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Larry Hurtado is, rightly, one of the most respected historians of early Christianity. His massive Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity is much cited. To a new reader, I would recommend his later and shorter How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus as a good starting point. Also notable is his God in New Testament Theology.
Goaded by once fashionable theories that worship of Jesus arose in the second century or later, Hurtado has pulled out all the stops in looking at all the historical evidence, both in and beyond the New Testament. He shows that an intense devotion to Jesus alongside God arose very quickly, and very early, in the first generation of believers in the risen Christ.
I think his work is insightful, and while I disagree with his exegesis of some texts, I find him in general an astute commenter on them, one who is committed, rightly, to understanding them in their own terms, and not reading into them what we would like them to say.
He has never much pursued the theological implications of his discoveries. It is clear to me that he does think the NT strictly identifies the one God with the Father, and with the one god Yahweh of the OT. He’s clear, unlike many Christians, that Jesus and God are two, that they are not numerically identical. He seems to acknowledge that later catholic tradition says that the one God is numerically identical to the Trinity. But he never discusses the fact that this is logically incompatible with the one God being identical to the Father alone. This is hardly just the translation of the NT gospel into the terminology of a different culture, as Hurtado sometimes suggests. He’s holding out hope that some sort of (vaguely social?) trinitarian belief truly does fit well with the NT. That remains to be seen, though, because he says precious little about what such a theology would be. (See e.g. Lord Jesus Christ, 651; God, 99-113; How on Earth, 55)
In this post, I want to highlight one of Hurtado’s key insights about early christology – one which theologians and apologists should pay attention to. I happened to hear a public discussion of his (linked here, last file). Just after the 27 minute mark, Hurtado says
“…I don’t think that we can account for the worship of Jesus, or the level of cultic devotion that was given, on the basis of his historical ministry and reminiscences of that alone. And part of the reason for that it seems to, that from what I understand to be key texts, such as Philippians 2 and even subsequent texts, it seems to either explicitly or implicitly root the justification for the veneration of Jesus in the action of God. God has highly exalted him and given him a name [unintelligible] with the intention that every knee should bow and every tongue should confess. So I think that the early Christians’ fundamental answer to the question “How dare you worship this figure?” at the earliest moment, would be, “Because God says so – because God requires it. And to refuse to reverence Jesus is to disobey God, quite seriously.” And so Paul can describe the unbelieving Israel who doesn’t see Jesus as “blinded” and as seriously disobedient to the God of their own tradition. …The point is that they root it not in “We worship Jesus because he told us to do so” but “We worship Jesus because God has appointed him and requires it.” It’s a very theocentric justification for this amazingly exalted, high christology.” [bold added, transcribed by me, omitting some verbal false starts, and a follow-up question I could not understand]
Well said. He of course says it even better in his published works. (Lord, 640-1; God 107-8) I have argued the same myself.
But given this justification for the worship of Jesus, why then did they have to infer that Jesus is “fully divine” or make him, someone or other, exist “in” the one God. Hurtado says,
…this peculiar view of God (as “one” and yet somehow comprising “the Father” and Jesus, thereafter also including the Spirit… was forced on them [2nd c. and later Christians] by the earnest convictions and devotional practice of believers from the earliest observable years of the Christian movement.” (Lord, 651)
But this move to a “fully divine” Jesus was not forced on them, not, anyway, by the worship of Jesus, as Hurtado himself shows. We know that many in the early catholic or “proto-orthodox” movement dissented even from the late 2nd c. logos theologies, fearing that they posited two gods. And various groups were sometimes denounced as holding “psilanthropism” – the view that Jesus is a “mere man” – i.e. that he have a human nature but not the divine nature.
We should ask: if the earliest Christians’ answer (re: how one can be a monotheist and yet worship both the one God and Jesus, the unique Son of God) was a good answer then, why isn’t it a good answer now? Yes, it’s a rhetorical question; I think it is a good answer. It’s a perfectly good and understandable answer, and it seems to have been part of the apostolic message. Count me in.
@Dave:
I agree that Jesus is not worshiped at Philippians 2, at least not in the hard, modern sense of the word. I was merely laying out what I consider the *logical* possibilities, an approach I was inspired to take because Dale is a logician:-) I think that options 1 and 2 are highly unlikely, and this leaves options 3 and 4. I lean towards #4 for both historical and biblical reasons.
