Can you just picture that?!
Many moons ago (like, a few weeks, actually), The Rambling Taoist threw down a gauntlet, of sorts: Christianity is bunk.
So I threw my gauntlet down too: prove it!
There was a bit of a haggle back and forth, but eventually, RT provided me with a few posts containing his objections to Christianity.
In one post (link above), he took issue with Christ’s nature in Christianity and the concept of “mere” mortal humans knowing God.
To be fair, this isn’t the only objection he has; I assume he has many objections (I’ll contribute posts to a few more in the near future). Nor is this post even the best objection, perhaps. Nevertheless, in the first part of the post he brings up a doctrine that is one of the most mysterious and paradoxical in the Christian faith.
Anytime one tries to plumb God’s identity and nature, we run aground a very stubborn wall after a short while. We can only grasp a smidgeon of who God is. That we can grasp Him at all is only because God, in His infinite grace, has stooped down and made that possible. We are rebels against God, so this is precisely what we don’t deserve.
He writes,
One of my biggest points of internal struggle was the concept of Jesus as part-man, part-God.
For me, the part-God portion mucks everything up. It negates the message Jesus’ life was supposed to typify. If he was truly endowed with the omniscient self, then all the supposed trials, tribulations and suffering he went through are, in my view, severely downgraded. How can one truly suffer from human misery and terror if part of that self knows everything is going to work out a-ok in the end?
I must stop at this point to offer a correction: actually, the Christian concept of Jesus in the Bible is not “part-man, part-God,” but fully man, fully God. Two natures in one person. Yes, definitely seems odd, for no one else has two natures in one person…but then again, Jesus is unique, just as you’d expect if God put on flesh, so noting that no one else in our experience is like that doesn’t carry much weight. These two natures are not mixed together or combined to form a new nature. They are separate but act in one accord; the attributes of both natures are held by the person of Christ.
You might think I’m splitting hairs here, but follow me on this. This is why Jesus can grow in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), yet know all things. One of the huge pits that many non-Christian cults get into doctrine-wise is to de-emphasize or deny one of the natures. The bottom line is that Jesus has a fully human body, emotions, mind, and will (minus the sin nature, of course), and in no way does this cast a shadow over his deity. The reason why this is so important is that it relates to the scope of his redemptive work. As Gregory of Nazianzus said (church leader/writer in the early days), “That which he has not assumed he has not healed.” In other words, He was fully God in order for Him to secure salvation for “whosoever” wants to come to Him, and He was fully human in order to fully redeem humanity. That’s what being a “mediator” between God and man entails.
Some think that having a human nature contradicts having a divine nature, but I see no contradiction. It’s not like the claim that Jesus is divine and not divine at the same time. THAT would be a contradiction, but I don’t see why God couldn’t join himself with a human nature. He’s God, afterall, and that strikes me as perfectly within His omnipresence.
I hope now you can see that Christ, since He had a fully human nature, as opposed to half, He can suffer fully, just like us. He suffered fully in His human nature. The writer of Hebrews touches upon this:
14Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. 16For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. 17For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for[f]the sins of the people. 18Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. (2: 14-18)
The prophet Isaiah called Christ “Immanuel,” or “God with us.” Christ was 100% God, yet shockingly, He was “with us” in every sense of the phrase, being 100% one of us. Beautiful.
As I alluded to earlier, this it is difficult for us to wrap our minds around this 100%, but then again, that’s what we should expect when we’re dealing with the Infinite. At the very least, Christians throughout the ages have come back to this doctrine again and again as the one that best sums up the teaching of the Bible about who Christ is.
The main beef RT has, though, is that Christ’s omniscience somehow downgrades His suffering. I simply reject that notion. Just because I know what’s coming up doesn’t mean my suffering is somehow diminished.
I hate shots…hate ‘em. When getting a shot, I know full well it’s only temporary, but this doesn’t help much. I simply can’t stand them, period. That’s a fairly trivial instance; you can think of many other more substantial examples.
