Biblical Framework
Charles
Clough
Lesson 112
Questions came up after the
last session about Dr. Custance’s hypothesis about Mary carrying basically
immortality in the ovum, and the virgin birth making use of that potential
immortality as an open door through which Christ could be incarnated. Remember I’m not teaching this as the Word
of God, this is the speculations of a Christian physiologist. The reason I do mention them is because
these kinds of thoughts, these hypothesis, by men who are actively studying the
Word of God and who were active in their professions, in their areas of
specialty, are good to interact with because they act as devices to make us go
back to the Word of God and look for the details. I’ve never participated in any one of these kinds of discussions
where I didn’t come out of the discussion with an even greater conviction about
the literal truth of the Word of God.
It forces you to observe things you maybe didn’t observe.
Basically here’s Custance’s
hypothesis. His hypothesis is that when
you look at the growth of a baby from conception, you have the sperm and the
ovum, there’s a growth period where all the cells can produce any kind of cell;
it’s just a period in the growth. And
at that point, all the information for eyes, ears, nose, feet, head, are all
contained in those cells. Then at a
certain point in the development of this fetus, all of a sudden specialty cells
begin to grow and these can no longer reproduce the whole body. They can produce components of the body but
they can’t produce the whole body. Yet
there are reserve cells that can produce the whole body, so-called germ cells,
as Weisman called them almost a century ago, and the stematic cells, I guess
now they call them the stem cells, vocabulary changes, but that’s the
idea.
What Custance is fixed on is
if you take Eve, Adam calling his wife isha,
which is the Hebrew word for woman, and he renames her from isha to Chavvah,
to the woman of life, that’s what Eve means, life. If she’s the mother of all
living, and you couple that with the next statement in Genesis 3, after the
fall, when God prophesies that the seed, translated from the Hebrew into Greek
as the sperm of the woman will defeat the sperm of Satan, the seed. It’s just odd language, and it’s not there
because it’s sloppy. It’s there because
human vocabulary is struggling with something going on; the way God’s designed
it.
Custance furthermore argues
that if you look at the sperm and the ovum they have opposite
characteristics. The ovum is there from
birth and never is increased. Sperm are
made all through a man’s life. The ovum
can be induced to self-replicate; sperm can’t.
So there’s more potential on the female side than on the male side. Custance argues in his book, as I said, the
book is 400 pages long, what he’s trying to do is speculate creatively on these
passages of Scripture and stop this business of reading through the Bible and
take this as myth or some other thing.
It’s more than that, that’s just a naïve approach to Scripture. We want to encourage people to try to ask
good solid questions of the text of Scripture.
Tonight we’re going to go
back to our subject, which is Christology; we’re looking at the birth of the
King, which is bringing into history the God-man. We’ve looked at the Biblical data that the Church had to deal
with in its first four or five centuries of existence. Out of that came this doctrine called the
doctrine of the hypostatic union, i.e. the doctrine that Jesus Christ is true
humanity coupled with undiminished deity united without confusion in one person
forever. That doctrine is the center,
is the core, of the whole New Testament revelation. If that goes, everything goes with it. So it’s essential that we understand the doctrine of the
hypostatic union because we’re working with four things, the birth of Christ,
the life of Christ, the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ. We’ve tried to show the approach that it’s
not that God’s revelation is insufficient or inadequate for man.
The problem is, this side of
the fall men essential reveal their autonomous desire for that tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, that external authority other than God, and we want
to be free of a God with whom we have ultimate accountability. The agenda is just that simple; in the raw,
basic, bottom line that’s what’s going on.
That’s why in John 3 it says the light came into the world and men loved
darkness rather than light. They don’t
come to the light unless they’re deeply reproved. So we’re studying how men respond to Christ and in particular how
they reject Him, or how they interact with Him.
We’ve looked at the Old
Testament data leading up to Christ. We
said there are three categories of data.
One category was that there are two streams of revelation in the Old
Testament. One stream looks forward to
a time when God will dwell with men; this is the first part of category one,
God with men, that’s the Immanuel theme, that’s I am the One who is with you
theme. There’s that desire through the whole Old Testament that one day God
will be reunited with men as He originally was in the Garden of Eden. This is not something new; this is going
back to what was old. Then we have the
second theme, the fact that there is an ideal human ruler, or human king. There will be a human king who will lead
men, mankind.
We said when you get into
certain passages of the Old Testament, these streams seem to converge. They don’t actually converge in the Old
Testament, but they seem to. Psalm 110,
“The LORD said to my Lord,” David speaking. Who’s the Lord of David? “The LORD said to my
Lord, sit at my right hand,” so something’s already happened there because when
David is writing this, he’s the king.
Who’s over the king? Nobody is
over the king. So who’s the Lord of
David, who is this mysterious person?
There are two people, “The LORD” talking to
“my Lord.” So there’s a sense in which
David is king but he’s not the ideal king, there’s somebody coming after
him. So these two streams seem to
converge, but they don’t quite converge.
The second category of
evidences for the deity of Christ is the fact that Old Testament quotes using
God’s name, Yahweh, are replaced in the New Testament with Jesus. Therefore, if you have a direct substitution
of Jeshua in passages where in
the Old Testament it’s Jehovah or Yahweh, what could that be other than a claim
tantamount to identifying Jesus Christ with Yahweh? Keep in mind we’re not talking about Greeks and pagans here,
we’re talking about Jews, monotheistic Jews, and monotheists in particular who
had a very clear Creator/creature idea.
How, writing in a Jewish community, in Hebrew language, talking to
people who very well know the Creator/ creature distinction, and you’re
substituting Jesus name for Yahweh’s name, how else can you declare the deity
of Christ?
