Jesus as the One YHWH Revisited

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” John 3:16-18

“and hope does not put to shame, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only this, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” Romans 5:5-11

“For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh… What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who indeed did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?” Romans 8:3, 31-32

“yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him.” 1 Corinthians 8:6

“one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.” Ephesians 4:6

“do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?” John 10:36

For Jews and Christians “God” and “the Father” were typically co-referring terms, that is to say, terms having the same referent, if not the same meaning, just as in a certain context of use “the President” and “Barack Obama” are co-referring terms.³ Given this fact, it would have been seriously misleading, no matter how exalted a view they held of Jesus, for early Christians to assert that Christ is (ho) theos, for such an assertion would have been understood to “mean that Christ is God the Father, which is emphatically not what Christians believed. They did not believe that the Father had become incarnate and died on the cross. There was thus clearly a personal distinction between Jesus and the Father. Such a distinction might be marked by referring to Christ as “the Son of God,” but even such a lofty title, while making the distinction clear, failed to convey fully what Christians wanted to claim about Christ’s status.⁴ Some other way, more adequate to Christ’s exalted status, had to be found for referring to Christ.

The early Christians’ solution to this problem was startling and ingenious. They adopted the term kyrios (“Lord”) as their principal means of referring to Christ (368 times in the NT). The christological significance of this term lies in the fact that while it, like the English word “lord,” has a wide range of meaning, from a term of polite address (“sir”) to divinity, kyrios is the term Greek-speaking Jews substituted for God’s proper name “Yahweh” in the OT! In reading aloud the Scriptures, Hebrew-speaking Jews would not pronounce the sacred name “Yahweh,” but substituted for it the word Adonai, such usage being represented in our English translations as “Lord” with small capitals. Greek-speaking Jews in turn substituted kyrios for the Hebrew Adonai. It was this divine title that early Christians seized upon to express Jesus’ exalted status.

The theological import of kyrios in reference to Jesus Christ is conveyed by the NT authors’ unsettling practice of quoting OT prooftexts about Yahweh in application to Christ.⁵ To give just three examples: in Romans 10:9 Paul affirms, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that “Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Paul assures his Roman readers that “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For, ‘Every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved’” (Rom 10:11). The prooftext is Joel 2:32, speaking of Yahweh, “the Lord, your God” (v. 23).

Again, in Philippians 2:10–11, Paul writes, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” The confession here is drawn from LXX Isaiah 45:23, “to me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess to God,” with reference to “the Lord, the God of Israel” (v. 3). That a text from so fiercely monotheistic a passage as Isaiah 45 should be applied to Jesus Christ displays dramatically the divine status ascribed to him by Christians.

Again, in Hebrews 1:6: “When he brings the first-born into the world, he says, ‘Let all God’s angels worship him’,” the prooftext is either LXX Deuteronomy 32:43 or Psalm 97:7, both of which have reference to Yahweh, to whom, as God, worship is solely due, notably, not only from human beings but from the highest angelic beings. Further, in Hebrews 1:10–11 the statements that are cited from Psalm 102:25–27 in application to Christ originally had reference to Yahweh.

3. We may draw upon Gottlob Frege’s important distinction between the sense and reference of singular terms to say that “God” and “Father” may in certain contexts have the same referent even though they do not have the same sense. In many biblical passages we could not substitute “Father” for “God” without changing the meaning, e.g., the expressions cited in the text obviously do not mean “Father the Father,” “Father our Father,” “[our] Father and Father,” etc. The point I am making seems to require that there be connotative proper names as well as non-connotative proper names. It seems to me that some names do, indeed, have senses, e.g., “Black Beauty,” “Champ,” “Mom,” etc. “Father” seems like this. For that reason it cannot always be substituted for “God” without meaning change. This point would go double for cases where “God” is not a proper name but part of a definite description, e.g., “the only true God,” which obviously does not mean “the only true Father.” “Similarly, when Jesus Christ is occasionally called theos in the NT, this should not be understood as the assertion that he is the Father. Drawing the distinction between sense and reference serves to expose the error of Tuggy when he says, “Never in the Bible does ‘God’ refer to some collective or group of divine persons, or to something like a ‘soul’ which underlies or supports three selves, or to something which isn’t a self but which consists of or contains divine selves” (Tuggy, “Divine Deception and Monotheism,” 200). Tuggy has no non-question begging way of knowing that just as “Phosphorus” (“the morning star”) and “Hesperus” (“the evening star”), though different in sense, both referred to Venus even though the ancient Babylonian astrologers did not realize it, so “God” does not on occasion refer, not to the Father, but to the Trinitarian God, even though the NT authors did not realize it.

