I have read sections of Thomas Morris' book, and I was a student of Dr. Ron Feenstra who edited a book and held a conference on such issues.
But I've also read the arguments of John Hick in his published books, including,
The Myth of God Incarnate, and
The Metaphor of God Incarnate, where he more than adequately deal with Morris, and
Encountering Jesus: A Debate on Christology. Michael Martin's
The Case Against Christianity also does a more than adequate job debunking Morris.
John Hick's argument against the deity of Jesus has three major points. We’ll briefly summarize and illustrate the first two which leads up to the conceptual problems that I first posted here. [The key words here and "summarize" and "illustrate."]
One) The traditional view that Jesus was literally God in the flesh was not something he himself believed or taught, but was written into the Gospels after the Easter event. For Palestinian Jews living in the first century, a close encounter with Jesus “would be a conversion experience.” For someone to see the conviction in his eyes as he preached that the kingdom is at hand, the authority of his words and deeds, the way he expressed love, the “miraculous” healings and providential circumstances that surrounded his life, and his apocalyptic conviction of living in the last days of the present age would lead one to think God is indeed in this person.
How this conversion experience led up to John’s claim in his Gospel that Jesus was “the only begotten Son of God” (John1: 18) is a large and complex topic. Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that the belief that Jesus claimed anything like this “has been demonstrated with growing certainty by critical study of the Gospels to be the work of the post-Easter community. Today it must be taken as all but certain that the pre-Easter Jesus neither designated himself as Messiah (or Son of God) nor accepted such a confession to him from others.”
Jesus—God and Man (Westminister, 1968).
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says to a man, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” (10:17-18). According to James Barr, “This only makes sense if Jesus is not claiming to be God.” Because “it fits with the fact that Jesus fully accepted Jewish monotheism.”
Beyond Fundamentalism, 1984 (p. 58). By contrast, John’s Gospel, dated conservatively at 100 A.D., thirty (to forty-five) years after Mark, reveals a very high view of Christ.
Conservative scholar James Dunn, in
The Evidence for Jesus, tells us the specific problem. It’s “whether we can use John’s Gospel as direct testimony to Jesus’ own teaching.” “This problem was not invented by modern scholarship; it was rather discovered by modern scholarship.” (p. 31). John’s Gospel is “obviously different” from the other three earlier Gospels in terms of style and content. In the other three Synoptic Gospels (so named because they see the same things) Jesus speaks in proverbs, epigrams, and in parables, whereas in John’s Gospel Jesus often speaks in long involved discourses (
John 6, 14-17). In the three Synoptic Gospels Jesus speaks often of the “kingdom of God” and hardly anything about himself, but in John’s Gospel he speaks often about himself (“I am the light of the world…the bread of life…the way the life and the truth.”), but he hardly says anything about the kingdom of God.
At best, scholars see these differences as indicative of the fact that John’s Gospel is a theological elaboration of history, while still others see them indicating it is wholly theological in nature with not much historical value at all when it comes to what Jesus taught. Case in point is the question of the high view of Christ revealed in John’s Gospel. Even Dunn acknowledges that the number of times Jesus speaks of God as his “Father” or ‘the Father’ in John’s gospel (173 times--Dunn's count) when compared to all three earlier Synoptic Gospels (a total of 43 times, many repeated between them) leads him to say that John’s Jesus is “the truth of Jesus in retrospect rather than as expressed by Jesus at the time…it is expanded teaching of Jesus.” (p. 45). And yet it is mostly because of John’s Jesus that we get a very high Christology. John’s Jesus is quoted as saying: “I and the Father are one,” (
John 10:30), and “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John14:9). But, based on what we’ve just seen, he never said those things. This is John’s Jesus speaking, not the historical Jesus.
Two) We can trace how Jesus was deified by his followers leading ultimately to the Nicean/Chalcedonian view of Christ as a way of expressing the Lordship of Jesus over the gods and goddesses of the Roman Empire. John Hick: “In general it seems that the early Christians, seeking to understand and communicate the significance of their Lord, grasped at concepts and titles within their culture and that the usage of these developed under the pressures of preaching and controversy.” (
Encountering Jesus, p 14).
Jewish tradition in Jesus’ time had three major images of the redeemer who would bring in the coming new and glorious age. One was the “Messiah” (Hebrew for “King”), who was to reign in a new kingdom in which Jerusalem would be the center of the world, and where God’s will would be done on earth. The second was that of the “Son of man” prophesized in
Daniel 7:13-14. Hick reminds us that “with a view to the later Christian doctrine of the incarnation, that neither the Messiah nor the Son of man was, in Jewish thinking, divine…it was emphatically not equivalent to being God incarnate.”
Encountering Jesus, (pp. 7-9). It couldn’t be!
A third image was “Son of God,” which was common in the ancient world as well as in Biblical literature. Oscar Cullman: “The origin of the ‘son of God’ concept lies in ancient oriental religions, in which above all kings were thought to be begotten of gods…. In the N.T. period one could meet everywhere men who called themselves ‘sons of God’ because of their peculiar vocation or miraculous powers.” “In the O.T. we find this expression used in three ways: the whole people of Israel is called ‘Son of God’ (
Hosea 11:1); kings bear the title (
Ps. 2:7;
II Sam. 7:14); persons with a special commission from God, such as angels (
Job 1:6; 38:7), and perhaps also the Messiah, are so called.”
The Christology of the N.T., (pp. 271-273).
According to John Hick: “It is not in the least surprising that Jesus, as a spirit-filled prophet, a charismatic healer, perhaps as Messiah, believed to be of the royal line of David, should have been thought of and should have thought of himself as, in this familiar metaphorical sense, a son of God. What happened, as the gospel went out beyond the Hebraic milieu into the Greek-dominated intellectual world of the Roman Empire, was that the metaphorical son of God was transformed into the metaphysical God the Son.”
Encountering Jesus, (p. 14). Pannenberg: “At first the ‘Son of God’ concept did not express a participation in the divine essence….Only in Gentile Christianity was the divine Sonship understood physically as participation in the divine essence.”
Jesus—God and Man (p. 117). The progression of this train of thought led up to the very strong affirmation of Nicene/Chalcedonian Christology of the 4th–5th centuries. John Hick: “It could well be that its deification of Jesus helped the early Christian community to survive its period of intermittent persecutions and that subsequently, if the church was to be the spiritual, moral, and cultural director of the Roman Empire, and thus of Western civilization, it needed the prestige of a founder who was none other than God, in the person of the eternal Son.” (in
Encountering Jesus).
Three) The belief that Jesus was fully man and fully God has never been shown to be consistently defined, explained or defended.
[Mentioned in my first post]
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Four conceptual problems with an incarnate God that have never been solved.
