And the Word was with God

by Narkissos 70 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  Hellrider

  No, but I became curious now. So I searced around, and found a short article/review about the book:

  http://www.greatnewstory.com/web/read/245.html

  ...oh what the heck, it`s short enough, I`ll post the whole thing here:

  "The Doctrine of the Trinity
  Christianity’s Self-inflicted Wound
  Anthony F. Buzzard and Charles F. Hunting (conservative theologians)
  
  “Could there have been lurking in the consciousness of Jesus the idea that he himself was another, coequal person in the Godhead, and therefore also fully God? It is beyond our imagination that any such notion could be detected here or anywhere else reported about Jesus by Mark. There is no disagreement between the orthodox Jewish theologian and Jesus…. God is one and only one. Mark 12:29” Page 33.
  
  Never was there the slightest trace of any argument concerning the trinity….It remains a fact that the doctrine of the trinity was never defended in the whole of the New Testament. “How can you believe, when you seek glory from one another, and you do not seek glory from the one who alone is God?” John 5:44.
  
  “John portrays Jesus as a loyal Jew faithful to the strict monotheism of his people. Did Jesus followers think he was God? Paul never equates Jesus with God.” Page 57.
  This work makes an extensive review of the gospels and Paul and then passes onto the book of Hebrews. “Even Thomas declaration, “My Lord and My God” uses the word ”God” in the sense in which it is applied to Kings and Judges.” Page 87
  
  None of Jesus followers thought of him as God is the conclusion of the first part of the book.
  
  The nature of pre-existence in the New Testament. Page 159
  
  “When the Jew said something was ‘predestined’, he thought of it as already ‘existing’ in a higher sphere of life. (6 E. C Dewick primitive Christian Eschatology).
  The so-called ‘pre-existence of Jesus in John refers to his existence in the Plan of God.----The so-called ‘pre-human existence of Jesus in the Bible refers to the prior existence of Jesus in God’s plan and vision. Pre-existence in the Bible does not mean what it meant in later creeds. There is a perfectly good word for “real” pre-existence in the Greek language (pro-uparchon). It is very significant that it appears nowhere in Scripture, but it does in the writings of Greek Church Fathers of the second century. These Greek commentators on Scripture failed to understand the Hebrew categories of thought in which the New Testament is written.
  
  No pre-existence for Jesus in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
  
  There is deepening silence about any real pre-existence of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts and Peter and the whole Old Testament.
  It is a considerable mistake to read John 1:1 as though it means “In the beginning was the Son of God and the Son was with the Father and the Son was God.” Page 168
  
  “Monotheism: Neither Paul nor any other Bible writer ever stated ‘there is one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. No example out of thousands of occurrences of Yahweh and God can be shown to mean ‘God in three persons’. The Triune God is foreign to the Bible.” Page171
  “The clear evidence of John is that Jesus refused the claim of God.” Professor J.A.T. Robinson.
  
  “In the Synoptics there is no direct statement of the pre-existence of Christ. They do not anywhere declare his pre-existence.” 8 (B.F. Westcott The Gospel of John.)
  “Christ’s place in eternity is in the foreknowledge and counsel of the Father.10 (Dictionary of the Apostolic Church (T&T Clark, 1916) Page 178
  
  By God’s foreknowledge everything comes to pass and everything that is, he establishes by his purpose, and without him [or it] it is not done. Page 189
  
  “The ‘word’ in John 1:1, they think, is a personification, not a person.” Page 190
  
  ‘Sent from God’ does not mean pre-existence” Page 193
  
  The Holy Spirit: a Third Person or God in Action?“
  
  “Our difficulty in accepting the Spirit as a third person of the Triune God is reflected in an amazing admission of the prominent orthodox Greek church leader, Gregory of Nazianzen, who in AD 381 stated: ‘Of the wise among us, some hold the Holy Spirit to be a power (energeia), others a creature, others for God, and still others are unwilling to decide, out of reverence (as they say) for the Scriptures, which do not speak plainly on the matter.” 2 Cited in ‘Macedonius” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1963), 7:112.The conventional conception of the Holy Spirit as a separate and distinct Divine Person is a growth. It was not the belief of early Christianity.” Page 216
  
