Christian2 wrote:Third, given English usage of the word God, the simple affirmation "Jesus is God" may be easily misinterpreted. In common English usage God is a proper name, identifying a particular erson, not a common noun designating a class.[2] For us God is the God of the Judeao-Chrisitan monotheistsic tradition, or God the Father of Jesus and of the Christan, or the trinitarian Godhead. So when we make the equation in English, "Jesus is God," we are in danger of suggesting that these two terms, "Jesus" and "God," are interchangable, that there is a numerical identity between the two. But while Jesus is God, it is not true that God is Jesus.[*] There are others - the Father and the Spirit - of whom the predicate God may be rightfully used. Jesus is all that God is, without being all there is of God. The person of Jesus does not exhaust the category of deity. So then, when we say, "Jesus is God," we must recognize that we are attaching a meaning to the term God - namely, "God in essence" or "God by nature" - that is not its predominant sense in English.
I appreciate what you are saying and your attempt to be precise. I can agree with a lot of it, but I have a worry here that may or may not be warranted. First, a generl affirmation. We are certainly not modalists, so I agree that there is a sense in which the statement "Jesus is God" can be misinterpreted, as "God" is taken as shorthand for "the Father." So, as always, we have to be careful with our language. And in the care, I think your bolded statement is, as Paul said, well said.
But beyond the care, I worry that you might be running the risk of giving away the farm, too. For while it is true that Jesus is not the Father or the Holy Spirit, I don't think it has to be true that "Jesus does not exhaust the category of deity," and that for two reasons: first, it seems like that statement suggests that there is something in the Father that is not in the Spirit or Son, and something in the Son that is not in the Father or Spirit, and something in the Spirit that is not in the Son or Father. I think this is, in fact, a common misunderstanding regarding the Trinity. We tend to see the Three Persons as each having their own wills, their own intellects, their own
selves that are somehow really one on the level of substance or being. But that is not true. There is only one will in God. There is only one intellect. There is only one act of being. We do not divine the will, for instance, into three parts, as if the Father gets a part and the Son gets a part and the Spirit gets a part. Nor do we say that there are three wills and that two of them are just in perfect harmony with the other (presumably, the Father's), such that there is only one will
functionally speaking. No. What we say is that there is ONE will, and that the person of the Father is that will. The person of the Son is that will. The person of the Spirit is that will. And so on with everything else. The only thing that distinguishes the three Persons from one another are their relations to one another. So on that, I'm not sure that we cannot say that Jesus does not exhaust the category of deity, since EVERYTHING the Father is,
substantially speaking, is what the Son is. The only thing the Son is not with respect to the Father is His relationship to the Father and the Spirit.
The second reason is that I think the whole statement might just be a category error. Thomas Aquinas argued, I think correctly, that "God" is not in a category, anyway. In other words, there is no such thing as "the category of deity." The word "category" itself literally means "classificatory division," which means that it sets limits on what the thing is and is not. But God is neither a thing nor is He limited. He is, on the contrary, completely infinite. God transcends all category. Strictly speaking, the word "God" refers to a concept (which is a category) in our mind, and that category is tied directly to God only insofar as we know Him imperfectly
relative to and contrast to all that He is not. As Thomas puts it, "we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not." It is here that faith makes the leap the reason cannot cross. It is here that faith knows God in a way that reason, in principle, cannot. Now, if God is not really in a category, then there is no such thing as "the category of deity." And so it is wrong to talk about Jesus filling up or not filling up that "category" in the first place.
I'm not sure how exactly that effects your argument, but I suspect the problem with your Muslim friend has much to do with an error in anthropomorphisizing God. He's probably trying to attribute things to God in the way he attributes them to humans, which can't be done (and thus the doctrine of analogical language). But I'd have to see it in more detail to say. In any case, I won't say any more at this point. Maybe this is all just wasted space, but I'll let you be the judge. God bless!
