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minuteman 
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 Posted: 16 July 2008 at 6:24am |
What is the basis of your claim please? Is it the bible NT? or Bible OT? or Quran? Please elaborate. He was a prophet of God, a true messenger of God. How could he teach that he himself was also a god? I cannot understand it. I hope that taking into account the teachings of Torah and Quran, it would be impossible to say that Jesus claimed anything like being divine (i.e. god).
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robin
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Posted: 16 July 2008 at 8:59am |
 thomasd wrote:
The discussion of the trinity is a really intriguing one, but its completely off the mark to try and say that Jesus never made claims of divinity. |
If Jesus is God why did he say:-
To whom was Jesus calling to at:-
Matthew 27:46
�About the ninth hour Jesus called out with a loud voice, saying: "E�li, E�li, la�ma sa�bach�tha�ni?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"�
Which is literally rendered "this is the God of me, God of me."-'The NASB-NIV parallel N.T. in Gk. & Eng.' with Interlinear Translated by Alfred Marshall*
Who is Jesus referring to at:-
John 20:17
�Jesus said to her: �Stop clinging to me. For I have not yet ascended to the Father. But be on your way to my brothers and say to them, �I am ascending to my Father (Literal Gk. �Father of me�^) and YOUR Father and to my God (Literal Gk. �God of me�^) and YOUR God.��
^'The NASB-NIV parallel N.T. in Gk. & Eng.' with Interlinear Translated by Alfred Marshall
�my poss[essive]. pron[oun]. (attrib.) 1 of or belonging to me. 2 affectionate, patronizing, etc. form of address (my dear boy). 3 in expressions of surprise (my God!; oh my!). 4 colloq. indicating a close relative etc. of the speaker (my Johnny's ill again). my Lady (or Lord) form of address to certain titled persons. [from *mine1] .�-Oxford Dictionary
�god n[oun]. 1 a (in many religions) superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature, human fortunes, etc. b image, idol, etc., symbolizing a god. 2 (God) (in Christian and other monotheistic religions) creator and ruler of the universe. 3 adored or greatly admired person. � .�-Oxford Dictionary
Jesus must have been calling to the Almighty (the Father, his God, see John 20:17, �my God�, (Lit. Gk. "God of me" 'The NASB-NIV parallel N.T. in Gk. & Eng.' with Interliner Translated by Alfred Marshall) quoting from Ps 22:1 where King David was, showing that God is somone other than himself. No, Jesus cannot be Almighty God if he plainly says in the above texts that he himself has a God!
We can also add to the above, the following words, where Jesus is speaking from an exulted heavenly postion:-
Revelation 3:12-13
"�The one that conquers�I* will make him a pillar in the temple of my God**, and he will by no means go out [from it] anymore, and I* will write upon him the name*** of my God** and the name of the city of my God**, the new Jerusalem which descends out of heaven from my God**, and that new name of mine. Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.��
*Jesus Christ
**Which in litrealy rendered "the God of me."-'The NASB-NIV parallel N.T. in Gk. & Eng.' With Interliner Translated by Alfred Marshall
***Jehovah
So we can ask again, who is Jesus talking to or about, as it cannot be himself?
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minuteman
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Posted: 16 July 2008 at 9:50am |
I feel that robin is writing against Trinity and perhaps against divinity of Jesus. Does any one note it? Please let me know. Thanks.
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robin
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Posted: 16 July 2008 at 1:34pm |
minuteman wrote:
I feel that robin is writing against Trinity and perhaps against divinity of Jesus. Does any one note it? Please let me know. Thanks. |
The Trinity is not in the Bible, it is a pagan adoption by apostate christians!
Divinity can mean several things in the Bible as the word God can mean several things in the Bible?
Edited by robin - 16 July 2008 at 1:37pm
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believer
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Posted: 16 July 2008 at 2:58pm |
Yes, Jehovah Witnesses believe that Jesus is not a manifestation of the One True GOD but a lesser god. Please correct me robin if that is not correct.
