The Son
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the July 12, 2014
Sabbath School Lesson
“My prayer is not for them alone. I
pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them
may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in
us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the
glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in
me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that
you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17:21-23, NIV
Since His
death and resurrection, Christians have struggled to come to grips with the
nature of Christ. Arius, who was born in the middle of the third century, C.E.,
was what we would today call a non-Trinitarian. He believed that Jesus was a
created being who therefore could not be eternal.[i]
Although this position was condemned as heretical by the Council of Nicaea in
325, C.E., this is still the position advocated by the Jehovah’s Witnesses of
modern times.[ii]
Another
early Jewish Christian group, the Ebionites, apparently denied the ideas of
Jesus’ pre-existence, divinity, and in some cases, the virgin birth.[iii]
The Ebionite Gospel of Matthew omits the first two chapters of that gospel
because of this. Their viewpoint on Jesus was that He was essentially another
Moses, greatly favored by God but not divine, only human. Some elements of
Ebionism continue in Islam and modern Jewish Christian sects.
The Gnostics
went the opposite direction and preached that Jesus was entirely spiritual and
that any physical manifestation was only an illusion. However, while they
attributed some aspects of deity to Jesus, they still placed Him in a lower
relationship to God the Father, seeing Him more as a creative demiurge.[iv]
The Gnostic beliefs continue, today, through such organizations as Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, and the
Alexandrian Gnostic Church.
It is not
hard to understand why such controversies existed over the nature of Christ.
After all, how does one explain omniscience contained within the physical
limitations of a human mind, or what about omnipresence within the confines of
a human body? Can the frail human frame be a vehicle for omnipotence? Yet, the Synods of Antioch (264-268, C.E.)[v]
and the First Council of Nicaea (325, C.E.)[vi]
attempted to resolve some of the apparent conflicts in
logic and understanding. The result was an understanding that Jesus was both
fully human and fully divine. The effectiveness of their work may be seen in
the overwhelming adoption of their view by the worldwide Christian community,
notwithstanding some isolated holdouts.
This does
not mean that controversies regarding Christ’s nature have not continued to
plague the church. In Seventh-day Adventism, for instance, two theological
schools have battled over the issue for decades. Some might hold that Christ
came with the sinless nature of Adam before his fall into sin. Others, in
contrast, maintain that Christ came with a nature burdened with the effects
of thousands of years of degeneration from the proliferation of sin in the
human race. Those who take the first position, feeling that it would be
impossible for sinful flesh to deliver humanity from sin, point to evidence of
the virgin birth, the “immaculate conception,” being unnecessary if Christ had
a degenerate nature.
On the other
hand, those who advocate for the degeneration from sin might point to such
messianic passages as “he hath no form nor comeliness”[vii]
which are often applied to Christ as contrasted with pre-fall Adam, created in
the image of God.[viii]
The fatal flaw in both arguments, though, is the taken-for-granted view that it
is possible for us to understand the nature of God. The early church seemed to
reject that view and advocated instead for accepting that the nature of God was
a divine mystery with its advocacy of a fully divine, fully human Christ. Logic
fails us when we try to explain how two full entities can be contained in one.
It is, in fact, no easier to explain that than it is to explain the mystery of
the Trinity. But where logic fails on one level, it may help us on another.
If Physics
is correct and there are far more dimensions than we can experience at our
level, it is possible that the interplay of those dimensions may not only be
difficult to perceive but also difficult to explain based on our limited
perspective. For instance, let’s posit a being who only
exists in a two-dimensional world. That being would live out its life in a
plane. It could only measure width and height but never depth. A line drawn
across that plane would be an insurmountable barrier to this being since he
could not travel in the third dimension.
Now suppose
we enter his world. Although we could see and understand everything about his
world because we have those same two dimensions in ours, he could only
understand the part of our world that was similar to his. If we wished to communicate
with him, we would be forced to limit ourselves to his perspective if we wished
to have any chance at being understood. Yet our being, which is beyond his
understanding, has far more to it than we could ever tell him. Perhaps this
explains to some degree why we cannot come to an agreed understanding about
Christ. His being, His essence, is simply outside of any ability we have to
perceive or measure it.
This may
also explain His miracles. If we look again at the two dimensional world where
a drawn line is an impassable barrier, our ability to travel beyond that
barrier would seem nothing short of miraculous to the beings of that world. We
need only look at one attribute of God to see how this can be. To be
omnipresent is to be present at every moment of Space-Time. We could naturally
not see such omnipresence, let alone measure it. We simply do not have the
tools. But moments where we can perceive when that presence intersects our
experience can seem miraculous.
For
instance, when Christ walked upon the water, the omnipresence of God may have
been uniquely perceptible at that moment and place, even though He exists at
every moment and place, whether under, in or on the water. Just as a portion of
our being can be perceived in the two-dimensional world, so God may have made
it possible to perceive a portion of His being in Jesus and perhaps in doing
so, He created the many “miracles” of Scripture.
Does this
make the miraculous mundane? Hardly. Instead it provides a framework for
understanding how the nature of God can be beyond our perception, yet still be
physically manifest, albeit in a limited expression. Perhaps this is why the
early church Fathers were able to accept the idea of full divinity within full
humanity. Perhaps it is a way for us to understand it as well.
However, the
idea may be terrifying to some. Just as our two-dimensional being might be
terrified to encounter someone from our dimension that he can neither
completely perceive or understand, we might be very fearful of a God who defies
explanation. After all, if God is beyond explanation then what does that say
about our denominationalism and our many conflicts over religious perspectives?
Each denomination wants to believe it is the one that finally got it right
about God. But if God is beyond us ever getting it right, how can we make such
claims?
Naturally
our claims for understanding God will fall short for such a being. Perhaps this
contributes to the decline of Christianity, when Christians make claims about
who God is and what His will is that cannot be substantiated. Not only does
this “God in the box” approach to religion make God appear to be much smaller
and finite than He really is, it also sets people up for disappointment when
they realize that what is “in the box” isn’t really God in the first place. We
end up with the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat.[ix]
When we don’t look in the box, God is alive and well inside, but the moment we
look in, we find He is dead. Perhaps this “God is dead” perspective postulated
by Friedrich Nietzsche[x]
is because God was never in the box in the first place. Perhaps our attempts to
put Him there, like a child struggling with a recalcitrant cat, only result in
harm to ourselves in the process.
Søren
Kierkegaard may have been right. Since our understanding is limited by
definition, a “leap to faith”[xi]
may be the only way to discover God. But that leap must truly be toward a God
who defies definition and not into the box that can never contain Him.
