The trinity is expressed as it ought to be and it is refreshing to be challenged to think deeply in what means for us. Carson, in his usual cogent way, demonstrates from the Scripture that Jesus merits the title of Son of God. Though some recent translations of Scripture replace that title with other more "acceptable" and less "offensive" titles, Carson shows that this is a dangerous trend, no matter the cultural or religious context. Missionaries and pastors will especially want to read this book, but so will any Christian who desires to have a working knowledge of the pertinent and crucial issues involved in this discussion.
One person found this helpful. Carson gives a thorough introduction to the many nuances of the diverse uses of the title Son of God in the Bible. He explains how the term is used in the Old Testament and how that shapes a trajectory of its use in the New Testament. He makes a very strong case why the term "Son of God" should be maintained in any biblical translation.
- Jesus and the Identity of God!
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The only reason I have it 4 stars instead of 5 is that I wish he would have turned it into a more extensive volume where he exhaustively explored all of the uses of the term Son of God and what they all mean. Jesus is the Son of God The answer may not be as simple as we may think. Carson in Jesus the Son of God: If we get Jesus wrong, everything else collapses. And, as Carson points out, this necessarily includes understanding his sonship. Carson's examination of this important title is focused on the following areas: Thus it carries with it a diverse range of meanings, all of which are only understood within their context.
Yet this also helps us get a better handle on the ways in which "son of God" is applied to Christ--sometimes as a catchall for various ideas such as his role as the great high priest , often as a link to the promised Davidic king, sometimes as a reference to Jesus' role as the true and greater Israel, and most stunningly as overtly transparent assignments of divine status to Jesus and of his preexistence: Rather, he is the Son of God from eternity, simultaneously distinguishable from his heavenly Father yet one with him, the perfect Revealer of the living God.
Jesus' sonship in concert with his preexistence.
Select Questions on Christology
The idea that Jesus is eternally God's son--and the idea that God has a son--is inflammatory to many, especially to Muslims who see it as an affront. A robust understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God allows us to better avoid the heresies of Arianism, Sabellianism modalism and tritheism; it also helps us to engage with the Muslim and explore his "deeper criticism of the incarnation: Where some have attempted to skirt the controversy over sonship language by expunging it from translations replacing it with "Messiah" , Carson reminds us that we lose something crucial when we do: One who is significantly less personal, one who is far more aloof.
But this is not the God of the Bible. There we see a God who comes into human history, who engages with his creation by taking on the form of man in order to redeem humanity. Simply, if we lose sonship we lose the gospel. But not only that, when we set aside this language we lose our connection to the church universal and become something other and deadly to the soul. As Carson writes, It is not a light thing to stand so aloof from the authority of those early councils and creeds that reflect so much sustained thought regarding how to think about God.
This does not mean that those early councils and creeds necessarily got everything right. Nevertheless, the kind of biblicism that learns nothing from the great councils is in danger of becoming cultic. What a helpful look at who our Savior is as the Son of God! Carson helps readers understand the typological and divine import of this small but weighty title for Jesus so that we might more carefully read and understand the Word.
Excellent book and thoroughly defines his words just what does 'Son of God' mean Important and vital teaching about present understanding of Muslim doctrines on 'son of God'. See all 31 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.
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ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. Amazon Renewed Refurbished products with a warranty. We can see the dynamic of this monotheism working its way out in the manifold crises of second-temple Judaism, with the Maccabees, Judas the Galilean, and above all the two wars of the late 60s and early s A.
This God was both other than the world and continually active within it. Emboldened by deep-rooted traditions, they explored what appears to us a strange, swirling sense of a rhythm of mutual relations within the very being of the one God: These four ways of speaking moved to and fro from metaphor to trembling reality-claim and back again. Best known of all is perhaps a fifth. Wisdom becomes closely aligned thereby with Torah and Shekinah. I still find it extraordinary that nobody ever taught me all this when I was in seminary.
Nor can we look to Jewish scholars for help at this point, since they, by and large, have not been interested in the topic as such. So NT scholars have just assumed that, if first century Jews were monotheists, they could not in any way have anticipated trinitarian thinking. This I believe to be a huge category mistake at both ends. First, as systematic theologians would of course remind us at once, the point of trinitarian theology is precisely that it is monotheistic, not tri-theistic. Second, as I seem to be one of the only people, who keep on saying, first century Jewish monotheism was never in any case a numerical analysis of the being of the one God.
I cannot stress too strongly that first century Judaism had at its heart what we can and must call several incarnational symbols, not least the Torah, but particularly the Temple. And, though this point has been routinely ignored by systematic theologians from the second century to the twentieth, it is precisely in terms of Torah and Temple that the earthly Jesus acted symbolically and spoke cryptically to define his mission and hint at his own self understanding.
