Unitarian Christian Alliance | Sean Finnegan - The Deity of Christ from a Greco-Roman Perspective @UnitarianChristianAlliance | Uploaded November 2023 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
In a paper presentation at the 2023 UCA Conference, Pastor Sean Finnegan addresses the deity of Christ within a Greco-Roman worldview.
When early Christian authors called Jesus “god” (or “God”) what did they mean?
Modern apologists routinely point to pre-Nicene quotations in order to prove that early Christians always believed in the deity of Christ, by which they mean that he is of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father.
However, most historians agree that Christians before the fourth century simply didn’t have the cognitive categories available yet to think of Christ in Nicene or Chalcedonian ways. If this consensus is correct, it behooves us to consider other options for defining what early Christian authors meant.
The obvious place to go to get an answer to our initial question is the New Testament. However, as is well known, the handful of instances in which authors unambiguously applied god (θεός) to Christ are fraught with textual uncertainty, grammatical ambiguity, and hermeneutical elasticity. What’s more, granting that these contested texts all call Jesus “god” provides little insight into what they might mean by that phrase. Turning to the second century, the earliest handful of texts that say Jesus is god are likewise textually uncertain or terse. We must wait until the second half of the second century and beyond to have more helpful material to examine. We know that in the meanwhile some Christians were saying Jesus was god. What did they mean?
In a paper presentation at the 2023 UCA Conference, Pastor Sean Finnegan addresses the deity of Christ within a Greco-Roman worldview.
When early Christian authors called Jesus “god” (or “God”) what did they mean?
Modern apologists routinely point to pre-Nicene quotations in order to prove that early Christians always believed in the deity of Christ, by which they mean that he is of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father.
However, most historians agree that Christians before the fourth century simply didn’t have the cognitive categories available yet to think of Christ in Nicene or Chalcedonian ways. If this consensus is correct, it behooves us to consider other options for defining what early Christian authors meant.
The obvious place to go to get an answer to our initial question is the New Testament. However, as is well known, the handful of instances in which authors unambiguously applied god (θεός) to Christ are fraught with textual uncertainty, grammatical ambiguity, and hermeneutical elasticity. What’s more, granting that these contested texts all call Jesus “god” provides little insight into what they might mean by that phrase. Turning to the second century, the earliest handful of texts that say Jesus is god are likewise textually uncertain or terse. We must wait until the second half of the second century and beyond to have more helpful material to examine. We know that in the meanwhile some Christians were saying Jesus was god. What did they mean?
