Is Christ God?

One of the hallmarks of Christianity, indeed, the acid test of orthodox Christianity, is the belief that Jesus Christ was — and still is — both “true God and true man.” According to the traditional churches, anything less than this is considered to be, strictly speaking, heresy. Yet, when it comes to the first part of this assertion (the second part, oddly enough, is often overlooked) we find that the claim is not all that straightforward or simple. It depends partly on what one means by the term “god.”

Webster’s New Unabridged International Dictionary, for example, gives five different meanings for the word, ranging from any supernatural or divine being thought to control events here on earth to mere spectators at a contest whose opinions determined the winner. The meaning that Jews, Christians, and Muslims give to the term, that of single, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing divine being who is the creator of all that exists, only comes second in the dictionary’s list, and perhaps rightly so, as it is seems to be the product of a long evolution of human thought on the subject and still is not shared by all the world’s religions. (Buddhists, for example, believing that the universe has always existed, see no need for any such divine Creator.)

Given this historical background, it should be no surprise to find that even Christian thought on the subject has been a bit more complicated than what it might seem at first glance. In fact, St. Paul was careful to refer to God — the God that Jesus called his “Father” — as ho theos (literally “the God”) that is, the Almighty or absolute God of monotheism. Instead, both in Paul’s epistles and the rest of the New Testament, Jesus is generally called “the Son of God,” (about 55 times) while there are three instances where Christ is called the “Word” (Logos) of God (John 1:1, 14, and Rev. 19:13) and one place (Col. 1:15) where he is called God’s “image” (eikon). In contrast to the above, there are only three instances in the New Testament where Jesus seems to be called God, but even these seem to be qualified in a way that is in relation to us, as in John 20:28 and Rev. 21:7 where he is called “my God” or in Titus 2:13 where he seems to be called “our God and savior” — though that latter reading remains disputed. But even aside from the issue of how that latter passage should be translated, the difference between speaking of “our God” as contrasted to “the God” or God without qualification would seem to indicate a careful distinction between the Almighty or absolute God of monotheism and the revelation or sharing of divine qualities by Jesus, not in an absolute sense but in a rather qualified way, that is relative to us or, as the official creeds put it, “for us and our salvation.”

That these different senses or meanings of the word “god” soon became confused in the minds or ordinary Christians was, I suppose, inevitable. Certainly, the homoousios of the Nicean Creed, variously translated as “consubstantial with” or “of the same nature as” (the Father), the term used by the heretic Arius in denying the divinity of Christ, then used, albeit reluctantly, by the bishops at Nicea in 325 to affirm it, did not help matters much. Indeed, once confirmed, but only after continued debate, at the First Council of Constantinople in 381, the same term then had to be used again at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, this time to affirm Jesus’ humanity as well as his divinity. But by then the confusion had become so widespread that both the Lateran Council in 649, and again, the sixth ecumenical council (Third Council of Constantinople, held in 680-81) had to be called to defend the fact that Jesus had possessed a human will — one which, as the Gospels make graphically clear, had to struggle to faithfully carry out the will of his Father.

If there is a moral to this story, I suppose it is this: words, even a single word, unless used very carefully, can make a big difference. To say that “God was in Jesus, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19) is not the same as saying, without qualification, that “Jesus was (or Christ is) God” — even if we mean it only in a relative sense. For ordinary people, who normally don’t draw such fine distinctions, what is only relative seems, at least most of the time, to be absolute. If so, then we can hardly blame most Christians for being confused, or many non-Christians (especially Jews and Muslims), the doctrine of the Trinity notwithstanding, thinking that Christians are idolaters.

R W Kropf 6/12/08 ChristGod.doc 08-06-12.htm