There’s a third category of
truth and that is where you have God roles, such as creation, saving,
forgiving, and in the New Testament that is replaced with Christ, Christ acts
in God’s roles. One of the most blatant
examples of this is when Jesus Christ turns to people and He says I forgive you
of your sin. Come on, that’s not a
priest, what a priest does is he pronounces that your sins are forgiven,
different language; he is commissioned by God to announce forgiveness for sin,
but that’s not what Jesus did. Jesus
didn’t use the vocabulary of a priest.
Jesus had this audacious statement, “I forgive you.” You sinned against God, “I forgive
you.” Who can forgive a sin against God
except God, or a blasphemer? So this
puts Jesus in a position where either He’s ultimately blaspheming, or He is
clearly God doing His work. That gets
us through the Biblical data. On page
34 you have the table which shows you where those substitutions are.
Then we go to page 35 and if
you open your Bible to Titus 2:13, we wound up by citing five passages in the
New Testament that speak of the full deity of Jesus Christ. We have John 1:1, “In the beginning was the
Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That declares the word, the logos
to be God. I understand the Jehovah’s
Witnesses have an attempt to end run that verse. We’ll get to that when we get to Arianism. There are these verses and you need to know
these. John 1:1 is a critical
text.
Titus 2:13 is a critical
text, “Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great
God and Savior, Christ Jesus.” The rule
in the Greek is called the Granville Sharp rule, which says when you have a
person, and you have two nouns referring to a person connected by kai, which is “and,” and you have an
adjective in front of that expression, “the great God and Savior, Jesus
Christ,” that puts them together; they speak of the same person. What this is is an article, plus an
adjective, plus a noun, plus kai,
plus a noun; that refers to one person, it’s a construction. So Titus 2:13 is a very strong text to prove
the full and complete deity of Jesus Christ, and that it was recognized and
written about by Paul very early in church history. It’s not something that happened later on when people just kind
of deified this human carpenter.
I John 5:20 is the other
one. These are the three most powerful
ones. “And we know that the Son of God
has come, and has given us understanding, in order that we might know Him who
is true, and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.” You could say isn’t that a divine
being? What does the next verse say?
[v. 21, “Little children, guard yourselves from idols.”] In a passage that’s
telling you to avoid idols, you don’t promiscuously talk about calling
something God unless the object that you’re calling God is God. So I John 5:20 is a third very powerful
reference.
There are two other verses
in the New Testament that are powerful, but you kind of have to be careful of
the text and the context because there are ways of messing with it. Turn to Heb. 1:8, this is a citation out of
the Old Testament. “But of the Son He
says, ‘Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever, and the righteous scepter is the
scepter of His kingdom.” That’s addressed to and about the Son, it’s clearly
calling the Son God. “Thy throne O
God,” it’s addressed to God, but the text that introduces the Old Testament
quote by the author of Hebrews says “But of the Son He says….” “Concerning the
Son He says ‘Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever.’” Why this verse isn’t as powerful as the
others is because somebody can say that it’s just talking about the throne of
the human king, it’s God’s throne but it’s the human king on the throne. To deal with that then you have to get back
into the monarchy, etc. there’s more argument involved in that one.
Romans 9:5 is the fifth
one. Keep in mind all the previous
material that we’ve covered. It’s not
that these five verses are the only places.
I just refer to these five verses because they’re the most explicit.
What do you do with a verse like this?
“whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the
flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever, Amen.” The problem with this, like with Hebrews, is the punctuation of
the sentence, because you could say that “God blessed forever” is kind of an
ejaculative thank you, “God blessed forever.”
Or you could read it as the “God blessed forever” is synonymous with the
rest of the clause. So here it is
again: John 1:1; Titus 2:13; I John 5:20; Romans 9:5 and Heb. 1:8.
We’re going to embark on
some very deep stuff. This is going to
challenge our ability to think because it gets right into the center of the
Godhead. We’re going to go through this
and it will take many weeks. Be
patient, because maybe it will sharpen your appreciation of the God whom you
worship, because we’re going to take a tour of some 400 years of church
history, and show you the blind alleys that godly people tried in their
thinking about Jesus Christ, and some of the not-so-godly people. The Church struggled and struggled and
struggled, and what I get so tired of hearing when you get in a debate or a
discussion is this weak-kneed response that goes like this: the New Testament
in its purity back then didn’t deify Jesus, that’s just Church speculation over
the centuries, you know myth gets encrusted upon the truth, so we’ve got truth
mixed together with myth, we’ve got to pull off all the myth and when you pull
off all the myth you wind up with this little lowly Jewish carpenter. It’s like the Church was so stupid, these
guys are so brilliant now, PhD’s today really know a lot more about Jesus, I
mean, Jesus didn’t have a PhD, how did He make it. Paul didn’t have one; he probably had the equivalent of one. Matthew didn’t, the twelve apostles, and
none of them have PhD’s, how did God ever start the Church. That’s why He started it, that’s how He
could start it; He didn’t have them around to mess things up.
What we’re talking about
here is that when we go agonizingly through this convoluted hallway and look at
all the doors, just visualize yourself walking down a hallway and you open one
door, and open another one, you want to see what’s in the room. That’s what we’re going to do. When we get done I hope to convince you that
the only model that we can have in our minds of God is the Trinity. The Church was forced into the doctrine of
the Trinity by trying to resolve the data about the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s not the other way around. The cultist will come to your door, they
will send you literature, you’ll get this in the college classroom, that
somewhere the Church got this out of the Greek milieu. If there’s any place they didn’t get it it
was in the Greek worldview, because the Greek worldview was pagan. The Greeks
didn’t have a concept of the Creator/creature distinction. Everybody knows that; what’s this business
about getting the Trinity out of the Greek culture.
