Audio only:
Joe reviews the debate between David Wood and Alex O’Connor on the question “Did Jesus Claim to be God?”
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shamless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I wanted to review the recent debate between Alex O’Connor, cosmic Skeptic on YouTube and David Wood, who has Acts 17 ministries. So it’s a skeptic and agnostic, I believe atheist actually against a Christian, and the resolution is, did Jesus claim to be God? Now, longtime viewers of this channel may know I’ve actually reviewed another of Alex’s debates back when he debated Dine Za, and as a Christian, I’m happy to say this one went way better for the Christian side. To be honest. I actually think it went really well for both sides. I know it sounds like participation trophies, but really both signs made really important points where I found myself thinking I was not going to go that direction at all, and I’m really glad they did and there’s something I can benefit from with what they just said, and I think other people can too.
So I wanted to unpack in both cases one thing I thought they did poorly and one thing I thought they did well. So I’m going to start with David and then turn to Alex. So as I say, I think David Wood did a good job on this debate. I think he did a spectacular job in terms of strategy, in terms of where he was going to go with the debate to prove that Jesus presents himself as God. It was a pretty unexpected direction and a really good one. However, to get there, you had to make it through about a hundred seconds of really uncomfortable opening icebreakers. Now, that might not sound like a lot, but look, I didn’t know before I watched this debate who David Wood was. I’d heard his name, I’d never watched anything he’d been in or read anything, or he had not really crossed my radar in a deep way.
That’s a bad mixed metaphor, and I think that’s probably the way it was for many people who might’ve been familiar with one or the other of the debaters. And so first impressions make a big difference not just for yourself but for the cause that you’re representing in this case, literally Christianity, literally whether Christ does or doesn’t claim to be God. And so I want to just play you his again, about the first a hundred seconds or so of his opening statement, and then I want to unpack particular things that he does. You might find it a little obnoxious, and I want to unpack why that is, because I think there’s something, I’m not doing this to pick on David Wood at all. Again, I don’t really know the guy. I’m doing this because I’ve seen something of a pattern of doing this badly, and I think what he’s trying to do is something that Alex actually does really well. So with no further ado, I’m going to let you listen for yourself and then I’m going to give my take on it.
CLIP:
Tell us when you’re ready so we can start the clock.
CLIP:
I’m ready now. Oh, you started. Okay. Well good evening. Good evening. What a beautiful audience. You’re all breathtaking. This is how you charm a crowd in America. Son, I’d like to thank LAN for arranging this conference and this debates one of many awesome debates taking place in 2025, pitting heroes against villains. I won’t say who the villain is in this debate. I’ll let all you lovely Christians judge that for yourselves based entirely on our accents. And speaking of British accents, I’d like to thank Alex for finally showing up. You got to give me some wiggle room on time, Roselyn, or you can all quit cheering for Alex. Alright, no, I’d like to thank Alex for finally showing up. He is a month and a half late, but he finally showed up. I’m teasing by the way, people have no clue how dangerous debate con is actually with the lineup they had and the number and the volume of death threats against multiple speakers. So plus he lives in what is rapidly becoming the Sharia compliant hell hellhole of the universe. So good to take precautions. We don’t want to lose Alex, by the way, are you guys starting to miss Jesus over there in the uk? Seems like you should be missing Jesus. Bye now.
Joe:
Okay, so bear in mind the opening statement that he has is 20 minutes long and he spends a little more than 5% of it doing basically open mic standup to open up. Now look, I understand I’m a public speaker. You often begin a debate or a talk with some kind of joke or something to sort of break the ice and to warm up the audience a little bit so that things go more smoothly. You don’t always just jump in 0.1 and I get that, but look at the kinds of icebreakers that he does. I’m going to just name the 10 things he does in the order that I saw them. First he says to the moderator, Ruslan, who is himself a Protestant, that he’s ready to start and then Ruan starts and he is like, oh, you started okay already like a weird start. Fine.
Then he treats the crowd fine, but then he says, this is how you charm a crowd in America, son, which manages to both play the oh watch out Alex’s English card, which I don’t know how that helps and to sound really condescending by calling him son. Third, he then calls this debate one of the many awesome debates, pitting heroes against villains and then suggests that the crowd of lovely Christians can judge. Witch is witch. Okay, so who is he building up or putting down on each of these? It’s like, well, he’s seemingly knocking on the moderator, then he’s knocking Alex, then he’s knocking Alex again. Then he tells the crowd that they should judge the debate based entirely on accents. I don’t really know what that was supposed to do because Alex, he’s got a cooler accent. I have to admit that as an American, but I think he’s knocking it.
It’s hard to tell. He then says just in case it wasn’t enough, just like bashing on Alex on ad Hominems, he says, I’d like to thank Alex for finally showing up. Now if you’re aware of the whole backstory, they had to postpone this debate because of death threats being made. Now those death threats, I think were mostly against David Wood because he’s got a lot of apologetics focused on Islam. But nevertheless, for I think fairly understandable reasons, Alex O’Connor was a little uneasy about participating as originally planned. So I’m thankful they were able to get it together and get the show literally on the road. Then he does all this and then sixth, he tells Lan that he’s going to need more wiggle room on time because people cheered or clapped that Alex wasn’t dead when he made this point. He then has an awkward laugh and says that everyone needs to quit cheering for Alex.
Then he says, again, I’d like to thank Alex for finally showing up. He’s a month and a half late the ninth, he makes fun of the UK as a Sharia compliant hellhole I believe, and then makes fun of the UK again saying they’re probably missing Jesus. Now I want you to, so all of the jokes that he makes, in other words, I get someone’s going to see this and say, what are you talking about? He’s just joking around. All of the jokes he makes are at either his opponent’s expense or at the moderator’s expense. None of them advance his case at all with the maybe quarter exception that when he says the UK misses Jesus, he sort of kind of segues that into the debate that he’s actually about to embark on. Now, want to contrast this with Alex’s opener. Now the first thing to note is Alex’s opener is substantially shorter. It’s about a third shorter. He also does some of the icebreakers, some of the cracking jokes. He even gets in one joke against David, namely that David didn’t keep time well when he had the long icebreakers we just talked about. But then listen to where he goes.
CLIP:
David didn’t factor in the clapping. I always factor in clapping into the timing of my speeches. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Or as we say in England, as I must apologize for the previous debate fiasco, David’s right that most people dunno what happened. A lot of accusations thrown my way, but I suppose that is the essence of our debate this evening. People thinking they know a thing or two about a person without hearing it from their own mouth. To which effect, I was thinking about how to approach this given that I didn’t know which approach David was going to take. I woke up this morning in this fine resort opposite Legoland, which means that there is a roller coaster just outside of my room and being a bit jet lagged. I woke up quite to the most peaceful of noises that is the sound of children screaming for their lives. Hearing the sound of innocent children screaming for their lives of course reminded me to read the Old Testament.
