Being the seed of Abraham and inheriting the promise

 https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa276ab-d588-83ed-9118-0ba8ab893660 

As far as I know, I am not biologically a descendant of Abraham. As far as I know, some people are. Yet it is important to remember the gospel teaching is that this is far less important than being a spiritual heir to the promise given to Abraham. If a person is biologically descended from Abraham, or has become Jewish by someone’s incorporation into Judaism in an alternative way such as circumcision, the important thing is to recognise that this alone does not guarantee God’s acceptance, nor is it what matters to receiving God’s blessing, like that blessing God promised to Abraham. John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Apostle Paul all pointed this out. What matters is to become one with Jesus through faith in him, and through receiving his teachings, and the Holy Spirit given when the gospel message is believed. It does not depend on biological descent, not adherence to the Law of Moses, nor circumcision. It is by persuasion of faith from hearing the gospel message given by God, through those sent. God sent Jesus and John the Baptist to preach and teach the message, and Jesus in turn sent Paul. Belief in what God has said in truth is what counts, and holding to teachings given through Jesus His Son. 

The righteous name

 Look at the phenomenon of the right-angle and its importance to humans in engineering and other practices, generalising it to see how righteousness is important in human life. We need tools to check how right things are. Our minds learn to receive what is true and prefer it over what is false. Teach your children right, and their lives are more likely to be the best lives they can live. They need what can be called righteousness. Without it they might reject what you have taught them, shown them, and told them, even when it is right and true. Teach them falsely and the right mind might reject it, and prefer truth when it finds it. The measure of a right mind, a right attitude, is how it responds to being told truth, taught truthfully, and shown truthful and right ways. The ultimate rightness of mind is a mind which accepts the most righteous truth in full belief. So to hear what the perfect Most High God says in truth, and to believe it, this is the best righteousness of all. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness”.  But when confronted with a truly noble and righteous person like Jesus Christ, we should accept this rightness of his reputation and his name as like a tool for measuring and knowing what is right and true, and learning to live accordingly. The power of this is such a benefit to living rightly that to deny it is to harm our prospects and bring about our own demise. The Holy Spirit says that the trees produce their buds and leaves by the power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have a human tendency which is rife today, which is to help our own persistence of wrong behaviour by denying what is right and true. We should not use this strategy with the name of Jesus Christ. We need to learn from Nature that this name underpins the very fabric of order and life. We should align with Nature by accepting the power that this name gives us to go on living without the demise of ultimate death. For this we need to believe in this name, in the rightness of Jesus Christ and what he stands for, and let it save us. 

(See an AI review of this here  https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa2658b-8b80-83eb-9a4a-860fb351f538 ) 

Rightness of mind

 True right-angles are very important to humans, and to human civilisation through all of history. If you have a right-angle in your building between horizontal ground and the vertical wall, as you build that wall, then your wall is more likely to stay stable over time. If your walls meet at their corners in right-angles, then the building work is more likely to have a stable progress as you add more rooms and adjacent buildings over time, and streets between your buildings are more likely to be easy to drive your vehicles through. A field boundary that meets another field boundary in a right-angle is more likely to provide a sustainable field pattern over time as more fields are added and ploughed. Humans have easily understood that there are many advantages in having right-angles in their work. So humans developed tools such as plumb lines, spirit-levels, T-squares, rope-and-stake devices, and many others, to help in creating and measuring right-angles. This principle can be generalised. It can be understood by humans that there is a concept of rightness, as a generalisation of phenomena such as right-angles. Get something right, and everything works the best it can be made to work. Get everything right and you have the best stability and the highest utility in what you produce over time. Teach your children right, and their lives are more likely to be the best lives they can live. They have what can be called righteousness, unless they reject what you have taught them, shown them, and told them. Teach them falsely and the right mind might reject it, and prefer truth when it finds it. The measure of a right mind, a right attitude, is how it responds to being told truth, taught truthfully, and shown truthful and right ways. The ultimate rightness of mind is a mind which accepts the most righteous truth in full belief. So to hear what the perfect Most High God says in truth, and to believe it, this is the best righteousness of all. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness”. 