  “The Spirit of God is certainly not an abstract power. Since it is God in action, it is most personal. It is God’s outreach. God’s Spirit is His personality extended to His creation.” Page 217 (Han’s Kung is in full agreement with this – see his writings)
  
  “It is going beyond the evidence of Scripture to equate the Spirit of God with a person distinct from One God, in the same sense as the Son is distinct from the Father” Page 218
  
  “The Spirit which operates in the early church was recognized as the ‘Spirit of Jesus’, his very personality extended to empower and inspire the believers------Acts 16,6,7 There is apparently no essential difference between the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus.” Rom 8:9. Page 219
  “God opens up his innermost purpose and plans to us, speaking heart to heart with man, His creature, and effecting his lesson by means of His own Creative intelligence and Spirit. “ Page 220
  
  “We do not assume the Holy Spirit is a person distinct from the Father and Son.” Page 221
  
  “God’s spirit is His holy intelligence, character and disposition, the index of the plans and purposes of His Heart. Through the Spirit we are invited to participate in that range of Divine activity.” Ps 25:14. Page 228.
  “------- We gain access to the Divine personality extended to us in the spirit.” : Page 229
  
  These authors restore the Biblical picture of Jesus functioning for God without being God. “Paul neither calls Jesus God neither identifies him anywhere with God. it is true he does the work of God, He is certainly God’s agent who does the work of God.”
  
  The object of this book, therefore has been to propose ways of believing more accurately what Jesus believed about God and himself thus bringing our own doctrines into line with his. The book contains 300 pages, dealing with every text in the Bible on the Holy Spirit and the current debate on the subject. “The developed concept of three equal partners in the Godhead….cannot be clearly detected within the confines of the canon.” Oxford companion to the Bible. International Scholars Publication Lanham, Maryland 20706
  
  “Post-apostolic writing are mixed with ideas foreign to apostolic Christianity.” Page 113.
  
  “It was Constantine who by official edict brought Christianity to the belief in the formal division of the Godhead into two – God the Father and God the Son. It remained the task of the later generation to bring Christianity to belief in the Triune God.” Page 141.
  
  Once Christianity has committed itself to the theological verdict of the secular conquering arm of the state, acceptance of violence in the church became established. The violent history of the church follows.
  
  An important chapter follows on the nature of pre-existence in the New Testament.
  “When the Jew wished to think of something as predestined, he spoke of it as already existing in heaven. This ‘pre-existence’ statement in the New Testament really have to do with ‘foreordination’ and predestination. It was the Greeks who misunderstood the Jewish way of thinking and turned Jesus into a cosmic figure who entered the earth from outer space. But is such a Jesus a human being?” Page 154.
  
  “The so called pre-existence in the book of John refers to his existence in the plan of God.” Page 159.
  
  “The clear evidence of John is that Jesus refused the claim of God.” Page 173
  
  The great and still undischarged task which confronts Christianity is to explain how the teaching of Jesus developed into early Greek theology.” Page 174 "

  ...It`s interesting that the author specifically adresses John 1.1., and explains it how it must have been understood at that time, with "the Word" as personification, as opposed to person.

  Any thoughts?
• 

  Narkissos

  Ya mean the "D" in JWD stands for discussion not debate?

  Discussion and even debate are fine for me, and remain the only way of dealing with objective issues -- scientific or exegetical for instance. You posit one thesis and it is discussed with a confrontation of arguments and facts. In the end it has to be right or wrong (or partly right and partly wrong). If you feel your thesis was wrong (at least in part) then you modify it (or join another) and a new discussion may ensue.

  However I feel that a forum structure might allow for another pattern of threads which could be better suited to "philosophical or spiritual ramblings," in which there is more to conceptualise and express than to prove. Someone offers an idea, and whoever feels like it modifies it after its own mind/soul; the first or a third one catches it where it has stopped and pushes it a bit further. Nobody is expected to elaborate on his/her posts. Anybody can develop another's idea. Ambiguity and clarity are equally welcome. An open model of conversation (broken line in a space or irregular spiral) rather than a closed one: i'm sure jgnat "sees" what I mean .