Joe:
Okay, so let’s unpack how Alex opened because I think it’s a lot more effective. I said he does make the joke about how David didn’t factor in the clapping. He always factors in the clapping, but then he makes a sort of self-effacing joke about, as we say in England, Salama like him, which is objectively a pretty good joke. Probably the best joke either side had over the course of the evening. So, but notice he’s not attacking David there. He’s making fun of himself in his own country. Then he apologizes, but then says there’s a lot of accusations. You haven’t really heard it from me, you’ve just heard from secondary or tertiary sources, which he’s already doing work to link to the debate at hand because his suggestion there pretty obviously is that Jesus doesn’t claim to be God the people around him do. And so he’s showing like, oh, well you wouldn’t trust just what everybody else is saying about me.
So he’s already thematically, even as he’s making these jokes, they’re number one, not tearing down the other person. And number two, they’re pushing the debate forward right out the gate, which is really well done, even though I don’t like the cause that he’s standing for, he’s doing it well, which then gets to the last joke that he makes, the sort of self-effacing. He likes children’s screaming joke again, who looks bad in this joke, him on purpose. And then he again leads it in this case to link it up to Old Testament massacres as he’s going to go in that direction. So that is a very, I think, skillful, masterful way of doing an opening statement. And I understand especially people who don’t have a lot of experience with public speaking, maybe you either don’t know how hard it is to do what he just did there, or you just say, well, I can’t do that.
Totally understandable. I’m going to give a couple pointers for maybe how to do this, not just because I think you might be doing public speaking like this. I know most of you won’t, but because I think in conversation with other people we can risk doing when we’re nervous, the kinds of things that I think David did here, I suspect that he was just nervous and that his nervousness put him in a bad direction rhetorically that actually really undermined. What is, I want to repeat here, A very good case for Christianity that he makes. So the other reason I wanted to do this is because I’ve seen now a pattern of this. As I said before, Alex had a debate previously with Dinesh DEA that Dinesh did way worse than David Wood did. It was somewhere between phoning it in and self emulation on Dinesh DE’s part, and it’s worth seeing how similarly Dinesh opens with just awkward potshots at Alex before getting into anything that might be deemed,
CLIP:
All right, here we go. If you don’t mind, I’m going to stand up. Is that okay? Please. Okay, I’m standing up because I want to kind of neutralize Alex’s accent advantage. I mentioned this because it seems to me no accident that so many of the prominent so-called new atheists have British accents. I think this is really important to that credibility because think of it, if Hitchens and Dawkins and Alex were three southern boys from Louisiana, would they have quite the same impact? I’m not sure.
Joe:
That is genuinely painful for me to watch. I’m sort of sorry to put you through it in my own. So it’s not just Alex O’Connor that this happens to. In my own debate with James White recently, I met him an hour before and he began in what I thought was a very strange kind of way by mocking my clothing and my wife and talking about how good he thought his own bow tie was.
CLIP:
Alright, well it’s great to be back here again this evening. The double header has begun, and I’m going to ask that whoever wins the debate this evening gets to take the little desk lamp home with them. I think that should be the reward for that work. That’s really cool. I’ve never had a little desk lamp before on my desk that makes me feel very warm and fuzzy inside. And I also need to make sure the bow tie is straight since I’m the only one wearing a tie this evening. Just thought I’d mention that and check the shoes out too. Just thought I’d, sorry, that’s just wow. Okay. Anyway, your wife lets you go out like that, huh? Okay. Alright. Sorry ma’am. Wherever you are.
Joe:
So what can we concretely take from that? Well, really simply, if you are in a situation whether it’s public speaking or you’re having a hard conversation or something and you feel the need to reach for a joke to break the tension to ingratiate yourself to the person you’re speaking to, whatever it is, make sure that if you are making the joke, it’s at your own expense. It’s really that simple. And if you are in a context where you’re giving some kind of formal defense of Christianity or anything, script your opening statement, David Wood is going first. He can afford to have everything written out, scripted and really carefully thought out because he doesn’t have to wait and see what Alex O’Connor comes with. He already has his prepared remarks. So I give that to say this debate was off to a pretty rocky start and I didn’t know if I was going to enjoy the debate or if I thought that the Christian side was going to do well. I was bracing myself for another bad debate where Christians embarrass before atheists like Alex O’Connor. But fortunately, immediately after that my impression changed. So as I say, there’s about a hundred uncomfortable seconds and then it presents a fantastic case in which he focuses on an angle that I’ve not heard a lot of other people make at all the so-called two powers,
CLIP:
Just when I think you couldn’t possibly be any dumber, you go and do something like this and totally redeem
CLIP:
Yourself.
Joe:
Okay, so what are the two powers? Well, I’m going to actually let David introduce the idea in his own words and then I’m going to expand on it a little bit with some more scriptural passages, but I think he actually does a really good job in the debate explaining it. I just don’t want to play like 20 minutes of him explaining it right now.
CLIP:
Here’s the idea in a nutshell, the Old Testament is very clear that there’s one true God, but there are numerous passages in the Old Testament where we see two divine figures. I’ll give a few quick examples. There are tons of these. Sometimes God seems to be in two different places doing two different things. Common example is the story of Sodom Mcm. The Lord appears to Abraham and tells him that he’s going down to Sodom and Gomorrah to see firsthand how bad the people are. So he goes down to Sodom and Gomorrah and what happens Genesis 1924, then the Lord reigned on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. The Lord on earth reigned down fire from the Lord out of heaven. This thing reboot every couple minutes. It sounds like there are two lords here. Watch what happens in Zechariah two, pay attention or you’ll miss it.
Come Zion escape you who live in daughter Babylon for this is what the Lord Almighty says, who’s speaking the Lord Almighty? And he says, after the glorious one has sent me, the Lord was sent by the glorious one against the nations that have plundered you. For whoever touches you, touches the apple of his eye, I will surely raise my hand against them so that their slaves will plunder them. Then you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me, the Lord Almighty was sent by the Lord Almighty shout and be glad daughter Zion, for I’m coming and I will live among you, declares the Lord Yahweh. Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day and will become my people. I will live among you and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you. The Lord Yahweh will live among them and they will know that the Lord was sent by the Lord Almighty. So Yahweh reigns down fire from Yahweh. Yahweh is sent by Yahweh. Plenty of passages like
Joe:
As David rightly says, there are a lot of passages in the Old Testament that point in this direction. For instance, when the Psalm says, the Lord says to my Lord, this is one of the things that Jesus sees upon in Matthew 22 when he sort of turns the tables on the Pharisees and he asks them, what do you think of the Christ whose son is he? They say the Son of David because he clearly is to be the son of David in the Old Testament. And then Jesus challenges him and says like how is it then that David inspired by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying the Lord said to my Lord, now notice Lord is a divine title and he’s making the point that this is seemingly the God of David who preexist David and is yet somehow distinct from the other one called the Lord.
