The Trinity or One God? (part 8 thru 11)

Continuing my review of the essay by Mark D. Roberts.
(Click on the title, above, to link to the essay.)

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Part 8

Pro. 8:29-30 seems to be centering on something here that is glossed over. Wisdom speaks as if a servant of God. The Old Testament indicates that angels served God before creation, so it is reasonable to consider that Wisdom may be one of God’s chief angels. Is it possible that God sent the angel, Wisdom, to earth as Jesus, to fulfill his purpose? The title of the piece asks if Jesus is Divine, but the real question is whether the Trinity is an accurate doctrine. My main problem with the idea of the Trinity is that, as he acknowledges, the Trinity was something that developed over several centuries. If it was the case from the beginning, why didn’t the Old Testament mention it? Perhaps because it didn’t apply at the time. But then why doesn’t Jesus teach of it? Why did Jesus refer to God as his father, and when God spoke to Jesus, or about Jesus, it was as if a separate entity? Why does it take four centuries of evolving thought to come to the conclusion that God and Jesus are one? That makes it more likely that the Trinity is a human construct and not a Heavenly one. And this brings it back to the real problem. When I go to Church, there seems to be an almost complete focus on the worship of Jesus, rather than God.


Part 9

This section again equates the Old Testament with the New, saying that what was said in the time of the old must also apply at the time of the new. This is a weak argument (especially if there were no Trinity in the Old Testament), as God could certainly make changes as desired, and these passages may refer generally or specifically to the circumstances at that time. More specifically, the passages from Luke and Philippians state that Jesus is “a” savior, not “the” savior specified in the Old Testament passages referring to God. In John, why does it not say, “The Father came to us as Savior of the world”? It clearly indicates a separation of identities. If God sent Jesus to bring the world closer to Him, there is no reason not to consider him either “a” or “the” Savior. In other words, God giving Jesus the mission of savior would make Jesus “the” Savior as much as if God came to earth Himself.

Part 10

The logical path of God is Salvation, Salvation through Jesus, Jesus is God, suffers from an issue of interpretation. In the same way that a road is the only way to a destination, and yet is not the destination, Jesus may be the path to salvation, without actually being the one to grant salvation. References to Isaiah 7:14 are also shaky, because Isaiah seems to be talking about contemporary issues, namely, convincing Ahaz to trust in God in dealing with the Syria-Israel threat, and the birth of Hezekiah.

.http://www.hope.edu.academic/religion/bandstra/rtot/ch10/ch10_1b.htm.

“If Jesus were to save us, they argued, then he had to be fully human. Only in this way could he bear the penalty for human sin.”

Ok, that is reasonable.

“Yet if he were merely human, then he wouldn’t be able to break the power of sin. So he must also be fully God.”

This is not a good argument. First, what determines, other than human interpretation, that Jesus must be able to break the power of sin? If Jesus were “only human”, would God’s hands be tied in deciding how sin was to be dealt with? If God simply wanted to forgive sins, why did he need Jesus to be sacrificed? Ok, we are drifting into a subject for another day… Still, it seems that God is being forced to follow rules of human design.


Part 11

This section delves more into the idea of Wisdom as an entity and gets closer to what I mentioned in section 8, though it doesn’t really make specific point yet. He describes the Wisdom tradition as just a poetic description of an aspect of God, but I wonder how he determines which writings are poetic license and which are literal fact. I’ll have to look into the concept of angels and guardian angels and such. I guess the idea of an angel being a teacher to humans isn’t exactly kosher, though. I wonder if this idea causes problems for monotheism? I imagine it’s possible that God could have a member of his heavenly host be a teacher to mankind. The idea that Jesus identifies himself more with Wisdom than with God, Himself gives my idea a bit more weight, unless there is a good argument against this concept.