{"id":44474,"date":"2023-11-30T23:01:36","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T05:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=44474"},"modified":"2023-12-08T14:05:15","modified_gmt":"2023-12-08T20:05:15","slug":"is-jesus-human-and-not-divine-now-published-by-wipf-stock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/is-jesus-human-and-not-divine-now-published-by-wipf-stock\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Jesus Human and not Divine? Now published by Wipf & Stock."},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’m delighted to say that my debate book with apologist Chris Date, which briefly went out of print, is now being published by Wipf and Stock<\/a>. (Amazon link<\/a>, Thriftbooks link<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on our face-to-face debate<\/a>, we followed up by developing our arguments over a course of months, leading to a book where the conversation is deeper, wider, and overall better. The book is short, clearly argued, and it has an excellent Foreword by Dr. Timothy Pawl. It is endorsed by James Anderson, Robert M. Bowman, Jr., Thomas V. Morris, and Fred Sanders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer to the question in the title, if we follow the New Testament, is: Yes! Here’s are two excerpts from my opening chapter:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>

In the New Testament, God and Jesus have many traits in common<\/strong>. Both are loving and forgiving, and are pursuing our salvation. Both are working to advance the Kingdom of God and to reveal God\u2019s ways to us. They\u2019re so alike that Jesus says, \u201cWhoever has seen me has seen the Father.\u201d1 And Paul says that Jesus is the \u201cimage of God.\u201d But in the New Testament, God and Jesus also differ in many ways.<\/strong> Jesus was tempted; in contrast, God can\u2019t be tempted. Jesus died on a cross, but the New Testament assumes that God has never died, because it implies that he is essentially immortal, in principle incapable of death. The New Testament is explicit that, like you and me, Jesus has a god over him, the one God. But the monotheistic, Jewish assumption is that the one true God is subject to no one. Jesus gets his calling, his commission, his power, and his authority from the one God. This is no surprise, since the \u201cone like a son of man\u201d in the prophecy of Daniel 7, which the first Christians understood to be the Messiah, is brought before God<\/strong> and given things which God has long had: \u201cdominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.\u201d A similar vision is found in Revelation 5, which portrays the exaltation of the risen Jesus. In contrast, since any cosmos there is must be created and ruled by God, God can\u2019t in any sense get his position, power, or authority from anyone else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>

The New Testament always and everywhere portrays Jesus as a real man, never as a \u201cgodman,\u201d never as \u201cGod incarnate,\u201d and never as \u201cGod the Son.\u201d <\/strong>John has Jesus describe himself as \u201ca man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.\u201d In 1 Timothy, we read that \u201cthere is one God, and one mediator<\/strong> also between God and men, the man<\/strong> Christ Jesus.\u201d And Paul sometimes compares and contrasts Jesus with Adam, as when he writes, \u201cJust as we have borne the image of the man of dust [i.e. Adam], we will also bear the image of the man of heaven,\u201d that is, Jesus, when like Jesus we believers are raised to immortality. Man, man, man\u2014this is explicit; and these writers are not anxious to follow up with \u201cand also divine\u201d because that is not their view! The central and repeated thesis of all four Gospels<\/strong> is that Jesus is God\u2019s Christ\/Messiah, which implies being a human. It is unfathomable that this should be their explicit, main, emphatic point if their most important claim is really that Jesus is divine, or a godman, or \u201cGod in human form.\u201d When they tell you their main thesis, it is something that Socinus can and did fully embrace.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you heard both sides of this disagreement? This short, readable debate book will help you to go deeper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,21,16,109,15,54,75,14,33,94,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-bible","category-books","category-challenge","category-christology","category-debates","category-divine-attributes","category-history","category-incarnation","category-socinian","category-unitarianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44474"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44512,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44474\/revisions\/44512"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}