@ Sean September 11, 2013 at 7:23 am
You said, “Philippians 2 clearly provides the clue to understanding all accounts involving the exaltation of Jesus: The honor, glory, reverence, obeisance/worship (PROSKUNEW) he received was “to the glory of God the Father”.
Honor, reverence yes, but obeisance/worship? Rather, I would clarify that Philippians 2 does not use proskunew or a word translated “worship” at all. It says “every knee will bow [kampha]”, so again we’re back to what is meant by “bowing a knee” and confessing Christ as Lord in this text, and we’re back to the complex question of “what is worship”? Does bowing a knee constitute worship? We might read that back into the text today since bowing is not a standard cultural practice today. Certainly by bowing a knee one gives glory to God in the context of Ph 2:11, but again, is this “worship”? And we also might ask of Ph 2 whether this context of “every knee will bow” is the everyday practice of Christians bowing to Jesus or if Paul meant a future context of “will bow” on the judgment day. There are a number of questions of this text that are not clearly answered except by one’s own interpretation of what Paul fully meant.
Tuggy writes in his Sept 19 post “Zarley on worship…” the following: “He is clearly worshiped in the fullest religious sense after. e.g. Philippians 2, Revelation 5, as well as prayed to.” I”m not sure what “fullest religious sense” means. Again, I don’t see Ph 2 as a clear text talking about the worship of Jesus but the exaltation of Jesus above every name (apart from God who is mentioned as the all in all). This is interpretation. Honor, respect, showing one is “exalting” Jesus by means of the action of bowing a knee, yes (just as the Israelites bowed to David as they worshiped God without a threat to monotheism in I Chronicles 29:20). But worship? Questionable. Let alone worship of Jesus as God (which I believe is Tuggy’s point).
My Point: Let’s not make the common mistake of making Ph 2 say more than it says. Hurtado uses Ph 2 as his key text to show how early there was cultic veneration of Jesus, but Dunn shows how that text might not be understood in the same way and how veneration might be later than Hurtado claims. If so, we’re back to wondering whether Palestinian Jewish followers of Jesus in the 1st century really did worship Jesus, and if they didn’t, we begin to see how this might be a practice in Christian worship that resulted from the interaction of the gospel with Gentiles and not demanded by the NT documents themselves.
Thanks for all the sources. Yes, Jesus as God’s agent is a prominent theme in John.
No, I don’t know any German, sorry.
Thanks, Dale. I’ve recognized for most of my Christian life that language used of Jesus in the NT is not unexpected in light of his role as God’s representative, but the force of this conviction was really brought home when I began reading various scholarly works on the subject of ‘agency’, e.g.:
1) Biblical and Theological Insights from Ancient and Modern Civil Law, by George Wesley Buchanan
2) Jesus and the Constraints of History, by A. E. Harvey
3) John’s Apologetic Christology: Legitimation and Development in Johannine Christology, James Frank McGrath
4) The Interpretation of John, Multi-authored. This book contains two chapters relevant to the subject of agency, i.e. “God’s Agent in the Fourth Gospel”, by Peder Borgen, and one dealing with the “I Am” sayings in John, by Jan-A Buhner (I forget the title, but it’s a chapter from Buhner’s book entitled “Der Gesandte Und Sein Weg Im 4”, which is translated into English by John Ashton).
5) The Glory of Christ in the New Testament: Studies in Christology In Memory of George Bradford Caird, multi-authored. This book contains a chapter written by A.E. Harvey, entitled “Christ as Agent”, and Harvey does an excellent job demonstrating how the concept of agency is patently at play in the book of John. He notes how it was the work of Jan-A Buhner that really got him contemplating Christology in light of the agency concept.
6) Der Gesandte Und Sein Weg Im 4, by Jan-A Buhner (as noted above). This book is quoted by virtually everyone who explores how agency is at work in the NT, esp. John. Unfortunately it’s in German, and, as far as I know, only the chapter noted above and a few bits and pieces have been translated into English. You don’t by any chance know German, do you? If so, I have a project proposal for you;-)
~Kaz
NOTE: This book contains a chapter written by A.E. Harvey, entitled
> > “Christ as Agent”. I only found out today that Wipf & Stock is now
> > publishing it in a reasonably priced paperback edition.
