The Son of God

Three Views of the Identity of Jesus

Charles Lee Irons, Danny André Dixon, Dustin R. Smith

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498224277
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This is a multi-view book in which representatives of differing viewpoints make a positive statement of their case, followed by responses from the others, and concluding with a rebuttal by the original author. The topic at hand in this book is the identity of Jesus (also known as Christology). What is the meaning of Jesus's identity as "the Son of God"? Charles Lee Irons argues that the title "Son of God" denotes his ontological deity from a Trinitarian perspective. Danny Andre Dixon and Dustin R. Smith challenge this view from two different non-Trinitarian viewpoints. Smith argues that Jesus is the authentically human Son of God, the Davidic Messiah, who did not possess a literal preexistence prior to his virgin birth. Dixon argues that Jesus is God's preexistent Son in the sense that God gave him life or existence at some undefined point prior to creation. The authors engage the topic from the perspective that reverences the authority and inspiration of Scripture as the final arbiter of this debate. The literature of early Judaism is also engaged in order to try to understand the extent to which the New Testament's Christology may have been influenced by or operated within the context of Jewish conceptions of divine secondary beings as agents of God.

Part One

A Trinitarian View

Jesus, the Divine Son of God

Charles Lee Irons

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous nineteenth-century New England Unitarian minister and father of transcendentalism, was a confessed non-Trinitarian. He dismissed the deity of Christ as the post-apostolic church’s “noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.”1 My interlocutors, Dixon and Smith, while no doubt differing with Emerson on many points, presumably would agree with him here. In this essay, I take up the challenge of demonstrating that the deity of Christ is not an exaggeration, but the sober claim of Jesus himself and a core part of the apostolic proclamation.

Thesis and Definition

Before I attempt to sketch the biblical case for the deity of Christ, I need to explain more carefully what I mean by it. The terms “deity” or “divine” can be used in different senses. When the founder of Rome died, he was hailed as “the divine Romulus”2, but the ancient Romans did not view Romulus as an eternally preexistent, divine being. He was regarded as an ordinary man who, because of his greatness as the founder of Rome, was taken up into heaven to join the pantheon of the gods after his death—a strictly postmortem affair called apotheosis. But this is not at all what the church means when it confesses the deity of Christ. Indeed, the church could not mean that without abandoning monotheism. Rather, the church confesses that Jesus Christ is eternally divine and belongs on the divine side of the Creator-creature distinction. He is not a man who became a god, but the Son of God who became man.

It is important to set the ontological deity of Christ within a broader web of doctrines defined with increasing precision by the church in the first four ecumenical councils. The following statement encapsulates the church’s historic understanding of the person of Christ:

The Son of God, the second person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance and equal with the Father, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties, and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin (The Westminster Confession of Faith VIII.2).

The historic Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation are interconnected and inseparable. I will be focusing on just one (extremely important) part of the web. By “the ontological deity of Christ” I mean that his career has three stages. First, he is the eternally preexistent Son of God, possessing the same divine nature as the Father; there never was a time when he did not exist as the divine Son.3 Second, he became man (“took upon him man’s nature”) when he was born of the Virgin Mary, and so in his earthly ministry he was the Son of God incarnate, both divine and human. Third, after he completed his redeeming work as the incarnate Son and Messiah, God exalted him at his right hand and gave him divine honor fitting for one who is eternally divine. I believe this is what the New Testament teaches, and that is what I will try to show in what follows.

Jesus is the Son of God

The apostles confessed and proclaimed that Jesus is the Son of God. Next to “Christ” and “Lord,” it is one of the most common christological titles in the New Testament. It occurs in various forms: “my Son,” “the Son,” “the Son of God,” “his Son,” and so on. Some variant of the title appears twenty-two times in Matthew, eleven times in Mark, fourteen times in Luke, twenty-seven times in John, seventeen times in Paul’s epistles, twelve times in Hebrews, and twenty-four times in the epistles of John. The designation occurs in every New Testament author except James and Jude. We cannot examine all of these instances, but as seen in Table 1, there are five key moments in the earthly life of Jesus as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels where the declaration of Jesus’ status as God’s Son is made. Actually, only Matthew has the “Son of God” title in all five, but even Mark and Luke record these five events even if they use the explicit title less consistently.

Table 1. Five Significant “Son of God” Moments in the Synoptic Gospels4

	Matthew	Mark	Luke
The Baptism of Jesus	3:17	1:11	3:22
Peter’s Confession	16:16	[8:29]	[9:20]
The Transfiguration of Jesus	17:5	9:7	9:35
Jesus before Caiaphas	26:62–66	14:61–64	22:67–71
The Centurion at the Crucifixion	27:54	15:39	[23:47]

Whether it is the voice of God the Father from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son” at Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration, or Peter confessing, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” or Jesus before the high priest Caiaphas being charged with blasphemy and condemned to death because he claimed to be the Son of God, or the centurion at the scene of the crucifixion confessing, “Truly this was the Son of God!”—in all five key moments, the declaration of Jesus’ divine Sonship has the aura of being utterly significant and decisive.

But it was not limited to what others said of him. Jesus understood himself to be “the Son of God” as well. There are three passages in the Synoptic Gospels that make this extremely likely from a historical point of view. The first is the one where Jesus is reported as praying to the Father: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt 11:27 || Luke 10:22).5 The second is Jesus’ implicit self-reference in the parable of the wicked tenants: “He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son’” (Mark 12:6 || Matt 21:37 || Luke 20:13). The third is the statement in the eschatological discourse of Jesus, “But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32 || Matt 24:36). Even scholars who do not accept the authenticity of Jesus’ more explicit claims to divine Sonship in the Gospel of John are prepared to accept the authenticity of these three sayings in the Synoptic Gospels.6

“Son of God” Much More Than “Messiah”

“Son of God” has a fair claim to being central to Jesus’ identity, both in his own self-consciousness and in the apostolic proclamation concerning Jesus. But what does it mean? Does it mean that a man named Jesus was God’s “Son” in a functional sense, i.e., that he was a merely human, Davidic messiah? This is a plausible interpretation of the title, given that it was part of the biblical (2 Sam 7:14; Ps 2:7; 89:26–27) and early Jewish (4Q174; 4Q246) expectation that the messiah would be called God’s Son.7 Many New Testament scholars interpret the “Son of God” title in that functional or messianic sense. But there are others who have mounted compelling arguments for taking “Son of God” as mea...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• On the Labels
• English Versions of the Bible
• Abbreviations
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Bibliography