More about the divine set apart Son

 Looking at how Jesus used Psalm 82, it might be argued that the psalm does not prove this, but it is implicit, it seems to me, in how Jesus used the psalm, that the gods mentioned are those who are a council over which the Most High presides, and that these are the sons of God also referred to in Job and Genesis, and it is implicit in Jesus’ teaching on this that he was one of these, a son of God, but who was most special because he was set apart by God to be sent into the world. Yes, the implied meaning is not explicit and is not proved, but it seems Jesus was happy to let that be understood as his implied meaning. Being set apart, implies set apart from those other sons of God. Being set apart from them also implies he was not condemned by God as they were. Better things are hoped for in Jesus’ case, hence God from heaven saying Jesus is His beloved Son, in whom He is well pleased. Hence Jesus is not only ‘A’ Son but ‘THE’ chosen one, although that phrase ‘chosen one’ is found elsewhere, not here in John or Psalm 82. (“This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!” Luke 9:35)

Here is the passage in John 10 where Jesus refers to Psalm 82.

“Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken—do you say of him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?” (John 10:34–36)

Psalm 82 in the KJV, which is public domain, says:

1 God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.

2 How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.

3 Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.

4 Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.

5 They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.

6 I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

7 But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.

8 Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.

However, Jesus made it clear in his teachings recorded in the Gospel of John that the kind of sonship relationship to God that matters is not biological, but rather one of behaviour and character appropriate for a son of God. He starts with the Jews saying they are children of Abraham. He emphasises that true children of Abraham would do the kinds of deeds Abraham did, in love and truthfulness, not in murder and lies. Murder and lies do not characterise children of Abraham but children of the devil, who is murderer and father of lies. He says that likewise his own sonship of God is seen in his doing deeds like God does. He cannot by convicted of sin, but lives as God taught him to live, Father teaching Son. He does as he sees his Father doing, who shows him what He, God, does. Yes, the Jews, Jesus admitted, were biologically descended from Abraham, but that is not the important thing. John the Baptist had likewise pointed this out to them, that they should not even start to say they are children of Abraham but they should repent of sin and produce behavioural fruit in keeping with that repentance. Jesus offered advice on how to do this. If they believed in him, they should then hold to his teachings, just as he in turn held to what His Father, God, taught him. As the teachings are kept a hold of, with belief in the teacher, the character and behaviour of the disciple starts to reflect the character and behaviour of the teacher. He has sonship to God in this way, and his believing disciples could have it too. It is provided in his sayings. Yes, biologically Jesus is born of a virgin, but that is not even something he mentioned, as is barely mentioned much at all in the writings of his New Testament apostles. It is sonship which comes from upbringing and learning which matters. The Father initiates the teaching, and the dutiful son becomes a true beloved pleasing son by being devoted to those teachings and acquiring the Father’s kinds of behaviour, judgments on things, ways of seeing and doing things, righteous love, truth, and character. Jesus went this way, and so can those who have sincere faith in him. None of us can have his virgin birth, but if we believe in him, we can have his God-taught ways, and goodness of fruits of character. That is sonship that matters. That is sonship which averts the condemnation in Psalm 82 of the council of gods who were called sons of God but did not feed the poor or grant them justice, and so were told their demise would be like the typical demise of mortal men. The true sonship that matters leads to a greater end: to eternal life with ultimately no such demise as the demise of these gods. That is what the beloved Son is sent by God to bring about, as light to the world. Indeed, his own death was not his ultimate end but rather resurrection and living forever, and it was a death which on a cross provided the sacrifice for the sins of the world. 

See also https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa1dce3-d7e8-83eb-b87f-2bd9dfe480b8 

The divine set apart chosen Son

 Looking at how Jesus used Psalm 82, it might be argued that the psalm does not prove this, but it is implicit, it seems to me, in how Jesus used the psalm, that the gods mentioned are those who are a council over which the Most High presides, and that these are the sons of God also referred to in Job and Genesis, and it is implicit in Jesus’ teaching on this that he was one of these, a son of God, but who was most special because he was set apart by God to be sent into the world. Yes, the implied meaning is not explicit and is not proved, but it seems Jesus was happy to let that be understood as his implied meaning. Being set apart, implies set apart from those other sons of God. Being set apart from them also implies he was not condemned by God as they were. Better things are hoped for in Jesus’ case, hence God from heaven saying Jesus is His beloved Son, in whom He is well pleased. Hence Jesus is not only ‘A’ Son but ‘THE’ chosen one, although that phrase ‘chosen one’ is found elsewhere, not here in John or Psalm 82. 