The doctrine of the Trinity
was reluctantly, reluctantly
created by the Church to deal with this problem that we’re working with. They came to it because they were forced to
come to it; they tried every other answer, and all the other answers don’t fit
what we hear about when the light came into the world. It doesn’t picture these passages. On page 35 we’re embarking on the formulation
of the doctrine. It will be a good
exercise for some of you who have never been involved in church history,
because what it will do for you, it will get you out of this arrogant spirit
that we sometimes get ourselves into as evangelicals, that the Holy Spirit only
taught our particular generation, everybody was stupid until we came along, and
we are just God’s gift to the Church, nobody had it straight before we walked
around, and after we’re gone nobody will get it straight. When we learn about church history we
realize that there were other people that the Holy Spirit did teach, believe it
or not! And those people did a lot of
very fine work and this doctrine of Jesus Christ was one of the finest pieces
or work the Church has ever done. And
it was all done before we had Sunday Schools, church growth movements, TV, how did
they ever get it done.
Look at the bottom paragraph
on page 35. I’m going to have to rely
on the notes, we’ll get to the passages, but I want you to follow with the
notes because this is about history, and I had to compile hundreds of pages of
history writing into these paragraphs.
“The Church took nearly six
hundred years to summarize all the Scriptural data about Christ into a
consistent doctrinal statement. The
story of that struggle will now be briefly surveyed from the perspective of four
great conclusions that were eventually reached concerning the nature of Christ.
To attain these conclusions,” this is my key sentence, “to attain these
conclusions the early Christians discarded one false concept of God after
another in their search to explain all the New Testament revelation in a
logically consistent manner.” A key
sentence! The church tried many
different ideas about God and it wouldn’t work. The stuff the cultists bring to your front door is garbage, it’s
stuff that has been tried 150 times before and every time people try it, it
doesn’t work. You’d think Satan would
get a little tired of doing this. It’s
the same garbage. “To argue, as
liberals and cultists do, that the Trinity was ‘imported’ from Greek philosophy
by the early Church is quite contrary to historical fact. On the contrary, the Trinity was an original
concept coming from within the Church only after all the ‘imported’ concepts of
God from outside culture had failed to correlate with New Testament
revelation.”
On page 36, here’s the first
struggle point. Here’s the first
problem, the first big argument that the Church had, the first plank in the
platform of the hypostatic union doctrine.
Here’s the deal: is Christ a divine person, distinct from the Father, or
not? The first point is, here’s the
Father, here’s the Son. Are they the
same person? Are these two masks worn
by the same God, or can we explain the divergence between them as one is God
and one is less than God. So the first
thing we’re struggling with is this problem: how to differentiate the Father
from the Son. We all go through
this. This is not theory, think about
when you pray. Do I pray to the Father
or do I pray to the Son? Most prayers
in the Bible are to the Father, the only prayers that you ever see in the Bible
to the Son is when the Son is physically showing Himself to people. All the other prayers in the Bible are to
the Father. Why is that? We want to
look at this.
“The first erroneous attempt
to describe Christ doctrinally was known as Monarchianism.” Look at the chart.
Those are the heresies; we’re going to go through them one by one. Look at the first two, the first two rows on
that chart. Both of them involve what
is called Monarchianism. Let me define
that word. The stem in that word is
Monarch. What Monarchianism is is a
monarch model of God, that is, people are thinking in their head when they
think of God of a solitary King over all. Solitary! The key word in Monarchianism is “solitary.” The Trinity isn’t solitary.
Think about Scripture. Before God created the world, what does
Jesus say that the Father did for Him?
He loved Me before the foundation of the world. So before creation was there a personal
relationship between the Father and the Son?
Yes there was. If God can have a
personal relationship within Himself, how does that make Him independent and
self-contained versus coming over here and seeing God as a solitary being? What is absent from His existence before
creation if He is a solitary person?
Another person. So if I’m
Islamic, or I am a late Judaism, and I have a solitary God, is a solitary God
personally complete before creation?
Ah, interesting, and it’s interesting that Islam’s divine attribute of
love is missing. Allah has many
attributes; love is not one of them. Do
you see why? What’s the object of his
love? If you make his love dependent on
creation, what have you done to the Creator?
You’ve made him dependent on the creation.
It’s precisely the
Trinitarian nature of God that permits His social life, His personal life, to
exist independent of His creation. A
very important point. If you screw this
up, you’re going to make God dependent on His own creation. Or, you’re going to make God a non-person,
in His essence He is not personal at all, He’s just a force. You’ve got to do one or the other, but it’s
precisely this multiplicity of persons in God that keeps Him totally
self-contained, self-sufficient, such that He never had to create the universe
if He didn’t want to. But if you don’t
have multiplicity within God, He has to create the universe to have somebody
around. God doesn’t need us, He doesn’t
need angels. So it’s very important
that we understand that God is self-contained, independent and He doesn’t have
to do anything outside of Himself, He’s perfectly content with Himself. He doesn’t need any object for His love
because He already has objects for His love within Himself. Jesus says that the
Father loved Him before the foundation of the world. They talked one to another; the Trinity communed one to
another. They don’t need us. So the Trinitarian nature is very
important.
Modal Monarchianism says
solitary person; that’s the doctrine here.
This was the presupposition of these two arguments. I hope another thing we learn is that this
is going to show what presuppositional thinking is all about, and how
important it is to examine your presuppositions; these poor people didn’t even
realize that they were presupposing this.
That’s what’s so nasty about presuppositions, you catch them like
viruses and you don’t even know they’re there.
You say why do I keep thinking this way. You’ve got to get deep down, and all of a sudden you say oh,
that’s why I’m thinking this way, deep down in my inner program I’ve got this
wrong set of rules. So these guys, when
they worked on this doctrine, they realized after a while the Church came to
this awareness, something’s wrong here, we keep going into the wrong room as we
walk down this hallway. So the room,
we’ll call it Monarchianism, that’s the presupposition that had to be exposed
for what it was. It took a long time
and a lot of arguments and a lot of dissatisfaction before Christians started
to deal with the tough issue: I can’t worship Jesus Christ this way, there’s
something wrong with this, the Spirit just doesn’t bear witness that this is
true.
