Craig & the Deity of Christ Pt. 2
The following excerpt is taken from Dr. William Lane Craig’s essay, “Tri-Personal Monotheism”, in One God, Three Persons, Four Views: A Biblical, Theological, and Philosophical Dialogue on the Doctrine of the Trinity, edited by Chad A. McIntosh, and published by Cascade Books, Eugene, OR 2024, pp. 32-37. All emphasis is mine.
Christ as Theos
The use of the divine title kyrios enabled NT Christians to regard the Father and the Son as equally divine while maintaining a personal distinction between them. At times, however, as if carried away by their exuberance for Christ, the NT authors seem to throw caution to the winds and come right out and affirm boldly that Christ is, indeed, theos. Not that they were completely unguarded in their assertions: in any context in which Christ is referred to as theos there is almost always some personal differentiation between the Father and Christ, lest Christ be confused with the Father. Their personal distinction remains inviolate. Nonetheless, on several occasions the NT does affirm that Jesus Christ is God.
The majority of NT scholars hold that theos is applied to Jesus no more than nine but no fewer than five times in the NT.6 These remarkable texts have been meticulously examined and ranked by Murray Harris as follows: theos is applied to Jesus Christ certainly in John 1:1; 20:28; very probably in Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, Hebrews 1:8, and 2 Peter 1:1; and probably in John 1:18.7 I shall briefly examine these texts in what I consider to be an ascending order of confidence in their referring to Christ as (ho) theos, climaxing with the decisive texts of the Johannine corpus. Since some of our readers will presumably not read Greek, I shall present the NRSV translation before providing the Greek text.
ROMANS 9:5
to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
hōn hoi pateres kai eks hōn ho Christos to kata sarka ho ōn epi pantōn theos eulogētos eis tous aiōnas, amēn. (Rom 9:5)
The key interpretive question regarding this statement concerns its punctuation. Should there be a stop after sarka, or should the subsequent words be taken to be a relative clause? Translations differ. In the first case, theos would presumably denote the Father, but in the latter case Christ. Grammatically, the articular participle ho ōn may be used either retrospectively to further describe a prior subject and so mean “who is” or prospectively to introduce a new subject and so mean “He who is.”
The basic difficulty with taking ho ōn to begin a new sentence is that such an understanding separates ho ōn from its natural antecedent ho Christos. Given that ho Christos precedes and agrees with ho ōn, a change of subject is prima facie improbable. Inclusion of at least the phrase epi pantōn in the relative clause is appropriate to Christ, since he is Kyrios (Rom 10:12; 14:9; Phil 2:9–11; cf. Col 1:16–17; Eph 1:20–23), so that a reader would naturally assume that the same subject is involved. Harris judges that to promote a divorce of ho ōn from the grammatically consonant ho Christos “is unconscionable.”8
Moreover, a major problem with the view that the doxology begins a new sentence is that whenever eulogētos occurs in an independent doxological clause, it always precedes God’s name (2 Cor 1:3; Eph 1:3; 1 Pet 1:3). Normal biblical word order for independent doxologies would require here something like eulogētos ho theos eis tous aiōnas, amēn. By contrast in NT doxologies in a relative clause (e.g., Rom 1:25; 11:34–36) there is always an antecedent for the subject of the doxology in a prior phrase.9 The available antecedent in v. 5a is ho Christos. Word order thus makes it quite improbable that Romans 9:5 contains an independent doxology to God the Father.
Harris reports that of the fifty-six principal commentators consulted for his study, only thirteen take theos to refer to God the Father, while thirty-six see a reference to Christ, a reading that is captured by the punctuation of the Greek text adopted in the 26th edition of the Nestle-Aland text and the third edition of the United Bible Society text, in a significant reversal of their previous positions.10
Accordingly, in Romans 9:5 Christ is very probably said to be God. The designation of Christ as God cannot plausibly be construed as some weak sense of divinity, not only because of what Paul says elsewhere about Christ’s preeminent status (Philippians 2:5–10), but also because Christ is said in this very passage to be “over all things.” So in calling Christ theos, Paul is either identifying Christ with God the Father or ascribing to Christ the same divine status held by the Father. Since Paul obviously distinguished between Christ and the Father, he must be placing Christ and the Father on the same ontological plane but without sacrificing his Jewish monotheism. The fact that theos is here anarthrous is consonant with its not being a proper name but a predication of deity. So here Christ is held to be God, just as the Father is God.
HEBREWS 1:8
In the opening chapter of Hebrews we read that God says to the Son,
Your throne, O God, is forever and ever
Ho thronos sou ho theos eis tōn aiōna tou aiōnos (Heb 1:8)
The principal question to be settled here is whether ho theos should be understood as a vocative form of address (“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever”) or as a nominative subject (“God is your throne forever and ever”). Since either is grammatically possible, considerations of background and context must guide our determination of meaning.
