"Howard J. Van Till" wrote:
> In a response to James Stark, Vince Calhoun asked.
>
> > Isn't
> > there adequate evidence from scripture that Jesus was God and that
> we are
> > called to worship Him?
>
> Interesting question, especially in light of the fact that it took the
> early Christian community several centuries to take a definitive stand
> on precisely this question. For more of the story, see Richard E.
> Rubenstein's book, When Jesus Became God (Harcourt, 1999). From the
> back jacket:
>
> "After almost three hundred years of persecution, Christianity made an
> astonishing breakthrough in 324, when Constantine the Great became the
> emperor of Rome. No longer fearing for their own survival, Christians
> turned to the question of how to define what beliefs identified a
> "true" Christian. Led by two charismatic priests‹Arius who preached
> that Jesus, though uniquely holy, is less than God, and Athanasius who
> argued that Jesus is God himself in human form‹the debate over Jesus'
> degree of divinity escalated from heated argument to violence and
> bloodshed."
>
> Like many episodes in the history of the institutional Christian
> church, this is a sobering story. What may seem so "obvious" to some
> today is itself the product of human history, complete with all of the
> shortcomings of human behavior. The Christian church is a thoroughly
> human institution. Its historical decisions ought not be considered
> beyond question.
This is correct only if one highlights the phrase "take a
definitive stand." It is very clear that within a few years of Jesus
death some in the Christian community were speaking of Christ as one who
had existed before his human life in "the form of God" and on whom in
his exaltation the "name above every name" (i.e., the name kurios =
YHWH) had been bestowed (Phil.2:5-11). Paul cites this attribution as
if it were common Christian belief, and from the date of Philippians
it's pretty clear that this belief must have arisen in the Palestinian
church. See, e.g., Martin Hengel, The Son of God (Fortress, 1976). Of
course a number of other NT texts speak of Jesus as divine.
Belief that Christ was simply a human being who somehow had been
deified never found favor in the mainstream church. This isn't at all
to say that belief about his nature or natures was monolithic, and a
good deal of the christology of the 2d and 3d centuries was
subordinationist to some extent. But it was, crudely speaking, a
subordination within the category of divinity - as, e.g., when Justin
Martyr speaks of the Logos as a "second God." Thus the idea that Jesus
"became God" is rather misleading. Even Arius was willing to say that
Christ was "God" and the Arians at Nicea would have accepted the phrase
"God of God" in the creed. Volume I of Aloys Grillmeier's Christ in
Christian Tradition (John Knox, 1975) is a throrough scholarly treatment
of the development, though of course not up to date in all regards.
What Nicea did was to formalize the realization that Christian
thought had come to over three centuries, that one couldn't make the
fundamental affirmations that Christ is Lord and Savior in the fullest
senses if one stopped short of saying in one way or another that he is
"one in being with the Father." Of course there were various political
factors involved at Nicea and its aftermath - on both sides, it should
be noted. Only the most naive about the church will be surprised by
that, and only those who don't believe that God can act through the less
attractive features of human nature will think that this disqualifies
the council's decision.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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