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John 3
16"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
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thomasd
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Posted: 16 July 2008 at 7:08pm |
| Yes, Jehovah Witnesses believe that Jesus is not a manifestation of the One True GOD but a lesser god. Please correct me robin if that is not correct. |
The Jehovah's Witness missionaries who go door to door, will not debate the Bible with members of any mainline Christian denomination, because the Jehovah's Witness Bible is an abbreviated version that removes every one of Jesus's claims to divinity. More tellingly, the original "prophecy" that branched Jehovah's Witnesses from the rest of Christianity, has been repeatedly revised to correct the date of the world's end and who will get into heaven. God doesn't make mistakes when passing a message.
minuteman wrote:
What is the basis of hyour claim please? Is it the bible NT? or Bible OT? or Quran? Please elaborate. He was a prophet of God, a true messenger of God. How could he teach that he himself was also a god? I cannot understand it.I hope that taking into account the teachings of Torah and Quran, it would be impossible to say that Jesus claimed anything like being divine (i.e. god). |
I'm basing my claim solely on the Gospel and the words of Jesus himself. Claiming that Jesus was only a prophet, or a good moral teacher is actually the one claim about him that is impossible to make on logical grounds. This is the central argument of Christian apologetics. If Jesus never claimed to be God then there is no theological reason that would prevent all Christians from becoming either Jews or Muslims. It is a truly massive discussion, and one which I can not do justice to one my own, so i will quote from Peter Kreeft. for more references, check out these 2 websites:
http://www.systematicchristianity.org/JesusClaimedToBeEqualToYahweh.htm
http://www.scripturecatholic.com/jesus_christ_divinity.html#jesus-III
http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/christ-divinity.htm wrote:
The doctrine of Christ's divinity is the central Christian doctrine, for it is like a skeleton key that opens all the others. Christians have not independently reasoned out and tested each of the teachings of Christ received via Bible and Church, but believe them all on his authority. For if Christ is divine, He can be trusted to be infallible in everything He said, even hard things like exalting suffering and poverty, forbidding divorce, giving his Church the authority to teach and forgive sins in his name, warning about hell (very often and very seriously), instituting the scandalous sacrament of eating his flesh—we often forget how many "hard sayings" he taught!
When the first Christian apologists began to give a reason for the faith that was in them to unbelievers, this doctrine of Christ's divinity naturally came under attack, for it was almost as incredible to Gentiles as it was scandalous to Jews. That a man who was born out of a woman's womb and died on a cross, a man who got tired and hungry and angry and agitated and wept at his friend's tomb, that this man who got dirt under his fingernails should be God was, quite simply, the most astonishing, incredible, crazy-sounding idea that had ever entered the mind of man in all human history.
The argument the early apologists used to defend this apparently indefensible doctrine has become a classic one. C.S. Lewis used it often, e.g. in Mere Christianity, the book that convinced Chuck Colson (and thousands of others). I once spent half a book (Between Heaven and Hell) on this one argument alone. It is the most important argument in Christian apologetics, for once an unbeliever accepts the conclusion of this argument (that Christ is divine), everything else in the Faith follows, not only intellectually (Christ's teachings must all then be true) but also personally (if Christ is God, He is also your total Lord and Savior).
The argument, like all effective arguments, is extremely simple: Christ was either God or a bad man.
Unbelievers almost always say he was a good man, not a bad man; that he was a great moral teacher, a sage, a philosopher, a moralist, and a prophet, not a criminal, not a man who deserved to be crucified. But a good man is the one thing he could not possibly have been according to simple common sense and logic. For he claimed to be God. He said, "Before Abraham was, I Am", thus speaking the word no Jew dares to speak because it is God's own private name, spoken by God himself to Moses at the burning bush. Jesus wanted everyone to believe that he was God. He wanted people to worship him. He claimed to forgive everyone's sins against everyone. (Who can do that but God, the One offended in every sin?)
Now what would we think of a person who went around making these claims today? Certainly not that he was a good man or a sage. There are only two possibilities: he either speaks the truth or not. If he speaks the truth, he is God and the case is closed. We must believe him and worship him. If he does not speak the truth, then he is not God but a mere man. But a mere man who wants you to worship him as God is not a good man. He is a very bad man indeed, either morally or intellectually. If he knows that he is not God, then he is morally bad, a liar trying deliberately to deceive you into blasphemy. If he does not know that he is not God, if he sincerely thinks he is God, then he is intellectually bad—in fact, insane.