There’s something mysterious going on here and the Pharisees have no answer for it. Now we see this in several places throughout scripture and so if you’re not attuned to this, this is really important for making sense of Christianity that when Christ comes into the world and he claims to be not only the Messiah but seemingly claims to be the God of Israel, this is not just coming out of the blue. Now, it would feel that way for many people. The analogy I’d give you is like this. Imagine a good suspenseful movie. Signs is always my go-to example, which I’m dating myself here, but you watch the movie, you don’t see the twist coming, but once the twist comms, you’re able to look back and say, okay, yep, I see all the clues now I missed them before, but there they were and there might even be mysterious things that you’re actively wondering about and then they’re suddenly resolved in this way.
That makes total sense. Well, this is very much like that. The two powers are mysterious in the Old Testament. So you don’t have to argue from the Christian perspective people clearly understood the Trinity or even two thirds of the Trinity. No, no, it’s just enough to say they’re very clear that there is one God and yet there’s two somethings, powers persons, something that are clearly both at play and are both being given this divine title of God in a way that is not a refutation of polytheism. There’s something, or excuse me, monotheism, it is not the polytheistic idea. There’s just two different gods. So there is something absolutely mysterious going on here. One of the clearest places that you find this is in Daniel chapter seven, it’s almost unavoidable because the passage, you look at it and think what else could this mean? So Daniel has this vision where he sees thrones plural and they’re placed and one of them is taken by the ancient of days and he’s described in very much this divine image.
His Raymond is white as snow. The hair in his head was pure wool is thrown with fiery flames. The wheels were burning fire. And so clearly we’re talking about God here, but then a couple verses later, Daniel says that he sees in the night vision and behold with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man now son of man in the way like the Hebrew idiom to be the son of X is to be X. The son of a dog is a dog, the son of man is a man. This is one like a man, which is already a very curious way to describe someone. Here’s my friend, she’s like a human. What that already tells me something else is weird. And David Wood rightly points out that when Jesus repeatedly refers to himself as son of man, something weird is going on there.
So one like a son of man comes and he goes before the ancient of days and is presented before him and two him was given dominion and glory and kingdom that all people’s nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away in his kingdom, one that shall not be destroyed. So there’s two thrones, one for God the father and one for the son of man. And we see this not in the New Testament but in the Old Testament. And so you might be wondering, okay, well how did the ancient rabbis make sense of this? And so a lot of the modern scholarship in this field is from Alan Siegel kind of reigniting interest in this from a Jewish perspective and he’s not interested as much in Christians’ agnostics who are the two groups that this is associated with.
He’s instead interested in the rabbis who are responding to this two powers theology. And one of the things that keeps recurring is the people who believe in two powers in heaven have the better biblical argument. So he quotes one of the ancient rabbinical sources, rabbi Levi says God faced them in many guises. In other words, when you see God and then God both appearing to act in two different ways we’re to just take that to mean the God appears in different ways. Sometimes he appears standing there sitting or young and old and so on. And then as proof of this allegedly with one of the examples is given Daniel seven that you see the thrones and the ancient of days. And then in regards to this Rabbi, Hiya Barr Abba who is early two hundreds just says, if a horse son should say to you they are two Gods quote, God is saying in reply, I’m the one of the sea and I’m the one of Sinai.
So it’s just like ad hominem attacks. It’s like they don’t have a good way of explaining it, but just remind them we’re monotheists and name call. That’s basically where it ends up. And obviously Alan Siegel is not overly impressed with that. He points out not only does the passage allow the interpretation that God changes aspect, it may easily be describing two separate divine figures more than one throne is revealed and scripture describes two divine figures to fill them. One sits and the other seems to be invested with power possibly enthroned. When you read Daniel seven, you don’t come away with the impression this is one figure in two different roles. It seems very clearly the ancient of days is enthroned the son of man and both are clearly divine figures, although the son of man curiously while being a divine figure is also as the name suggests human.
That’s pretty mysterious. And as you might imagine, looks like the Christian claims about Jesus. Siegel says the ancient of days may be responsible for judgment but delegates the operation to a son of man. This is going to be really important when we get into Alex’s take. So notice that the two powers make sense of what we’re going to call divine delegation. The ancient of days delegates the operation to a son of man who accomplishes judgment by means of a fiery stream that this son of man is young, that is dominion, is to be merciful ostensibly, the point of the reference is hardly evident in the text. In other words, the rabbis are saying, oh look, this is just a way of God showing us he’s young and old and so he appears as a young man and an old man and Siegel’s like that is not clear at all from Daniel seven.
There’s no indication that the son of man is any younger than the eternal ancient of days. That’s just being added to explain away the problem of Daniel seven. He goes on to say it’s use here, this rabbinical use presumes that some orthodox counter interpretation of this dangerous scripture has already developed and is well known that the two descriptions of God’s appearance may imply a contradiction in scripture is not specifically mentioned. It is no longer an important problem. In other words, you might read Daniel seven and say, Hey, isn’t this a contradiction? You said God was here and then you said he was over there. And so oftentimes when you get to a passage like this, when you know someone reading the Bible for the first time, they’re likely to be confused by a certain thing you’re likely to explain, okay? When you come across this part, it doesn’t mean that you might think it means it means this other thing, but here they’re not doing that for the idea of a biblical contradiction.
They’re doing that for the idea of two powers in heaven, which seems to tell us that there is some kind of tradition that the rabbis are rejecting of viewing it in this way. And so he says, rather the midrash, instead of focusing on fighting off accusations of contradiction immediately follows the ex of Jesus with a warning that no doctrine of two powers in heaven should be derived from the passage. But I want to again stress, the only reason to focus so much on hey don’t believe in two powers is because presumably people were believing in two powers. Now here we have a difficulty and the difficulty is the documentary evidence sort of dries up not completely and that’s going to be important, but somewhat we have much more evidence of rabbinical debates and commentaries and everything else in say the second, third century ad and beyond than we do in the period before.