On page 36 let’s go through
what happened. “One version of
Monarchianism, known as Modal Monarchianism, held that all three
persons—Father, Son, and Spirit—were not really separate persons but only
appearances of masks that the solitary God put on Himself to meet man.” So when
God wants to meet man in a certain role, He puts on the Father image; when He
wants to meet man in another role He puts on the Son image; when He wants to
meet man to do something else He puts on the Spirit image. It’s the same person appearing under three
masks. Anybody immediately see a
problem with that? If these are masks
that God puts on, who’s the real God?
If these are masks, they’re not the real revelation of who He is. So now you start to make God
unknowable.
The Father and Son “were not
really separate persons but only appearances of masks that the solitary God put
on Himself to meet man. Sabellius, for
example,” this is another word for Modal Monarchianism, for those church
history buffs, Sabellianism.
“Sabellius, for example, taught that ‘He himself is the Father; he
himself is the Son; he himself is the Spirit—as I say there are three names in
one object….’ God, therefore had three labels, none of which expressed what God
was really like. Man saw Him in
one situation as the Father, in another situation as the Son, and so forth; but
man never saw Him as He really is.
Modal Monarchianism tried to maintain the truth of monotheism,” it was
good that way, it tried to protect monotheism, “but it used a defective
monotheist ‘model’ and thus failed to fit the obvious New Testament data that
speak of the Father and the Son as two distinct persons.”
“As one instance, consider Jesus’ praying in the Garden of
Gethsemane.” Who is He praying to? “Was He talking to Himself in sort of
make-believe monologue put on for” the benefit of His disciples, who by the way
were sleeping as He was praying, “put on for man’s benefit? Modal Monarchianism can’t escape this
conclusion, whether in its ancient form or in a modern form” modern back in the
70’s when they originally wrote this, “(like the Local Church movement of
Witness Lee—see Table 2).” I don’t even know if that’s around any more, but
that was going for a while, these guys were related to Watchman Nee and somehow
incurred a lot of his followers, and he held to Modal Monarchianism, it’s the
same old stuff. “New Testament data
about these two distinct persons had to be taken seriously as telling man
something real concerning the nature of God.”
[Following chart referred to often in coming lessons as “the chart on
page 37.”]
Ancient Heresy
Title Modern Counterpart Error
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Modal Monarchianism “Local
Church of Witness Lee Solitary monotheism: three persons only
masks
of appearance.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dynamic Monarchianism Unitarianism;
old liberal theology; Solitary
monotheism: only the Father
Later
Judaism; Islam is God
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arianism Jehovah’s
Witnesses Pure
ideal called “God” that can only
communicate with
non-ideal world through
an
intermediary being: Son less in essence
than
the Father.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Docetism Extreme
Calvinism Only
the Pure Ideal called “God” is real:
physical
history, including Christ’s humanity, not “real” existence; only an allusion.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nestorianism Neo-orthodoxy God limited by
His creation: Son’s divine nature only
loosely
associated with his human nature.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monophysitism Oriental
claims of “incarnations” God and
Creation are basically one of Krishna; modern liberal/pagan (Monoism): Son’s two natures mixed
theology
together into one nature.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 2. Six ancient Christological
heresies with their modern counterparts listed.
Unbiblical presuppositions about God’s being are
underlined.
So Modal Monarchianism,
which was the first attempt at this thing, that one failed, the Modal
view. It quickly got refuted by the
fact that the New Testament data clearly shows the Lord Jesus talking to the
Father and the Father talking to the Son.
The next one, “When a second
version of Monarchianism arose, it came to be known as ‘Dynamic
Monarchianism.’” Same model deep underneath,
don’t lose the forest for the trees, deep down these guys hold the same idea,
God is a solitary person, and if He’s a solitary person He can’t be the Father
and the Son. But what Dynamic
Monarchianism did is it made the Father God, and that made Christ what? If the Father is God and there are two
distinct people, this guy can’t be God.
So they began to attack and undercut the deity of Christ. Watch how they did it.
“This new version took the
New Testament distinction between the Father and Son seriously, but it failed
to correct the same faulty monotheism of Modal Monarchianism and thus
incorrectly described Christ. Since God
was one in person, the Dynamic Monarchians reasoned, both the Father and the
Son could not be this one person. They
made the Father the real God, leaving the Son as a mere human vessel of an
impersonal divine power. The Dynamic
Monarchian Theodotus taught that Jesus, born of a virgin,” watch this now,
here’s what they did, they accepted the virgin birth, “was a true man, into
whom at His baptism a divine power called Christ entered.” See what they did, they took the baptism of
Christ and they made that the point at which this infusion of divine power came
upon Him, but He was basically no more than a man. “Although this version of
Monarchianism better explained the New Testament data concerning the Father-Son
distinction, it left unexplained the other New Testament data affirming
Christ’s deity, His role in salvation, and His authority to reveal directly
God’s Word.”
“Interestingly, this second
version of Monarchianism corresponds to modern liberal ideas about Jesus.” I quote the Roman Catholic theologian here
because at this point Protestants and Catholics are agreed. This is one area where Rome and Geneva both
got together; we both defend the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ. “The
renowned Roman Catholic Christologist, Karl Adam, has commented: ‘Modern
liberal assessments of Jesus as the great, unique, but purely human means of
divine revelation are remarkably close to this heretical dynamism….’” We read Harry Emerson Fosdick’s quote; what
did he call Jesus? The Master. Any Dynamic Monarchianism could have called
Him the Master. What you want to see is
that there are not many ideas in the world, they keep repeating, it’s the same
old garbage, it just revisits, recycled garbage. All you have to do is go
through the first cycles, don’t go through eight cycles of it, go through one,
get it all over with.
“These two Monarchian,
erroneous attempts to describe Christ, therefore, failed, because of their common starting assumption of a
personal, solitary monotheistic God.” That was their problem; that
was why they had problems trying to explain the New Testament data, they
couldn’t get it together because they had a wrong presupposition about the very
nature of God Himself.
