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The Centrality of Christ Lecture Notes & Resource Materials The Centrality of Christ Lecture Notes & Resource Materials March 2, 3013 Session One – Dr. Michael Haykin [audio/video available] Q - What challenges did the early church face in communicating the gospel to their world and culture? “Alexamenos Worships His God” The early church speaks about Christ in their world and culture. Dr. Michael Haykin It is not every day that the New York Times best-seller list contains a book that deals with the history of the Christianity in the Roman Empire, the relationship of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, and the conniving of the Roman emperor Constantine (r.306– 337). Dan Brown’s monumental best-seller The Da Vinci Code—which had sold 80 million copies as of four years ago, has been translated into more than 40 languages, and was also made into a movie (though the movie hardly matched the success of the book)—is the book to which I am referring. A high-speed murder mystery, The Da Vinci Code is also a perfect example of postmodern historical revisionism in which an art historian, hero Robert Langdon, discovers that contemporary expressions of Christianity have no sound historical basis.1 For instance, according to Brown’s novel, it was not until the reign of the early fourth- century Roman emperor Constantine that the Bible, in particular the New Testament, was collated. Again, Brown’s novel depicts Constantine as the one who had the New Testament as we know it drawn up in order to suppress alternative perspectives on Jesus.2 The novel also makes the claim that it was not until the early fourth-century Council of Nicæa (325) that Jesus Christ was regarded as anything other than a human prophet. It was at this council, which was astutely manipulated by the power-hungry Constantine for his own ends, that Jesus was “turned…into a deity” and for the first time 1 Gene Edward Veith, “The Da Vinci phenomenon”, World, 21, no.20 (May 20, 2006), 20–21. The edition of the Da Vinci Code used in this talk is The Da Vinci Code (New York: Anchor Books, 2006). 2 Da Vinci Code, 231–232. 1 became an object of worship.3 Moreover, the novel asserts, both of these events took place in order to conceal the fact that Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalene,4 had a child by her,5 and that he intended that Mary be the founder of the church.6 Key Christian teachings are thus the result of a power move by Constantine and other males in order to squash women. As Brown has one of his characters say, “It was all about power.”7 What Brown’s book reveals is the difficulty modern men and women have in regarding Jesus as anything other than a prophet or good moral teacher. Of course, this is not something new: throughout the history of the last two thousand years, Christ’s divine status has been a challenge to human reason. But without the deity of Christ, as American scholar Douglas McCready has argued, “every distinctive Christian belief would have to be discarded” and the Christian faith itself would become, at best trivial, and at worst, utterly irrelevant.8 So, let us look at some of the evidence in the early Church, stretching up to the time of Constantine, for the conviction that Jesus Christ is indeed fully God. I want to consider both Christian witness and pagan. Some New Testament evidence Apart from James’ letter, the earliest New Testament documents are the letters of the Apostle Paul. A number of these letters plainly speak of Christ’s divine pre-existence.9 For instance, there is Colossians 1:15–16, which maintains that Christ is “the image of the invisible God.”10 In other words, Christ perfectly represents God. This text goes on to say that Christ created the entire universe: “by him all things were created, in heaven 3 Da Vinci Code, 233–235. 4 Da Vinci Code, 244–247. 5 Da Vinci Code, 255–256. 6 Da Vinci Code, 248–249, 254. 7 Da Vinci Code, 233. A goodly number of book-length responses have been made to these claims. Here are some of the best, in terms of their critique of The Da Vinci Code: Darrell L. Bock, Breaking the Da Vinci Code: answering the questions everybody’s asking (Nashville: Nelson, 2004); Stephen Clark, The Da Vinci Code on Trial: Filtering fact from fiction (Bryntirion, Bridgend: Bryntirion Press, 2005); Bart D. Ehrman, Truth And Fiction in The Da Vinci Code. A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Erwin W. Lutzer, The Da Vinci Deception (Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House, 2006); Garry Williams, The Da Vinci Code: from Dan Brown’s fiction to Mary Magdalene’s faith (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2006). 