In the pages of the New Testament, then, we find the raw data that the doctrine of the Trinity later sought to systematize. The New Testament church remained faithful to its heritage of Jewish monotheism in affirming that there is only one God (Mk 12:29; Rom 3:29-30; 1 Cor 8:4; 1 Tim 2:5; Jas 2:19). In accord with the portrayal of God in the Old Testament (Is 63:16) and the teaching of Jesus (Mt 6:9), Christians also conceived of God as Father, a distinct person from Jesus his Son (Mt 11:27; 26:39; Mk 1:9-11; Jn 17:5-26). Indeed, in New Testament usage, God (ho theos) typically refers to God the Father (e.g., Gal 4:4-6). Now this occasioned a problem for the New Testament church: If God designates the Father, how can one affirm the deity of Christ without identifying him as the Father? In response to this difficulty the New Testament writers refer to Jesus principally as “Lord” (kyrios), the same word the Septuagint translators used in place of God’s name Yahweh. The New Testament writers applied to Jesus Old Testament proof texts concerning Yahweh (e.g., Rom 10:9, 13). Indeed, the confession “Jesus is Lord” was the central confession of the early church (1 Cor 12:3), and they not only called Jesus “Lord” but also addressed him in prayer as Lord (1 Cor 16:22). This difference-in-sameness can lead to odd locutions like Paul’s confession “yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:6).  

Furthermore, the New Testament church, not content with the use of divine nomenclature for Christ, also ascribed to him God’s role as the Creator and Sustainer of all reality apart from God (Col 1:15-20; Heb 1:1-4; Jn 1:1-3). In places restraint is thrown to the winds, and Jesus is explicitly affirmed to be (ho) theos (Jn 1:1, 18; 20:28; Rom 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb 1:8-12; 1 Jn 5:20). Noting that the oldest Christian sermon, the oldest account of a Christian martyr, the oldest pagan report of the church, and the oldest liturgical prayer (1 Cor 16:22) all refer to Christ as Lord and God, Jaroslav Pelikan, the great historian of Christian thought, concludes, “Clearly it was the message of what the church believed and taught that ‘God’ was an appropriate name for Jesus Christ.”²

Finally, the Holy Spirit, who is also identified as God (Acts 5:3-4) and the Spirit of God (Mt 12:28; 1 Cor 6:11), is conceived as personally distinct from both the Father and the Son (Mt 28:19; Lk 11:13; Jn 14:26; 15:26; Rom 8:26-27; 2 Cor 13:13; 1 Pet 1:1-2). As these and other passages make clear, the Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force, but a personal reality who teaches and intercedes for believers, who possesses a mind, who can be grieved and lied to, and who is ranked as an equal partner with the Father and the Son.

In short, the New Testament church was sure that only one God exists. But they also believed that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while personally distinct, all deserve to be called God. The challenge facing the postapostolic church was how to make sense of these affirmations. How could the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each be God without there being either three Gods or only one person? (Craig & J.P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview [IVP Academic Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, second edition, 2017], Part VI—Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, 31. Christian Doctrines I: The Trinity, pp. 576-577; emphasis mine)

“For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God (el gibbor), Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, On the throne of David and over his kingdom, To establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness From then on and forevermore. The zeal of Yahweh of hosts will accomplish this.” Isaiah 9:6-7

“Now all this took place in order that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled, saying, ‘Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,’ which translated means, ‘God (ho theos) with us.’” Matthew 1:22-23 – cf. 28:20

“‘Return to your house and recount what great things God (ho theos) has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city what great things Jesus (ho ‘Iesous) had done for him.” Luke 8:39

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. John 1:1, 18

“Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God (ho theos mou)!’” John 20:28

“Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God (tou theou) which He purchased with His own blood.” Acts 20:28

“whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.” Romans 9:5

“But to the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God (ho theos), endures forever and ever. You rule with a scepter of justice. You love justice and hate evil. Therefore, O God (ho theos), your God has anointed you, pouring out the oil of joy on you more than on anyone else.’” Hebrews 1:8-9 New Living Translation (NLT)

“looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God (tou megalou theou) and Savior, Jesus Christ,” Titus 2:13

“Simeon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who have received the same kind of faith as ours, by the righteousness of our God (tou theou) and Savior, Jesus Christ:” 2 Peter 1:1

“And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God (ho alethinos theos) and eternal life.” 1 John 5:20