We see this with Jesus, too. He knew full well He was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, but this didn’t stop Him from weeping for His friend and His friend’s family. What’s more, when He was on the cross, the physical pain of crucifixion alone was unbearable. I mean, geez, have *you* ever had dull, rusty nails jammed through your wrists, then hoisted upon those nails and left to suffocate for hours (that’s what crucifixion does…it suffocates the victim, in a slow, excruciating fashion.)? When you add into that the abandonement of His friends, a severe beating with a whip, multiple long charade-filled trials, and, to top it all off, experiencing the separation from His Heavenly Father, you’ve got an unspeakable amount of suffering, and it’s just cold to assume that Christ’s knowledge diminishes that.
Sure, the unknown may make suffering more intense, but I see no reason to infer from that that someone who knows what’s around the bend is undergoing second class suffering. In fact, sometimes knowing what is coming up makes the suffering more intense. This was exactly the source of anguish for Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.
Moving on:
In my view, the Jewish carpenter would be worthy of all this adulation IF believers accepted the fact that he was entirely human just like the rest of us. As a mere mortal, his suffering on the cross takes on a entirely different dimension. It would show that he died for what he believed in, not knowing if what he believed was right.
Again, Jesus is fully human. That last sentence is strange, though. If I die for a principle, and I know that principle is right, my death is not worthy of as much adulation? I don’t buy that. In fact, we admire some of our greatest heroes simply because they went to their death boldly, with no hesitation.
He continues,
More importantly, if Jesus was just some guy from Nazareth, then it means that each of us could tread a similar path. It means that we could lead a life based on the very principles he espoused.
I refer to the verses from Hebrews above.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, the institutionalized Christian Church is absolutely terrified of this view. If people believed in this way, there would be no need for churches, ministers, and all the trappings that go with it. No more offerings, TV evangelists or massive property holdings. No more Focus on the Family, Moral Majority or Promise Keepers.
I’ve got two names for you: Oprah and Joel Osteen.
Believe me: organizations, churches, and people don’t need Jesus’ divinity in order to snooker the masses. Witness the myriad of cults and pulpit pimps that trample all over Christ’s divinity for profit. They downplay it, de-emphasize it, or reject it outright and it doesn’t hurt their pocket books in the least. These folks have little if anything to do with Immanuel, yet they rake in the dough. If you want to make a bunch of money or start a religion, you don’t need to turn a peasant sage into God incarnate.
In fact, the God-man can hinder profit in a lot of cases. Face it: self-help sells. Your Best Life Now is sexy. People want to pursue what they want with abandon, and they want to be patted on the back for it. The God of the Universe visiting us gets in the way of that. If Christ is fully God, He has a claim on everyone’s life, and that is mighty inconvenient for those who want to live life on their own terms.
He ends,
So, this conflict started me down the road to Taoism. What pushed me over the edge, however, was the Christian belief in knowing God. The very idea that a mere mortal could understand the breadth of the complex universe is not a sign of devotion but complete egocentrism!
Whatever it is out there — being, process, law, principle or something else — is so vast that what our feeble minds can comprehend is tantamount to a few pixels of a trillion upon trillion gigabyte picture. It’s like holding a handful of sand and then pompously thinking we can each accurately describe a 1 million mile long beach!
First, he sets fire to a straw man: The Bible, nor any creed, nor any Christian worth his or her salt says we can know God fully. That is foolish. Rather, God in His undeserved mercy and grace met us where we are. He broke through and communicated with us in Christ, and because of that, we can know God personally. Fully? Not by a long shot. But we can know Him. When you take into account that we did nothing to deserve this, that it’s an act of sheer grace, it is not egocentric at all.
In fact, RT betrays his cards in that very paragraph. He assumes he can know some things about God or the ultimate. He thinks he knows that He/it is so vast that all other humans can’t grasp Him/it. That just goes to show that the claim that a human can know God partially is not very controversial, and it’s hard to deny.
