Defending the Deity of Christ

A must-read theological resource:

Christianity is of course Christ. Only by having a correct understanding of Christ can we have a correct understanding of Christianity. Given that the person and work of Christ is the key to humankind in terms of getting right with God, we must get right who he is and what he did.

And this is always vitally needed, as defective (unbiblical) Christologies have always been an issue for the Christian church over the past two millennia. The early church fathers and creeds had to wrestle with what we are to make of Christ, in light not just of the Hebrew Scriptures, but the new revelations that became the canon of the New Testament.

Thus heresies such as Arianism, Docetism, Nestorianism, Ebionitism, Subordinationism and Adoptionism all had to be carefully dealt with and challenged by the early church fathers. And these Christological errors have never fully disappeared. In more recent times the same heresies have appeared, in the form of the cults such as the Jehovah Witnesses, Mormonism, Unitariansim, Oneness Pentecostals, and some “progressive” Christians.

So there has always been a need to carefully explain and defend the biblical understanding of Christ. Over the centuries there have been so many excellent volumes dealing with this matter. By now many thousands would exist that discuss his divinity, dealing with critics and answering objections.

Back in 2007 Robert Bowman and J. Ed Komoszewski released the 392-page work, Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (Kregel). It was a very solid and useful work that is well worth owning, being a very helpful look at various issues involving the deity of Christ. This book offered more than just some mere proof-texting, but a well-rounded case for his divine status and nature.

But now, some 17 years on, the pair have again teamed up to release The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense (Kregel, 2024) which totals 853 pages. The bibliography itself is some 50 pages long. This new defence of Christ’s deity is perhaps the best book to date attempting this.

This new work is not exactly a revised edition of the former book. In the Preface to the new book the authors explain the relationship between the two books:

Some explanation is in order concerning the relation of this new book to our 2007 book Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ. We originally planned to produce a second edition of that book (and still do, in future years); however, the needs of the day have led us to go far beyond that original goal. The Incarnate Christ and His Critics is an entirely new book of about three times the length of our earlier book, though organized using the same five-point outline featuring the HANDS acronym (Honors, Attributes, Names, Deeds, and Seat). Putting Jesus in His Place is a semipopular defense of the deity of Christ aimed primarily at a general readership. In contrast, the Incarnate Christ and His Critics is an academically oriented treatment, though written in a manner that is hopefully accessible to all motivated readers.

 

The literature relevant to the deity of Christ has expanded dramatically in the years since Putting Jesus in His Place was published. We estimate that relevant serious literature has more than doubled since that time (not to mention the less-than-serious material with which cyberspace is now awash) compared with all of the relevant literature published in the previous two centuries. In our notes we cite more than four hundred books and articles published since our earlier book. Although we are painfully aware that there is much more we did not reference, we have made it our aim to bring readers reasonably up to date with works that are representative of the mass of relevant studies. (p. 17)

This work covers all the bases. All the key objections to, and distortions about, the orthodox teachings concerning the person of Christ are capably dealt with here. Because of the breadth and depth of material found within these pages, I need to be selective and simply highlight some chapters to give the reader a flavour of what is found in the book.

Consider Chapter 21. Heterodox critics of the biblical stance such as Unitarians, JWs, Mormons, and others will say that Jesus might be a god, but that there are many gods, so he is not all that special. The authors assess the various Hebrew names for God, and discuss some passages that SEEM to indicate this ‘many gods’ view. For example, twice Moses is spoken of as a god: Exodus 4:16 and 7:1. They write:

Both texts explicitly qualify that Moses would be “God” in relation to a specific individual: “to him,” that is, Aaron (4:16), and “to Pharaoh” (7:1). These qualifying phrases rule out the idea that these texts speak of Moses as a “deified” figure. They are not referring to some change in Moses’ nature or what would happen to him after he died. Rather, they describe how Moses would function in relation to Aaron and the Pharaoh. (p. 393)

 

The authors also interact with one evangelical scholar who recently passed away, Michael Heiser. While his work has been helpful in many ways, the authors differ with him here: “His evangelical theology combined with his command of Old Testament scholarship enabled him to present a much stronger case for this view than what one typically finds in the works of those encumbered by such false doctrinal systems as Mormonism and Watchtower theology.” (p. 392)