See a ChatGPT assessment of my argument here https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa1cb9a-a12c-83eb-8f83-14721779c63a 

Retro causality in apocalyptic eschatology

Retrocausality concerns a future event producing an effect at an earlier point in time. Prophecy raises an interesting question about whether such a phenomenon might be possible: can a future eschatological event have effects before it occurs?

I have considered four prophetic sources—the Book of Enoch, the Second Book of Enoch, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Book of Revelation. Taken together, these sources contain an apparent allusion to a future millennium of peace associated with the rule of Christ, and they contain indications that this future state somehow bears upon the preceding course of history. At first sight, this could be interpreted as a form of retrocausality: the future millennium produces effects in the period preceding it.

But that need not be the only interpretation.

The Book of Enoch explicitly presents certain future events as predetermined by God. In the Apocalypse of Weeks, the history of the world is divided into ten “weeks,” whose sequence and events are established beforehand in the heavenly realm—as though they have been written upon heavenly tablets. Enoch therefore presents a conception in which God has already determined certain aspects of the future.

This provides an alternative explanation for the apparent influence of the future upon the past or nearer future. It is not necessarily the future event itself that reaches backward through time and produces an earlier effect. Rather, God has predetermined the future event, and that same prior divine determination also determines events occurring before it.

Thus, if the peaceful millennium is predetermined by God, the peace or other conditions appearing before the millennium need not be effects flowing backward from the millennium itself. They may instead be effects of the divine predetermination that establishes both the earlier events and the later millennium. In this model, the causal direction is not from the future event backward into the past, but from God's prior determination of the entire sequence into both the nearer future and the ultimate future.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa10fb7-1a08-83ed-9850-948177c49cf9

Spiritual gifts

 “I experienced an event whose apparent correspondence was so specific, immediate and independently confirmed that I regard supernatural interpretation of tongues as the best explanation available to me, while recognising that the event cannot be reproduced or examined retrospectively in a laboratory.” 

ChatGPT concerning my experience of tongues. 

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a9f09b4-942c-83ed-8a82-53580226276f

Freedom in knowledge of this truth

 Jesus came to give you truth, if you believe: Truth that can set you free. What truth sets you free? Truth that he died for you, on a cross. Truth about how heaven wants things done, in keeping with this. Knowing this truthfully, gives you freedom, if you believe and hold to it. Freedom to stop behaving badly at odds with heaven. Freedom in knowing your behaviour in keeping that knowledge of the truth matters so greatly to God. So greatly that He gave this sacrifice for you, of His Son. The blood of this Lamb of God was shed for you. God wants you free. Free from slavery to bad behaviour that will get many ultimately condemned if they are never freed from it. Live out that truth once you know it. Keep doing so, and your freedom will remain. And seek God for more truth, and more freedom, and tasks to do for Him in that free state, to maintain it. Hold to this and be set free. Your freedom matters so much to God, and Jesus obediently went along with this, despite the ultimate sacrifice it meant for him, and God raised him from the dead so he ever lives to free those who follow his way of truth. Believe in God. Believe also in Jesus, God’s beloved son. 

Countering Religious Blind Spots

 Experiential Knowledge Countering Religious Blind Spots 

Both modern Christianity and Islam may have a blind spot when it comes to understanding Jesus’ identity. This does not mean that either religion has ignored the question. Both have developed detailed and sophisticated answers. The issue is that religious traditions inherit ways of interpreting Scripture and history. Once a particular framework becomes established, it can become difficult to step back and ask what earlier people may have meant before that framework existed.

Christianity

Modern Christianity generally teaches that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God. The Son is understood to be fully divine while still being distinct from the Father.

Because of this, statements in which Jesus says that the Father is greater than he is, that he can do nothing on his own, that the Father sent him, or that the Father is his God are usually understood through later theological ideas. These include the Incarnation, the distinction between Jesus’ divine and human natures, eternal sonship, and the Trinity.

That framework may be internally coherent. But it can make it harder to ask an earlier historical question:

What did expressions such as “Son of God,” “sent by God,” “one with the Father,” and “given authority” mean in their original Jewish setting, before the theological language of Nicaea existed?

The phrase “Son of God” did not automatically mean that someone was God's biological offspring or that the person possessed exactly the same divine essence as God. Jewish Scripture uses the language of sonship in several different ways.

For example, Psalm 2 connects sonship with God's fully approved and anointed king (Christ, Messiah), his enthronement, and the authority God gives him. Psalm 82 describes subordinate beings as “gods” and “sons of the Most High,” while still placing them under the authority of the Most High.