They offer a very high, completely Jewish, and extremely early christology, something that is still routinely dismissed as impossible, both at the scholarly and the popular level. This was not a matter, as has often been suggested, of the early Christians haphazardly grabbing at every title of honor they could think of and throwing them at Jesus in the hope that some of it might make some sense, rather like a modernist painter hurling paint at a canvas from twenty paces and then standing back to see if it said anything to him.
Rather, all the evidence points to serious and disciplined theological thought on the part of the very earliest Christians. Refusing to contemplate any god other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they found themselves drawn by the Spirit to use language of Jesus, and indeed of the Spirit, which was drawn from the Jewish traditions and traditional ways of reading scripture. This language fit so well and enabled them to say so many things by way of worship, mission, proclamation, and ethics that they must have been daily encouraged to pursue the same line of thought, to turn it into hymns and layers and creedal formulae, discovering and celebrating a new dimension of something they already knew like someone who had only known melody suddenly discovering harmony.
The result of all this explosion of exciting but, as I have suggested, focused and disciplined thinking about Jesus and the Spirit is that, in effect, the NT writers offer an incipient trinitarian theology without needing to use any of the technical terms that later centuries would adopt for the same purpose. What is more, when we understand how their language works, we discover that it actually does the job considerably better than the later formulations.
Let me put it like this, no doubt overstating the point for the sake of emphasis. Chalcedon, I think, always smelled a bit like a confidence trick, celebrating in Tertullian-like fashion the absurdity of what is believed, and gave hostages to fortune which post-Enlightenment fortune has been using well. But the NT writers, by re-using the Jewish god-language in relation to Jesus and the Spirit manage to say everything that needs to be said, and to make it look, from one point of view at least, so natural, so obvious, so coherent with the nature of God and with the full humanity of Jesus that fortune receives no hostages at all.
Ironically, the Jewish setting and meaning were either misunderstood or forgotten so soon within the early Church that the fathers struggled valiantly to express the truth, but with one hand, the biblical one, tied behind their backs. And let us not be put off by the sneer that if these meanings were what God had intended us to have they would not have been forgotten for two thousand years.
Those who stand in the Reformation tradition should remember what Luther said when people tried to pull that trick on him. My suggestion, then, is that the NT writers, despite what has been said about them again and again within post-Enlightenment biblical scholarship, can be shown to be expressing a fully, if from our viewpoint incipient, trinitarian theology, and to be doing so as a fresh and creative variation from within, not an abandonment of, their Second Temple Jewish god-view. This rich seam of Jewish thought is the place the early Christians went quarrying for language to deal with the phenomena before them.
This does not do justice to what was actually going on. Some, conversely, have suggested that it was only when the early Church started to lose its grip on its Jewish roots and began to compromise with pagan philosophy that it could think of Jesus in the same breath as the one God. Jewish polemic has often suggested that the Trinity and the Incarnation, those great pillars of patristic theology, are sheer paganization.
I shall argue against this view as well. The question can be posed thus: Whatever we say of later Christian theology, this is certainly not true of the NT. There is no time here to explore these themes in detail, but it is important to glance in outline at the way in which different writers developed these ideas. Several of the Jewish themes I have mentioned come together in the famous Johannine prologue. The passage as a whole is closely dependent on the Wisdom tradition, and is thereby closely linked with the Law and the Presence, or Glory, of God. Similar points can be made about the letter to the Hebrews.
The christology of the opening verses of the letter is closely reminiscent of the portrait of Wisdom in Wisdom of Solomon chapter 7. The letter, of course, goes its own way by constructing a christology unique in the NT in terms of Jesus as both high priest and sacrifice, the ultimate reality to which the figure of Melchizedek pointed. John and Hebrews are usually regarded as late. What about the early material? Paul is our earliest Christian writer, and, interestingly, the earliest parts of his letters may be those which embody or reflect pre-Pauline Christian tradition.
Within that strand of material, three passages stand out. The same is true of Philippians 2: It is important to note here that, although Philippians 2: The language is reminiscent of imperial acclamation-formulae: Despite its many differences with both 1 Corinthians 8 and Philippians 2, Colossians 1: The same point is made, by a sort of concentration of this theology into one statement, the spectacular verse in Colossians 2: Another passage, which is very different on the surface and very similar underneath is Galatians 4: As in the Exodus, the true God reveals himself as who he is, putting the idols to shame 4: It is very early and very Jewish.
The logic of the passage is that the Galatians must either learn to know the one true God in terms of Jesus and the Spirit or they will be in effect turning back to the principalities and powers to which they were formerly subject. Their choice is either incipient trinitarianism or a return to paganism.