Now we’re going to move on
to the third one. This is the most
famous of all, Arianism. Look at the
chart, today Jehovah’s Witnesses are just another example of Arianism; it’s
about the sixth recycle of this heresy.
Arianism started out with something else. Notice what they did.
Look on the right column. Here’s
where the Greeks came in, if you want to say somebody imported something into
the Church, here’s an import. The
Greeks held to the ideal world, Plato an illustration of what they’re talking
about. Try to draw a perfect
triangle. In plain geometry you get the
compass and you work it out, that’s rules how to create a triangle on a piece
of paper. Can you ever create a perfect
triangle on a piece of paper? No,
because you’ve got the graphite from your pencil, it doesn’t always go in a
straight line, the paper is crooked, if you take the finest drawing of a
triangle and look at it under a magnifying glass it looks horrible. If you try to sketch a triangle it looks
horrible. So can you ever create a
perfect triangle? But we all know what
a triangle is. We all know when it’s not
a triangle, but try to make a real triangle.
You just can’t ever do it. So
here’s what the Greeks said: a real triangle doesn’t exist in the physical
world, it only exists in the unseen mental world. That was the world of the ideal.
So because they wanted to
create this ideal, they had to have the ideal because they realized if you
don’t have an ideal where do your categories go, where does your logic go? You’ve got to have an absolute. So they conceived of an absolute as a
principle, like the ideal triangle, like the ideal circle. There was this realm of ideal ideas. That was what the Greeks fastened on because
they truly recognized something; if you don’t have something like that you’re
in trouble real fast. This is what
happens in our society today. We don’t
have any concept of what right and wrong is.
And Plato would have agreed. We
disagree with Plato on the [can’t understand word/s], but he would have agreed
with us, you cannot have a society of unified nature without an ideal over it
to which everybody is committed.
Otherwise you just have [can’t understand word/s] moving against each
other, political parties struggling with one another, but you don’t have any
common ground.
So they were right in seeing
a need for this thing. The problem they
saw was that in this world you don’t ever have an ideal, you can’t get
there. So they separated the ideal from
this world. On the right column under Arianism, the “Pure ideal,” now here’s
what happened, here’s the import happening, see if you catch it. They took this Greek bifurcation between the
ideal and this world and it looked so great, it seemed to explain things so
nicely, and they said gee, this is a great tool for studying the Bible. So they
started doing this, they moved over here and said now we’re going to re-label
it. So they put a Christian vocabulary
on it. They said let’s do away with
this and call this God. What happens
when you do something like that? This
is a fatal error. What’s the content of
G-o-d? It’s this pre-understanding of
the Greeks; in other words, all they have done is re-label their own thought
pattern by attaching G-o-d to it. What
has happened to the content of the meaning of the word “God?” It’s no longer Biblical, you can talk God
but the content of the object of the word “God” now is this ideal world that
you’ve gotten from Greek philosophers.
It’s not the Biblical God.
So they misidentified God
and once they did that they were in trouble again, because where did Jesus walk
and talk? In this world or the ideal
world? This world. Oh-oh, now if I’m a Greek and I don’t
believe that you can ever get the ideal in this world, what happens to the
nature of the Lord Jesus Christ? Can he
be God? He can’t be God; He could be
close to God. There are better triangles
and then there are crude triangles, and He was a pretty good triangle, but He
wasn’t the ideal triangle because the ideal triangle doesn’t exist in this
world. So see what happens, here we go,
we thought we had this nice cool idea and it seemed to solve everything, we
imported its warped theology, baptized it with a Christian vocabulary, and then
like a landmine we walk on it and it blows up and blows our legs off. The Church has done this again and
again. You can’t be too picky-uny about
importing this crud in. That’s why Paul said “Beware of” what in Col. 2:8,
“Beware of philosophy and vain deceit.”
Paul knew this. He had studied
under the top people of his day. Paul
knew Aristotle, Paul probably read it when he was eleven, he didn’t have TV,
had to have something else to do. He
could read Plato and Aristotle when he was a kid. He’s clued in to this kind of thing.
Now we come on page 37 to
Arianism. The question now, whereas
before it was number one, is the Father distinct from the Son, now we come to
the second issue. We know the Father is
distinct from the Son, we’ve solved that, but what we want to do now is how and
in what way is the Son subordinate to the Father. Clearly Jesus obeys the Father.
The New Testament says everything the Father says I do.
Now that we’ve distinguished
the two, how are we going to handle this subordination without making the
subordination an inferiority? By the
way, watch carefully what’s happening here, because when we get done with this
you’re going say it’s all heavy theory.
We’re going to show you something.
Modern feminism is dealing with this problem. There’s a Biblical role of women, in the Scripture they’re
supposed to be subordinate, etc. etc. is taken to be as affront because it
makes women less than men in essence.
If that argument holds, let’s move that argument over to the Father and
Son and see what happens. If
subordination of the Son to the Father means subordination of essence, like
they’re saying, then Jesus can’t be fully God.
So the Trinity, they can’t
work the Trinity, and I was reminded of this back many years ago when feminism
first came out, I wanted to read what a Christian feminist had to say. I forgot who the lady was, a very famous
lady, evangelical woman who had written this book, and I quickly looked at the
index, because I wanted to see where is this lady going to deal with the
Trinity, I want to se because I know she’s going to have a problem and I want
to see how she handles it. Sure enough,
I check the index and she’s got a reference to the Trinity. Would you believe… she’s having a problem
with the doctrine of the Trinity; of course she is, because she’s got the
concept of subordination to be one always of essence, and she was saying I’m
really struggling with this doctrine, we’ve got to rethink this one. Yea, sure,
it’s only the hub of the Christian faith, go ahead, rethink it, why don’t you
shake up the foundations too. It’s all
interconnected; this is not theory.