> > Interestingly, the scholar to whom this multi-authored book is
> > dedicated (Caird) rejected the concept of eternal torment. See is
> > commentary on Revelation. The book contains a number of good
> > articles. In fact, if memory serves, Bruce Metzger’s article on
> Rom.
> > 9:5 is included.
> >
Sean
It all goes back to our human frailty!
People see what they want to see!
People don’t see what they don’t want to see
Mental gymnastics becomes ‘eisegesis’ !
And we have people like Richard Bauckham telling us to embrace a ‘higher Christology’ based on these gymnastics.!
I enjoy your posts !
Every blessing
John
Hi John,
I remember how dumbfounded I was the first time someone argued that 1 Cor 15 is no problem for a trinitarian view of God, because when it says that “God may be all in all” it means that God the Trinity may be all in all. There are probably a number of problems with that particular move, beyond the fact that it clearly involves eisegesis:
1) That’s a rather obvious example of reading one’s preferred theology into a text where it just doesn’t fit, at all.
2) The historical problem I mentioned in my first post would apply here in a big way.
I’ve seen some real interpretative whoppers in my day, but the assertion that, per Paul, it is the Trinity that will be “all in all” is certainly one of the more memorable ones.
Sean
I really appreciate your thoughts on this matter.
Clearly one has to ask ‘in what sense’ is Christ being worshipped.”?
As Dale suggests above, it is probably as God’s divine agent
My mind keeps reverting to 1 Corinthians 15 vs 24-29
“then comes the end when he hands over the kingdom to his God and Father, when he………
….When everything is subjected to him , then the Son himself shall be subjected to to the one who subjcted everything to him, so that God may be all in all”
Surely this puts the matter into perspective?
Every Blessing
John
Many good points, Sean – thanks for the comment!
“To honor the agent is to honor the principal he represents, whereas to dishonor the agent is to dishonor the principal.”
This is directly taught, by Jesus. We ought not neglect it, like so many do.
While I would never seek to minimize the import of the treatment Jesus received in the NT in contexts of ceremonial exaltation, I think the attempt to use these situations to support God as Trinity are sorely misguided. To honor the agent is to honor the principal he represents, whereas to dishonor the agent is to dishonor the principal. Philippians 2 clearly provides the clue to understanding all accounts involving the exaltation of Jesus: The honor, glory, reverence, obeisance/worship (PROSKUNEW) he received was “to the glory of God the Father”.
A number of commentators have noted that both God and the King were given PROSEKUNHSAN jointly at 1 Chron 29:20. I’d say that it’s difficult to justify the assumption that this act of obeisance did not include the element of worship. If you read the entire account in the LXX, the words PROSEKUNHSAN TON KURION KAI TON BASILEA (bowed to/worshiped the Lord and the King) come at the very end of a rich, reverential prayer, and the prostration seems (to me) to constitute a sort of “Amen” gesture.
As I see it, there are four ways to interpret this account, logically speaking:
(1) Assume that PROSEKUNHSAN here did not involve worship, but merely constituted a bowing before God and the King;
(2) Assume that the prostration was done in the context of worship so that both God and the King are “worshiped” equally;
(3) Assume both God and the King received “worship”, but that God is worshiped as the principal and the king as his representative in ruling authority over the people (I think that the Amplified Bible even has wording that suggests this), so that there is an important distinction clarifying why this is appropriate;
(4) Assume that that while the single act of PROSEKUNHSAN was offered to both, the obeisance was intended as worship toward God but only reverential respect toward the King.
IMO, for whatever it’s worth, 1 and 2 are less likely, which leaves 3 and 4 as real possibilities. Whichever of these two views one chooses, I think the same could easily apply to the obeisance/worship offered in Revelation. Jesus deserves greater honor than the earthly King because he secured the salvation of man which rescued us from sin and death, so his ceremony had to be more richly textured in its expressions of exaltation towards God’s agent. If you think about it, under the circumstances and in context, it would strike one as quite inappropriate for God to have said to the Son/lamb: They’re about to worship me now, so you have to go sit over there to avoid impropriety;-)
Sean
We keep back to the issue of the meaning of the word ‘worship’
I believe that the word ‘laeterou’ (sp? ) applies only to the worship of the oner true God.
The word ‘proskueno’ seems to apply to the worship of a wide number of entities=including Christ and false gods.
In Revelation 5&6 we see Christ worshipped – but in a role in which he is clearly subservient to ‘the one who sits on the the throne’ – i.e. the one who has elevated him.