The rabbis leave much better records than did the Pharisees who preceded them. And so we can see the rabbinical debates. We don’t always know how well those rabbinical debates matched earlier debates, and that’s exactly the point Alex makes in response. He argues basically, okay, well we know from these post-Christian sources that we shouldn’t believe in two powers, but that doesn’t tell us if this was anything more than a weird fringe view in the Old Testament times or in the times leading up to Christ. Now I think there’s two answers to that. One answer is that even if that’s true, it still gives you a biblical basis to say, well two powers was right. There is something of an interaction between the father and the son. Even if nobody had noticed it, that would still be true. It’s possible for something to be there in the text that wasn’t caught until the fullness of revelation in Christ. So I don’t think it’s actually that strong of a counter, but second, I think he’s also just wrong about this. Now a little bit of background here, it’s worth pointing out Alex had never heard of this until very recently and we know this for a fact because we can actually watch him discover it on video
CLIP:
Then I’m assuming you’ve heard of the two powers in Heaven Motif?
Joe:
No.
CLIP:
Okay, there’s a Jewish historian named Alan Segal. He wrote a book called The Two Powers in Heaven. And what he talks about is there’s this weird thing happening in the Hebrew Bible where there’s almost two Yahweh figures that they point to. So some verses for instance, we’ll say Yahweh reigned down fire from Yahweh. And so Phil of Alexandria second tumble period talks about this two powers in heaven motif. And he says there’s two Yahweh. There’s the first power and the second power, but they’re both Yahweh. It’s almost like a sort of proto Trinitarian view
Joe:
For what it’s worth, Siegel who again is Jewish, he doesn’t have a dog in the fight of trying to prove this to be true. He doesn’t believe in two powers himself as far as I can tell, but he wants to acknowledge that there is this debate. He says, while it’s difficult to date the rabbinic traditions accurately, in many cases the results showed that the earliest heretics used it as heresy. Remember believed in two complimentary powers in heaven, meaning the father and the son working in unison while only later could heretics be shown to believe in two opposing powers in heaven like a good God and then an evil dimmy urch like gnostic idea. So two powers in unity, very much the Christian idea compared to two opposing powers, very much the gnostic idea. And he’s saying what we’re going to call the Christian idea. Although obviously the people who believed in this weren’t originally, they’d never heard of Jesus Christ.
Yet this is older than the gnostic take on these texts. The extra rabbinic evidence allowed the conclusion that the traditions were earlier than the first century. Now he does a lot more work in part three of his book is all about the extra rabbinical evidence that we have that suggests that we find evidence of this before the time of the rabbis, before the creation of Christianity is a distinct system from Judaism. All of this stuff, it seemingly even before the time of Christ. Now follow of Alexandria, it’s kind of a funny one to say, is before the time of Christ, he’s born maybe 2025 bc so he’s older than Jesus by about a generation or a half generation, but he dies after him. He dies mid-century, maybe as late as about 50 or so. We don’t have great dates for that. So that’s all ballpark in it.
So he is in Alexandria Egypt. He doesn’t even seem to be aware of Christ or Christianity, which is in its very early days during his life. And so whether it had spread to Alexandria by the time he dies, it’s hard to say partly because we don’t know exactly when he dies or how big the Christian community in Alexandria was. Then needless to say, philo does not appear in any way to be reacting to Christianity or copying it or anything like this. He never mentions it in his writings. He is instead dealing with some pretty tricky biblical texts. So this one doesn’t look like a tricky biblical text in most English bibles because in Genesis 31 verse 13, God says, I’m the God of Bethel. And you think, okay, big deal. It just means that’s like the non-denominational church that he likes. No, it doesn’t mean that Beth means house or place and L means God.
So I am the God of the house of God, or I am the God of the place of God where it seems to be a God sent by God. That’s a very strange way for him to introduce himself God from God. What could that possibly mean? And Philo commenting on this says, well surely this is just a case of a soul that God gains to show himself to and converse with that someone who’s been transformed by union with God can be called a God from God in some sense. And he says, we need to carefully inquire whether there are two gods. That sounds like we have to take something like a two powers theology seriously. Although in his case he’s imagining something that would be heretical like two separate gods and so he is going to reject it. You can’t say there are two separate Gods judaism’s very clear.
There’s only one God. And he points out that in the text and says, I am the God that appeared to be not in my place, but in the place of God. So I am the God that appeared in the place of God, Beth L, the place of God. So what do you do with that? Right? He’s going to just say, well, truly there’s only one who can be called God, but we can in the less strict sense talk about others, either heretically or in other ways being Gods if you want to say, oh, the gods of the pagans or something like this. But he’s clearly trying to make sense of how we resolve these passages in places like Genesis that seem to point to their being a God from God.
Likewise, in Genesis 28 Jacob’s Ladder, he says, the Lord stood above. So you got the Jacob’s ladder angels going up and down the ladder and above it. The Lord stood above it. I’m the Lord, that’s God of Abraham, your father and the God of Isaac. And he comments on it that this is the archangel, namely the Lord himself. So if you watch the full two hour debate, David points out that some of the angel of the Lord passages, we have a very particular idea of what an angel is, an art and everything else, but technically an angel, it does not refer to a nature, it refers to a mission ose to the messenger. And so someone who is sent is an angel. And so oftentimes an angel in the Bible refers to what you’re imagining, although probably it doesn’t look like what you’re imagining other times though it refers to a messenger or refers to the priest or refers to the bishop in Revelation one to three here though it seems to refer to Christ being sent from God that the angel of the Lord isn’t an angel like you’re imagining it is God from God.
And so Philo similarly envisions that the angel, the archangels he calls them is in some way God himself because he is described as the Lord. Again, a fascinating kind of passage, and again you can’t blame this on the rise of Christianity. Siegel commenting on this says not only can Philo refer to Yahweh as the logos, this is going to be really big. He can also interpret other recurrences of Yahweh in scripture to indicate that the presence of an angel, not God for instance, and then it’s the part that I just quoted from Genesis 28. It’s identified as the archangel who is the logos. So this is going to be really important when John says in the beginning was the logos the word and the word is with God, and the word was God. Yeah. Philo would be like, I understand what that means. He wouldn’t completely but he’d be on the right track that the sending forth the word of God, the logos coming forth is the message and the messenger and is in some mysterious way, also properly called God.