Jesus and the Identity of God
Within these passages, and others like them for instance, the remarkable Romans 8: Later Christian theologians, forgetting their Jewish roots, would of course read this as straightforwardly Nicene christology: Jesus was the second person of the Trinity. Many have assumed that this is meant by the phrase in John and Hebrews, though that assumption should probably be challenged. These latter uses such as 2 Sam 7: It became another way of speaking about the one God present, personal, active, saving, and rescuing, while still being able to speak of the one God sovereign, creating, sustaining, sending, and remaining beyond.
It was, in fact, another way of doing what neither Stoicism nor Epicureanism needed to do, and paganism in general could not do, but which Judaism offered a seemingly heaven-sent way of doing: Put back in context, though, it appears as what it is: Similar exegetical points could be made from other NT writings, not least the very Jewish book of Revelation.
But I have said enough to indicate, or at least point in the direction of, the remarkable phenomenon at the heart of earliest Christianity. It is as though they discovered Jesus within the Jewish monotheistic categories they already had. The categories seemed to have been made for him.
They fitted him like a glove. It was the one and only Jesus himself. This raises in an acute form the question why they told the story the way they did. In the logic of this paper we now work backwards from what people said about Jesus a decade or three after his death and resurrection to what can be said about the human, earthly Jesus himself in his own time and even, dare we say, in his own mind. At this point we need to ward off several frequent misunderstandings. And if we in the Church think we are immune from this, I would urge that we think again.
Christians are alas, capable of all kinds of fantasies and anachronisms in reading the Gospels, and to pull the blanket of the canon over our heads and pretend that we are safe in our private, fideistic world is sheer self-delusion. It is demonstrably the case that where the Church has thought itself safe in its canonical world worshipping the ever-present ascended Jesus in prayer and the liturgy, it is capable of massive self-delusion and distortion.
It will not do, again, to sneer that historians always see the reflection of their own faces at the bottom of the well. Those who forswear historical Jesus study will find it impossible, ultimately, to escape seeing the reflection of their own faces in their dogmatic Christs.
But if that is the negative reason for engaging in historical Jesus study, as a kind of necessary check on fantasy and idolatry, the positive reason is so important, so exciting, and in our generation so possible and accessible that I cannot begin to describe the frustration I experience when I find this enterprise caricatured, slighted, and dismissed with a wave of the hand.
Just because Muzak and hard rock exist, that is no reason not to write great music today. The existence of kitsch does not mean that there is no such thing as great contemporary art. The existence of the Jesus Seminar does not mean that historical study of Jesus is a waste of time. The positive reason for studying Jesus within his historical context and using all the tools at our disposal to do so has to do with that still-neglected factor, the meaning of Israel within the purpose of God. If we are to be biblical theologians, it simply will not do to tell the story of salvation as simply creation, fall, Jesus, salvation.
We desperately need to say: I believe it is because of this vacuum that people have elevated minor themes, such as the sinlessness of Jesus, to a prominence which, though not insignificant, they do not possess in the NT itself. This approach is unacceptable for the same reason the approach of Crossan and others is unacceptable: After all, it is precisely the cavil of the heterodox today that the Gospels themselves are the self-serving back-projections of a later, and perhaps corrupted, theology.
I fail to see why we should provide such people with more ammunition than they already have. At the human level, Jesus is like us precisely in this: Orthodox Christians are frightened of letting Jesus belong to a world like this, precisely because we know that if he is like us in belonging to such a world, he will he very unlike us in that his world is not our world. We are therefore, eager to flatten his world out or to declare, it of little relevance, because we want to be able to carry him, his message, and his timeless achievement of salvation across to our world without losing anything in the process.
In this eagerness we forget what the NT writers and above all Jesus himself never forgot: It is precisely because he is The Jew par excellence that he is relevant to all Gentiles as well as Jews. This is the ultimately humiliating move for Gentile and Jew alike, precipitating an epistemology of humiliation whereby all may know this Jesus as the living, saving word of God, as different from us in the way that makes him the same as us, as over against us and therefore relevant to us.
This was the story, the warts-and-all story, that Jesus of Nazareth brought to its god-ordained climax. If we want to know the truth of the salvation which he wrought, that is where we must look for it and not somewhere else. Otherwise, for all our impeccable orthodoxy, we might as well go back and shake hands with Rudolph Bultmann.
As George Caird used to say, Christianity appeals to history, and to history it must go. What sort of a task is this, then? It is not simply a matter of apologetics, though I do believe that proper historical Jesus study has enormous apologetic value as we are able to say that, yes, the gospel records do make sense within the world of first century Judaism, despite what the Jesus Seminar and the mass-market paperbacks tell us.