In terms of background, the author is citing LXX Psalm 44:7 (= Ps 45:7): “Ho thronos sou, ho theos, eis ton aiōna tou aiōnos.” The traditional interpretation of this verse in the original Hebrew is that elohim (God) is a vocative, so that either the king or God himself is addressed. The vocatival understanding of the verse is even more apparent in the LXX, which inserts the vocative dynate (“O Mighty One”) from v. 4 into v. 6, increasing the probability that ho theos in v. 7 is used vocatively.11 This traditional understanding is reflected in the punctuation of the verse in the LXX.
Considerations of context heavily favor the vocatival reading. In order to show the Son’s superiority to any angelic being the Son is addressed in vv. 8, 10 as both “God” and “Lord,” twin titles for deity:
“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.” (v. 8)
“In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth.” (v. 10)
The vocative kyrie in v. 10 supports reading the ho theos in v. 8 vocatively as well.12 The whole point of the opening section of Hebrews is to show the Son’s superiority to the angels. Calling Christ both “God” and “Lord” in contrast to angels thus supports the theological point that the author is making. Harris therefore reports that in Hebrews 1:8 “the overwhelming majority of grammarians, commentators, authors of general studies, and English translations construe ὁ θεὸς as vocative.”13 Thus, Christ is here very probably called God.
There is no denying the christological import of this appellation. The parallelism of the Son’s being addressed as both “God” and “Lord” and the exalted descriptions of him in his superiority to angelic beings make it clear that Christ is not addressed merely in the way that a Jewish king might be called elohim. God is said to have created the world through the Son and made him heir of all things (Heb 1:2). “He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature [hypostasis], upholding the universe by his word of power” (v. 3). Nothing of this sort could be said of any angelic being.
Harris points out that of the three main titles given to Jesus in Hebrews 1 “Son” is the title on which attention is focused (vv. 2, 5 bis, 8), so that “God” and “Lord” serve to explicate two aspects of his Sonship, namely, divinity and sovereignty.14 Whereas “God” is a monadic predicate applied to the Son absolutely, “Lord” is a dyadic predicate applied to him relationally. The Son is God even in the absence of creatures, but in relation to creatures he is the sovereign Lord of all. This distinction between absolute and relational predicates sheds light on the heavy emphasis on the subordination and exaltation of the Son found in Hebrews and throughout the NT. Although from the very beginning of creation, Christ was Lord, having created both the heavens and the earth (1:10), nevertheless he was “for a little while made lower than the angels” (2:9), taking on flesh and blood “that by the grace of God he might taste death for every one” (2:9, 14). But God has raised him from death and “crowned [him] with glory and honor because of the suffering of death” (2:9).
This same theme of the abasement and exaltation of the Son to Lordship over all things is expressed by Paul in Philippians 2:5–10. Here Christ is elevated, not from being a creature to divinity, which would have been absurd and blasphemous in Jewish ears, but from voluntary self-abasement to Lordship, from a state of temporary humiliation to glory. Such self-abasement and elevation concern functional or economic, not ontological, subordination and exaltation.
So in Hebrews Christ is affirmed to be the perfect representation of God’s glory and nature (1:3), to have existed in some sense “prior” to creation (1:10), to be the subject of passages about Yahweh in the OT (1:6, 10–12; 3:7–11, 15), and to be the appropriate object of worship of both men and angels (1:6; 12:2). Ontologically he is God. At the same time he is subordinate to the Father in that the Father is responsible for the preparation of his body (10:5), for his introduction into the world (1:6), for his resurrection (13:20) and his exaltation to the Father’s right hand (1:13), for his appointment to the office of high priest (3:2; 5:5, 10), and for his being designated heir of all things (1:2). These roles are clearly economic and thus compatible with his sharing full divinity with the Father.
TITUS 2:13
while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
prosdexomenoi tēn makarian elpida kai epiphanein tēs doxēs tou megalou theou kai sōtēros hēmōn Iēsou Christou. (Titus 2:13)
The main interpretive question about this statement concerns its grammatical construction. Do theou and sōtēros designate one person (“our great God and Savior”) or two (“the great God and our Savior”)? Fortunately, there is a clear answer to this question. There is broad majority support for understanding the reference to be to a single person, for at least two reasons.
