Jesus himself never speaks of himself as God.

Bede Griffiths

The Cosmic Person in the New Testament - Part 1

In traditional Christian theology Jesus is commonly conceived as God and the central Christian doctrine is conceived in terms of God becoming man. But this is in fact a comparatively late form of theology which was crystallised at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. It is quite different from the manner in which Jesus is presented in the New Testament. I want to suggest that this theology, though perfectly correct and legitimate in itself, is a particular kind of theologicial language which was developed over many centuries in the West and certainly corresponded with people's needs at the time, but today presents for most people an insuperable difficulty. Examples of this language are, "God became man", "He came down from heaven" and "God appeared on earth". These images, which were quite natural to people in the past, now appear as essentially mythological and make the Gospel message appear totally unreal and irrelevant. But this language, as I have said, is not the language of the New Testament itself. In this chapter it will be shown that the New Testament has a completely different perspective. It does not start at all from Jesus as God but from Jesus as man. Jesus himself never speaks of himself as God. His favourite designation of himself is as Son of man, which in Hebrew and Aramaic is practically equivalent to Man. After his resurrection his disciples came to ask themselves who this Man was, and interpreted his life and message in the light of the Jewish tradition as prophet, priest, king, Messiah, Lord, Son of God, and finally right at the end of the New Testament period began to use the word "God", but even then with great caution. (P.114) In other words, to speak of Jesus as God is to use a language which was only arrived at after long reflection and has a very specific meaning. To use it as a general term without proper qualification can only be profoundly misleading.

It is particularly misleading when it is seen in the context of other religious traditions. For a Muslim to say that the man Jesus was God is the ultimate blasphemy. It is to "associate" a creature with the Creator and to deny the absolute transcendence of the one God. For a Hindu it presents an opposite difficulty. For a Hindu there is no difficulty in speaking of Jesus as God since in Hinduism every human being is potentially divine and anyone who has realised his divinity is entitled to be called God or Bhagavan. Jesus thus appears to him simply as an 'avatara', one of the many forms in which God has appeared on earth. For many Catholics also, it must be admitted, to speak of Jesus as God is to think that he is a divine being appearing on earth. As Karl Rahner has argued, many Catholics are monophysites without knowing it, believing only in Christ's divine nature. That is, they think of Jesus as God appearing on earth and not as he appears in the New Testament, as a man standing in a unique relation to God.

The language of later theology is a typical example of that abstract, logical, analytical thought which is characteristic of the Western mind as opposed to the concrete, symbolic, synthetic thought which is characteristic of the Bible and of all ancient thought. Thus the word "God" in the New Testament, as Karl Rahner has shown, is never used as an abstract term but normally signifies God the Father. (cf. the word 'theos' in the New Testament, in Karl Rahner, 'Theological Investigations. vol.i.) There are, in fact, only six occasions in the whole of the New Testament where the name of God appears to be given to Jesus, and all of these are qualified in some way. (P.115) The only absolutely unequivocal occasion is the saying of Thomas in St. John's Gospel, "My Lord and my God". (John 20:28) This is an expression of devotion rather than of theology, but it marks the exact point when the new language began to develop. A little later, at the beginning of the second century, St. Ignatius of Antioch began to use it quite freely. But in the New Testament as a whole it remains abnormal and is the result of a gradual development of thought.