Nor is this, taking up a point that Colin Gunton made, a matter of defending the Christian faith on grounds from outside of faith. The thin, truncated, Enlightenment version of historiography, the pseudo-objective would-be neutral and presuppositionless study of the bare facts of the past, is a parody of the real thing, and woe betide us if we allow the parodies to put us off the reality.
We are called to mission, including to the Enlightenment world, and we shall learn the truth as we learn how to declare it, how to give a reason to our contemporaries for the hope that is in us. This is the God given saving story of a muddled, often disobedient people who nevertheless carried within them the holy seed, the seed of promise.
Let me give you an illustration. I have a houseplant in my living room, which someone gave me some years ago. I watered it, dusted its leaves, and watched it grow for two or three years. It had pleasant but undramatic green leaves. After that time, suddenly and without warning, from the center of the plant there grew a flower, tall, red, and spectacular. Nothing in the plant had prepared me for this but there it was. That, after all, was what this plant had been all about.
Apply that to history in general, and you may end up with Schleiermacher. Apply it to the story of Israel, and you get Jesus. I do not think we will find that the true Jesus is significantly different from the Jesus of the Gospels as has now become literally a dogma in many critical circles , nor do I believe that we will know who the Jesus of the text of the Gospels actually was and is unless we go behind the text and find out what it actually means. You could almost say that this is not much more, basically than high-grade lexicography.
Just as the Renaissance by its study of Greek enabled Erasmus and others to go behind the Vulgate and discover meanings in the NT which nobody had suspected and which proved quite revolutionary, so I believe that the explosion of study of Second Temple Judaism in our day enables us to go behind the received ways in which we have understood the words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters of the NT. We are enabled to discover meanings in our beloved Gospels, and hence meanings in our beloved Jesus, which we had never suspected and which may again prove quite revolutionary.
At the heart of this enterprise stands the question what Jesus thought about his own mission and identity? Did he think he was going to die for the sins of the world? I cannot myself see that an orthodox christology or atonement theology can give a negative answer to either of those questions without running into serious difficulties. Can you really be God incarnate and have no idea of it? Unless we are prepared to address the question in those terms we are simply being Apollinarian, producing a Jesus with a human body but a divine mind.
When we do so, we find that dozens and dozens of lines of inquiry converge to produce a well ordered, coherent, historically credible sense of vocation, emerging in central symbolic actions, hinted at in a hundred cryptic and teasing sayings. Jesus believed that in doing so he was not just pointing to or talking about, but was actually embodying, the return of YHWH to Zion.
These, though striking and startling, emerge from the world of Second Temple Judaism like the flower growing suddenly out of the plant. They were not expected, but upon inspection this is where they belonged. All the elements of the package were around somewhere in the culture. They are not, repeat not, a retrojection of later Christian theology, not even of later NT theology, which by and large developed in other legitimate ways.
They are only credible, but they are totally credible, as the historically reconstructed mindset of Jesus himself. And they form, not the substance of later atonement and incarnational theology, but its historical starting point. A couple of smaller points. It is often supposed that addressing this question involves psychoanalyzing Jesus. It involves doing what historians always do: Suppose one of the two brigands crucified alongside Jesus had been raised from the dead.
People would have said the world was a very odd place; they would not have said that the brigand was therefore divine. No, the basic meaning of the resurrection, as Paul says in Romans l: In Jesus God had rescued Israel from her suffering and exile. And then the final step, in Jesus God had done what, in the Bible, God had said he would do himself. Resurrection pointed to messiahship, messiahship to the task performed on the cross, and that task to the God who had promised to accomplish it himself.
From there on it was a matter of rethinking, still very Jewishly, how these things could be. Does any of this train of thought go back to Jesus himself? I have argued that it does. Having abandoned Jerusalem at the time of the exile, his return was delayed, but he would come back at last. He acted as though he thought the stories were coming true in what he himself was accomplishing.
This is the context, at last, in which I think it best to approach the question with which this essay began. Jesus who wanders round with a faraway look, listening to the music of the angels, remembering the time when he was sitting up in heaven with the other members of Trinity, having angels bring him bananas on golden dishes. I do not wish to caricature the caricatures: Equally, what passes for historical scholarship sometimes produces an equal and opposite caricature: As it stands, this invites another fairly obvious retort: But the question is still wrongly put.
What we should be asking is: This is what, after all, the great Rabbi Akiba seems to have believed about bar-Kochba. And Jesus seems to have believed it about himself. The language was deeply coded, but the symbolic action was not. He explained his action with riddles all pointing in the same direction.
Recognize this, and you start to see it all over the place, especially in parables and actions whose other layers have preoccupied us.