  Would look more like a "game thread". And I feel such a conversational setting would allow for expression of deeper and more personal thoughts than the discussion/debate setting.

  Do you see the Semitic "Wisdom" to be analogous to the Hellenistic "Word", or are they distinct?

  I think they are distinct, but I'm not sure they coexist as personification-hypostases in the same texts down to the NT. Perhaps in Philo, although he clearly focuses on logos and ascribes the hypostatic Logos / Son of God part of the Wisdom tradition -- without refering directly to Proverbs 8 or the Book of Wisdom, which is perhaps significant. It seems to me that you have either Lady Sophia or Sir Logos; only in later Gnostic texts do they meet in the same mythological-allegorical narratives.

  Another important aspect is that the Hebrew Wisdom herself probably derives in part from the Egyptian Ma'at -- and Philo is a Jew in Hellenistic Egypt, at the confluence of Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek traditions.

  I kinda favour the idea of a Sophia/Pneuma construct, rather than a Sophia/Logos one

  Do you mean Sophia and Pneuma as distinct figures, or a construct of both (a Sophia-like Pneuma or a Pneuma-like Sophia)?

  Wisdom and spirit are a noteworthy match in Luke-Acts (Luke 1:17; Acts 6:3,10), where sophia is personified (Luke 7:35; 11:49) and no logos christology appears (not even pre-existence in any form). Paul sometimes opposes spirit and wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:4,13), or makes wisdom one among the "gifts of the Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:8; cf. Ephesians 1:17).
• 

  Narkissos

  Leolaia,

  Josephus' example (pros ton theon eusebeia) seems very close to the occurrences in 4 Macabees (which depart from earlier LXX usage) where pros ton theon qualifies fear (phobos, 15:8), faith/loyalty (pistis, 16:22), hope and endurance (elpis - hupomonè, 17:4).
• 

  Justin

  In the Gospel of John, the idea of preexistence is in regard to the Logos. This Logos is not simply a human Jesus who preexists in the mind of God, for John assumes that the Logos existed when God spoke everything into existence in Genesis. The Logos became personified as Wisdom in the book of Proverbs (8:22-31). John states that "the Word was made flesh," but he doesn't say exactly how this happened. Is the Word identical with Jesus Christ? Or is this a poetical expression to indicate that the Word is expressed in the human life of Jesus? Certainly John thought that in some sense, because the Word was preexistent, Jesus himself had preexisted - for he has Jesus ask the Father: "glorify me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." (17:4, emphasis mine) It would not seem that the human Jesus would simply ask to go back to being an idea in the mind of God. Or is this more a statement of the Logos coming through the man Jesus? The solution which the Church finally adopted is that the same Person, Jesus Christ, is both God and man simultaneously ever since the Logos assumed flesh. JWs have a different solution - that the Logos existed in spirit form, then gave up that existence to become the human Jesus, and at the resurrection went back to being spirit with the added quality of deathlessness (immortality). In the early Church, before the decisions of the ecumenical councils, there were some theologians who thought that the Logos and Jesus were two distinct entitites, and that the man Jesus was possessed by the Logos - perhaps starting, not with his birth, but at his baptism.

  So a question that can legitimately arise from John's gospel is not whether the Logos preexisted, but whether Jesus of Nazareth as such preexisted his own conception and birth.
• 

  LittleToe

  Didier:Just trying to assist in pushing out some ideas for contemplation:

  Do you mean Sophia and Pneuma as distinct figures, or a construct of both (a Sophia-like Pneuma or a Pneuma-like Sophia)?

  Option 2: I was thinking of the counterpart.

  If Sophia is termed feminine, and the Holy Spirit is deemed the same, then you have a neat fusion of ideas in the Trinity with Masculine/Feminine/Child, and a focus for the Divine Feminine/Goddess.