First, it is characteristic of Greek grammar, roughly speaking, that the construction <definite article + common noun + “and” + common noun> takes a single referent rather than two. Originally formulated by Granville Sharp, the principle may be more accurately—and, for our purposes, relevantly—formulated as follows:
In native Greek constructions (i.e., not translation Greek), when a single article modifies two substantives connected by kai (thus, article-substantive-kai-substantive), when both substantives are
i. singular (both grammatically and semantically),
ii. personal, and
iii. common nouns (not proper names or ordinals),
they have the same referent.15
Daniel Wallace points out that none of the five classes of alleged exceptions to Sharp’s Rule comprises, in fact, exceptions to this formulation of the principle; but even if they did, Titus 2:13 does not fall into any of those classes.16 “Consequently, in Titus 2:13 . . . we are compelled to recognize that, on a grammatical level, a heavy burden of proof rests with the one who wishes to deny that ‘God and Savior’ refers to one person, Jesus Christ.”17
Second, the expression theos kai sōtēr (“God and Savior”) was a stereotyped formula common in first-century religious terminology, both in the classical authors and in the koiné. It was apparently used by both Palestinian and Diaspora Jews in reference to Yahweh. It invariably denoted one deity, not two. In usage contemporaneous with the NT the formula theos kai sōtēr never refers to two persons or deities. Wallace concludes that “regardless of the source of the expression, the use in Titus 2:13 and 2 Pet 1:1 of this idiom is almost certainly a reference to one person, confirming once again Sharp’s assessment of the phrase.”18
Harris reports that on the basis of such considerations almost all grammarians and lexicographers, many commentators, and many writers on New Testament theology or Christology are agreed in the verdict that in Titus 2:13 Jesus Christ is called “our great God and Savior.”19 More recently Gordon Fee observes that this view is “the currently ‘reigning’ point of view, adopted by almost everyone in the NT academy.”20
2 PETER 1:1
The same grammatical question that attends Titus 2:13 also attends 2 Peter 1:1, which speaks of
the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ
dikaiosynē tou theou hēmōn kai sōtēros Iēsou Christou. (2 Pet 1:1)
Is the reference to one person or two? The only difference in the construction is that here the possessive pronoun hēmōn is brought forward to follow theos rather than sōtēr. Accordingly, unless the position of hēmōn is a game-changer grammatically, Sharp’s Rule and the use of the standardized formula theos kai sōtēr require here as well reference to one person.
But the difference in the position of hēmōn is trivial.21 What is critical is that the two substantives are governed by a single definite article, in which case the personal pronoun applies to both substantives, whether it precedes both (e.g., 2 Pet 1:10) or follows either of them (e.g., Eph 3:5; 1 Thess 3:7). Revelation 1:9 provides an exact parallel to 2 Peter 1:1: ho adelphos hēmōn kai sungkoinōnos in reference to one person. Elsewhere in 2 Peter we have three instances of tou kyriou hēmōn kai sōtēros Iēsou Christou (1:11; 2:20; 3:18) where the single referent of kyrios and sōtēr is indisputable.
So Sharp’s Rule and the use of the stereotypical formula theos kai sōtēr go to justify reading 2 Peter 1:1 as “the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. This reading is confirmed by the use of sōtēr throughout 2 Peter (1:1, 11; 2:20; 3:2, 18). The term always refers to Jesus Christ, is always anarthrous and conjoined by kai with a preceding articular noun, either kyriou or theou, and the phrase ho kyrios hēmōn kai sōtēr always refers to a single person. It would be unprecedented if tou theou hēmōn kai sōtēros Iēsou Christou in v. 1 did not also have a single referent.
Harris reports that the view that in 2 Peter 1:1 the title “our God and Savior” is applied to Jesus Christ is endorsed by the great majority of twentieth-century commentators, by most grammarians, and by authors of general works on Christology or 2 Peter. Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1 are thus mutually reinforcing, confirming the view that by the time these works were written Christ was being referred to as God.
6. Harris provides a list of scholars in his Jesus as God, 274. Though Harris’ list obviously needs updating, Komoszewski informs me that not much has changed since Harris wrote, though the case for a reference to Christ as theos in Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1 has been strengthened. The major change has been that “virtually every exegetical commentary since Harris has affirmed 1 John 5:20 as a reference to Jesus as theos” (private communication, March 23, 2022). (Ibid., p. 32)
16. Wallace. Sharp’s Canon, 249-51. Wallace reports, “After perusing some three to four million words of Greek text from classical Greek through the first millennium CE, I was amazed at how consistently valid this principle is. At the outset of this investigation, I fully expected to find several exceptions to the rule… But after observing probably thousands pf TSKS [article-substantive-kai-substantive] constructions, my own reticence to fully accept Sharp’s rule as valid has been overturned” (281-82). (Ibid., p. 37)