- This topic is empty.
- Posts
Hi,
GM has offered us a couple of contributions from this man so perhaps we should look at his ideas.His theology dervies from anglicanism, an offshoot of catholicism.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wright_(theologian) – 66k
http://www.hornes.org/theologia/travis-tamerius/n-t-wright-evangelical-theology
blog.preachingtoday.com/2008/03/interview_with_n_t_wright.html – 68k –Personally I find his words heavy and dry and bereft of life.
Hi GM,
From your article
“Another passage, which is very different on the surface and very similar underneath is Galatians 4:1-11. Here Paul tells the story of the world as the story of God’s freeing of slaves and his making them his children, his heirs. As in the Exodus, the true God reveals himself as who he is, putting the idols to shame (4:8-11). But the God who has now revealed himself in this way is the God who “sends the son” (4:4) and then “sends the Spirit of the Son” (4:6). In these passages we have, within thirty years of Jesus’ death, what would later be called a very high christology. 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.Within these passages, and others like them (for instance, the remarkable Romans 8:3-4), Paul, like other NT writers, uses the phrase “son of God” to denote Jesus. 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.[23] Paul’s usage, though, is much subtler and offers further clues not only as to what the earliest Christians believed, but why “Son of God” in Jewish thought was used occasionally for angels, sometimes for Israel (e. g. Exod 4:22), and sometimes for the king. These latter uses (such as 2 Sam 7:14, Psa 2:7 and Ps 89:27) were influential both in sectarian Judaism (“son of God” is found as a messianic title at Qumran[24]) and in early Christianity. Since, the early Christians all regarded Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, the one in whom Israel’s destiny had been summed up, it is not surprising, whatever language Jesus had or had not used of himself, that they exploited this phrase—it is perhaps too formal and too redolent of the wrong way of doing NT christology to call it a “title”—which was available both in their Bible and their surrounding culture to denote Jesus and to connote his Messiahship.[25]
But already by Paul’s day something more was in fact going on. “Son of God” came quickly to be used as a further way, in addition to the five Jewish ways already available and exploited by the early Christians, of saying that what had happened in Jesus was the unique and personal action of the one God of Israel. 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: holding together the majesty and the compassion of God, the transcendence and the immanence of God, creation and covenant, sovereignty and presence.
All this means that the phrase “son of God” taken out of context is not much help for deciding what a particular NT writer thought about Jesus. Put back in context, though, it appears as what it is: one focal point of a wide variety of arguments in which the Jewish messianic hope comes together with the Jewish expectation that YHWY himself would be savingly present with his people. If this is not so, Paul’s usage is inexplicable. The death of God’s son can only reveal God’s love (as in, e.g., Rom 5:6-10) if the son is the personal expression of God himself. It will hardly do to say “I love you so much that I’m going to send someone else.”
Classic trinity thought smudging the meaning of Son of God to make him God
Hi,
More from Mr Wright
'The question of “Jesus and God” is a huge and difficult matter. Caricatures abound: 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: but you would be surprised what devout people sometimes believe.) Equally, what passes for historical scholarship sometimes produces an equal and opposite caricature: the Jesus who wandered around totally unreflective, telling stories without perceiving how they would be heard, announcing God’s kingdom, speaking of bringing it about, yet failing to ruminate on his own role within the drama. We must not, as many have done, lose our nerve, and start asking the “sort of” questions (e.g., “what sort of person would think he was divine?”) that depend for their rhetorical force on the implied assumption “within our culture.” Too many have been content with the cheap retort that anyone supposing himself to be God incarnate must be mad, and we do not think Jesus was mad. As it stands, this invites another fairly obvious retort: some of Jesus’ opponents, and some even in his own family, thought he was out of his mind, and it is unlikely in the extreme that the early church made these charges up. But the question is still wrongly put. What we should be asking is: never mind what would count in our culture, how would a first century Jew have approached and thought about these matters?There is some evidence—cryptic, difficult to interpret, but evidence none the less—that some first century Jews had already started to explore the meaning of certain texts, not least Daniel 7, which spoke of Israel’s God sharing his throne with another (something expressly denied, of course, in Isaiah 42-8).[35] These were not simply bits of speculative theology. They belonged, as more or less everything did at that period, to the whirling world of politics and pressure groups, of agendas and ambitions, all bent on discovering how Israel’s God would bring in the kingdom and how best to speed the process on its way. To say that someone would share God’s throne was to say that, through this one, Israel’s God would win the great decisive victory. 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 was coming to Zion, doing what YHWH had promised to do. 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. Why, after all, does Jesus tell a story about a yearning father in order to account for his own behavior?[36] It is this that also accounts for his sovereign attitude to Torah, his speaking on behalf of Wisdom, and his announcement of forgiveness of sins.[37] By themselves none of these would be conclusive. Even if they are allowed to stand as words and actions of Jesus, they remain cryptic. But predicate them of the same young man who is then on his way to Jerusalem to confront the powers that be with the message and the action of the kingdom of God and who tells stories as he does which are best interpreted as stories of YHWH returning to Zion, then you have reached. I believe, the deep heart of Jesus’ own sense of vocation. He believed himself called to do and be what in the scriptures only Israel’s God did and was.'
