Crucified God

On the Trinities podcast, we have been looking at various efforts to explain how one who is "fully God" could die, if God is immortal.

It's a bit of a head-scratcher, but I had a go at playing "devil's advocate" and wrote to both the show host and the PhD student advocating a new form of social Trinitarianism to try and assess the strengths of this approach.

Here then I posit the following impossible triad (all cannot be true) and how I think a Trinitarian should answer. These alternatives are inspired by Jurgen Moltmann's distinction that it is not as accurate to say death of God as death in God (The Crucified God) and McIntosh's intrinsic/group persons. If I were a fourth century or later trinitarian, I would also want to distinguish between person and being, or intrinsic and group persons. I would say that the Triune God is a being (or group person) and that Jesus Christ is not a being (or a group person); Jesus Christ is an intrinsic person.

Definitions:
God = one (group) being; God = three fully divine intrinsic persons, F S & HS
Immortal = "never dying"

1) God is essentially immortal
2) No fully divine person has ever died
2) Jesus is fully divine

As I mentioned in my comment, I think the way forward for a capital T Trinitarian might first be to deny the wording as accurate because Jesus Christ is an intrinsic person, not a being (i.e. human-divine person, not a human being), to substitute the word person for being, then deny 2. Now they can take refuge in the person/being distinction and propulse a possible further distinction that might follow from Moltmann's thought, that God experienced death within him.

Alternatively, if we took a McIntosh Group Person social Trinity, this scenario could invite the comparison with a closely knit family losing a treasured member. The functional group person experiences the death of an intrinsic person. Here, it is the group person who is essentially immortal, and the intrinsic person Logos incarnandus (Barth) who is not.

Who wrote Revelation?

The standard response to the question of "Who wrote Revelation?" has been for many centuries (including the 2nd century): John, the apostle, the son of Zebedee. But are we sure of that?

There is a good paper just released on this exact topic written by Hugo Cotro here, in the DavarLogos Spanish theological journal; the article is entitled  Could the Author of Revelation step forward please?

I realised that my research (on this blog, although unfinished) on arche, which has bored most readers of this blog, might actually be of some relevance here, along with a very surprising discovery I made today about John's [otherwise] non-usage of Sophia.

I decided to write to Mr Cotro:

Dear Mr. Cotro.
I hope you don't mind my contacting you following your interesting article on the authorship of Revelation. I enjoyed reading your piece which I found summarised some of the arguments well, encouraging both positions to remain more open than perhaps has been the case. In particular I was impacted by the lack of evidence of an early Johannine circle. 
I wanted to submit to you two small grammatical arguments against same-author-as-fourth-gospel, which I suspect is maybe your preference. It may seem small, but they constitute two small linguistic stones on the it's-not-John-son-of-Zebedee camp (assuming the gospel is indeed that guy) and I don't know if you had them in view:
Firstly, John's gospels and the epistles [bearing his name] apply the anarthrous-yet-definite ARCHE in its many forms. John is the greatest New Testament advocate of this construction, which is also, of course, the LXX method in Genesis 1:1 and elsewhere. However, there are two authors who do not seem  to accept this usage. The main one is Hebrews, unless he is quoting the LXX, which he tends to do very faithfully. The second one is the author of Revelation.
My second linguistic stone is Sophia. I was stunned to discover not only that Logos is related to Sophia (which in itself is not a shocking discovery of course), but that John *never* (unless I am mistaken) uses Sophia... except guess where?
I hear your point about assistance from Ephesus, which is speculative and possible.
Thanks,
John

God becoming flesh and the NO MIXING clause (i)

John 1:14 was taught to me in Bible school as the verse to shut up all heretics. It's so simple! The word - God - became flesh. This is the full incarnation, and anything else isn't worth wasting your time on.

At some point we will look in a bit more on this blog into some of the detail of John 1:1, which is a foundation for this view I was taught. That said, before we look at 1:14 now, it is perhaps important first to remember that we have two strange (for us) article-free nouns in that opening verse in 1:1.

