Who is the Christ We Are Following?

I once had the privilege of walking through the Fundamentals and the Solas….not sure whether people absorbed the importance of them, but it was fun to put it together. (back to Dean Taylor’s wisdom for teachers now!) I would summarize a few of Tyler’s points as “TRINITY”. We do, IMO, an extremely weak job of teaching the Solas and the Trinity in Fundamental churches—and then we wonder why non-Trinitarian cults like the Mormons or JWs take about a church or two each day from us in terms of equivalent numbers. Well, duh.

And (sorry) to climb on a soapbox I use often, part of the deal the article addresses is our relative lack of logic. The example given in the article is that 83% of evangelicals affirm the Deity of Christ one way, but then 63% turn around and deny it by saying He is a created being.

OK, so how did we get there? Pushing logic out of college curricula half a century ago certainly doesn’t help, nor does the historic (sorry) suspicion of academic institutions among “fundagelicals”. As a result—and partly as a result of our own laziness in learning to boot—we all too seldom “throw the flag” when obvious genetic fallacies are introduced as “evidence”, and we fall for obvious nonsense(there’s that Mormonism again).

So I’d argue that if we want to grow in our faith this way, we could do no better than to teach people how to recognize the basic fallacies of informal logic—pointing out that if we are people of the logos, we can do little better than to care for our logic. It’ll take some time, because a lot of the nonsense arguments out there are part of our churches’ cultures, but if we want to really apply the Fundamentals and the Solas, it’s necessary.

It is lack of information and intellectual curiosity. People know very little. Worse, they don’t care that they don’t know. Teach 8 years at a university and you will realize this.

[Mark_Smith]

It is lack of information and intellectual curiosity. People know very little. Worse, they don’t care that they don’t know. Teach 8 years at a university and you will realize this.

Does it count to be a TA? I have about 5 years with that.

No argument that there’s a lack of curiosity and knowledge—I’d just suggest that it goes hand in hand with a lack of thinking and logic. Why bother accumulating knowledge if you don’t know what to do with it?

Mark, let’s illustrate the power of logic using the article’s text. Now if knowledge, or information as you say, is the solution, we should find Biblical passages that specifically note that Christ is not among the created order, right?

Now, look it up. Do you find such a passage? Neither did the article. Rather, the eternality of Christ follows as such:

1. Jesus Christ is God (John 1, elsewhere)

2. God is eternal (1 Timothy 1:17, elsewhere)

3. Therefore Christ is eternal and not created.

In the same way, you cannot establish the Trinity without logic, nor can you establish the Solas or the Fundamentals. You will not find them in Scripture as such. Information without logic is really gelded that way—it’s not unimportant, but it simply lacks the power of knowledge assisted by right ways of thinking.

[Bert Perry]

Why bother accumulating knowledge if you don’t know what to do with it?

There’s your problem right there, Bert. Today’s college student (and church pew sitter) isn’t “accumulating knowledge.” They are occupying space. They are punching a card to get a piece of paper so they can get a mindless job that pays well and requires no thinking. I could count on one hand the few students who actually want to “accumulate knowledge.”

It seems to me the survey sets the users up for (what it deems) a failure. So call me a heretic if you will, but if I were reading this question (#9 on the survey)—

Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.

—the first question I would have in my own mind while answering it is whether we are talking about pre or post-incarnate Jesus? Because it does make a difference, in my opinion, for answering the question. The Person of Jesus is eternal, divine, and uncreated; but that Person through the incarnation took on the flesh of the creature designed by God to be like Him (i.e., became one with the created), and by doing so, then He made this statement true (#10 on the survey):

Jesus is truly God and has a divine nature, and Jesus is truly man and has a human nature.

So as the incarnated Son of God, Jesus in his “truly man” form with “a human nature” was (in part) “created by God.” To be deemed any other would mean the incarnated Him was not really truly man nor really having a human nature, since humans are creatures. But equally so, He was, is, and always will be eternal and uncreated in relation to the divine essence of Who He is as a Person.

Now whether He, if deemed to be in His incarnation, is the “first and greatest being created by God” then hinges on how one takes “first” in this statement. If “first” is temporally taken, the answer is still false—Christ did not incarnate before other creatures were made and the pre-incarnate Christ was in no way created. But if the incarnated Christ is the subject and “first” is read as “preeminent” (i.e., “first and greatest” either being essentially synonymous to each other for added rhetorical effect or the former term speaking of His rank within mankind and the latter term speaking to His being unique even within the category of mankind because of His divinity), then I would have no issue with one answering true to the statement.

The problem is, the semantics of the statement are too vague to be useful in knowing how those taking the test interpreted it. So we may be dealing with a bunch of heretical theology or we may be dealing with people that understand that Christ, in His incarnation, is also now the preeminent human creature of God’s creation.

Scott, isn’t the proper term, Biblically speaking, for how Christ came to earth as a man is that He was “begotten”, not “created”? I’m open to being proven wrong, and quite frankly at one point I think I would have made the error the article refers to, but this isn’t the most subtle of errors.

We also ought to be wary of saying “it’s just semantics”, as very often that’s a casual way of dismissing the differences between categories that are very real. Word to the wise, brother.

Bert, I agree the points of distinction are very real. But that is also why, in my opinion, the semantics of how it is asked becomes the more important. Especially when dealing with people from a variety of backgrounds who will not have the same basis behind what the questioner is asking.

So yes, Christ was begotten (that is a good, biblical term, 1 Jn 4:9). But He is begotten into the family-line of a creature (David) through a creature (Mary) and begotten as a creature (human). So unless one considers His incarnate flesh to also be eternal (somehow), that part of Him is part of creation and thus created.

But Tyler’s reply is along the lines of my point. The question about Christ’s created nature (or not) could have been worded in a much better way to indicate that the eternal Person is in view, not the incarnate Person, so that one could better distinguish heresy from orthodoxy through the survey.

And Tyler’s other reply is also true, the idea of begotten has to be clarified itself, for theologians do tend to consider the term as referring to the eternal Sonship of Christ; yet it cannot be denied that He was also “begotten” in the virgin Mary by the Spirit (in a more human, normal sense of the term).

I just edited my answer to refer back to both your comments, and I agree, “begotten” (in the context of where it is used for translation) becomes challenging to clarify the meaning well and is probably best avoided.

We need more catechism. :^)