Unless you grasp the separation between God and his willing vessel you will always confuse the two.
More.
“Thinking and speaking of God and Jesus in the same breadth is not, as has often been suggested, a category mistake. Of course, if you start with the Deist god and the reductionists’ Jesus, they will never fit, but then they were designed not to. Likewise, if you start with the New Age gods-from-below, or for that matter the gods of ancient paganism, and ask what would happen if such a god were to become human, you would end up with a figure very different from the one in the gospels. But if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, of the Psalms, and ask what that God might be like, were he to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross. Start with the Deist God, and your historical Jesus study will only achieve incarnational christology by sliding towards docetism. Start with the real historical earthly Jesus, and your God will come running down the road to meet you, deeply attractive, deeply preachable, deeply challenging in his transforming embrace. That, for me, is the theological significance of the earthly Jesus. “
But of course God was not His Son
More,
“Anyone can, of course, declare that this picture was read back by the early Church into Jesus’ mind. The evidence for this is not good. The early Church did not make much use of these themes. There is, of course, some overlap, but also quite substantial discontinuity. (This, ironically, may be why this latent christology has often gone unnoticed. Scholar and pietist alike have preferred the early Church’s christological formulations to Jesus’ christological vocation. The pietist read them back into Jesus’ mind, and the scholar declared them impossible and then argued on that basis for an unreflective or reductionist Jesus.) As with Jesus’ Messiahship and his vocation to suffer and die, the key sayings remain cryptic, only coming into focus when grouped around the central symbolic actions. The early Church was not reticent about saying that Jesus was Messiah, that his death was God’s saving act, and that he and his Father belonged together within the Jewish picture of the one God.I see no reason why the contemporary Church should be reticent about this either. Using incarnational language about Jesus, and Trinitarian language about God, is of course self-involving; it entails a commitment of faith, love, trust, and obedience. But there is a difference between self-involving language and self-referring language. I do not think that when I use language like this about Jesus and God I am merely talking about the state of my own devotion. I think I am talking, self-involvingly of course, about Jesus and God.”
Distant dry trinity theology.
Abhor such teachings.So brother Nick,
You abhor them because they don't fit in your theology of believing Polytheism or Arianism. I see Jesus is the perfect image of God when I see Jesus I see the true God in him not any lesser God or a god. Jesus is the fulfillment of all God's promoses that are recorded in the Bible. God dwells with us in Jesus the man who is the Christ or Messiah.Please see Col 2:9
“For in him dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily”,Jesus is the complete representation of the invisible God not a part or a small god as many believe here but he himself is not that deity. God is the source of light but son is the lamp to reflect that God to humans in three dimension as we can understand three dimentional image properly. He is now the permanent Theophany of the invisible God as you see the angels of God were temporary Theophanies of the same invisible God in O.T.
Hope you will appreciate these understandings
AdamHi GM,
This thread is about the anglican theologian and his offerings.
Should we cling to the robes of men such as him when the words of Jesus live?Hi GM,
To speak of the THEOLOGY OF PAUL is to divide Paul from Christ and from God in him.
Paul was only a servant and what he wrote has equal validity to all scripture as God's teaching.Certainly the words of our Lord my brother, but remember our Lord was a Jew who was believing Monotheism not any Polytheism or Henotheism.
I utter the same to all here when my Lord confirmed Jewish Monotheism of believeing in Only One God.
Hi GM,
If you prefer the terminology of theologians to that of scripture then you can be led anywhere false.I'm listening to my master Jesus what he said about the Only God because He alone is the creator there was no one else besides Him.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
