What if jesus was not divine

They believe, first, that Jesus is truly and fully human. The nineteenth-century Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard offers a parable to clarify this. A king fell in love with a humble maiden. He considered how he might woo her. If he were to court her with the trappings of majesty, she might love him for the wrong reasons. Yet if he were to dress up as a person of her own class, her love, if it came, would be founded on deceit. Thus he must become a person of her own class if he was genuine in his desire to win her heart.

This is not a stunt, but an eternal and costly gesture of grace. Thus Jesus was subject to the contingencies of human existence. He had physical limitations: he could not be in more than one place at one time, he needed food and drink, he needed rest. He experienced profound human emotions: he was tempted, angered, grieved, abused, and executed. For example those parts of human nature that withdraw from God are not intrinsic to being human.

Sin is not essential to human identity, because Jesus was a human being but did not sin. If Jesus is a human being, he must be the definitive human being. Christians believe, second, that Jesus is fully and truly God. Christians understand that, while he took on human nature, Jesus was still God in personality.

This was true from the very beginning of his life. The God revealed in Jesus is undoubtedly passionately devoted to the poor, radically open to the outcast, extraordinarily hospitable to sinners, and prepared to shape every aspect of life for humankind. Christians believe, third, that Jesus, being both God and human, remains one person.

The danger lies in seeing divine and human personhood in absolute, exclusive terms — in perceiving a zero-sum equation in which if Jesus is one, he cannot be the other. The era of the Enlightenment turned the focus of reflection away from traditions handed down and towards the self, and also made the venerated traditions subject to unprecedented critical scrutiny.

In particular it raised three questions about Jesus. The anthropological critique suggests all religions have a sense of incarnation, the mystical, and a sense of the numinous.

It sees the Christian doctrine of the incarnation as simply the way in which one tradition understands the self-communication of the numinous. The historical critique begins with discomfort at the dissonance between the apparently simple language of the gospels and the labyrinthine complexity of the creeds. Out of this contrast comes a chorus of suspicious voices.

There are conspiracy theorists, who suggest that Paul or some other early leader hijacked the historical figure of Jesus and projected onto him a back-breaking assortment of metaphysical longings. Some even suggest Jesus himself never claimed to be divine. There are intertestamental historians who see so much expectation of the end of the world in the contemporary literature that Jesus becomes little more than a container for the religious fantasies of his time.

There are early Church historians who find it hard to disentangle the historical Jesus from the practices and beliefs of the first Christians. Christians respond that the classical debates of the early church were inevitable given the diversity of the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. That diversity is a strength rather than a weakness, since it attests to a much wider experience of the incarnation than any one conspiracy could bring about.

The philosophical critique of the incarnation is most identified with the German eighteenth century Enlightenment figure G. The logic is that Jesus exhibited some more generally significant feature underlying the reality of the cosmos. A contemporary version of the philosophical critique of the incarnation might be termed the moral critique. This is voiced today most explicitly from a feminist perspective. Revelation as History. The Bible is seen as the record of these deeds, for example the Exodus or the resurrection of Jesus.

The biblical text itself, however, is not part of revelation. Some representatives of this approach hold that revelation must include a supernatural cognitive assistance illumination so that the historical events can be interpreted correctly Baillie Others deny that this is necessary Pannenberg Revelation as Inner Experience.

Others take the relevant experiences to be conceptually structured and more like perceptual experiences Alston ; Pike The pre-conceptual view encounters epistemological puzzles about how non-conceptual inner occurrences can justify beliefs about God, or how the experiences can be about God in the first place Proudfoot Revelation as Dialectical Presence.

It is unclear whether this model manages to present a coherent account of divine revelation for a sympathetic discussion, see McCormack 28— The intention behind the model, however, is to reconcile the claim that revelation provides real, objective knowledge of God with the claim that God radically transcends all human categories and all created media of revelation. Revelation as New Awareness. In essence, revelation is more about seeing the self and the world in a new light than about knowledge of God Dulles 98, 99, Such an account requires appeal to propositional revelation at some point, or at least to traditional natural theology Wahlberg Ch.

The existence of revelatory claims in different religions raises the question of epistemic justification: Could such claims be justified, and in that case, how? In the contemporary debate, there are both non-inferential and inferential evidentialist models of justification for revelatory claims. However, since the contemporary debates about justification draw inspiration from a long tradition of reflection within theology, it will be useful first to consider some historical background.

