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<font face="Times New Roman, Times">Hi Michael,<br><br>
I don’t think you have read my chapter “The Myth of God Incarnate” very
carefully. (See www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/gre3.htm.) The first section
discusses what I call the “Hebraic” principle. This is the major
achievement of ancient Hebrew thinkers. <br><br>
In contrast to other Near Eastern views in which the human and divine
were mixed and confused (most egregiously by the idea of a human mother
giving birth to a god), the ancient Hebrews affirmed the transcendence of
God, a clear separation of the Creator and the created. <br><br>
The Hebrews did not believe that the Messiah was a divine being.
Even Martin Luther knew Hebrew well enough to translate Isaiah 9:6
correctly. The Messiah was a “powerful” like God not “the mighty
God” of King James. The Hebrew ‘<i>el gibbor</i> is grammatically
parallel to <i>harere’el </i> (towering [not divine] mountains) and
<i>‘arze’el</i> (towering [not divine] cedars of Lebanon). Do I
even need to mention that Isaiah 7:14 is also mistranslated as predicting
a virgin birth?<br><br>
The Synoptic Gospels do not support the deity of Jesus. Indeed, in
Mark Jesus explicitly denies it in the famous saying “Why do you call me
good? No one is good but God alone” (10:18). Jesus knows full well what
the Hebraic principle means. Even the author(s) of John, who appears to
identify Jesus and God as the same being in the first verse, still
preserves a difference between God and Jesus. At the end of the famous
first chapter, the author states that "no man has ever seen
God," an expression of the Hebraic principle that is repeated
frequently (5:37, 6:46; 1 Jn. 4:12; 1 Tim. 6:16). The clear implication
here is that Jesus is not identical in substance (<i>homoousia</i>) with
God as the creeds state that he is.<br><br>
Here is the biblical language that you asked for and it is not the same,
as you imply, as the language of the creeds, which is thoroughly
corrupted by the horrible Hellenism that you learned to loathe from your
association with Christ Church. As I argue in my chapter, the
Incarnation is a clear violation of the Hebraic principle and returns
Christianity to paganism. The language of the creeds, for example,
the Son being of the same substance (<i>homoousia</i>) as the Father or
being an equal person of a trinity (<i>trinitas</i>), are not words from
the Greek New Testament and are, therefore, not biblical
language.<br><br>
I congratulate you in the one way in which you have broken from a
Hellenized Christianity. You embrace process theology when you say
that the divine nature is dynamic and not the static immutability of
Greek ideas of deity. While process theology makes divine immanence
intelligible--as least for some of us--I know of no process theologian
who supports a literal man-God. They are without exceptions
heretics with regard to the orthodox proposition that Christ is fully
human and fully God. For more on process theology see
<a href="http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/ngier/process.htm" eudora="autourl">www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/ngier/process.htm</a>.<br><br>
Thanks for the dialogue, Michael, but let’s take the rest of this debate
off-line, as we all join in celebrating, in our own ways and far less
intellectually, the Myth of God Incarnate.<br><br>
Happy Holidays,<br><br>
Nick Gier<br>
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