Let’s look at some of these
passages, because ultimately the doctrine has to fit the text. You can come up with all kinds of doctrine,
but does it fit what God has told us in His Word. [blank spot: notes say,
“Christ’s Subordination to the Father is Note One of Essence. New Testament
references such as Matt. 19:17; Mark 13:21; Luke 18:19; John 14:28; 1 Cor.
11:3; 15:28, as well as Paul’s use of the term God (theos) ] …when he
talks about the Father, and kurios,
or Lord when he talks about the Son.” Why does he use different titles? Why
doesn’t he use “God” for both? We’ve
just showed some passages, Titus 2:13 was one of them where he does that, but
generally he doesn’t. That pattern
“argues for some sort of subordination of the Son to the Father. Other New Testament data discussed earlier
in this chapter, however, equally demands full deity for the Son.” Remember, we saw dual streams of
revelation.
On page 38 we want to look
at Arianism because this was a very, very serious, serious heresy n church
history. “The Arian heresy, the most
popular answer to the dilemma, dominated the Church for a limited period.” It actually was the majority view, by the
way. The Arians won the day in
America. If you had taken a vote,
Arians would have won. “Arians taught
that Christ’s subordination to the Father was a subordination of essence. Christ was made of like substance (Greek: homoiousion) as the Father but not the
same substance (homoousion) as
the Father.” Notice these two Greek
words; what do you notice in those two Greek words that’s different? They look almost alike except for one
letter, the little letter “i”. In the Greek that’s called an iota. Did you ever heat the expression, it doesn’t
matter one iota. Do you know where that
came from? The Arian controversy. Now you see these things that have slipped
into our language. What did we say when
we talked about the Dark Ages? We all
use the term Dark Ages. Who invented
that term? The liberals, that was the
enlightenment people, the “enlightenment” people, there was no light on in the
Middle Ages, they only preached the gospel, that’s all, Dark Ages. And we have the “enlightenment” when we go
back to Aristotle and all the pagans, we call that an enlightenment, that’s an
advance. We’ve learned this in our
history courses.
Here’s another jewel, “it
doesn’t matter one iota.” Do you know
who started that? It was Gibbon, The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, and he had some little snotty footnote
in this history book, he says ha-ha, the Christians fighting about one
iota. So that expression, “it doesn’t
matter one iota” is absolutely wrong. A
lot does matter on one iota, and we’re going to see, one iota makes a big
difference here, it’s whether Jesus is God or not. So let’s look. Follow the discussion.
“The Arians, however, like
the Monarchians before them, had imported an outside, unbiblical idea of God
into the discussion. They relied upon
Platonism in which ‘God’ was the name for pure essence, above and separate from
the world. In Platonic tradition this
one ‘God’ could communicate with the world only through some intermediary being,
a half-god/half-man, called the logos (unfortunately, the very word used in
John 1 to describe Christ). When Arians
borrowed this Platonic concept of God” underline that, notice who’s doing the
borrowing and who’s doing the importing.
It’s not the orthodox Christians that are doing it, it’s the heresies
that are doing it, it’s precisely opposite of what you learn in history
class. It’s the heretics that are
importing this stuff into the church.
So they imported the “Platonic concept of God and used the intermediary
being idea to solve the subordination dilemma,” making Jesus Christ a semi-God,
semi-man, “they naturally identified Christ the Son as this intermediary being,
making Him ‘divine,’ but not in the true Biblical sense.”
“By ignoring the New Testament
data supporting Christ’s full deity and, therefore, His role in revelation and
salvation, Arians were led” now watch this.
Remember I said when you import a Trojan horse at night, what comes out
of the horse? Trojans. Watch what happens, the Arians imported this
stuff, now watch the payback, here come the Trojans out of the horse. “Arians were led by their error into a
serious problem. They so separated God
the Father in the Ideal world from God the Son” by the way, think how close
this comes in our thought patterns, haven’t you had this thought many times in
your Christian life, well, God really isn’t here, He doesn’t walk around the
crud I walk around in, it’s very nice to have these promises, but boy He isn’t
here to see this mess. See how easy it
is to slip into this stuff. “They so
separated God the Father in the Ideal world form God the Son Who spoke in this
world that neither the Son nor mankind who listened to Him could really ‘know’
God.” Now drop down to the quote.
I’m quoting the guy, this is
Arius. “God Himself, then, in His own
nature, in effable, unknowable by all men.
Equal of like Himself He alone has none, or one in glory…. The Unbegun”
look at this, “the Unbegun,” that means He’s the eternal one, “made the Son a
beginning of things originated; and advanced Him as a Son to Himself by
adoption.” What does that sound like? That God the Father created the Son. “He has nothing proper to God in substance.” Look at that one, that’s talking about the
Son. The Son “has nothing proper to God
in substance. For He is not equal, no,
nor one in essence with Him…. God is ineffable, unknowable, to His Son.” …to HIS SON, see where they were
driven, “For He is to Himself what He is, that is, unspeakable. So that nothing which is called
comprehensible does the Son know to speak about; for it is impossible for Him
to investigate the Father, Who is by Himself.
For the Son does not know His own essence, for being Son, He really
existed, at the will of the Father.”
There’s so much language to carry through this stuff. This is hard stuff; you have to read this
over 20 times before it clicks.
Follow with me the next
paragraph. “Denial of Christ’s full deity had to lead the Arians into a morass in
which God is unknowable, in which revelation about Him is only historically
relative, and in which salvation is impossible from the Son. The anti-Arians,” now watch what happens,
these are the guys that were the minority crowd, they had to get up and they
had to argue their way out of the box, and I mean there was some stuff, because
remember the Arians won, they won the vote, so the orthodox guys were the small
party here. But here’s what they did to
win the day. Watch their argument. This finally the Church, the Holy Spirit
bore witness that this was Scriptural reasoning. “The anti-Arians who insisted on the sharp Creator/creature
distinction without any such ‘intermediary’ being, asked why Jesus Christ was
being worshipped if He were not full deity: ‘Who said to them that, having
abandoned the worship of the created universe they should proceed again to
worship something created and made?’”