In historical Christian thought, the concepts of special revelation and faith go together. Faith is the believing response to the divine revelation Dulles 4. There has been a broad consensus that the act of faith requires grace in the sense of an internal, divine influence or assistance.

However, classical Christian thinkers also agree that the act of faith is reasonable, and that Christian belief is epistemically justified to an eminent degree Lamont Important church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Chrysostom and Augustine all held that there are good arguments from publicly accessible evidence for the veridicality of the Christian revelation—arguments that establish the claim that God has spoken beyond reasonable doubt.

Patristic arguments typically appeal to fulfilled prophecies, miracles,. Lamont 46, However, the major church fathers did not seem to view these apologetic arguments as necessary for proper faith, or as the epistemic basis for faith. Instead, the divine revelation itself—the word of God—is often portrayed as having the power to non-inferentially justify Christian beliefs.

As Clement of Alexandria writes,. He who has believed in the divine Scriptures, with a firm judgement, receives as an irrefutable demonstration the voice of God who gave us those Scriptures.

So faith is no longer something that is confirmed by demonstration. Stromate II , 2, 9, quoted in Lamont Augustine, likewise, emphasized that Christian belief is produced by God working internally in the believer through grace. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas affirms both the supernatural, grace-induced character of Christian belief and its rational warrant.

Since Aquinas is a common reference point in contemporary discussions about faith and revelation, it will be helpful to consider his thought in a bit more detail.

Aquinas believes that the Christian revelatory claim can be justified, at least to a significant degree, by inferential arguments see, e. Sometimes he seems to suggest that arguments are necessary for rational assent to revelation Summa Theologiae II-II, q. See also Niederbacher — Due to this tension, there are different interpretations of Aquinas.

As we will see in the following sections, similar elements recur in contemporary theories. According to the Naturalist Interpretation , at least some persons assent to the articles of the Creed because, first, they accept a cluster of arguments from natural theology, second, they believe on the basis of human testimony and other evidence that miracles and other signs have occurred in biblical history and in the history of the church.

From these considerations they conclude that God has made a revelation in history, which is contained, in its essence, in the Creed. The Christian revelatory claim is justified on this inferential basis. The Voluntarist Interpretation , on the other hand, claims that a consideration of the evidence is insufficient to elicit firm assent to revelation.

Aquinas says:. We are moved to believe the words of God insofar as the reward of eternal life is promised to us if we have believed; and this moves the will to assent. De Veritate , q. However, since the activity of the will—when it comes to belief in God—is part of a reliable belief-forming process put in place by grace, the beliefs that it produces are warranted.

Aquinas, hence, was an epistemological reliabilist of sorts, according to this view Ross ; Stump The Supernatural Externalist Interpretation gives arguments from public evidence a role in preparing a person for the assent of faith. However, the actual assent is the product of a supernaturally infused cognitive habit.

Belief in the revelatory claim is hence a basic belief, and it is justified. Jenkins — Most contemporary Aquinas scholars now reject the Naturalist Interpretation, which cannot do justice to the textual evidence. Hence, even though Aquinas indeed presents a collection of credibility arguments, he seems to have held that belief in divine revelation can be—and usually is—justified in some other, non-inferential way.

Starting with Duns Scotus, the role of inferential arguments in the rational acceptance of revelation was gradually expanded and made more precise in mainstream Christian thought. The act of faith was reduced to the drawing of the necessary inference from this insight to the conclusion that Christian beliefs are true. As we have seen, however, the church fathers and Thomas Aquinas held more complex views in which elements of both inferential and non-inferential justification are found, and where supernatural grace and the will play important epistemic roles.

Below we will encounter again these elements in the accounts of contemporary philosophers and theologians. A claim is non-inferentially justified when its positive epistemic status is a result of some form of direct cognition, as opposed to being achieved through a process of inference from evidence.

Since intentional design by definition entails a designer, this means that our experiences of nature could give us immediate knowledge of the existence of a creator Ratzsch ; Wahlberg ; Plantinga Ch. For related views, see Mullen and Evans The putative plausibility of this hypothesis depends on the phenomenological observation that the appearance of design in nature is something that forcefully strikes most people, even atheists. As Hume lets Cleanthes say:.

