Lady Luck or Divine Providence?

Perhaps God has nothing to do with the weather at all and the climate of a given region is a natural phenomenon. As such, the weather is simply due to luck, an observation that begs the following question: what controls our lives Divine Providence or Lady Luck? At some point everyone has exclaimed, "What a great stroke of luck," or "We survived by the providence of God." As a Baptist, I have grown up with the concept of "the providence of God," but what exactly is luck and how do I reconcile it to a dominate idea in Western culture that God somehow regulates the universe?

            My brother-in-law had a great game of golf one weekend—even for him. He shot 67 for 18 holes, including a hole-in-one. His wife (my sister) chalked up the hole-in-one to his skill with the clubs. But he insisted, "No, any time you shoot a hole-in-one, it's luck." I thought about it for a moment and had to agree. If holes-in-one were due to skill there would be more of them. So, I suggested, "Perhaps it was divine providence." My brother-in-law replied, "No, it's luck. God doesn't care about golf." My brother-in-law is a Baptist Deacon, so I had to take him seriously. Golf is a game where you play against yourself, so the only reason for God to intervene in his game and bless him with a hole-in-one was to lower his golf score and make him feel rather smug. We usually like to think that God has bigger issues on his plate, which is what I think he meant when he said, "God couldn't care less about golf."

            What we seem to mean by luck is that sometimes things go in our favor and at other times they do not, including even the most trivial matters. We seem to conceive of luck as a pervasive random force in the universe that, for whatever reason, is erratic or whimsical in its application. If this is true, we do not live in a universe where everything is micromanaged by God. Hence, people who believe in God's providence must cope with the disturbing idea that God (if God there be) manages some things that happen, but, on the other hand, God allows other things simply to happen, as they will, without his oversight. Or perhaps we do live in a world where God micromanages everything and must be given the credit (or take the blame) for everything that happens. If God is to be given the credit for everything that happens, then we humans bear no responsibility for global warming, poverty, the breach of the ozone layer, or the failure of the levees in New Orleans in 2005. Somehow, however, we instinctively know that we cannot make God the scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the world. Most of us realize (I hope) that God is not responsible for the incompetent response of the Federal Government to the disaster in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, or the current bumbling administration presently making a mockery of the democratic ideals of the nation. Voters at least must share the blame for that debacle.

            Perhaps luck is only a more or less natural force in the universe, something like gravity for example. While the ancient Greeks and Romans personified it into a deity named Tychē (Greek) or Fortuna (Roman), we moderns have secularized the force. Nevertheless, the idea that some things just happen for no apparent reason is a disturbing concept for those who think that God guides a master plan for the universe. If things happen for no reason, then we have a universe permeated by a principle of randomness that suggests God may guide matters in the universe in most instances, but leaves others to happen without his guidance. Such a possibility raises the question how can we tell benevolent concern from random event? Perhaps we cannot.

            The Bible is full of bad things perpetrated by the biblical God on basically decent people. Many believers seem willing to accept that sometimes God does bad things to good people for reasons they cannot understand. Job thought so as well: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil" (Job 2:10 RSV)? Maybe we invented the idea of luck because such capricious behavior on God's part is simply inconsistent with the idea of a benevolent God. But if we invented luck, we could have invented God as well.¹

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, Or: Cascade, 2009), 6–7. This essay first appeared before 2009 as a Religion and Ethics Editorial in the daily Newspaper, The Springfield News Leader.

Psychic Mediums and Christian Believers

What is the difference between psychic mediums and Christian believers? Or is there a difference? A medium claims to have an inherent ability to communicate with the insubstantial spirits of the dead and a Christian-believer claims to have the ability to communicate with a divine insubstantial spirit (that is to say, God) through a spirit (Rom 8:26–27). The only evidence offered by either to prove their claims is their public confidence that said communication has taken place. The voices of the deceased arise (if at all) apparently in the mind of the medium and the voice of God arises (if at all) apparently in the mind of the one who prays. We outsiders are only privy to their claims and cannot listen in on their conversations or probe their minds for evidence of the “voice” messages they claim to have received from beyond the grave.

            In the Christian Old Testament one who was thought to communicate with the dead was called a medium (Hebrew ‘ob) or necromancer (1 Sam 28:7). Generally, Bible dictionaries treat such figures and practices under the category of magic.¹ In general, in antiquity, nature itself was thought to be under the control of both gods and demons; one who practiced necromancy was thought to be in collusion with the dark spirits of the universe.² Thus, the Bible condemns those who were believed to practice magic by means of communication with the spirits of the dead³ but encourages those who through the Spirit seek communication with the God of Hebrew faith through prayer. Necromancy is defined by one Bible dictionary as a “[form] of divination using spirits of the dead to foretell the future.⁴ In 1 Sam 28, for example, King Saul solicits a medium, a woman of Endor, to call up the shade of the prophet Samuel to consult him as to “what he should do” (1 Sam 28:15 RSV).

            In the New Testament there are several encounters of the apostles with those who practiced the magic arts involving divination through an insubstantial spirit and soothsaying (a person who claims to foretell the future through various means).⁵ Apparently there were books to consult in the practice of magic (Acts 19:19).