Often. In fact, Siegel says in a footnote, Philo is able to link the two Hebrew words for God, Elohim and Yahweh, which he knew by their Greek equivalents, theos and curios with the existent one and his logos respectively. So that would be we would say father and son. So pretty cool. There’s a bunch of other stuff, but I think it’s enough to say when Alex treats this is just like a weird fringe view. I don’t think that’s right. It’s hard to disprove it. We have so little evidence, but Philo is one of the two famous first century Jews. I mean in terms of Jewish authors, it’s Philo and Josephus and Philo is clearly playing around with this stuff and there’s others as well. You look at some of the non-canonical literature, you can find them playing around with this idea of whether there’s another power, whether it’s an angel or whatever it is, and how to make sense of that.
St. Michael’s, one of the candidates kind of thrown out fascinating stuff. Okay, so I love that David Wood went there because I found it really fascinating. A lot of this was stuff I didn’t know, and I think it makes a really good case that when we’re talking about what do we see from the way Jesus speaks and acts, if you understand the two powers, you understand his claims to be claiming to be the God from God, even when he calls himself son of God or son of man, any of these things, if you have that Jewish framework, these make sense as divine titles. We know that because the ones who had those roles in the Old Testament, which Christians would say this is Jesus, when we see those figures appear each time they’re referred to as God or some variation. So I think outstanding, I mean there’s so many more predictable ways he could have gone with that, but he went with a way that I think really delves deep in the Old Testament and shows the coherence between the Old Testament and the New Testament, which I know is a thing Alex O’Connor likes to hit on.
Can we really say this is the same God in both places? Yes.
So with that said, I want to turn to Alex’s case. I want to start with what he gets right? I think he does a really good job of exploring this notion of divine delegation or the delegation of divine power and authority. Now, Alex’s case is going to be like this. I’m paraphrasing it, you can watch it for yourself. There are times where Christ is presented as acting with divine power, and one read is that’s because he is by his nature divine, but there’s another possibility. And that other possibility is he has been empowered by God to do things and you and I may be also empowered by God to do things, but that doesn’t make us divine by nature. Nobody’s going to turn around and worship you if you go and perform a miracle because you’re not doing it in your own authority. You’re doing it in the authority of the one who sent you. And Christ repeatedly points to the authority of the one who sent him. So doesn’t it follow that he’s no more divine than you or I? If we performed a miracle would be. I’m again heavily paraphrasing. That’s kind of the crux as I understand it, of his argument. And I think that he makes some really good points in that, that we as Christians are often kind of sloppy about in making the case for Christianity.
CLIP:
Jesus says that the glory you’ve given me, I will give to them. In John chapter 17, he says, the glory you’ve given me, I will give to them. The disciples we’re told in Isaiah in the book of Isaiah that God shares his glory with nobody. And this is sometimes a suggestion that’s made is sometimes that because Jesus says, glorify me God in John chapter 17, he must be God because God shares his glory with nobody. But people just seem to forget that in the same chapter, Jesus says that He will give the glory that he has been given by the Father to the disciples too. Again, all I’m asking you to consider is however you interpret these verses where Jesus has given glory, Jesus has given the judgment and bear in mind that Jesus is given all of these things, what he then does with those things and whether he delegates them to other people because if he does, then it’s clearly not just something that can be delegated to God himself.
Only God judges only God can judge. But Jesus says that he will judge. Jesus also promises judgment over the 12 tries of Israel to the disciples, so are the disciples, God, Jesus forgives sins and only God can forgive sins. In John chapter 20 verse 21, he says, as the Father has sent me again, as just as the Father has sent me, I’m sending you, if you forgive people’s sins, their sins will be forgiven. If you do not, their sins will be retained. I’m told that only God forgives sins, but then Jesus gives that ability to his disciples. In other words, all of these things which are supposed to indicate that Jesus has a special relationship with God, of course he does, but it’s a relationship that he hopes and literally prays that will be shared with everybody.
Joe:
Now, as we’re going to see, there’s some things that Alex gets wrong there, but there’s a lot that he gets right. And I regularly as a Catholic find myself making a variation of Alex’s argument because people say, oh, priest can’t forgive sins. God alone can forgive sins. And they’re quoting whether they know it or not, the scribes and Pharisees in the gospel. And so you can see in Matthew nine a version, the account of the paralytic is in a couple of different gospels, they bring Jesus a paralytic. He tells him, take heart my son, your sins are forgiven. And then the scribes say, this man is blaspheming. Okay? So when you hear that, you might think, okay, this is going to be Jesus proving himself here to be divine because they’re accusing him of blasphemy. But Jesus doesn’t do that. He actually deflects it. He says, why do you think evil in your hearts, for which is easier to say your sins are forgiven or to say rise and walk, but that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins.
He then says, is the paralytic rise? Take up your bed and go home and the man does. So now Jesus has given an ambiguous answer. He’s declared himself son of man, and said He has the power to forgive sins. Now, this could mean one of two things. One, by his nature as a divine being or divine person, he can do this or two as one sent by the Father, he can do this. And interestingly, the crowds go away assuming that he means the second of those that he’s not claiming to be God, but is claiming to be given this God-given authority. And so in Matthew and I, verse eight, it says, when the crowd saw it, they were afraid and they glorified God who had given such authority to men. Now notice Matthew is telling you they were right in understanding this. Now, that is a very strange thing.
If you don’t have a good Trinitarian theology and if you don’t have a good Christology, here’s the things we got to keep straight. Jesus Christ is both God and man. And so as God, he knew all sorts of things as man, he is still subservient to God, he’s still praises. He does all of these things. It’s a mysterious relationship. But that is at the heart of the Christian claim that there are times where Christ is acting in his own power and authority in times where he’s clearly acting as one, serving God as a man, a perfect man, a man who is also God serving the Father. But then also even within Trinitarian theology, remember the two powers that it is not just like two powers that have the exact same role. There’s one who sins the other. And so there’s a clear sense of something like divine delegation.
One way to put it is like this. When we say the first person, the second person, the third person of the Trinity, we don’t mean that chronologically. They’re all eternal, but we also don’t mean that arbitrarily because there is a real sending that we see within the life of God and in what’s called the economy of God. So the Father sends the Son, the son asks for the father to send the spirit through him philo. And so we see this clear sending of the spirit from the Father through the son. He breathes the spirit upon people. This is how you have first person, second person, third person of the trinity. It’s right there. And so there are times when the things Jesus is saying about being sent and delegated authority and all this stuff, this is not a repudiation of his divinity. This is a recognition that he is the son and not the father.