We have seen a good number of posts on the subject.
Perhaps it is time for someone to synthesise the import of these?
Every Blessing
John
Hi John,
Thank you for your comments. Thom Stark had a website up for a while with a series called “Oh My Godman”, and he made some interesting observations regarding Paul’s use of Isa at Philippians 2.
He did a very nice job drawing out the similarities between Jesus and Cyrus. They are both referred to as “Messiah”; God gave Cyrus a “name” (though unstated) that seems to have signified conferred authority; both Cyrus and Jesus are “worshiped/given obeisance” (Cyrus receives ????????????? in the LXX); and the people bow before Cyrus and pray. Interestingly, the bowing before Cyrus in recognition of his role as God’s “anointed one” appears (to me) to be the initial fulfillment of Isa 45:23! Paul probably viewed Isa 45 as messianic, and that’s probably why he applied verse 23 to Jesus.
BTW, I agree that Adam Christology is at work as well, which is why I favor your rendering of Philippians 2:6 over the popular alternative.
~Sean
Sean
I posess only a superficial understanding of the matters you raise – but something that has always intrigued me is the fact that Trinitarian theories took hundreds of years to develop in their ‘final’ form.
Apart from the ‘time’ difference, the Christian Church expanded mainly in new geographical areas -thousands of kilometres away from the Holy Land.
Some have contended that Trinitarian thought would have been ‘stamped out’ if it has emerged in the Holy Land in the first century.
My evengelical friends point to the fact that words from Philippians 2 appeared as an early hymn which was sung within a decade of Christ’s death. This they say, is early evidence of Trinitarian thought.
People like myself would argue that Paul was comparing Christ with the ‘first’ Adam
We would argue-
– unlike Adam, Jesus, though..in the form of God..did not reach out for equality with God (in contrast with the first Adam Genesis 3v 5-6)
-the ‘second Adam instead humbled himself (emptied himself of human ego) and became obedient unto death on a cross
-for which GOD has exalted him.
Note that the subjct of every verb in verses 6 -8 is Christ ,while the subject is God in verses 9 -11.
Why the doctrine of the Trinity has survived for so many years has intrigued me – and I can only conclude that this is a potentially fruitful area for behavioural scientsts ”and perhaps politicians.
.
The concept of ‘Christ is God’ is certainly a ‘unique selling proposition’ that distinguishes orthodox Christianity from its ‘competitors’.
Thanks for your stimulating submission
Blessings
John
Hi Dale,
I have to agree with you about Hurtado, who is not only an extremely thoughtful religious historian, but he has a gift for expressing himself with flair, elegance, and clarity. Even when I disagree with what he says I often can’t help but enjoy the way he says it.
A certain irony has impressed itself on my own mind, though, in that while many orthodox believers I’ve conversed with seem to rush to embrace his conclusions because they believe that it puts the old argument that the Trinity emerged via syncretism to rest once and for all, they fail to notice the rather conspicuous lacunae that his historical model seems to create. I’ll try and unpack this, and maybe you can comment and let me know what you think.
Consider two historical facts side-by-side:
1) The early Christian movement used the Hebrew Scriptures to contextualize, understand, and defend its view of Christ, who came to be seen as the fulfillment of OT prophesy.
2) The acceptance of Trinitarianism renders the view of God as understood by Jews in light of the Hebrew Scriptures to be heretical (or at the very least, erroneous).
Regarding #2, notice what Gregory of Nyssa had to say:
“For, in personality, the Spirit is one thing and the Word another, and yet again that from which the Word and Spirit is, another. But when you have gained the conception of what the distinction is in these, the oneness, again, of the nature admits not division, so that the supremacy of the one First Cause is not split and cut up into differing Godships, neither does the statement harmonize with the Jewish dogma, but the truth passes in the mean between these conceptions, destroying each heresy, and yet accepting what is useful in it from each. The Jewish dogma is destroyed by the acceptance of the Word, and by the belief in the Spirit; while the polytheistic error of the Greek school is made to vanish by the unity of the nature abrogating this imagination of plurality.”