These passages do not tell us exactly who Jesus was. However, they show that biblical language could describe an exalted or specially appointed figure without necessarily answering the later question of whether that figure shared God's divine essence.

This makes Jesus' use of Psalm 82 in John 10 especially interesting. Jesus is accused of making himself God. In response, he points to Scripture in which subordinate figures are called “gods” and “sons of the Most High.” He then describes himself as the one whom the Father sanctified and sent.

This suggests that the discussion was more complicated than simply asking whether someone was either “human” or “God.” Ideas such as God's representatives, delegated authority, and exalted sonship need to be considered before applying later categories about the nature or essence of God.

Islam

Islam has a corresponding blind spot.

Islam firmly rejects the idea that God is Jesus or that Jesus is God's literal biological offspring. At the same time, the Qur'an gives Jesus an exceptionally high status. He is the Messiah, a prophet and messenger, specially chosen and purified by God, a recipient of divine signs, and someone closely associated with God's Word and Spirit.

So Islam does not simply present Jesus as an ordinary human teacher.

However, Islamic theology does not generally attempt to reconstruct the full history of what the expression “Son of God” meant within its original Jewish and early Christian settings. The Qur'an's rejection of walad—the idea of God having offspring or a child—addresses a theological claim in its own context. But that does not necessarily settle every historical meaning that the expression “Son of God” could have had.

In the Bible, sonship can refer to kingship, being chosen by God, covenant, representation, obedience, divine commissioning, or a special relationship with God.

The Qur'anic concept of walad, by contrast, concerns divine offspring and claims that would compromise God's absolute uniqueness.

These ideas can certainly be compared. But they should not automatically be treated as identical.

The historical question is therefore worth asking:

Does the Qur'anic rejection of divine offspring address the entire biblical range of “sonship,” or is it responding to particular claims about Jesus' divine status?

The Missing Middle Category

A deeper problem in modern discussions is that they often present only two possibilities:

Jesus was merely human, or Jesus was God in the fully developed Nicene sense.

But Jewish and early Christian thought included other categories as well.

It spoke about God's agents, heavenly beings, divine Wisdom, God's Word and Spirit, exalted kings, messianic figures, and other representatives who could exercise authority received from God without simply being identical with the Most High.

The existence of these categories does not prove that Jesus belonged to any particular one of them.

It does, however, mean that the historical question cannot be answered properly by assuming that “human” and “God” were the only categories available to Jesus and his earliest followers.

From Early Christology to Nicaea

It would be historically inaccurate to say that the Council of Nicaea invented belief in Jesus' divinity. Claims about Jesus' extraordinary status appear much earlier.

The earliest Christians were already dealing with a difficult question:

How could Jesus be confessed as Lord, placed above ordinary humanity, associated with God's work, and worshipped, while Christianity still remained committed to Jewish belief in one God?

Nicaea did not create this problem. Rather, it attempted to give the problem a precise theological and philosophical answer.

At the same time, it would also be misleading to simply project the Nicene answer back into the first century.

The word homoousios, meaning that the Son is of the same essence or substance as the Father, belongs to a later stage of theological development. First-century writings can express a very high view of Jesus without already presenting the complete philosophical system that fourth-century Christianity eventually developed.

John's Gospel illustrates this tension particularly well.

On one hand, Jesus speaks about his dependence on the Father. He says that the Son can do nothing independently, that the Father sent him, that the Father is greater than he is, and he refers to the Father as “my God.”

On the other hand, John also contains some of the New Testament's strongest statements about Jesus' exalted status. The Gospel begins by describing the Logos as existing “in the beginning,” and Jesus speaks about sharing glory with the Father before creation.

Neither side of this evidence should simply be ignored.

Both need to be taken seriously and explained.

Function and Ontology

One important distinction is between functional or relational unityand ontological identity.

Two people can be completely united in purpose and action without being the same person or the same being.

John's Gospel uses the language of “oneness” not only for the Father and Son but also when Jesus prays for his followers to be united. This does not mean that the relationship between the Father and Son is identical to the relationship among believers. But it does show that the idea of “oneness” can have a relational or participatory meaning.

This distinction can also be understood through experience. Someone might experience and understand the Father and Son as distinct, with the Father being God alone, while also experiencing them as completely united in their actions and purposes. In a similar way, people can become genuinely united with God's people without becoming identical either to God or to the community.

The Historical Question

The issue, then, is not simply that Christianity has one answer and Islam has another.