Consider, anatomize the eye … and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of a sensation? Psychological research, moreover, indicates that teleological beliefs about nature come natural to humans.

A related consideration in favor of design-perception is that it could potentially explain why beliefs about design in nature are so widespread and often held so persistently, even though they have turned out to be hard to justify by argument Ratzsch — Adapted to the present context, the argument runs something like this: Since beliefs about intentional design in nature arise in a similar way as ordinary perceptual beliefs and memory beliefs, there is no reason to discriminate among these classes of beliefs with respect to their prima facie epistemic status.

Hence, if we regard perceptual and memory beliefs as prima facie justified without argument, we should regard design-beliefs in the same way. It could be objected that in order to have beliefs about design, a rather complex conceptual background is necessary. Design beliefs, therefore, cannot be understood as perceptual. However, the necessity of a conceptual background for having a certain kind of perceptual beliefs does not necessarily entail that those beliefs are inferentially derived from the background McDowell ; Wahlberg — See also McGrath Ch.

Is evolution a defeater for the idea of design-perception? De Cruz and De Smedt Perhaps not. The hypothesis that God creates indirectly, through the evolutionary process, entails that God exerts a certain control over the outcomes of that process. This means that God has intended at least certain features of the outcome, and these features would hence count as divinely designed. Since divine design in this sense seems to be compatible with evolution, design-perception might be as well Wahlberg —; Kojonen Another objection proceeds from the claim that design-beliefs about nature are generated by mechanisms that are too unreliable to confer positive epistemic status.

The debate about this is ongoing Barrett 31; Visala Ch. In the realm of special revelation , there are also theories of direct, perceptual justification. Appealing to the parity argument, Alston contends that such mystical practices can be on more or less equal footing, epistemically, with basic doxastic practices such as sense-perceptual and memory-based belief-forming.

In general, basic doxastic practices cannot be shown to be reliable without circularity, but if they are socially established and their outputs are reasonably internally consistent and consistent with the outputs of other practices, they can be rationally engaged in.

He suggests that the ability to experience God can be improved through spiritual practices and disciplines—an idea that is common in mystical traditions see also Wynn 73— The main problem for the idea of direct perceptual encounters with God is the fact of religious diversity and the seeming incompatibility between the outputs of rival mystical practices. One approach to this problem is to view the incompatibility as merely apparent. For critique of the Kantian picture, see Plantinga b: Ch.

Nevertheless, those descriptions allow people to respond to and interact with the Real in ways that are conducive to salvation. Finding this price too high, Alston takes the disagreements between religions to be real, and argues that there could be realms of reality.

Alston This possibility entails, for Ward, that believers must be prepared to critically question their own tradition in light of insights from other religions Ward — Besides experiences that have God as their putative object, other kinds of religious experiences could be revelatory as well.

Non-inferential justification of revelatory claims need not be construed as perceptual. Alvin Plantinga, while sympathetic to perceptual theories of natural revelation b: —; Ch. Plantinga claims that this attack fails. If theism is true, it is very likely that there is a sensus divinitatis , and in that case, belief in God would be warranted.

When confronted with the teachings of Scripture, the Holy Spirit can instigate people to accept them as true by creating faith. Other critics attack the very idea that religious beliefs can be properly basic, which Plantinga defends by means of a version of the parity-argument see section 2.

Grigg, for example, argues that a major difference between religious beliefs and ordinary perceptual beliefs is that people may have a bias in favor of religious beliefs, since there is a psychological benefit to be gained from believing that God exists Grigg In response, it has been argued that the same is true of some perceptual beliefs e. A related critique is that more or less absurd belief-systems could claim to be based on properly basic beliefs.

Michael Martin, developing a version of it, claims that. In response, Plantinga can point out that basic beliefs are defeasible, and that the basic beliefs of what we take to be obviously irrational belief systems might be easily defeated Baker 88— Hill In response, it could be argued that if a religion is false, defeaters will probably arise.

Another type of objections focus on the epistemic consequences of religious disagreement. Should disagreement be taken as a defeater of belief? Still, it could be argued that while disagreement is not a defeater of belief, it should lead people to believe with less confidence. There is … a monumental issue which Plantinga does not discuss, and which a lot of people will consider needs discussing.