Consider passages such as Exodus 12:2 and Numbers 33:4 which speak of the “gods of Egypt”. Heiser thinks these were actual gods who were given authority by Yahweh to rule over Egypt on his behalf. But the authors reply:

One problem with this interpretation is that the main “god” judged by Yahweh in the exodus events was the Pharaoh, whom Egyptians revered as a god-king. Obviously, the Pharaoh existed, but he was not really a god (certainly not in Heiser’s sense of an inhabitant of the spiritual world). As for the other “gods” worshiped by the Egyptians, Yahweh’s judgment on them exposes them as just as much fraudulent deities as was the Pharaoh, whether they existed as supernatural beings of some kind or not. (p. 395)

Another chapter worth briefly exploring discusses the “paradoxical Christ” that affirms one person with two natures: a divine nature and a human nature. In Chapter 16 the authors look at the evidence for all this. They present much biblical material and then write:

Given this understanding of the incarnation, suppose, hypothetically, that it were true. Suppose that Jesus Christ had existed in divine form as the Son, not as the Father, prior to his human life, had become a mortal human being, and then rose from the dead with a glorified human nature. What would we expect to find in the New Testament if this were the case? Here are some things we would expect or predict to find:

 

• Explicit references to Jesus Christ as God and explicit references to him as a man.
• Statements in which both Christ’s divine and human natures are referenced together in some way.
• Statements indicating that Christ was unique among all human beings in ways related to his deity.
• Statements expressing the idea that Christ became human.
• Statements showing that Jesus, as a human being, honored and submitted to the Father as his God, yet also as deity shared fully in the prerogatives of God.
• Statements about Christ that are surprising or puzzling if he were just a man as well as other statements about him that are surprising or puzzling if he were God.

If we find all of these features of Christology in the New Testament, that would be extremely strong confirmation of the hypothesis of the incarnation as taught in orthodox Christianity. At the other extreme, if we find aspects of New Testament Christology that contradict the above predictions, that would be strong evidence disconfirming the hypothesis. Thus, the approach we are taking here does not assume that the incarnation is true, but rather it presents a way of “testing” the incarnation as a doctrinal hypothesis. (p. 307)

As the authors make quite clear throughout this essential work, whether it is the divine titles applied to Christ, his works, or his various attributes, the case for Christ and his deity is solidly summarised and can be readily affirmed. Say the authors:

In bringing together these five lines of evidence for the deity of Christ, are we perhaps cobbling together a composite picture of Jesus as God that is not found anywhere in the New Testament? Are we seizing upon a text in John calling him God,” another text from Hebrews crediting him with making the universe, and yet another text from Revelation about Christ sitting on God’s throne, and forming out of these disparate texts from different contexts a theory about Jesus that is not taught in any part of the Bible?

 

The answer to this question is decidedly no. There are many passages in which three or more of our five lines of evidence are found in one place, attesting to the deity of Christ. In fact, there are several passages in the New Testament in which all five of these lines of evidence converge in a single context. (p. 758)

They conclude this very important work with these words:

The traditional Christology expressed in the creeds of the early church, which were based directly on New Testament creedal statements (notably 1 Cor. 8:6; 15:3–4; Eph. 4:4–6), best integrates the teachings of the New Testament on the person of Jesus Christ. He is the divine Son, the Word, who was with God the Father in the beginning and yet who was himself God, and who became flesh and lived a perfect human life (John 1:1–2, 14–18). He humbled himself to become a man and died on the cross for our salvation (Phil. 2:5–8). God highly exalted Jesus, who was now not simply the divine Son, but the Son incarnate, bestowing on him the divine name (that he rightly had before his incarnation but now has in his glorified, incarnate state), and calling on all creatures to worship him and confess him as Lord (YHWH). Just as the Son came to glorify the Father, after the Son returned to heaven the Holy Spirit came to glorify Jesus Christ (John 16:13–14). Our worshiping and glorifying Jesus as Lord, far from detracting from God’s glory, redounds to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:9–11).

 

This life is short. One day we will meet the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. When we do, we’ll fall at his feet and worship him—either in abject fear or in adoring love. (p. 758)

Any good personal Christian library should contain works discussing the person and work of Christ, which not only lay out the biblical material on this, but refute the errors, distortions and heresies that have always crept in to the discussion. If you can only afford one volume, this is the book for you.

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