Both traditions can inherit established answers to questions that were originally expressed using a much more complex vocabulary.

The historical question should come first:

What did Jesus and the earliest Christian communities actually mean by sonship, Messiahship, Lordship, divine agency, authority, heavenly status, and unity with God?

Only after investigating those questions can we responsibly evaluate the theological conclusions that developed later.

Several historical interpretations are possible:

1. Jesus is a uniquely appointed human Messiah.
2. Jesus is an extraordinarily exalted or pre-existent agent who remains subordinate to the one supreme God.
3. Did Jesus participate in the unique identity of Israel's God in a way that provided the foundation for later Trinitarian theology?
4. Different New Testament authors may have expressed these ideas with different degrees of intensity, with later Christianity bringing them together into a more precise metaphysical system.

The deepest blind spot, therefore, may not simply be a failure to notice apparent contradictions.

It may be the tendency of mature religious traditions to inherit conclusions that make it harder to see how the underlying ideas developed in the first place.

John says that his Gospel was written so that readers might believe that Jesus is the Christ and, through that belief, have life in his name.

Whatever questions we may have about later theological developments, we still need that central purpose of John's Gospel to be fulfilled.

A Heavenly Answer 

There is a hope of knowledge from heaven through Jesus Christ, on holding to his teachings, and this is a hope of knowledge of the truth, which sets free from sin the one knowing the truth. As Jesus promised. There is experiential knowledge from heaven, from God, through Jesus Christ, by personal revelation. 

For example, on coming into the family of believers, included into the fold like a sheep being branded, I experienced the Father and the Son dealing with me like a shepherd handling a sheep working closely together with his son. Here is the experiential knowledge given me. They work in unity. The Father, telling me that He is God, held me up when I was falling over, saving my reputation from what seemed to be imminent demise. Saving me symbolically from threat at my feet. The Son covered me in a storm telling me I didn’t need my own umbrella as he hold up his own protective faith over my head. Saving me symbolically from threat above my head. Then both together hold my spirit as I sit among the flock, and strike me with the hot branding iron of the Holy Spirit, as a leader speaks in tongues by the Holy Spirit, and interpretation of the message in tongues arrives in my head as I hear each word, all by the same Holy Spirit. I got my branding. I was one with the flock. Father one with Son. Me one with flock. This is the ‘substance’ of the unity. I know it from experience. It is still true knowledge, not less so because it did not come out of a book or a school of theology. This is how God teaches when we love Him and hold obediently to His Son’s sayings. 

Religious Blindspots - by AI together with Stephen D Green

 Religious Blindspots - by AI together with Stephen D Green

‘There is a genuine possibility of a blind spot in the way both modern Christianity and Islam commonly approach the question of Jesus' identity, although the nature of the blind spot is different in each tradition. The issue is not that Christians or Muslims have simply failed to notice contradictions or never thought deeply about Jesus. Both traditions have developed sophisticated theological responses to the questions surrounding him. The deeper problem is that a religious tradition normally inherits an interpretive framework that tells it how the different pieces of evidence fit together. Once that framework is established, certain historical questions can become difficult to see because the later answer has already been supplied.

In modern Christianity, the inherited framework is broadly that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the one God, with the Son being genuinely divine while remaining distinct from the Father. Consequently, when Christians encounter statements such as Jesus saying that the Father is greater than he is, that he can do nothing on his own, that the Father sent him, or that the Father is his God, these statements are normally interpreted within the later framework of incarnation, divine and human natures, eternal sonship and Trinitarian distinctions. The statements therefore do not necessarily appear to constitute a doctrinal problem. They are understood as describing Jesus' incarnate mission, his relationship to the Father, or his assumed humanity. This is a coherent theological system, but it can obscure a historical question that is different from the theological question: what did expressions such as “Son of God,” “sent by God,” “one with the Father,” or “given authority by the Father” mean within their original Jewish conceptual environment before the later metaphysical vocabulary of Nicene Christianity existed?

The problem becomes particularly important because “Son of God” does not inherently mean biological offspring, nor does it inherently mean that the person described is consubstantial with God. Jewish Scripture already contains several different forms of sonship and divine representation. Psalm 2 associates God's anointed king with sonship, enthronement and delegated authority, while Psalm 82 depicts subordinate beings as “gods” and “sons of the Most High” who nevertheless remain under the authority and judgment of the Most High. These passages do not establish what Jesus' ontology was, but they demonstrate that biblical language could describe an exalted or divinely appointed figure without the expression itself answering the later philosophical question of whether that figure possesses the same divine essence as God.