But if we’re not expecting that, if we don’t what to look for, then those things can be as confusing to us as they likely were to the crowd in Matthew nine. So all that’s to say when you find these things that God alone can do, that could mean the one doing them is divine. But you have to be a little cautious about that. Now, I would say the fact that Jesus is consistently doing things only God can do is pointing to his being divine. But we do have to bear in mind that he does things like, as Alex says, breathes upon the apostles and tells them that they have received the Holy Spirit. And if you forgive the sins of any, they’re forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they’re retained. Now, I’ve heard many Protestants try to get around this passage. The apostles can’t really do that.
They can only declare sins forgiven because only God can forgive them. And they’re just denying Matthew nine, eight, that God has given divine authority to men, that there are men who operate with divine authority. When the priest says, this is my body, this is my blood. He doesn’t have to say, this is Christ’s body and this is Christ’s blood because he’s acting with divine authority. So much so that we refer to him as acting in the person of Christ. He’s speaking the words of Jesus through him. This notion of divine authority being given from the Father to the Son and from the Son to us is perfectly Christian. We want to agree with Alex on this. St. Paul famously says, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. So the Father sends the son, the son sends us, he also sends the spirit.
So some sense of that we have to hold onto. And so when we see, and I’m going to look at the sacraments particularly here as an example, but this isn’t just the sacraments. Anytime you’re doing good things, that’s only from God. God alone is good, but you can also be good not apart from God, but by God working through you, Christ living in you. So example here would be John the Baptist and Judas. Now, those are two starkly different figures. John the Baptist, obviously much holier than Judas, greatest of those born among women who aren’t part of the kingdom. He is never invited during his earthly life to join the church mysteriously. And Jesus instead chooses as part of the kingdom. And one of the apostles, Judas Iscariot, who is not great strikingly, when you read the New Testament, you’ll notice the people who are baptized by John have to get rebaptized.
You see this in Acts explicitly, but nobody has ever described as being rebaptized who was baptized by Judas. St. Augustine talks about this. His point is that you are not better than John, but the baptism given through you is better than that of John for the one is Christ, the other, John the Baptists. So whether it’s Paul or Peter or even Judas who baptizes it is Christ who baptizes. So as a result, Judas baptizes and it sticks so to speak, it creates this indelible mark. John does this symbolic baptism and it has to be redone. So he says, we don’t prefer Judas to John obviously, but we do prefer the baptism of Christ even when performed at the hands of Judas to the baptism of John the Baptist because his was just symbolic. So all that’s to say, if you have this framework that God delegates authority and that he sends people forth with truly divine power, then you can understand why the baptism that even someone as rascally as Judas Iscariot RAs feels like an understatement as wicked is Judases harriot, even a bad priest, a bad bishop, a bad pope, a bad apostle can baptize and it is still Christ working through that awful instrument because of the delegation of divine authority.
This is how this works. This is all rooted in this concept, and if you miss this, you miss a lot of the New Testament, okay? So far I agree with all that part with Alex O’Connor, but I think he gets a really, well, I don’t think I know he gets a major thing wrong. How then do we distinguish between the son being sent by the father and say the apostles or Christians more broadly being sent by the sun? What is different about those? And there’s an easy answer to that. I want to flag a thing that he gets wrong pretty repeatedly. He says Cathos because it means just as basically he’s going to argue it means that there has to be a unical relationship, that if X is cathos to Y, it’s just as y. They have to be identical, and that’s not true, and we’re going to see that that’s not true.
But for now, let’s give the right answer. We’re going to talk about sonship here. St. Paul does this really well. In Galatians four, in the fullness of time, God sent forth his son singular. He has one son, his son, born of woman born under the law to redeem those who are under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. So he’s got one son by nature, and then a bunch of us adopted into sonship through redemption. And because your sons got us sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying Abba father. So notice he has sent the spirit of his son again, the first person, second person, third person relationship is laid out there pretty explicitly. But so too is the fact that Christ is son by nature. We are sons and daughters by adoption. If you get this, then you can understand why when the father sends the son, he’s sending one who is like him in nature.
Remember, son of X means X, the son of a dog is a dog, the son of God. In this sense by nature is God, by nature. We aren’t God by nature, we are god’s by adoption, if you want to put it that way. That is a strong way to put it. But as we’re going to see in a little bit this concept of what’s called theosis or divinization, this is actually part of the answer to what Alex O’Connor is hitting on that yes, there are these passages which talk about us acting with divine power and authority. Protestants will, someone’s called this glorification, and that happens here on earth is where it begins. And then of course it happens in a much bigger way in heaven. We pass from glory into glory. If you get this, I know I’m going quickly through this part. If you get this right, then you can understand how on the one hand we can say in John three 16 that God gave his only son because it’s talking to son by nature.
And then the same John can write in one John three, see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God because one is by nature and one is by adoption. But then he says that we will become like him Jesus, for we shall see him as he is. So there’s some kind of transformation to becoming St. Peter’s going to call it partakers of the divine nature. Now, that’s a much bigger topic that I’m going to have time to unpack here because it’s somewhat adjacent to the question, does Jesus claim to be God? And the answer is, yeah, all of this stuff, but him being the son by nature and we are by adoption is presenting Jesus as uniquely divine, whereas we just do divine things with divine help. So I think Alex’s strongest argument, I think he’s actually exploring a part of Christianity that many Christians are woefully uneducated on and often get wrong.
And so it is worth asking when you see Jesus doing something, is it in his own name, in his own authority? Is it in the name of the one who sends him? Because it is often the latter that doesn’t deny his divinity, of course, but it does point to his relationship to the Father is a little more complex than people realize. What’s his low point? Alex’s not Gods. His low point is the way he makes arguments tied to language that I think is not persuasive and not a good way of understanding language. What I mean by that is he regularly makes these arguments that such and such a word basically always has to mean such and such a thing. And if it doesn’t, then you’re just playing games. If you recognize a word might mean different things in different contexts. And I think when I frame it that way, hopefully it’s clear that this is not a good argument. But let me give some examples. When he is talking about worship, he’s going to look at, well, he’s going to look at one really, but a couple of the New Testament words for worship.
CLIP:
We’re told that Jesus only rightly accepts worship. This is interesting by the way, David flashed on a few passages of Jesus accepting worship in the gospels. The word most commonly translated as worship in the New Testament is pros, which means to bow down or prostrate before a higher authority. And of course, Jesus received this ProScan worship, therefore he must be God. If that is the case, then we have to consider the fact that David in the SEP agent, for example, bows down ProScan before Au, that Joseph’s brothers ProScan before him when he’s governor of Egypt, that the entire nation of Israel offers proneal worship to King David.