A measure of your insanity is the size of the gap between what you think you are and what you really are. If I think I am the greatest philosopher in America, I am only an arrogant fool; if I think I am Napoleon, I am probably over the edge; if I think I am a butterfly, I am fully embarked from the sunny shores of sanity. But if I think I am God, I am even more insane because the gap between anything finite and the infinite God is even greater than the gap between any two finite things, even a man and a butterfly.
Josh McDowell summarized the argument simply and memorably in the trilemma "Lord, liar, or lunatic?" Those are the only options. Well, then, why not liar or lunatic? But almost no one who has read the Gospels can honestly and seriously consider that option. The savviness, the canniness, the human wisdom, the attractiveness of Jesus emerge from the Gospels with unavoidable force to any but the most hardened and prejudiced reader. Compare Jesus with liars like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon or lunatics like the dying Nietzsche. Jesus has in abundance precisely those three qualities that liars and lunatics most conspicuously lack:
His practical wisdom, his ability to read human hearts, to understand people and the real, unspoken question behind their words, his ability to heal people's spirits as well as their bodies;
His deep and winning love, his passionate compassion, his ability to attract people and make them feel at home and forgiven, his authority, "not as the scribes"; and above all
His ability to astonish, his unpredictability, his creativity. Liars and lunatics are all so dull and predictable! No one who knows both the Gospels and human beings can seriously entertain the possibility that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic, a bad man.
No, the unbeliever almost always believes that Jesus was a good man, a prophet, a sage. Well then, if he was a sage, you can trust him and believe the essential things he says. And the essential thing he says is that he is the divine Savior of the world and that you must come to him for salvation. If he is a sage, you must accept his essential teaching as true. If his teaching is false, then he is not a sage.
The strength of this argument is that it is not merely a logical argument about concepts; it is about Jesus. It invites people to read the Gospels and get to know this man. The premise of the argument is the character of Jesus, the human nature of Jesus. The argument has its feet on the earth. But it takes you to heaven, like Jacob's ladder (which Jesus said meant him: Gen 28:12; Jn 1:51). Each rung follows and holds together. The argument is logically airtight; there is simply no way out.
What, then, do people say when confronted with this argument? Often, they simply confess their prejudices: "Oh, I just can't believe that!" (But if it has been proved to be true, you must believe it if you really seek the truth!)
Sometimes, they go away, like many of Jesus' contemporaries, wondering and shaking their heads and thinking. That is perhaps the very best result you can hope for. The ground has been softened up and plowed. The seed has been sown. God will give the increase.
But if they know some modern theology, they have one of two escapes. Theology has an escape; common sense does not. Common sense is easily convertible. It is the theologians, now as then, who are the hardest to convert.
The first escape is the attack of the Scripture "scholars" on the historical reliability of the Gospels. Perhaps Jesus never claimed to be divine. Perhaps all the embarrassing passages were inventions of the early Church (say "Christian community"—it sounds nicer).
In that case, who invented traditional Christianity if not Christ? A lie, like a truth, must originate somewhere. Peter? The twelve? The next generation? What was the motive of whoever first invented the myth (euphemism for lie)? What did they get out of this elaborate, blasphemous hoax? For it must have been a deliberate lie, not a sincere confusion. No Jew confuses Creator with creature, God with man. And no man confuses a dead body with a resurrected, living one.
Here is what they got out of their hoax. Their friends and families scorned them. Their social standing, possessions, and political privileges were stolen from them by both Jews and Romans. They were persecuted, imprisoned, whipped, tortured, exiled, crucified, eaten by lions, and cut to pieces by gladiators. So some silly Jews invented the whole elaborate, incredible lie of Chrisitanity for absolutely no reason, and millions of Gentiles believed it, devoted their lives to it, and died for it—for no reason. It was only a fantastic practical joke, a hoax. Yes, there is a hoax indeed, but the perpetrators of it are the twentieth-century theologians, not the Gospel writers.