This makes Jesus' appeal to Psalm 82 in John 10 particularly significant. Jesus is challenged because his opponents believe that, although he is a man, he is making himself God. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting the accusation in the later categories of “divine” versus “human,” he invokes a passage in which Scripture itself can call subordinate figures “gods” and “sons of the Most High.” He then describes himself as the one whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world. This does not prove that Jesus regarded himself as merely human, nor does it prove that John denies his divinity. It does, however, show that the conceptual world available to the discussion was more complicated than a simple opposition between “ordinary human” and “God himself.” The biblical category of divine agency, delegated authority and exalted sonship therefore deserves to be examined before later ontological categories are imposed upon it.

There is a corresponding blind spot on the Islamic side. Islam is uncompromising in its insistence that God is one and that Jesus is not God or God's offspring. Yet the Qur'an simultaneously gives Jesus an exceptionally exalted status. He is the Messiah, the son of Mary, a messenger and prophet, one specially chosen and purified by God, a recipient of divine signs, and a figure associated with God's Word and Spirit. The Qur'an therefore does not solve the problem simply by reducing Jesus to an ordinary human teacher. It preserves an extraordinarily elevated conception of him while denying that this elevation makes him divine. Nevertheless, Islamic theology does not generally reconstruct the entire semantic history of the Christian expression “Son of God” in its original Jewish setting. The Qur'anic rejection of divine walad, meaning offspring or child, addresses the theological claim in its own context; it does not by itself settle every historical question about the range of meanings that “son of God” possessed in Jewish and early Christian literature.

This distinction matters because biblical sonship and Qur'anic divine offspring are not automatically equivalent concepts. A biblical statement that someone is God's “son” can involve kingship, election, covenant, representation, moral likeness, obedience, divine commissioning or special relationship. The Qur'an's rejection of God having walad is a rejection of divine offspring and of claims that compromise God's absolute uniqueness. These positions can therefore be compared, but they should not be collapsed into the assumption that the Qur'an is simply rejecting one precisely defined Christian term with an identical semantic meaning. The historical question is whether the Qur'anic critique is directed at the whole biblical range of sonship or at particular claims about Jesus' divine status and relationship to God as understood in its own religious environment.

The deeper problem, then, may be that both traditions can overlook a middle conceptual category. Modern debates often present the alternatives as though Jesus must either have been merely human or must have been God in the fully developed Nicene sense. Yet the Jewish and early Christian worlds contained categories of divine agency that do not fit neatly into that binary. Jewish Scripture and Second Temple Jewish thought could speak about God's agents, heavenly beings, divine Wisdom, God's Word, God's Spirit, exalted kings, messianic figures and other representatives who could exercise authority derived from God without simply being identical to the Most High. The existence of such categories does not prove that Jesus belonged to one of them, but it means that the historical question cannot be answered adequately by assuming that the only alternatives available to Jesus and his earliest followers were modern “human” and “God” categories.

This also helps explain why the later development of Christian doctrine can be misunderstood. It would be historically inaccurate to say that the Council of Nicaea simply invented the idea that Jesus was divine. Extraordinary claims about Jesus' status appear much earlier than the fourth century... The earliest Christians were already confronted with a difficult theological problem: how could Jesus be confessed as Lord, exalted above ordinary humanity, associated with God's work and worshipped by his followers while the movement remained committed to the Jewish conviction that there is one God? Nicaea did not create that problem. It attempted to provide a precise metaphysical answer to it.

Nevertheless, the fact that the underlying problem is earlier does not mean that the Nicene answer was already fully expressed in the first century. The term homoousios, meaning that the Son is of the same substance or essence as the Father, belongs to a later philosophical and theological vocabulary. The fourth-century Church was attempting to determine what ontological conclusions should be drawn from earlier Christian claims about Jesus. This distinction is crucial. A first-century text can contain extremely high Christology without already containing the complete metaphysical system of fourth-century Trinitarian theology. Conversely, the fact that Nicene metaphysics came later does not prove that the earlier high Christology was merely human Messianism.