Joe:
He goes on from there, but it’s very much the same kind of idea. He’s claiming that, oh, this word pros is being used or this proneal worship as he calls it, which is actually a very bad way to approach it because he’s adding the word worship to make it sound like worship every time. And that’s just not handling the evidence well, but let me explain. There’s actually one thing he is getting right and then explain how he’s mishandling that. So when we’re talking about worship, this is often translated as that one word worship, but there are at least four. There’s actually more than that, different words in the Greek that that could be laia or laia like gifts or to make offerings, which is where we get the word liturgy and ProScan, which means to be prostrate. And this refers to different aspects of worship.
There’s overlap between some of these terms. And the problem is that these terms are often used in other contexts. And so if you read these words just as they’re found in the Greek, they don’t all mean the same thing, and they don’t all always mean worship, which makes this hard. So to give you an example, St. Paul talks about a service being done to him. Now, if you understood liturgia there as like a mass or a service, then he’d be claiming himself to be the object of divine worship. But nobody reads it that way. He’s just saying that Timothy does something nice. That’s it. But in the other times that this same Greek word is used, it is referring to the worship of God. So Alex is right-ish that, or I guess right in the direction he could have gone with it, which is the mere fact that we see a word being used that sometimes means worship does not automatically mean that it means worship.
In this case, that is true of words, that is true of words like prone. And any half informed Christian will admit all of that. The problem is he seems to say, well, therefore it can never mean worship. And if it does ever mean worship, it always mean worship and therefore everybody’s an idolater. And the problem with that is just that it’s flagrantly wrong because we often see this being done as an act of worship to God the Father, and there’s no question. In other words, Alex’s argument proves too much. If you can’t use the biblical verbiage for worship to mean that people are worshiping anyone, then that doesn’t just mean people aren’t worshiping Jesus. It also means they’re not worshiping the Father. What is right, as I say, is it sometimes the verbiage doesn’t mean worship, but often even usually it does. Saint Augustine, by the way, basically makes the same point that Alex is making, but better when he points out that it’s very hard to weed out what are the squa intrinsic parts of worship that only belong in divine worship because we find other things like honor and veneration and all of that.
And his argument is the only thing you can really say only happens to God is sacrifice. So you can read that for yourself in City of God, book 10, and he makes a very good argument that at the heart of worship and this concept of worship is this notion of sacrifice. Now that then becomes really tricky to apply to the case of Jesus because one of the arguments Alex makes is we don’t see people making sacrifice to Jesus in this way. Don’t see the stuff that is just obviously unambiguously worship done to Jesus. Now, there are two responses to that. One is there’s a certain sense in which the sacrificial action is the action of the son being offered through the Spirit to the Father. Again, understanding worship in a Trinitarian way where Jesus is involved in worship, but we worship the Father in Jesus by the Spirit.
That’s a major part, the heart of worship. And if you go to any mass around the world, it is directed to God the Father specifically not just to the General Trinity or anything like that. It is through the spirit, the offering of the Son to the Father that just as the Father sends the Son who sends the spirit, spirit leads us to the Son who leads us to the Father. This is built into Trinitarian Christianity and it’s built into the New Testament data and the Old Testament data for that matter. So all that’s to say, yeah, that’s going to complicate the picture of why don’t we just see Jesus as an object of liturgical worship in that kind of sense, and particularly with offerings being made, but the other is that he’s right there in the flesh with them. So we do see things like for instance, the Magi come and they present gold fit for a king, frankincense, which was an offering you would put on the incense for divine offering and Mer an embalming spice.
And the way Christians have classically understood this, that whether they know it or not, they’re acknowledging Jesus as the king of kings and as the true God, but also as a mortal man that the son of man is all of those things. And that fits very well with the picture in say Daniel seven. And while they’re there, they offer ProScan, they go prostrate. Now pros just means to kneel or bat down or to worship. And so as you might imagine, that can mean an act of adoration and the sense of divine worship or it could mean something else. But to even make that very obvious, I think distinction, Alex is going to push back and claim that’s just like special pleading.
CLIP:
Okay, I suppose I really want to nail down on this worship point since I was kind of getting at that at the end and David says, yeah, a prone can mean just simply bowing down, but in a religious context it means something else. What do you mean? How do you know that without begging the question?
Joe:
Well, it’s really simple. I mean, if you see someone kneeling down to propose to a woman or you see someone kneeling down on both knees to be knighted or you see someone kneeling down before a figure is sending into heaven, you don’t need a dictionary to say, oh, okay, even though the body motion is the same, the intent expressed by the body is different in those contexts. This is not difficult. This is how we understand anything. I mean with a lot of language, a word might have more than one meaning in English and Greek and Hebrew and every language that’s ever existed and as a result that certain amount of the indeterminacy of language, you just figure out from context. And to be fair, sometimes the context is not a hundred percent clear. Someone could read the Magi coming before Christ and giving ProScan and saying, are they offering worship or are they just kneeling down because it’s a baby in a manger?
You got to get down there with them. If you see somebody kneeling next to their bed, they might be praying or they might be looking for something under the bed, you have to kind of pay attention to make sense of that. You may not have even get it right away. So we can acknowledge all of that, but to say there’s awfully a lot of prone being offered to Jesus and to just act like, oh yeah, none of that counts because technically not every time is pro worship isn’t a very strong argument because it’s really an argument against reading things contextually and just assuming the same word is going to mean the same thing every time and it just doesn’t. But I think the other thing that makes this a bad argument is something that you may have heard him mention already. He calls it ProSal worship, but that is begging the question himself. The whole point is ProSal isn’t automatically worship. It’d be like if I called it kneeling worship pro just means to kneel to be prostrate, prostrate worship. Okay, well if you’re doing prostrate worship to David or anybody who isn’t divine, but if you’re just kneeling, that doesn’t automatically tell me you’re kneeling in worship unless somebody comes along and just adds the word worship on there.
CLIP:
If prone worship is something that only God can receive, then all of these people sinned, all of them. The entire assembly of Israel sinned when they bowed down before David. I don’t think that’s a good interpretation.
Joe:
Alex’s interpretation isn’t strong here because ProCon worship does belong to God alone. It’s right there in the name worship, but ProScan simply bowing down does not automatically. So only if you add the word worship and then say, oh, well they’re not just prostrating prostrating in worship. Well then they would be committee idolatry. So I think he adds a word and then insists that the word pyo has to mean the same thing in all the context which nobody believes. I mean Christian or non-Christian, it just clearly doesn’t in Greek, even if you don’t accept the divinity of Christ, you have to reject the university of language. The same word doesn’t always mean the same thing in every context, but this is not the only word that he does this with. Now you might’ve already kind of caught this theme, but I actually think that what Alex O’Connor is arguing for, that Christ is sent by God and what David Wood is arguing for that the two powers is a good way of understanding Jesus’s divinity fit together pretty perfectly because the whole point of the two powers is that God is sent from God, God from God, light from light, true God from true God.