This is whether Christian beliefs do have warrant … He has shown that they do, if they are true; so we might hope for discussion of whether they are true. Swinburne The idea of divine testimony is at the core of traditional conceptions of revelation in both Jewish-Christian and Islamic thought for the latter, see Adeel 30— However, testimony and the justification of testimonial beliefs can be understood in different ways. Within contemporary philosophy of testimony, there are two basic schools.

Reductionists hold that beliefs acquired through testimony must be justified by an implicit or explicit argument from evidence that establishes the trustworthiness of the witness. Anti-reductionists deny this and regard testimony as a basic, sui generis source of epistemic justification, like perception and memory.

Hence, for anti-reductionists, testimonial beliefs are non-inferentially justified. This view has interesting implications for the issue of belief in divine revelation. Inspired by Aquinas as well as by contemporary anti-reductionism especially John McDowell , Lamont argues that the ability to gain knowledge from truthful testimony is an intellectual virtue, together with perception and memory Lamont Ch. When a hearer H believes a speaker S testifying that p , the very fact that S knows p and sincerely testifies to p gives H knowledge of p , which entails that H has a knowledge-constituting justification for p.

Lamont argues, on theological grounds, that God speaks through the Church, and that the Bible is part of this divine speech Lamont Ch. When a person believes a biblical statement because it is spoken by God, what the person acquires is testimonial knowledge. This recognition happens, according to Lamont, through the effects that the divine message has on the hearer. Following John Owen, Lamont appeals to the moral enlightenment and transformation of the hearer that result when the divine message is heard.

These effects, argues Lamont, can only happen through divine power, and they are therefore clear signs that allow the hearer to recognize the divine identity of the speaker Lamont — It can be questioned whether there are moral transformations that prove the involvement of a divine power King If we can infer, from certain effects of the message, that it is God who has spoken, then we can also infer that the message is true since God would not lie or be mistaken.

Wahlberg has attempted to formulate a consistently anti-reductionist theory of knowledge by divine testimony. An example would be if a person believes Jesus when Jesus claims to speak for God supposing that his claim is true.

Wahlberg acknowledges that normally, it would. He is the word made flesh. He is the second person of the trinity. He is very God of very God, of one substance with the Father, who for our salvation came down from Heaven and was incarnate be the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary. Certainly this view of the divinity of Christ presents many modern minds with insuperable difficulties. Most of us are not willing to see the union of the human and divine in a metaphysical incarnation.

Yet amid all of our difficulty with the pre existent idea and the view of supernatural generation, we must come to some view of the divinity of Jesus. In order to remain in the orbid of the Christian religion we must have a Christology. Baille has reminded us, we cannot have a good theology without a Christology. We may find the divinity of Christ not in his substantial unity with God, but in his filial consciousness and in his unique dependence upon God. It was his felling of absolute dependence on God, as Schleiermaker would say, that made him divine.

Yes it was the warmnest of his devotion to God and the intimatcy of his trust in God that accounts for his being the supreme revelation of God. All of this reveals to us that one man has at last realized his true divine calling: That of becoming a true son of man by becoming a true son of God.

It is the achievement of a man who has, as nearly as we can tell, completely opened his life to the influence of the divine spirit. The orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadaquate. To say that the Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is actually harmful and detrimental. So that the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied.

The true significance of the divinity of Christ lies in the fact that his achievement is prophetic and promissory for every other true son of man who is willing to submit his will to the will and spirit og God. Christ was to be only the prototype of one among many brothers.

The appearance of such a person, more divine and more human than any other, andstanding and standing in closest unity at once with God and man, is the most significant and hopeful event in human history. This divine quality or this unity with God was not something thrust upon Jesus from above, but it was a definite achievement through the process of moral struggle and self-abnegation.

He had been asking them what his contemporaries were saying about him and they had repeated a variety of answers. Now he presses the questions closer home. It is all very well to tell me what other people are thinking about me. What do you think I am? The question of the young Jewish Rabbi has gone echoing down the centuries. Brown, How to Think of Christ , pp. Baillie, God Was in Christ , p. Brown, How to Think of Christ , p.

There is not a limitation to which our human kind is heir but Jesus shares it with us. Like the rest of us, he was hungry.

At the well at Samaria he asked the woman who was drawing water for a drink. He asked questions, and expected answers. He was a learner, and not from books alone.

He learned obedience, we are told, in the way in which we must all learn it, by the things which he suffered. He was cut to the heart by the faithlessness of disciples.