In a recent essay, I relayed that the analysis offered of its subject matter, the logic of the concept of God, was inspired by an exchange that I had with a friend and fellow Roman Catholic. My friend had mentioned that her own search for Truth has led her to essentially reject some of the most fundamental teachings of Christianity.
One claim she made is that while she believes that Jesus is a divine son of God, she rejects the proposition that He is the only divine son. What she may not realize (I can’t be sure given that we never had the opportunity to finish our discussion) is that this notion that she now entertains had in one form or another been in circulation during the earliest years of the Christian era.
Yet it had always been condemned as heretical.
This is for good reason, as will be shown later.
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In the second century, what’s come to be known as “Adoptionism” began to take root. The adoptionists denied Christ’s divinity by denying that He was co-eternal with God the Father. From the perspective of this heresy, Jesus was no more and no less than a man, an exceptionally godly man who, upon proving his obedience to God, was rewarded by the latter with resurrection from the dead and adoption into the Godhead.
Jesus, in other words, is God’s adopted son—the first but, if the Scriptures are to be believed, not the last.
In the fourth century, Arianism taught that Jesus was a creature of God the Father’s, albeit, the first of His creatures. The Father created Jesus and the latter, in turn, created the cosmos. Subsequently, the Father adopted Jesus as His first Son.
There have been several other heresies over the centuries and millennia. For present purposes, and due to space and time constraints, I draw the reader’s attention to these two specific heresies only because they are illustrative of the idea that my friend is expressing. Though she may object that, unlike the adoptionists and Arians, she is not challenging Jesus’s divinity, the fact of the matter is that unless Jesus is the one and only Son of God, and unless this means that He is “begotten not made” and “one in being with the Father,” as over 1 billion Christians, reciting the Nicene Creed, affirm each week, then Jesus may as well not have been divine.
And if He is not God, then there is no salvation and Christianity is a lie.
It is understandable, given the mystery of the Incarnation—the uniquely Christian doctrine that God became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus who was fully God and fully human—that there should emerge misunderstandings as to Christ’s identity. But the Incarnation is of a piece with an intricate theological eco-system, as it were. It is the central piece of this theology. Once it is rejected, the rest of the system to which it belongs will inescapably unravel.
This is but another way of saying that rejection of the Incarnation is rejection of Christianity, for heretical Christianity is fake Christianity, and fake Christianity is not Christianity.
For starters, Christianity, like the Judaism out of which it grew, is fiercely monotheistic. In resolutely affirming the existence of one God, the monotheist, whether Jew, Christian, or, for that matter, Muslim, just as staunchly denies that there are any other beings deserving of worship. And if there are any other beings to whom loyalty, fidelity, and love are owed, they are owed these things, ultimately, for God’s sake, because they in turn owe their being to Him Who is Being itself.
However, if Jesus is not God, then the countless numbers of people throughout the last 2,000 years, including the over 2 billion people today, who revere and worship Him are idolaters; they are guilty of violating the first Commandment, which proscribes anything that remotely approximates polytheism.
In short, either Jesus is God or else Christians are idolaters.
Second, the Jesus with Whom we’re presented in the New Testament is anything but the meek, mild, self-effacing figure of the popular contemporary imagination—which is to say that the Jesus of the Bible is most certainly not a good, much less a godly, man if He is just a man.
In multiple locations throughout the Scriptures, Jesus likens Himself to God. Indeed, it is precisely because His enemies understand Him to be making Himself equal to God that they plot to have Him killed.
Far from being a godly man, if Jesus was no more than a man, then He was a most godless man, for He was guilty of immense arrogance, self-delusion, condescension, and, most damning, blasphemy.
Third, if Jesus was just a man, then the Christian doctrine of the Blessed Trinity is also a fiction. God is either Unitarian or something else, but He cannot be Trinitarian in nature.
This is profoundly problematic for more than one reason. Not only does it mean that Christianity has been mistaken for most of its history in affirming this unique conception of God, but the bottomless Love with which the Christian identifies God will be deprived of its basis unless God is Triune in essence.
Christianity distinguishes itself among the world’s religious and philosophical traditions insofar as it unabashedly declares that God is Love. Yet it is the idea that God is Three Divine Persons in a single Godhead that justifies this position, for it would appear logically impossible for God to be Love unless God—or Love—is comprised of inter-personal relationships.
After all, love is relational. Self-love, though a genuine species of love, is intelligible just insofar as we learn about love from our relationships with others. And while God is omniscient or all-knowing, it would appear as logically impossible for God to know love, much less be Love, if He only knew Himself from all eternity as it is logically impossible for God to be weak or immoral.
Love is self-giving. Essentially, it consists in the giving of oneself to others. This being said, the paradox of God knowing love, to say nothing of being Love, prior to creation is resolved once it becomes clear that the Godhead is a community, a family, of Three Persons, each of whom loves the other two from all eternity.
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This account, though, will not do if Jesus is only a man.
Fourth, if Jesus is only a man, then there is no Salvation. The Christian doctrine of the Atonement, irrespectively of the multiple interpretations to which it lends itself, must go the way of the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity:
God gave Himself in order to reconcile humanity with Himself. It was for this reason that the Logos, the Word of God who was God became flesh and dwelt among us, as Saint John informs us in the prologue to his gospel.
This is what the doctrine of the Atonement is all about. But if Jesus is not God, then God did not demonstrate His immeasurable love for us through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection from the dead and, thus, Salvation has not been achieved.
In conclusion, we can now safely summarize the main point: Either Jesus is the unique Son of God, God the Son, or else Christianity is Big Lie.