That notion which Christians have been praying in the creed for a long time involves a sense of delegation and sending and mission. And Christ speaks of that pretty explicitly. But unfortunately Alex is going to argue against that on the basis that Jesus is sending must be just as our sending because of this word S. Now he’s asked about this in a very good question. Lan asked him, which is, Hey, it seems like if you accept the, he calls it the Eastern Orthodox idea of theosis, it’s also the Catholic idea of theosis that we are called to become partakers of the divine nature, not by our nature, but by sharing, by adoption through grace. Wouldn’t that resolve everything you just said? And he really banks his entire rebuttal to that on one word that doesn’t work just as he thinks it does.
CLIP:
You’ve brought this up before the idea in eastern orthodoxy of theosis or deification, does that solve the dilemma that you’re referring to? Theosis, the process of humans attaining likeness to and union with God, participating in the divine energies, divine nature and experiencing community with the Holy Trinity. If we’re adding the Eastern Orthodox position, which is within the realms of Orthodox, he has Protestants would probably call that glorification, right? They’re giving very specific language. Your dilemma is Jesus’ God, and then he’s given this godlike authority to his disciples. Could you concede potentially that that solves the dilemma?
CLIP:
Only if that also describes how Jesus relates to his own father, because of course, constantly Jesus is using the word cathos or which means just as in the same way as so sure, maybe this is talking about a kind of elevation of humans to share in the likeness of God in some other kind of way, but deification, yeah, deification. But then Jesus would have to see himself in the same way, which is in so many words what I’m trying to say, Jesus was in fact doing. So yes.
Joe:
So you can see how a lot of the argument comes down to, okay, we actually both agree that the Father sends Jesus. This is at least certainly Alex is granting this is how the New Testament presents Jesus, that he’s sent by the Father, that he sends the Holy Spirit and he sends us. And then the question becomes, does that mean our relationship is the exact same as Jesus’s and his case for why it does turns on cathos, which would mean either we’re all members of the Trinity or Jesus, he’s just a man sent as kind of an ideal, but just one among many who are sent in this kind of mission. And the problem is ke ethos just doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require what’s called university. So quick breakdown in the way language works, there’s three types. There’s unical language where the same word means literally the exact same thing in different contexts.
Seven and seven say you’ve got equivocal language where the banks of a river and banks that you do banking at, it’s the same word, but they don’t mean anything even relevant. They’re just two totally different words that sound the same. And then you have analog language, which is kind of in between those two, and we’ll get into some of those examples. But if you say, this food is healthy and this person is healthy, you don’t mean the same thing those two times that you’re using the word healthy, but there is a relationship because eating healthy food is healthy for you. So when you’re saying the food is healthy, you don’t mean it’s alive. I hope probiotics are gross, but you mean that there’s some relationship to this notion of health that’s analogical language. And when we’re talking about theology, we often are using analog language and Alex seems to be resisting that, which I think everybody has to acknowledge on the basis of this word.
But here’s my counter to that, that when you see the way the word cathos is being used, it contradicts Alex’s claims in two ways. The first is that we use cathos regularly for things that aren’t unical. So in Luke 17, Jesus says, just as it wass in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of man. But I don’t think anyone’s going to read Luke 17 and say, oh, the return of God in glory is going to be exactly like Noah’s Ark. No, it doesn’t mean literally identical in all aspects there. Or to take another example that I think is really pointing to the analog use. Jesus says, be merciful even as CAOs, your father is merciful, or just as your father is merciful, but obviously you aren’t called to be merciful in the same way God is. You can’t can’t be good in the way God is because God is good by nature and you are good only by adoption.
You participate in goodness. God possesses it in his essence. And Jesus later in the gospel of Luke makes that point. Why do you call me good? No one is good, but God alone, he’s being again a little playful about, am I God, am I not? But he’s doing this thing of recognizing the difference between the goodness of God and all other participations in goodness. Now, Jesus is not denying other people can be good, but they’re good as it were by delegation. They are good by sharing in divine goodness whether they realize it or not. And yet, Caho is used to describe our relationship with mercy and God’s relationship with mercy. That can’t be true if unless Alex’s claim is that Jesus thinks we can literally do the exact same thing God does, which I don’t think is his claim, but I’d be interested in how he would kind of explain that.
Otherwise, I think you just have to say, Cathos doesn’t mean this strict analogical likeness. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require Unical relationship, but if you think it does, that actually destroys Alex’s case. Here’s why. Jesus says in John five, the father judges no one but is given all judgment to the Son. There’s that divine delegation theme. Again, the ancient of days is clearly something we should have in view. Daniel seven, you get the ancient of days, and you have the Son who judges the son of men that all may honor the son even as cathos, they honor the father. So if Cathos means literally identical, which is Alex’s apparent argument, then he’d have to say that Jesus says in the gospel jam, he treats as reliable, at least in this debate, that Jesus says he is owed the exact same honor as the Father.
So you can’t have it both ways. If Cathos means that every time it’s used, then you have to say, John five proves the whole case for Christianity. Jesus does claim to be God. If you think he doesn’t mean that, then the whole reason for objecting to theosis demonization as a solution that yes, we share in God’s goodness, but Jesus possesses it by nature. The only rebuttal he has there is cathos and it doesn’t work here. It doesn’t make any sense. And honestly, whichever way you go, you find Jesus demanding something that certainly appears to be divine honor. In the very next verse, he who does not honor the son does not honor the Father who sent him. So Jesus is both claiming to be sent by God and claiming to be worthy of divine honor like the Father. So just to sum up, I love this debate.
I was not sure if I was going to like it or not. I was kind of bracing myself for the worst. I did not like the last one that I saw. I thought Alex did great and Dinesh Susa did not. This time I actually thought both David Wood and Alex O’Connor did great, especially if you exclude opening statements. And both sides I think pointed to areas where maybe the other one was a little weak, and I would love to see more of this kind of conversation once each person has had the chance to maybe dig a little deeper and explore the things maybe they weren’t as ready for. I think there’s good stuff here, and as I’ve hopefully made abundantly clear, I think this is something where if you have the right understanding of the relationship of the Father to the Son, and if you have the right understanding of the relationship of Jesus’ divinity and humanity, and if you have the right understanding of our sharing and divine power through grace, then you can say both sides are substantially right, but that this is the heart of what Christianity has always claimed. Alright, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe, Heschmeyer. God bless you.