Do you see the argument?
I’ve shown this 150
times. What does it all boil down
to? The Creator/ creature
distinction. You’ve got to have that
distinction. This is where the
anti-Arians hung them up, they said okay guys, if you want to be so smart, if
you want to make Jesus Christ less than God on the Creator/creature
distinction, that makes Jesus Christ on this side, not that side; now we accuse
you of blasphemy, because you’re saying that I am supposed to worship Jesus
Christ. Jesus Christ can’t be the Creator, therefore He must be a creature, if
He’s a creature, I’m worshiping a creature.
How do you defeat that logic?
What is that logic coming up in tension against? Do you feel the tension coming up? Something’s wrong here, and what is wrong is
that substrata, that presupposition that came in, that “Ideal,” they mislabeled
the Ideal and called it God. They didn’t inform themselves from the Scripture;
they informed themselves from Plato and Aristotle.
So, here’s the argument,
they kept on pressing the point. “They
furthered argued that if the semi-divine Logos/Christ were not fully God, he
had to be mutable.” What does mutable mean? He was changing. Like we all are, we’re in a world of flux;
He changes. So here’s one of their
arguments, “‘How can he who beholds the mutable” the changing “think that he is
beholding the immutable’” the unchanging.
In other words, how do you see God’s face looking at Jesus? If Jesus is a creature and He’s subject to
this world and He’s changing all the time and I go to worship Him, I can’t be
worshiping God then, can I? I’m looking
at the wrong object, because you’ve turned Christ into a Creature. Now you’re making me worship a creature and
telling me I can see God’s face in the creature. Impossible!
Then they had a third
argument. “The anti-Arians, led by
Athanasius,” there’s the hero; he was the guy that stood up and took the
heat. Athanasius got up, he was a
deacon in Alexandria, and his famous saying was, here’s another key sentence,
“if Jesus be not God, then Christians are not saved.” Why? What’s eternal life?
To know Him. If Jesus isn’t God we
don’t know God. We don’t have eternal
life then. See, that’s the same thing,
the Jehovah Witnesses still have a problem with that. “[Karl Adams summarizes the debate:] ‘The dogmatic result of the
Arian disputes could be summarized thus: Christ is not a god of secondary
order…. He is God Himself…. This was the basis of the formulation ‘God-man’….
What Christ does, thinks, utters, works, has absolute validity. [All Christianity is thereby exalted above the mere
human and historical condition.]”
The next quote comes out of
the Nicene Creed. Here’s the original
version of the Nicene Creed, not the one that we have in the hymn book is
somewhat edited, what did we notice when we looked at it? Look at the original
version. Keep in mind, Athanasius is
going at it with Arius and they’re fighting, they’re arguing and they’re voting
in Church Councils and they’re maneuvering for positions, they’ve got their
spin doctors out, and they’re going through all this argument. And finally the Church says you know, the
Spirit within us testifies that Athanasius must be right. If Jesus Christ is not God we know not God,
we are not saved, so therefore they said we’ve got to go back to the Apostle’s
Creed and fix it up so this doesn’t happen again. We’ve had too much church
discord over this point. So to get the
unity of the faith, they went back and they modified the creed. They said we’re going to rework this
thing. We read it before we went
through this history, now read this Nicene Creed and see if it doesn’t make
sense to you.
“We believe in God, the
Father Almighty, Creator of all things visible and invisible;” why’d they put
that in there? Because the intermediary
beings, the invisible angels. God is
the Creator of all things; what does that sentence doing to the
Creator/creature distinction?
Strengthening it. “We believe in
God, the Father Almighty, Creator of ALL things, visible and invisible.” That wasn’t in the Apostle’s Creed. There was a hole in there; the Arians could
say oh yea, I believe in God the Father.
They recited the Apostle’s Creed; the Creed didn’t filter them out. So the Church made the mesh on the filter a
little finer. Now we’re going to strain
out the Arians. “…Creator of all things
visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, only
begotten of the Father,” now look, “that is,
of the substance of the Father, God of God, begotten, not made, being of the
same substance with the Father…. [Emphasis supplied.]” See all that vocabulary packed into that
creed, we don’t even recite the creed any more in our churches. What a sad day.
“In this creed the Church
used every vocabulary word it could find to deny the Arian heresy that Jesus’
subordination to the Father was one of essence. The Son was of the same essence (homoousion)
as the Father’ He was not merely of like essence (homoiousion).” The iota did make a difference.
I hope this gives you a
flavor for the fact of how to appreciate that a lot of godly men and women had
to pray this thing through, had to argue this thing through, had to go back to Scripture
and think this thing through until we could get it straight. Without Christ’s doctrine pure we cannot
preach a pure gospel. The whole issue
of salvation is contingent on Christ being who He is.
--------------------------------
We covered a lot of stuff
tonight, there are a lot of ramifications and it’s difficult material, and it
is deep, because it’s God that we’re talking about here.
Question asked: Clough
answers: The hypostatic union doctrine can be summarized in a set of phrases
and each one of these phrases deal with one of these errors. That’s why I’m going to go through all these
errors so you can see that it wasn’t just somebody [can’t understand word/s]
fire and language. In many ways the
guys that did the creeds were the precursors of lawyers. They’re the theological criminal lawyers,
they wrote this to try to be as tight as they possibly could. You can never write a perfect creed because
somebody can always, what I call rubberize it, like we’ve done the
Constitution. I sometimes wish the
Christian bookstore would have the first liberal edition of the Scripture, made
of rubber and you could stretch it any way you wanted.