The second escape (notice how eager we are to squirm out of the arms of God like a greased pig) is to Orientalize Jesus, to interpret him not as the unique God-man but as one of many mystics or "adepts" who realized his own inner divinity just as a typical Hindu mystic does. This theory takes the teeth out of his claim to divinity, for he only realized that everyone is divine. The problem with that theory is simply that Jesus was not a Hindu but a Jew! When he said "God", neither he nor his hearers meant Brahman, the impersonal, pantheistic, immanent all; he meant Yahweh, the personal, theistic, transcendent Creator. It is utterly unhistorical to see Jesus as a mystic, a Jewish guru. He taught prayer, not meditation. His God is a person, not a pudding. He said he was God but not that everyone was. He taught sin and forgiveness, as no guru does. He said nothing about the "illusion" of individuality, as the mystics do.
Attack each of these evasions—Jesus as the good man. Jesus as the lunatic, Jesus as the liar, Jesus as the man who never claimed divinity, Jesus as the mystic—take away these flight squares, and there is only one square left for the unbeliever's king to move to. And on that square waits checkmate. And a joyous mating it is. The whole argument is really a wedding invitation.
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Matthew 27:46
“About the ninth hour Jesus called out with a loud voice, saying: "E�li, E�li, la�ma sa�bach�tha�ni?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"” |
Because as Jesus was being crucified, he took the sin and imperfection of the entire world upon himself so that we might be forgiven, and God can not dwell in the presence of imperfection.
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minuteman
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Posted: 17 July 2008 at 2:42am |
Soryy, not proved. The long speech of peterkreeft (?) was also no good. There are many mistakes in it. I will just quote one:
Jesus is either God or he is a liar.
That is not necessary. Suppose that he never claimed to be god. Christians have altered the words of the bible and they are believing that he said so. What will happen then. He will not be a God and not be any liar.
The problem is we have so many of other prophets. They were niether God nor they were liars. We believe Jesus to be perfect as a prophet of God. That is enough. he need not be a god to be perfect. He being guided by the Perfect God could be perfect. that is enough and good enough.
So Jesus is niether God nor a liar. He is also not imperfect. We need not explore into his perfection. What he taught was good enough and if we could follow and digest what he taught, it would be too much for us to do. Why we are worried about perfection? Are we going to try to be perfect? No. Just see what people are doing to achieve perfection with Jesus as divine and perfect. they are not doing anything at all.
So there is no harm to keep Jesus amongst the line of other messengers of God. That is not any low level. In fact, to be a prophet and messenger of God is to be at highest level of human capacity, capability. Please try to understand that it is enough to keep Jesus as a messenger of God. Always messengers / prophets have been coming to the world. Never God came himself.
Up at the cross also, Kreeft has referred something but no use. Why not Kreeft consider that Jesus was calling God for help? Why not discuss that Jesus had a God? He used to pray to that God.
You see, if you are sure that Jesus in bible NT claimed divinity and claimed being a god and taught people to worship him, if you are sure then you may go ahead with your beliefs as they are. Otherwise,
But if Jesus did not do any such thing then you may be on wrong platform. The important issue at hand is whether Jesus said that he was god. This is a very serious matter. It should be spoken explicitly, not to be derived from different phrases. (More later, if not offended,.,,)
Edited by minuteman - 17 July 2008 at 2:47am
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thomasd
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Posted: 17 July 2008 at 5:58am |
minuteman wrote:
�But if Jesus did not do any such thing then you may be on wrong platform. The important issue at hand is whether Jesus said that he was god. This is a very serious matter. It should be spoken explicitly, not to be derived from different phrases.� (More later, if not offended,.,,) |
| John 10:30 "I (Jesus) and the Father are One." |
This is as explicit as it gets.
| 10 And straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” 11 And she said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go your way. From now on sin no more.” |
The authority to forgive sin is granted to no one but God.
Johnn 8 54-59
54Jesus replied, "If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. 55Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and keep his word. 56Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad."
57"You are not yet fifty years old," the Jews said to him, "and you have seen Abraham!"
58"I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" 59At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds. |
I AM was how God identified himself to the Jewish people. When Jesus says "before Abraham was born, I am!" he is setting himself equal to God. The Jews understood this and that is why they tried to stone him.
Jesus did not come only as a prophet--a simple messenger, he came to form, through his death and 3 days later his victory over death, a covenant between God and all of humanity.
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