God—was indebted to his background in Stoic philosophy. We cannot ignore the ancient context of the Biblical texts, nor can we ignore the context within which we interpret them. And when we do both those things, we come to see just how it is possible for people with the same shared Scriptures and the same shared Jesus to nonetheless have drawn different conclusions.
More than a century ago, an editorial in the periodical The Biblical World addressed this very point:
The duty of Christian thinkers in the present generation is to address themselves consciously and earnestly to the task never indeed abandoned, but long held in check by the doctrine of an authoritative canon of Scripture or an authoritative church, and to seek from all the sources at our disposal to frame for our day such a statement of truths in the realm of religion as will on the one hand satisfy in the fullest possible measure the data at our disposal and on the other hand meet as fully as possible the needs of our day . . . . In this process the true greatness of Jesus and the finality of his fundamental thought will not be lost, but only transferred from postulate to assured result of investigation. But no period and no experience, certainly not that of our own day, will be without its possible contribution, and our effort will be not to return to the position of any past age, even that of the dawn of Christianity, but with fullest loyalty to the achievements of the past to push on as far as possible toward the larger light and fuller truth.1
The situation has not changed, but this dialogical nature of theology seems no more generally recognized among Christian laypeople than it was in the past. And that is unfortunate.
Most of the volumes that have been published offering multiple viewpoints on a topic have done so within the framework of a shared set of assumptions, typically that of conservative Evangelicalism. Some of the views included might seem radical within that context, but often they appear quite narrowly clustered when viewed from another perspective. Occasionally such volumes include, in the interest of “fairness” or perhaps of sensationalism, a viewpoint that is considered fringe not merely by Evangelicals but by all academics. The present volume is different from such other volumes in important ways. On the one hand, the contributors share a commitment to interpreting the Bible diligently and accurately, and allowing the evidence from the Bible to shape their views. On the other hand, the three christological viewpoints which the authors represent are only relatively rarely found within the same church setting. Trinitarianism, Arianism, and Socinianism are typically not found within the same denomination, much less within the same church, and more often than not, adherents to one of the viewpoints will regard the other views as anathema.
And so the fact that the authors are friends across such divides is an important message of the book, one which should not be missed. The content of their discussions is important, but so too is the fact that people with a shared desire to follow Jesus and to be faithful to Scripture can understand who Jesus is in different ways. In the past, those with the authority to do so who held one of these viewpoints might have excommunicated or expelled the others. In some circles, that might still happen today. And yet if we think about the emperor Constantine, he brought Christians together at the Council of Nicaea to seek unity, and oversaw the condemnation of Arius—and yet he would later be baptized by a bishop who adhered to the same viewpoint as Arius. Christians who listened carefully to the various sides could find arguments from both to be compelling, and could find it difficult to choose between them.
Christianity has always been diverse, and has long been plagued by a tendency toward reciprocal condemnation and exclusion of others who have different opinions than our own, as we have proved time and again to be unable to apply the demand of Jesus that we love our enemies to those who are “enemies” only of our idea, but not necessarily of ourselves. The contributors exemplify something that scholars have long known, and which explains the approach to scholarship which I outlined towards the start of this preface. It is very easy for any one of us, no matter how great our expertise in a given area, to be wrong. If we are to get at the truth, our chances of achieving this are much greater if we seek it in community, a community that challenges us with a critical examination of our assumptions and claims, and presents us with alternative viewpoints which we in turn must evaluate. It is a delight to see three individuals with such different viewpoints committed to interacting with the best scholarship on New Testament Christology, and to engaging one another. I hope that readers will find themselves welcomed into the conversation, and that they in turn will not just learn about Christology, but about being Christians who disagree—sometimes adamantly and vociferously—yet without hating one another. For it seems to me that, if we figure out who Jesus is, and in the process ignore what he taught, we have missed the point. It is possible to be genuinely concerned—as the authors of this volume are—to mean the “right thing” when calling Jesus “Lord, Lord,” and yet to recognize that this Lord, however his nature is understood, has called those who follow him to live in a certain way.
James F. McGrath, PhD
Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language & Literature
Department of Philosophy and Religion, Butler University
Indianapolis, Indiana
1. “Truth ‘Once for All Delivered,’” The Biblical World 35.4 (April 1910) 221–22.
On the Labels
Charles Lee Irons on the “Trinitarian” Label
The trinitarian view of the identity of Jesus that I wish to defend is the historic position enshrined as church doctrine in the Nicene Creed. It is the position that Jesus is the divine Son of God. Jesus’ identity as the Son of God implies his full ontological equality with the Father. Jesus did not become the Son; he always was the Son. There was never a time when the Father was without his Son. The Son, in his very person, not merely through his words, fully reveals the Father, which he could not do if he were a mere creature. Crucial to this understanding is a fundamental metaphysical presupposition that there are only two kinds of being: Creator and creature. Any existing being that has a beginning and a time when it did not exist is a creature. Any existing being that is described in Scripture as having created all things belongs on the Creator side of the Creator-creature distinction. Since the New Testament asserts that God created all things through the Son, the Son must be fully divine and not a creature. In addition to focusing on the Son’s eternal preexistence, I also defend his full humanity. This yields a three-phase Christology: (1) eternal preexistence, (2) incarnation, and (3) exaltation. The eternally preexistent Son became man and was exalted to the right hand of God the Father in order to receive divine worship and to exercise divine sovereignty over all things, a worship and a sovereignty that are appropriate because of his ontological deity.
Danny André Dixon on the “Arian” Label
I have, with stipulations, agreed to allow the tag “An Arian View” to summarize my position. If my point of view is successful in its attempt to consistently make sense of the biblical data, then it would have been true many years before Arius’s flash-in-the-pan appearance in history and his followers’ crystalizing his perspectives. I do not quote Arius in presenting my argument, although at the end I generally grant that Arius and I would have points of agreement. I do not know if Arius himself ever said any of these things. His friends and enemies report in their writings what he purportedly taught and did. So one may believe as I do without ever having heard of Arius or perused even the skeletal pickings that exist of his reported creed.
In this discussion, I think I appropriately interpret biblical texts to say that as God miraculously caused Mary, a virgin, to conceive in a way that has never been known to happen among the brotherhood of men (Luke 1:34–35), so it is no difficult matter for him to miraculously cause a preexisting entity to take on a God-prepared body (Heb 10:5)—in effect, to become a human
