The Liberal Perspective on Jesus’s Divinity Is Wrong

The divinity of Christ is one of the core components of the Christian faith, a point of contention for atheists, and a question of millennia-spanning history.

For many in the faith, the question is never asked. Jesus is God. That’s it.

For me, that’s also the end of the matter.

Some are not persuaded.

The core tenets of non-denominational Christianity, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity usually have some variation of the following statement:

We believe that Jesus Christ is God, the second person of the Trinity, uncreated and eternal with the Father.

All right. That’s an amazing start to understanding God in corporeal form.

Polycarp (who studied under John) stated in his letter to the Philippians that we must stand before God and recount our lives, calling Jesus both Lord and God Himself (1).

The reason this is important is that Polycarp is one of the closest ties from the church fathers to the original practitioners and disseminators of Christianity. If he’s calling Jesus God, then you know that theology is sound.

Tertullian (who I’m not always a fan of) said this about Jesus’s nature (2):

“At all events, he who represented the flesh of Christ to be imaginary was equally able to pass off His nativity as a phantom; so that the virgin’s conception, and pregnancy, and child-bearing, and then the whole course of her infant too, would have to be regarded as putative. These facts pertaining to the nativity of Christ would escape the notice of the same eyes and the same senses as failed to grasp the full idea of His flesh.”

He’s contrasting the divine nature of Christ with the understanding about Jesus’s nature as He is equally flesh.

He spoke out against the Gnostic heresy that Jesus was purely spirit—the heretical teachings of a group so eccentric in their viewpoints that they might as well not be called a sect of Christianity.

I find Gnosticism interesting as a religious belief, and sometimes I study it, but far be it from me to entertain their ideas as serious doctrine.

Ironically, the Gnostics believed almost a super-inflated ideology about Jesus.

Early Church Fathers had a distinct and uniform theology on God most times.

Heretics like Marcion and the previously mentioned Gnostics span the gamut of all manner of wild ideas about Jesus Christ, the application of the Law of Moses, and even denying the resurrection of the dead.

Any belief today that transgresses this understanding is heretical and should be thrown out without looking back.

There is only one single verse we need to put the idea of Jesus not being God to rest. I recognize this is an appeal to biblical authority, but I am not in a formal debate here—plus, theological assertions should be backed up with Scripture.

There are many more verses than this one to rest the case of Jesus being God.

But it tells us a few things.

“Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am’” (John 8:58 [ESV]).

Jesus Himself said this. That He is the Self-Existent One who created all things. He is referring to Moses at the burning bush. God speaks one of His names to Moses, which means He is self-existing, putting to rest the infinite regression of the First Cause debate.

“God said to Moses, ‘ I AM WHO I AM.’ And He said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” Exodus 3:14 [ESV]).

God simply is. There is no need for a time before God, because God created time itself, so the concept of before is like asking, “What is a square circle?” Freemasonic references aside, God alone just is.

This means when Jesus claims to be ‘I AM,’ He’s saying He’s always existed, truly eternal—encompassing the whole meaning of the word.

The debate shouldn’t even be raging on whether or not Jesus thought He was God. He claimed it all the time, and this is one of the overt examples of the notion.

Notice they picked up stones because they considered what He was saying blasphemous in the following verse.

“‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty’” (Revelation 1:8 [ESV]).

In Revelation, the resurrected and glorified Jesus says He is, was, and is to come. That encompasses all the parameters of time and goes beyond time.

Only God is the first and the last, as He states in Isaiah 44.

To claim this about Himself, Jesus is saying He is God Almighty.

Don’t listen to scholars on the liberal side who say Jesus never claimed to be God. He claimed to be God everywhere throughout the Four Gospels and in Revelation.

The Early Church Fathers knew this. Paul knew this. God Himself provided the evidence in the authorship of the Bible, a story so consistent over thousands of years by many authors and an overarching author through them.

Jesus is the Yahweh of the Tanakh in human form. He will always be and has always been.

Don’t fall for the liberal bible scholarship that also thinks setting Daniel in the late B.C. time is a responsible idea, even though by doing that they still prove the divine authorship of Scripture, because Daniel predicts Jesus coming in the first century and the destruction of the Second Temple generations before it occurred no matter where they date it.

If they’re that dense, then they’ll sink under the weight of biblical truth.

Yeshua is Yahweh and the Son of Yahweh. Any son God has will be equally God.

Shalom.