The same problem appears when John is read as though every statement has already been translated into later Trinitarian terminology. John's Gospel contains statements that strongly support distinction and dependence: Jesus says that the Son can do nothing independently, that he was sent by the Father, that the Father is greater than he is, that the Father is the only true God, and after the resurrection Jesus speaks of “my God and your God.” Yet the same Gospel contains some of the strongest evidence for a remarkably high Christology: the Logos exists “in the beginning,” Jesus speaks of glory shared with the Father before the world existed… The historical problem is therefore not solved by selecting only the subordinate-sounding passages or only the divine-sounding passages. Both sets of evidence have to be explained.

This is why the distinction between function and ontology becomes so important. A person can genuinely act with another person in unity without becoming identical to that person. People can share a mission, a purpose, a relationship, a life or a community without becoming one being in an ontological sense. John's Gospel itself uses the language of oneness not only for the Father and Son but also for the unity Jesus desires among his followers. This does not establish that the Father's unity with the Son is merely the same kind of unity as the unity among believers, but it demonstrates that “oneness” has a participatory and relational dimension within John's conceptual world. The later theological question is whether the Father-Son relationship involves something beyond this participatory unity—something ontological.

A personal spiritual experience can make this distinction particularly vivid without functioning as historical proof of any particular doctrine. An experience of being incorporated into a flock, of being protected and shepherded through the coordinated action of the Father and Son, and of being marked or “branded” as belonging to that flock can provide first-person knowledge of a kind of unity that is real without requiring sameness of identity. The Father and Son can be experienced as distinct yet completely united in their action toward the believer, while the believer can become genuinely united with the flock without becoming identical to either the shepherd or the flock. This is not evidence that proves or disproves Nicene ontology, but it provides an experiential illustration of the distinction between relational or participatory unity and unity of essence. It also resonates conceptually with biblical language about believers being “one” and being incorporated into the relationship of Father and Son, as well as with New Testament imagery of the Holy Spirit marking or sealing believers as belonging to God.

The important historical insight is therefore not simply that Christianity has one answer and Islam has another. It is that both traditions can inherit highly compressed answers to questions that were originally expressed in a more complicated conceptual vocabulary. Christianity ultimately asks how Jesus can be divine while God remains one. Islam asks how Jesus can be the Messiah and one of God's greatest messengers while God's absolute unity remains uncompromised. Historical-critical investigation asks a prior question: what did Jesus and the earliest communities actually mean when they described his sonship, Messiahship, authority, relationship to God, heavenly status and unity with the Father?

Those questions overlap, but they are not identical. A first-century Jew could use the language of sonship, divine agency, Messiahship and delegated authority without necessarily answering the later philosophical question of whether the person described possesses the same ousia as God. Likewise, the later Christian confession that Jesus is consubstantial with the Father may be understood as an attempt to resolve implications that Christians believed were already present in their Scriptures, but the conceptual precision of that answer should not simply be projected backward into every first-century use of “Son of God.”

This is where the apparent doctrinal blind spot becomes most significant. The debate can become trapped in the question, “Is Jesus God?” before adequately asking what “God,” “Son,” “Messiah,” “Lord,” “divine,” “sent,” “one,” and “authority” meant within the conceptual world in which the earliest claims were made. Christianity can sometimes move too quickly from biblical sonship to later ontology; Islam can sometimes move too quickly from Christian divine-sonship claims to the Qur'anic rejection of divine offspring; and non-Trinitarian interpretations can make the opposite mistake by discovering legitimate Jewish categories of agency and sonship and then assuming that these automatically explain away the highest Christological claims.

The real historical task is therefore more demanding. It is to determine whether Jesus is best understood as a uniquely appointed human Messiah, as an extraordinarily exalted or pre-existent agent who nevertheless remains subordinate to the one supreme God, or as a figure who participates in the unique identity of Israel's God in a way that provides the foundation for later Trinitarian theology. It is also possible that different New Testament authors articulate these possibilities with different degrees of intensity, and that later Christianity synthesized those diverse strands into a more precise metaphysical system.

The deepest blind spot, then, may not be that Christianity or Islam simply failed to notice a contradiction. It is that both traditions, like all mature religious traditions, inherited conclusions that can conceal the historical stages through which the underlying concepts developed. Once those stages are separated, a much more fundamental question appears: not simply whether Jesus was “God” or “not God,” but what kind of relationship between God and Jesus the earliest Jewish and Christian evidence actually presupposes. Only after that question has been answered can we responsibly ask whether Nicene Christianity represents a faithful clarification of the earliest claims, a significant development beyond them, or some combination of both.’

ChatGPT together with Stephen D Green, September 2026