In the New Testament, Jesus has a god (who is also ours)

Where does the New Testament say this? In these places. (The video is by unitarian Christian blogger Sandra Hooper.)

I suggest that all Christians should carefully weigh the argument below. (If you don’t know what it means to say that an argument is valid and/or sound, then you may want to look at this first or these four segments. These are standard terms in logic and analytic philosophy.)

1. Jesus has a god over him.
2. Jesus is God.
3. God has a god over him. (1, 2)

There are only three escapes from this argument:

• Claim that it is invalid – that 1 and 2 might be true even though 3 is false.
• Deny or doubt premise 1 (that Jesus has a god over him).
• Deny or doubt premise 2 (that Jesus is God).

Why not embrace the conclusion? Because it’s inconsistent with monotheism. If monothesim is true, then “God,” that is, the one true God, is unique, and has no one in any sense “over” him. The one God, creator of the cosmos, doesn’t worship or pray to anyone. The argument must be objected to, not embraced.

As the video shows, several New Testament writers not only imply but explicitly say that Jesus has a god (namely, God) over him. So it looks like a Christian committed to the New Testament should not deny 1. We’re down to two options then.

• Claim that it is invalid – that 1 and 2 might be true even though 3 is false.
• Deny or doubt premise 1.
• Deny or doubt premise 2.

I would say that “is God” in 2 is vague.

• If it means that Jesus and God are numerically identical, that Jesus just is God himself and vice-versa (which is what many Christians would understand by 2), then it is clear that the argument is valid. (3 follows from 1 and 2.) Then, we must deny 2. But not only to escape 3. Rather, we observe that in the New Testament (and even in most Christian traditions) there are many differences between God and Jesus. But, nothing can at one time differ from itself. So, we knew that 2 (so understood, as making a numerical identity claim) was false anyway.

• 

  What if 2 simply means that Jesus is divine, or that he has a divine nature? Well, if one if those entails that Jesus is the one God himself, then the argument is valid, and the only escape is to deny 2, as just explained. But if 2 read as “Jesus is divine” doesn’t entail that he’s numerically identical to God, then 3 doesn’t follow – the argument will be invalid.
• What if 2 is understood to mean that Jesus is a part of God? Again, 3 won’t follow. The argument will be invalid.
• What if 2 is understood to mean that Jesus may be described as a “god” or addressed as “God”? (I think that’s true, by the way.) On this option, the argument will be invalid. 1 and 2 won’t imply 3.

Any of these responses allows the Christian to say the argument is unsound.

A weaker reply would be to claim merely that it is not cogent (not known to be sound), because there is some doubt about one or both premises, or about the validity of the argument. I don’t see any room for doubting validity (however the premises are read, as we’ve seen, the resulting argument is clearly valid or not).

There’s only one other (sort of) principled reply I can imagine. (Are there others? Try your hand at it in the comments.) It is what a positive mysterian like Dr. James Anderson would say: we have tons of reason to believe 1, and also to believe 2. We admit that 3 seems to follow. But we have tons of reason to deny 3. So, while the argument has true premises and seems valid, I guess it must not really be valid, though I can’t do anything whatever to help you see that it’s invalid. We must accept this as a holy mystery: 1, 2, not-3.

Is this reasonable? I doubt it. But note that this mysterian reply only makes sense on the first interpretation of premise 2 above. On the others, the argument just fails because it is invalid, so the mysterian resistance to inferring 3 would be unneeded. Now, reading 2 in the first way above, the argument is obviously valid. It has this form:

1. x is F
2. x = y
3. Therefore, y is F.

If x just is y (and vice versa), and any property of one is a property of the other – ’cause this “other” is really the same thing we started with! We have at least as much, and probably more reason to believe that the argument is valid, than we have to believe both 1 and 2. So no, it doesn’t seem reasonable to accept 1 and 2, and say, I guess the argument just must, contrary to appearances, be invalid. Again, not that given our assumption of trust in the NT, there are many reasons to deny 2, as Jesus and God, in the NT, differ. This reduces any justification we have for 2. But then, we’ll have less reason to accept 2 (and so, 1 & 2) than we will to accept the validity of the argument. It just is valid. To escape affirming 3, we must deny 1 or 2.

Me, I deny 2, since according to the Bible, the one true God is the Father.

You?