The first strange article-free noun only appears once, in the word "beginning". Literally, it says: IN BEGINNING. The "rules", or perhaps it is more "principles", in Greek grammar that "govern" how these articles function are complex and - to this day - incomplete. So it is indeed curious to find in the first two words of John's gospel: IN BEGINNING. Could this mean "a" beginning? Some think so. Even within this same gospel, Jesus uses the word beginning to refer to the beginning of his earthly life and ministry. What these interpretations seem to fail to integrate, however, is that the LXX (Greek translation of the Old Testament) uses the same language in Genesis 1:1: IN BEGINNING. The second strange article-free noun is Theos, God. Theos + article occurs twice with the definite article, and once, probably the most crucial of the three, without. This is John 1:1c - THE GOD WAS THE WORD. This whole state of affairs was left out of my teaching at Bible school  (admittedly, this was an entry-level one-year theology course).

But right now where my focus is on the word becoming flesh - verse 14. Sometimes it is worthwhile entering as fully as possible into orthodox (ecumenical councils) belief systems to see if there are hidden issues that we should be aware of. I cannot help but thinking there are. One of the key notions in the minds of those voting the wording of the Chalcedonian creed concerning the two natures of Christ (fully man, fully God), was that there was NO MIXING. One person, of two natures, now indivisible in the "hypostatic union", but NO MIXING. Why? I never really got that bit, but I think I do now have an idea. One of the problems for the early church in reconciling the divinity of Christ with the Scriptures they now held as canonical, were the numerous occasions when Jesus did not seem very divine, or lesser than the Father. In fact, as my paper will highlight, there are many of those, some of them more explicit than others.

These fourth-century bishops were aware (although to what extent we can but guess) that the New Testament Scriptures have absolutely no hesitation in expressing "Jesus and God" formulations, Jesus praying to God, Jesus calls God his Father, and he also calls his Father, his God. They also particularly noted that Jesus and God's respective wills could differ, and, most significantly, God raised Jesus back to life. They needed a way through, and this "no mixing" was the key. In my own interpretation, I see this very much like a switch. Let us imagine - I think like the two-natures pioneers - some internal switch within Jesus. It is not possible for God to not know something, Jesus did not know something, therefore we flick the switch to human nature. Jesus is speaking according to his human nature. No mixing. Jesus is speaking again with the switch firmly switched to "human" when he says "not my will, but yours". Because within God there can be but one Divine will, here the human nature of Jesus speaks and submits to the entire triune God's will. No mixing. The human nature of Jesus speaks in a way that the divine nature would never speak - there has to be a separation, which thus avoids the otherwise inevitable clashes and contradictions between the creeds and the Scriptures they supposedly support. Of course, the conversation does not stop there...

Who controls that switch?
I think we know the answer to that.

How can one person have two contradicting wills, and not be schizophrenic? How can a person have two wills and one mind?
I think we know the answer to that too.

Most importantly, though, another good question is arising out of John 1:14. If there is no mixing, then in what sense did the divine word BECOME flesh (or fleshy or human)? There is NO MIXING! We also know that the Old Testament understanding of the Invisible God is re-affirmed in the New Testament (1 Timothy 1:17, 1 John 4:12, John 1:18). In which case, is there not a significant difference between saying
A: the divine Word, eternal true God simply became human.
AND
B: the divine Word, eternal true God became a sort of God-man, who spoke or acted according to one nature or the other depending on the occasion.
?

Maybe I am confusing "human" with "flesh". But it still seems to me that while A seems very different to B, trinitarians start off by saying A on the basis particularly of John 1:14, while ending up having to say something much more like B. In a subsequent post, I will attempt to look into the question of human personhood as something much wider and complex than simply the "flesh" it is attached to, in my ongoing quest to find justification for this creedal stuff lurking in our minds and devotion.

The over-importance of "he" in John 1:2

Some folk stress huge importance here of "he" rather than "the one" (see KJV and others), it is described as a "correction" for John 1:2. They probably should not stake so much on this tweak in my view. Four points should be born in mind:

1. Of course the pre-existance of Jesus feels much more real with a "he", but the KJV hardly inspired a generation of unitarian theology because of its "this one" back in the early 16th century.

2. Unitarians do not have an issue with poetic personification. Their clearest example of this, they would say, is found in the feminine personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 8. Yes she really is a she!

3. The word translated as "he", Οὗτος, is - I do not think it can be disputed - most commonly translated this or this one. Since it can also be translated "it", and "she", as well as "he", we still need to be careful not to overstate the pre-existent (male) Jesus.

4. Of the four tranlsations I checked in French, all state "elle" [she] and not "il" [he], because the Greek is so clearly referring to the LOGOS, which in French is the feminine word Parole.

My conclusion is that the "he" emphasis is a clear overstatement in English that both the Greek and the French bring us back to the author's intention, to restate the one in question is the word.