If we want to see how Jesus was normally conceived by his first disciples, we cannot do better than to turn to the Acts of the Apostles on the occasion of Pentecost when St Peter, addressing the people and proclaiming the message of the Gospel for the first time, declares, "Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God ... you crucified, but God raised him up." Nothing could be further from the affirmation of Jesus as God, and Peter then goes on to say, "God has made him Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified." (Acts 2:22,24) This presents the exact terms in which the New Testament speaks of Jesus. He is a man who was crucified and whom God raised up and it was God who made him "Lord" and "Christ". "Lord" and "Christ", that is, Messiah, are the terms which are habitually applied to Jesus in the early Church. The word "Lord" or 'Kyrios' can have many different meanings. It can be simply a title of respect like the English "Sir" and it can mean master or owner, but in the Old Testament, when the name 'Adonai' in Hebrew was substituted for the name of Yahweh out of respect for the Holy Name, this was translated 'Kyrios' in Greek and so the word "Lord" came to be used normally of God. But there are two points to be noted here. The first is that the title "Lord" normally signifies not God in himself, but God as Lord of the world. It always had the sense of power and authority. The second point is that in the mind of the early Church this Lordship, or power and authority, was given to Jesus by God. (P.116) Thus Jesus says at the conclusion of St Matthew's Gospel, "All authority has been given me in heaven and on earth". (Matthew 28:18)

St Paul habitually uses the same language. He always distinguishes between "God and Father" and "the Lord Jesus Christ". He will speak of the "God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" showing how he raised Christ from the dead and "made him sit at the right hand in the heavenly places far above all rule and authority and power." (Ephesians 1:17,20-21) The metaphor of "sitting at the right hand" signifies, of course, sharing in the divine power and authority, but again this is something which is given to Jesus by God. Elsewhere St Paul is always careful to distinguish between God and Christ. Thus he can say, "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself", (2 Corinthians 5:19) which would make no sense if Christ is simply identified with God. Even more clearly he writes to the Corinthians, "All things are yours and you are Christ's and Christ is" - not God but - "of God". (1 Corinthians 3:23) Finally there is the passage where he describes the final state of the world: "When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all." (1 Corinthians 15:28) Clearly here the Son is the Son of Man, the heavenly man, who having accomplished his work in creation returns to the Father, the source of all.

Even in St John's Gospel, where the word "God" is actually used of Jesus, the distinction between Jesus and God is clearly affirmed. In the Prologue where it is said, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God", a subtle distinction is made between the word "God", with the article ('ho theos') and the word without an article ('theos'). The distinction may seem fine but it is significant. All through St John's Gospel Jesus constantly affirms his total dependence on God. Thus he can say, "I can do nothing of my own authority ... I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me." (John 5:30) (P.117) And again he says, "The Son can do nothing of himself but only what he sees the Father doing." (John 5:19) It is striking, moreover, that when the accusation is made against him that, being a man, he makes himself God, he replies not by affirming that he is God, but by saying, "Is it not written in your law, 'I said you are gods'? Do you say then of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, "you are blaspheming" because I said, 'I am the Son of God?'" (John 10:34-36) That Jesus believed that he stood in a unique relation to God as Son to the Father there is no doubt. He can say, "I am in the Father and the Father in me" (John 14:10) and even "I and the Father are one", (John 10:30), but he could not say, "I am the Father" - that would be the equivalent of saying "I am God" and that he could never do. Finally, even at the very end of St. John's Gospel after the resurrection, Jesus affirms the distinction between himself and God with the utmost clarity saying, "I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." (John 20:17) Clearly even in St John's Gospel there is no question of a simple identification of Jesus with God.

When we turn to the earlier Gospels and ask how Jesus was first conceived to have spoken of himself, we should note that when someone addressed him as "good master", he objected saying, "Why do you call me good? There is no one good but God alone," (Mark 10:17-18) thus clearly differentiating himself from God.

Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith)
Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois
ISBN 0-87243-180-0
Pgs. 113-117

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www.adishakti.org/
www.al-qiyamah.org/
www.adi-shakti.org/  — Divine Feminine (Hinduism)
www.holyspirit-shekinah.org/  — Divine Feminine (Christianity)
www.ruach-elohim.org/  — Divine Feminine (Judaism)
www.ruh-allah.org/  — Divine Feminine (Islam)
www.tao-mother.org/  — Divine Feminine (Taoism)
www.prajnaaparamita.org/  — Divine Feminine (Buddhism)
www.aykaa-mayee.org/  — Divine Feminine (Sikhism)
www.great-spirit-mother.org/  — Divine Feminine (Native Traditions)