In a recent essay, I relayed that the analysis offered of its subject matter, the logic of the concept of God, was inspired by an exchange that I had with a friend and fellow Roman Catholic.\u00a0 My friend had mentioned that her own search for Truth has led her to essentially reject some of the most fundamental teachings of Christianity.<\/p>\n
One claim she made is that while she believes that Jesus is a <\/em>divine son of God, she rejects the proposition that He is the only <\/em>divine son. \u00a0What she may not realize (I can\u2019t be sure given that we never had the opportunity to finish our discussion) is that this notion that she now entertains had in one form or another been in circulation during the earliest years of the Christian era.<\/p>\n Yet it had always been condemned as heretical. <\/em><\/p>\n This is for good reason, as will be shown later.<\/p>\n In the second century, what\u2019s come to be known as \u201cAdoptionism<\/em>\u201d began to take root.\u00a0 The adoptionists denied Christ\u2019s divinity by denying that He was co-eternal with God the Father.\u00a0 From the perspective of this heresy, Jesus was no more and no less than a man, an exceptionally godly man who, upon proving his obedience to God, was rewarded by the latter with resurrection from the dead and adoption <\/em>into the Godhead.<\/p>\n Jesus, in other words, is God\u2019s adopted son\u2014the first but, if the Scriptures are to be believed, not the last.<\/p>\n In the fourth century, Arianism<\/em> taught that Jesus was a creature <\/em>of God the Father\u2019s, albeit, the first <\/em>of His creatures.\u00a0 The Father created Jesus and the latter, in turn, created the cosmos.\u00a0 Subsequently, the Father adopted Jesus as His first Son.<\/p>\n There have been several other heresies over the centuries and millennia.\u00a0 For present purposes, and due to space and time constraints, I draw the reader\u2019s attention to these two specific heresies only because they are illustrative of the idea that my friend is expressing.\u00a0 Though she may object that, unlike the adoptionists and Arians, she is not challenging Jesus\u2019s divinity, the fact of the matter is that unless Jesus is the one and only Son of God, and unless this means that He is \u201cbegotten not made\u201d and \u201cone in being with the Father,\u201d as over 1 billion Christians, reciting the Nicene Creed, affirm each week, then Jesus may as well not have been divine.<\/p>\n And if He is not God, then there is no salvation and Christianity is a lie.<\/p>\n It is understandable, given the mystery of the Incarnation\u2014the uniquely Christian doctrine that God became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus who was fully God and fully human\u2014that there should emerge misunderstandings as to Christ\u2019s identity.\u00a0 But the Incarnation is of a piece with an intricate theological eco-system, as it were.\u00a0 It is the central piece of this theology.\u00a0 Once it is rejected, the rest of the system to which it belongs will inescapably unravel.<\/p>\n This is but another way of saying that rejection of the Incarnation is rejection of Christianity, for heretical Christianity is fake<\/em> Christianity, and fake Christianity is not <\/em>Christianity.<\/p>\n For starters, Christianity, like the Judaism out of which it grew, is fiercely mono<\/em>theistic. In resolutely affirming the existence of one God, the monotheist, whether Jew, Christian, or, for that matter, Muslim, just as staunchly denies that there are any other beings deserving of worship.\u00a0 And if there are any other beings to whom loyalty, fidelity, and love are owed, they are owed these things, ultimately, for God\u2019s sake, because they in turn owe their being to Him Who is Being itself.<\/p>\n However, if Jesus is not God, then the countless numbers of people throughout the last 2,000 years, including the over 2 billion people today, who revere and worship Him are idolaters<\/em>; they are guilty of violating the first Commandment, which proscribes anything that remotely approximates polytheism.<\/p>\n In short, either Jesus is God or else Christians are idolaters.<\/p>\n Second, the Jesus with Whom we\u2019re presented in the New Testament is anything but the meek, mild, self-effacing figure of the popular contemporary imagination\u2014which is to say that the Jesus of the Bible is most certainly not a good, much less a godly, man if <\/em>He is just<\/em> a man.<\/p>\n In multiple locations throughout the Scriptures, Jesus likens Himself to God.\u00a0 Indeed, it is precisely because His enemies understand Him to be making Himself equal to God that they plot to have Him killed.<\/p>\n Far from being a godly<\/em> man, if Jesus was no more than a man, then He was a most godless <\/em>man, for He was guilty of immense arrogance, self-delusion, condescension, and, most damning, blasphemy. <\/em><\/p>\n Third, if Jesus was just a man, then the Christian doctrine of the Blessed Trinity is also a fiction. God is either Unitarian or something else, but He cannot be Trinitarian in nature.<\/p>\n This is profoundly problematic for more than one reason.\u00a0 Not only does it mean that Christianity has been mistaken for most of its history in affirming this unique conception of God, but the bottomless Love with which the Christian identifies God will be deprived of its basis unless God is Triune in essence.<\/p>\n Christianity distinguishes itself among the world\u2019s religious and philosophical traditions insofar as it unabashedly declares that God is Love. <\/em>Yet it is the idea that God is Three <\/em>Divine Persons in a single Godhead that justifies this position, for it would appear logically impossible for God to be Love unless God\u2014or Love\u2014is comprised of inter-personal relationships.<\/p>\n After all, love is relational.\u00a0 Self-love, though a genuine species of love, is intelligible just insofar as we learn about love from our relationships with others. And while God is omniscient or all-knowing, it would appear as logically impossible for God to know love, much less be <\/em>Love, if He only knew Himself from all eternity as it is logically impossible for God to be weak or immoral.<\/p>\n Love is self-giving.\u00a0 Essentially, it consists in the giving of oneself to others.\u00a0 This being said, the paradox of God knowing love, to say nothing of being <\/em>Love, prior to creation is resolved once it becomes clear that the Godhead is a community, a family, of Three Persons, each of whom loves the other two from all eternity.<\/p>\n This account, though, will not do if Jesus is only a man.<\/p>\n Fourth, if Jesus is only a man, then there is no Salvation. The Christian doctrine of the Atonement, irrespectively of the multiple interpretations to which it lends itself, must go the way of the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity:<\/p>\n God gave Himself<\/em> in order to reconcile humanity with Himself.\u00a0 It was for this reason that the Logos, <\/em>the Word<\/em> of God who was <\/em>God became flesh and dwelt among us, as Saint John informs us in the prologue to his gospel.<\/p>\n This <\/em>is what the doctrine of the Atonement is all about.\u00a0 But if Jesus is not God, then God did not demonstrate His immeasurable love for us through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection from the dead and, thus, Salvation has not been achieved.<\/p>\n In conclusion, we can now safely summarize the main point: Either Jesus is the unique Son of God, God the Son<\/em>, or else Christianity is Big Lie.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a recent essay, I relayed that the analysis offered of its subject matter, the logic of the concept of God, was inspired by an exchange that I had with a friend and fellow Roman Catholic.\u00a0 My friend had mentioned that her own search for Truth has led her to essentially reject some of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n