb.1:3). the Spirit who "declares" the Son (Jn. 14, 15, 16) to the believer would be he who establishes communion (both epistemic and doxastic) between you and the image (="the Son") you are looking at, and this communion with the image would thereby be transposed into communion with the Father, who is the ground and term of everything.
the "arrival" at that term (="the Father") wouldn't be a static event--its not as though (according to us) you would "leave behind" the Son and Spirit at that point. rather, you would thereby participate in the life of the Trinity, becoming a son in the Son, and having the Spirit of God communicated to you.
of course, other answers could be given. but the point is this--these analogies are conditioned by our faith life, hence each answer, though true to a point, would probably be succesful as expounding different aspects of the Trinity.

Q2: If God were to be speaking in the room would the auditory signal coming from Him sound more like the voice of one person or the voice of three persons?

**8** well, given that Jesus is the "Word", re above. :smile:
peace.

[doogieduff]

Boy did GIOP really botch John 10:15.

GIOP says,
As stated previously, no man can know God as God knows him in an intellectual sense. However, Jesus and Paul make it plain that we can know God fully in an experiential sense. Let's not just partially quote Matthew 11:27. Please quote the entire verse:

"All things have been delivered to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son but the Father, nor does any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom the Son may be pleased to reveal him" (Darby).

According to Jesus, therefore, it is possible for creatures to fully know God experientially. He to whom the Son chooses to reveal the Father is capable of knowing the Father fully.

GIOP, where in this verse does it say the extent in which one can know the Father? It doesn't. You made that up. It says, "the Son will reveal the Father" but makes no mention as to what extent. You then say Jesus said one can fully know God experientially, yet scripture never says this, not even once.

Does one have to lie to oneself to reject the deity of Christ? It seems here to me, the answer would be yes.

[GodisonePerson]

Mr/Ms Doggieduff,

I am not interested in a protracted dialogue with you. But it is now necessary to correct the egregious errors you have made here.

Boy did GIOP really botch John 10:15.

Excuse me, but I did not offer a comment on John 10:15. The verse that I quoted and applied was Matthew 11:27.


GIOP, where in this verse does it say the extent in which one can know the Father? It doesn't. You made that up. It says, "the Son will reveal the Father" but makes no mention as to what extent. You then say Jesus said one can fully know God experientially, yet scripture never says this, not even once.

For those who are challenged when it comes to following a chain of discourse, let me make it real simple like for you.

(A) No one but the Son fully knows (EPIGINWSKEI) the Father

(B) No one fully knows (EPIGINWSKEI) the Father but the Son

(C) And (KAI) anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal the Father.

The extent of the knowledge one has of the Father if the Son reveals the Father to him is contained in the Greek verb EPIGINWSKEI. The prefix EPI- evidently intensifies that which is described by GINWSKEI. In any event, Jesus makes it clear that one who has the Father revealed to him is capable of knowing the Father as the Son knows the Father.

In order to understand what I'm saying about "experiential" knowledge, may I suggest a word search on the word GINWSKW? Any good lexicon will clarify matters for you. If you still have trouble after researching GINWSKW, please let me know. I'll try to help you see why the "knowledge" talked about in Matthew 11:27 cannot be intellectual in nature.

Does one have to lie to oneself to reject the deity of Christ? It seems here to me, the answer would be yes.

It sounds more like some have to lie or at least close their eyes to the facts to prove that Christ is Almighty God.

Dan