Found here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/205/2050223.htm
So we have two historical features in tension, (a) Christianity arose as a sect within Judaism, and (b) the later trinitarian concept of God was incompatible with the very Judaism from which it emerged. Now, if the converts who formed the incipient church heard something similar to what Trinitarians hear when encountering the early teachings about Christ, and if they had similar assumptions to that of modern Trinitarians — e.g. (a) the notion that there are two strict categories of gods, “true” [the One God] and “false” [condemned/idolatrous], and (b) that the application of QEOS to Jesus necessarily meant that he was “true deity as to his nature”, etc. — then they would have needed the leaders of the new movement to make sense of those teachings, which would have been paradoxical and potentially dangerous under those sorts of assumptions.
When orthodox Christians hear the expressions “Jesus is God” and “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus”, they aren’t overly troubled, because they have a conceptual grid into which such seemingly paradoxical statements can be placed to avoid cognitive dissonance. But the early church didn’t have such a conceptual grid, and so such statements would have caused concern and controversy. Yet there is no compelling evidence that this was a point of concern to the early Christians. Notice what both James Dunn and Maurice Casey observe vis a vis Christ devotion:
“The silence on this score cannot be because we have no means of knowing what Jewish reaction to earliest Christian theology was at this stage; on the contrary, we can see well enough from the literature of first generation Christianity that Paul’s understanding of the law was a sore bone of contention for those who valued their Jewish heritage highly. Had Paul’s christology been equally, or more contentious at this time for his fellow Jews, we would surely have heard of it from Paul’s own letters. The absence of such indicators points in the other direction: that Paul’s christology and the devotional language of the earliest Christian worship did not cause any offense to monotheistic Jews. So far as both Paul and his fellow Jews were concerned, early Christian devotion to Jesus still lay within the bounds of the Jewish understanding of God in his dealings with his world and people.” (The Partings of the Ways, 1st edition),
pp. 205, 206
“The disputes extant in Acts and the epistles are about halakhah rather than christology, and if there had been a general perception among Jewish members of the communities that other Christians were hailing Jesus as fully God, there would have been disputes severe enough for us to hear about them.” (From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God), p. 115
So, in my opinion, this creates a problem vis a vis expectation:
1) If the early church believed that applying the term QEOS to Jesus and including him as a central figure in the context of cultic religious devotion meant that he is in some sense the one God of the Bible ontologically, then there unavoidably would have been concern, controversy, discussion, and disputes about this. Such concern and disputes would not only have occurred between the early converts and their opponents, but it would have existed among the new converts themselves, who would have been desperately driven to resolve the cognitive dissonance they would have been experiencing while engaging in the constellation of cultic religious practices that were part of the emerging community’s religious life. (Did you catch the echoes of Hurtado in that last sentence? [grin]).
2) That discussion, once begun, would have raised issues that would have been a major stumbling block for many, and would have naturally evolved very quickly into the types of disputes that arose in later centuries. Full doctrinal delineation by the Apostles would have ultimately been required, and this very
early in the life of the new movement.
The absence of discussion, dispute, concern, and controversy over Christ as “G-god”, along with the absence of concomitant doctrinal delineation by the NT writers, is perhaps the clearest evidence there is that (a) the arbitrary assertion that there are only the one true God and false gods is unfounded from a biblical perspective (this is a common assertion from the Evangelical camp), (b) the arguments put forth by the majority of grammarians over the significance of verses like John 1:1c are gravely flawed, and, most importantly, (c) Trinitarianism is not in harmony with early Christian thinking or teaching from the standpoint of history and historical probability in light of reasonable expectation.
~Kaz
Hi Dale,
An excellent post. Dr. Hurtado is a brilliant scholar, but with that said, I think he has placed way too much emphasis on the so-called “worship” of Jesus in the NT and early Church. One thing I noticed long before reading Hurtado is that the Greek word proskuen? has a wide range of meanings, and if one objectively examines it’s application to Jesus in the NT, one is hard-pressed to place the devotion given to him on the same level as God the Father. (FYI: I love to quote Rev. 3:9 to Evangelicals [wink]).
Another important aspect of worship in the NT, is that the Greek term latreia is reserved for God the Father alone; and I think this fact (and it’s implications), is virtually ignored by way too many Trinitarians.
For all those who have taken the time to read Hurtado’s reflections on this issue (i.e. devotion/worship of Jesus in early Christianity), I would highly recommend to them that they also read Dr. James D.G. Dunn’s, Did The First Christians Worship Jesus? . Dr. Dunn’s work puts more than a few holes into a number Dr. Hurtado’s assessments.
Grace and peace,
David
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