The doctrine of the
hypostatic union is that Jesus Christ is undiminished deity, because what they
were doing, the Arians, they were trying to diminish the deity, undiminished deity and true humanity, the
next heresy is Docetism, and Docetism held that Jesus’ humanity was a fantasy,
it was just a phantom thing, it was an appearance, He wasn’t really there physically. They elevated Him so much that they lost the
humanity. Now we don’t have any
atonement. So He is undiminished
deity, He is true humanity, then there’s another heresy coming up where His
deity and His humanity got mixed together, and now you have this half-breed
created creature kind of thing.
So it is undiminished deity
and true humanity united in one person without confusion, and that “without
confusion” is to knock off another heresy that came up where they were mixing
them together. Undiminished deity and
true humanity united in one person without mixture. Now how do you get these two, it’s hard, you can’t logically
synthesize all this to your own satisfaction, but you have to have all these
elements because if you don’t have the elements then you go drifting off into
the wild blue. So you have to have
undiminished deity, true humanity, united in one person, without mixture,
forever. So it’s not a temporary thing
during the period of the incarnation on earth, and then somehow He loses His
humanity when He rises from the dead and ascends into heaven. He has His human body today, bones,
fingernails, etc. It is united forever.
So every one of those
phrases is a hard fought for phrase, and is very, very important to have. I hope that as we go through this, another
thing, if you haven’t ever been exposed to this, that this will help you
realize that theology is like a sweater, and you start untangling something and
it quickly unravels in strange places.
You’d never think, for example, that Docetism, by denying the full
humanity of Christ all of a sudden does away with the cross, then the whole
doctrine of salvation goes out the window.
You’re dealing here with a fundamental thing and you tamper with the
foundation and the whole building rocks.
That’s why it was good that the Church spent 400-500 years getting it
straight. Thankfully we haven’t had to
rethink this. If you look at that
chart, the liberals are trying to redo it, because all they’re doing is
revisiting Dynamic Monarchianism all over again, that’s all it is, the same
thing, and they’ve got the same problem, an unknowable God. That’s why they give book reviews on Sunday
morning instead of the Bible, because they haven’t got anything else to
do. You can’t talk about God, we don’t
know Him, all we know is the Bible isn’t right, we know that for sure.
Question asked: Clough
replies: The story of Islam, I’m not
intimately familiar with all the details myself, but true Muslims don’t deify
Mohammed. They keep him human. There are all kinds of problems in the
origin of Islam. One story that I want
to check out before I get into a part of the series is the strange fact that
Allah, the name “Allah” is apparently associated with a lunar deity in the time
of Mohammed. And the theory is that what you have here is a monotheistic
warping of an original pagan god. And a
strange convolution, Mohammed knew a lot of Jews and he knew Christians, and he
wasn’t out in the desert eating sand, this guy knew a lot of stuff, he had
intercourse with people who really knew.
He was exposed to a lot. When
you have Allah, apparently a lunar deity by derivation, it is interesting, what
is the emblem of Islam? The
crescent. Think about it. They don’t have a red cross; what is their
[can’t understand word] agency. The red
crescent. You look on Islamic country’s
flags and what do you see? The crescent. So it’s interesting.
The reason why I mention
this is simply because when I was in Dallas I was talking to Dave Hunt, you’ve
probably heard of his books, very anti-Roman Catholic, but Dave was talking to
me and said it’s kind of interesting that the lunar effect, the lunar deity was
also the deity of Babylon, and if that’s so, it’s a short step to think about a
synthesis somehow whereby perhaps Islam is preparing the way for the beast by
emanating from the Middle East, being embedded in some sort of lunar deity
worship, and being quite aggressive.
I’m not sure I buy that, I’m not refuting Dave, I’m just not well read
enough to say.
But here’s the point that I
get from the people who are experienced with Islam. I went to seminary with a guy who’s president of a mission to
Islam, he lives in Egypt, and you talk about a mission field that’s hard to
roll, you talk about trying to be a missionary to Islam, holy mackerel. He says that it’s very clear that Islam has
two characteristics, that if you live in an Islamic country you’ll see. One is an extreme authority, a total
destruction of secularism. He says
every day on the street people will talk about Allah this or Allah that, they
don’t conceive of society in a secular tone like the western person. In that they’re more Biblical actually,
because they haven’t made that fatal neutrality argument. There’s no neutrality
in Islam.
The other thing, however,
with Islam that is odd, he says is that’s very, and he doesn’t mean this in the
sense that the Islamic people are necessarily unloving ethically, because the
wives love their husbands, the husbands love their wives, but in the theology
of Islam there is very little by way of an absolute love and compassion. He believes, and I believe, that that is the
result of the fact that they don’t have a Trinity, that their god finally in
the last analysis has to create something outside of himself to have an object
for his love, and that prior to creation that was not his essence; his essence
wasn’t, so to speak, active that way.
That carries over, because of the lack of love, in the god himself, into
the redemptive problem.
Now we have a situation where
in Islam you work, it’s a salvation by works scheme, your good works out [can’t
understand word] your bad works. Well,
if you’re going to be saved by works, then what does that do to God’s grace? There is no grace if it’s full of works,
Paul tells us this. Well if there’s no
grace, then that in turn undercuts the whole attribute of love, because grace
in Christian theology is an emanation of God’s love after the fall in the
presence of sin. Grace is love in a
sinful world. So there’s nothing like
that in Islam. This is why when you see
the fierceness of Islam, the holy war nature, the judgmental part of it—ideas
have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. And you can’t fight the fruit without
dealing with the root. And he says
that’s the problem. He says in his
experience he has never, ever won a Muslim to Christ by arguing with him. What stimulates the Muslims, makes them
question their own faith, is the presence of grace in the lives of
Christians. They see that and it shocks
them. It shocks them because it’s
something unknown in their whole system.
So it becomes a weapon actually, a weapon with them. That’s the Islam story as far as I can push
it right now.
We’ll meet next week. Keep working through these things and I’ll
think you see that history repeats itself, there’s only four or five basic
ideas that keep coming up in new form, but same person, different coat,
different hat but it’s the same person.