8 He Came Down From Heaven: The Preexistence of Christ and the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press/Leicester, England: Apollos, 2005), 317. 9 He Came Down From Heaven, 70–104. 10 Text from the Scriptures is taken from the ESV unless otherwise indicated. 2 and on earth, visible and invisible,” they were “created through him and for him.” Being thus the creator of all things, Christ cannot be included in the created order.11 Following these claims, there is also the assertion in Colossians 1:19 that in Christ dwelt “all the fullness of God,” an assertion that is repeated in Colossians 2:9 (“In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”). As the American scholar Douglas McCready notes of these two latter verses, they declare “about as clearly as can be said that Jesus is God without confusing God the Father and the Son.”12 Paul also affirms Christ’s creatorship in 1 Corinthians 8:5–6—“there is…one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”13—and his deity in Romans 9:5 where Christ is described as “God over all, blessed forever.”14 With regard to this second Pauline text, the third-century Christian exegete Origen (c.185–254) rightly noted: “It is clear from this passage that Christ is the God who is over all.”15 There is also the much-discussed hymn to Christ in Philippians 2:5–11, which clearly presupposes Christ’s pre-existence.16 While the hymn is focused on the example of Christ’s humility and self-sacrifice, it does make two significant ontological statements about the Lord Jesus. First, he “was in the form of God” (2:6). While there are sharp disagreements among New Testament scholars about the exact meaning of this phrase, the most consistent interpretation of this statement in the context of the hymn is that it is a declaration of Christ’s enjoyment of the status or nature of God himself.17 Then, the hymn goes on to assert that, prior to his descent to the earth during the incarnation, Christ possessed “equality with God” (2:6). It was naturally his and he willingly gave it up when he took on human existence. Other New Testament texts that strongly assert the divinity of Christ would include Matthew 11:27, Hebrews 1:1–8, and a significant amount of material in the writings of the Apostle John. Consider the latter. At the very opening of the Gospel of John, for instance, John 1:1 and 1:14 speak unequivocally of Christ as a divine being: as the Word he “was with God” and “was God (theos)” but he “became flesh and dwelt” in this world. In verse 1 it needs to be noted that the term for God, theos, does not have the definite article. As McCready points out, this syntactical construction serves to make the point that while the Word is equal with God—what God the Father is in terms of divine attributes the Word is—he is not identical with God. John thus emphasizes Jesus’ deity 11 He Came Down From Heaven, 81–82. 12 He Came Down From Heaven, 82. 13 See McCready’s discussion in He Came Down From Heaven, 86–87. 14 See also McCready, He Came Down From Heaven, 91–92. 15 Cited McCready, He Came Down From Heaven, 92. 16 For extensive discussion, see McCready, He Came Down From Heaven, 73–80. 17 McCready, He Came Down From Heaven, 76–78. 3 without committing the error of what would later be called modalism, which removes the distinctions between the persons of the Godhead.18 In light of these statements about Christ’s deity in the opening chapter of John’s Gospel, the statement by Jesus in John 10:30 that he and “the Father are one” is probably to be read as being more than simply an assertion of his union with the Father in thought and intent. In light of the gospel context it seems to affirm a union of being between the Father and the Son.19 Some of Jesus’ hearers, who radically disagreed with him, certainly understood it this way, for we are told in John 10:31–33 that they accused him of the blasphemy of making himself God. Yet another Johannine text that is affirmative of the deity of Christ is 1 John 5:20, where Jesus is described as “the true God and eternal life.” To be sure, there are difficulties with the grammatical construction of the sentence in relation to what precedes it. And while the import of the text is soteriological in intent—we can know God, “him who is true,” because of the revelatory work of his Son, who “has given us understanding” of God—yet, as the Scottish New Testament scholar I.
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