  Where do we go from here?
• 

  Narkissos

  Gender/sex relationship is certainly the most "natural" way to construe the basic antagonism.

  In the Semitic Gospel of the Hebrews Jesus speaks of "my Mother, the Holy Spirit".

  In Gnosticism (e.g. the Apocryphon of John, one of the Nag Hammadi texts, http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html) too a female principle is the first emanation of the original, androgynous or rather impersonal principle, which is the Spirit (neuter); and, at later/lower stages, the female principle appears again -- sometimes in an ambiguous role as when, without the consent of her consort, she creates the first archon who will claim to be "the only God" (the OT God, the God of this world) -- yet she repents and shares in the further process of salvation/revelation, especially through Eve who will be the revealer of Sophia (which is superior to "God") to Adam. The latter is a very old motif actually: in the Gilgamesh Epic (IV) already it was a woman who imparted knowledge and wisdom to the beast-man Enkidu and make him a man; this is perhaps reflected in the title of ngd (often translated "partner") given to the woman in Genesis 2:18, inasmuch as ngd may suggest both antagonism (standing before, in front of, against somebody, cf. LXX kat'auton) and revelation (ngd hif`il is a very common verb meaning "to reveal, inform, tell, relate" etc.).

  This of course is fascinating from psychoanalytical standpoint -- CG Jung was one of the first readers of the newly-found Gnostic texts. And from a theological standpoint, too, provided your theology is a theanthropology.

  As a side comment, this reminds me of my first Trinity discussions after I left JWs. I used to say "Trinity is only perceptible and understandable from within" -- that is, when you stand in the Son's position; out of this very topos -- "in Christ" -- it is meaningless.
• 

  LittleToe

  Didier:

  I don't mean to take this down a rabbit-hole, but:

  As a side comment, this reminds me of my first Trinity discussions after I left JWs. I used to say "Trinity is only perceptible and understandable from within" -- that is, when you stand in the Son's position; out of this very topos -- "in Christ" -- it is meaningless.

  Would you mind elaborating, please?
• 

  Narkissos

  Ross:

  Do I need to?

  In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.
  On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
• 

  LittleToe

  That's what I thought you meant, but I didn't like to presume

  So, taking Barthian Theanthropology, or God in relation to man: would you like to take this from the angle of a triune embodiment including a "feminine" pneuma, or shall we restrict it to the logos, for the moment?

  Could it be said that man is an extension of logos as an emanation, thus the words of men are further creations in their own right?

  If that be the case; is it physically the words, or the thoughts "behind" or "invoking" the words, that have the creative content?
• 

  Catholic_Apologist

  Hi everybody,

  Thank you all for your very thought-provoking and sometimes erudite posts.

  The Trinity is a very theological and complex topic, and I am not qualified to go into Greek to English translations, subtle distinctions, and ancient formulations of doctrine. However, I do have some questions that this discussion thread has brought to mind:

  1. Did God become a Father only when He created, or is He a Father from all eternity?

  2. Before God created, was He alone? If God is love, does that mean that before He created, He loved only Himself?

  3. When God uses the term "us" in Genesis, is He speaking to Himself, or to the angels? If He is speaking to the latter, does that mean that man is made in the image and likeness of the angels?

  4. When the average, non-scholarly person, reads the Bible, how does he or she know which translation to trust, when many people who are very well-educated and have studied the ancient Greek manuscripts disagree on fundamentals points of interpretation.

  5. Does traditional Jehovah's Witness theology on this point have more in common with Islam than with traditional Christianity?

  6. If the Trinity is a correct doctrine, what does God's revelation of Himself as a Family of Persons teach us about the human condition?

  7. If the Trinity is an incorrect doctrine, then why did Jehovah God suffer it to be widely accepted by followers of Jesus for so long? Why didn't Jehovah God allow Arianism to become the orthodox form of Christianity?

  I'm sure the questions I've posed betray my own point of view. Still, I'm interested in what others think about the topic.

  God bless everybody!

  Brian (a.k.a. Catholic Apologist)