{"id":4679,"date":"2013-05-11T11:57:13","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T15:57:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=4679"},"modified":"2015-01-24T09:55:02","modified_gmt":"2015-01-24T14:55:02","slug":"linkage-white-vs-navas-does-the-new-testament-teach-the-deity-of-christ-dale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/linkage-white-vs-navas-does-the-new-testament-teach-the-deity-of-christ-dale\/","title":{"rendered":"White vs. Navas &#8211; Does the New Testament teach &#8220;the deity of Christ&#8221;?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"navas vs white\" href=\"http:\/\/lhim.org\/blog\/2012\/09\/27\/patrick-navas-vs-james-white\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-4683 alignright\" style=\"border: 11px solid white;\" src=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/boxing-clip-art-283x300.gif\" alt=\"boxing-clip-art\" width=\"283\" height=\"300\" \/>Ably reviewed<\/a> by Sean Finnegan. I would add a few philosophical comments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>White, like many evangelicals, understands &#8220;the deity of Christ&#8221; as meaning that Jesus and God are <strong>numerically one<\/strong>, that is, numerically identical. He argues that various things the NT asserts about Jesus imply this. (e.g. He is worshiped, called &#8220;Lord.&#8221;) Conveniently, he <strong>ignores<\/strong> the many passages which assert or presuppose a qualitative difference between Jesus and God. He ignores these because it is self evident that things which ever (or even merely could) differ, can&#8217;t be numerically identical.<\/li>\n<li>White emphasizes the charge of &#8220;rationalism&#8221; vs. Navas. It&#8217;s unclear quite what that is supposed to be. Perhaps his main idea is that a &#8220;<strong>rationalist<\/strong>&#8221; ignores elements of divine revelation which are inconsistent with his theology.<\/li>\n<li>But if that&#8217;s what he means, then as I just observed &#8211; White is plainly a rationalist! Takes one to know one, evidently. \ud83d\ude42 (Is he <em>projecting<\/em> his own double-think onto his opponent?)<\/li>\n<li>Sean&#8217;s point about <strong>choice of passages<\/strong> should be emphasized. Navas here fights White, as it were, on White&#8217;s home turf. To be fair, White should debate him again, taking the negative side, and letting Navas pick the five passages.<\/li>\n<li>White was sloppy on the topics of <strong>monotheism and worship. <\/strong>And he overuses the<em> ad hominem<\/em> and question-begging assertion that Navas is simply looking at the texts through unitarian blinders. Still, he is an able debater. As is Navas.<strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>This sort of debate can get tedious because of the focus mainly on the exegesis of texts. Those texts are, of course, the main evidence. But I think that both sides could have spent more time making their overall case &#8211; actually <strong>making <em>explicit<\/em> arguments<\/strong>, not only showing how various texts allegedly fit their respective views, and then going, <em>see<\/em>! This is, after all, a battle <em>of theologies<\/em>. If <em>only<\/em> reading the texts was going to solve this, well, it would&#8217;ve been resolved a long time ago. And it is clear &#8211; or at least, it is clear to me &#8211; that <strong>the theoretical arguments are really the locus of disagreement<\/strong>. e.g. Jesus is rightly worshiped, and only God can be rightly worshiped, therefore, Jesus just is God and vice-versa. (Even though they differ!) But that second premise is false,<a title=\"Who should Christians worship?\" href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/4037\" target=\"_blank\"> according to the New Testament<\/a>. On carefully thinking through <strong>White&#8217;s traditional catholic arguments, see <a title=\"Trinity, History of\" href=\"http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/trinity\/trinity-history.html#NewTes\" target=\"_blank\">this<\/a><\/strong>. They do get a bit more into such argument in part 2.<\/li>\n<li>Relatedly, it strikes me that for White, focusing almost completely on (favorite) texts is <strong>a way of avoiding hard questions<\/strong>, like: isn&#8217;t White&#8217;s theology <strong>self-contradictory<\/strong>? (e.g. Jesus and the Father are both identical to God, but not to each other. God is and is not the ultimate source of the cosmos. God does and does not have a God above him.) If so, we can reject it as false. And we can see that there is a weighty reason to suspect his interpretations of the texts, on our assumption that what they teach is <em>true<\/em>, and so self-consistent. If he&#8217;s going to resist these inferences, he&#8217;ll need to say a <em>lot<\/em> more about how it can be rational to believe a clear, stable, apparent contradiction. It will not do to merely repeat that his view is (allegedly) based on <em>all<\/em> the texts.<\/li>\n<li>In light of 2nd and 3rd century catholic theology, it is amazing that White thinks it absurd (and\/or &#8220;Gnostic&#8221;) that the Son is an intermediary between God and humans, who is less great than God \/ the Father. More on that theme in a forthcoming screencast and paper, but for now, see <a title=\"trinitarian or unitarian? series\" href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?s=%22trinitarian+or+unitarian%3F%22&amp;searchsubmit=\" target=\"_blank\">this series<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ably reviewed by Sean Finnegan. I would add a few philosophical comments: White, like many evangelicals, understands &#8220;the deity of Christ&#8221; as meaning that Jesus and God are numerically one, that is, numerically identical. He argues that various things the NT asserts about Jesus imply this. (e.g. He is worshiped, called &#8220;Lord.&#8221;) Conveniently, he ignores&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/linkage-white-vs-navas-does-the-new-testament-teach-the-deity-of-christ-dale\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">White vs. Navas &#8211; Does the New Testament teach &#8220;the deity of Christ&#8221;?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4683,"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":[37,21,6,54,8,20,9,3,43,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-bible","category-complaints","category-debates","category-linkage","category-mystery","category-philosophy","category-theories","category-unitarianism","category-worship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679","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=4679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34670,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4679\/revisions\/34670"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}