The website christianity.org.uk offers a refreshingly honest take on the claim that Jesus is God. It admits that Jesus never claimed to be God but offers the suggestion that by 'intriguing' his Jewish followers he caused them to conclude he must be. It implies, though it has a careful line in anti-semitism to tread - that many Jews, similarly intrigued, didn't reach this conclusion.
About time! After centuries of pointless oppression, specious argument and downright lies from representatives of the mainstream Church we get the admission that the status of Jesus is not obvious. It's a conclusion that the Church arrived at some time after Jesus's death.
It accepts that there are other ways to understand Jesus and the divine sonship hypothesis is the 'one that [some] Christians came to accept as the belief that made best sense of what had happened during the thirty remarkable years of Jesus’ life'.
It also, remarkably, accepts the wide variety and contradictory understandings of the meaning of the Crucifixion. In the spirit of Free Christianity, it confesses that different people understand Jesus very differently.
We haven't yet quite got there. The website still claims that the New Testament clearly backs up the claim of divine status, whereas only the later epistles offer much support and then only if you have already accepted a trinitarian solution to Jesus. Nor, more importantly, does it address the obvious issue that there are abundant evidences in the Gospels that Jesus was not God and, like the non-believing Jews to which christianity.org.uk refers, would have regarded such a claim as repugnant.
Still, it's a step forward. Free Christianity advances.
About time! After centuries of pointless oppression, specious argument and downright lies from representatives of the mainstream Church we get the admission that the status of Jesus is not obvious. It's a conclusion that the Church arrived at some time after Jesus's death.
It accepts that there are other ways to understand Jesus and the divine sonship hypothesis is the 'one that [some] Christians came to accept as the belief that made best sense of what had happened during the thirty remarkable years of Jesus’ life'.
It also, remarkably, accepts the wide variety and contradictory understandings of the meaning of the Crucifixion. In the spirit of Free Christianity, it confesses that different people understand Jesus very differently.
We haven't yet quite got there. The website still claims that the New Testament clearly backs up the claim of divine status, whereas only the later epistles offer much support and then only if you have already accepted a trinitarian solution to Jesus. Nor, more importantly, does it address the obvious issue that there are abundant evidences in the Gospels that Jesus was not God and, like the non-believing Jews to which christianity.org.uk refers, would have regarded such a claim as repugnant.
Still, it's a step forward. Free Christianity advances.
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