Today, the practice of necromancy has edged its way into modern culture to the point of respectability on the basis (it seems) that the medium provides a service to society (the medium brings comfort to those who have lost loved ones). The names of many of the mediums who currently have a television presence, or otherwise public persona, are known and consulted by many in society from presidents to dishwashers.⁶ A glance at the internet shows that contemporary Christian denominations overwhelmingly condemn the medium’s practice of necromancy, soothsaying, and the magic arts in general, but resolutely encourage Christians to maintain a constant practice of prayer.

With this observation I have come full circle to where I began: What is the difference between a psychic medium and a Christian believer, if any? The psychic medium claims an ability for communicating with insubstantial dead spirits and often uses a spiritual guide. The Christian believer claims an ability for communicating with an insubstantial divine spirit through the medium of an insubstantial holy spirit—that sounds rather similar to my ear. But absent any evidence, the claims of each are unsubstantiated, no matter how comforting the practice of each may be. At best, the claims of both could be genuine. At worst, their claims could be an elaborate scam, or each could be deceiving themselves. The bottom line is: do we share the cosmos with insubstantial spirits good and bad, and do the dead still “exist” in some kind of spirit “substance” somewhere?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Joanne K. Kuemmerlin-McLean, ABD 4.468–71, especially, 469 under A.1.g and h.

²Kimberly B. Stratton, “Magic,” NIDB 3.767–69. (767).

³For example, in Hebrew Bible: Lev 19:31; 20:6; 20:27; Deut 18:10–12; 1 Sam 28; 1 Chron 10:13—14.

⁴Joann Scurlock, “Necromancy,” NIDB 4.248.

⁵Acts 16:16–18; Acts 8:9–13.

⁶Here are the names of a few of the better-known mediums: https://www.keen.com/articles/psychic/well-known-psychic-mediums

https://www.aol.com/psychic-stars-rising-stars-netflix-135700140.html

The Theological Implications of Bird Poop

Does everything happen for a reason? If I said that someone survived a car crash with barely a scratch, but four others in the car were killed outright, most people, religious or not, would likely observe, “stuff happens for a reason.” Behind that observation is the popular religious belief that God micromanages the world. But if I were to ask, was there some divine reason for a bird dropping poop on my forehead rather than on my shoulder this morning, many might think that my question was silly. Nevertheless, a serious issue lies behind both situations: is anyone completely in charge of the universe?

            One answer is that God is in charge and micromanages the universe. If so, everything happens for a reason. A micromanaging God would scarcely leave anything to chance. This way of reasoning leads inevitably to the conclusion that even bad things (the recent pandemic, for example) are due to God’s deliberate management. Hence, since by popular definition God can do no wrong, whatever seems bad must really be good—and that includes the bird poop on my forehead. A micromanaging God would have had good reason for the bird poop—for under the theory of divine micromanagement, God makes everything happen for a benevolent reason

            Perhaps, however, God only generally manages the universe and is simply not responsible for everything that happens. Under “general” management some things are divinely manipulated but other things are simply allowed to happen for no reason at all. Under this theory the universe has been set up to work in a well-regulated way, and God only intrudes every so often for whatever reason strikes the divine fancy. For the most part things do seem to work fairly well in our world. The world turns with general regularity and only an occasional glitch or two (cancer and destructive tornadoes come to mind). This theory raises the question: how can we ever really be certain what is caused by God, what is part of the regular pulse of the universe, and what is a glitch in the system? The bird poop is well accommodated by this explanation: it is just one of those billions of little things that never register on the divine radarscope, or are just part of the regular pulse of the universe where things happen for no particular reason—like a leaf falling off a tree or bird droppings. I simply happened to look up at an opportune moment this morning at the precise time the bird pooped. Such occurrences are part of the regular design of things, for leaves fall from trees and birds poop all over the place. But under this theory one can never be sure of anything God does or does not do.

            It is also possible that God has chosen to be an observer of events in a universe designed to run itself, more or less—or worse God has gone missing. One may well ask, how is that possible? God created the world, so why would he abandon it? Good question! But since we cannot even prove that God exists, how could we possibly know whether God is missing? A missing God, however, does make a kind of perverted sense of our human situation, and could account for natural disasters and unconscionable human suffering (cancer, tsunamis, and hurricanes come to mind)—in short, no one is minding the store. Bird poop on the forehead makes excellent sense in such a world. A God absent for the big things could scarcely be expected to be around for the little things.

            Perhaps we have simply misunderstood God’s character. If God were a bit devious, it could explain the general regularity of the cosmos and its blessings when things work without the glitches, such as natural disasters, the tragedies of human disease, and fatal accidents. In short, God may be prone to be a bit “impish,” so to speak. Certain passages in the Bible seem to support such a theory, at least the early Israelites and Christians must have thought so by some of the ways they portrayed God (the Book of Job comes to mind). Bird poop on the forehead is precisely the kind of thing one might expect from a mischievous God.

            Of course, it is always possible there is no God. The only difference between this possibility and the last is that human tragedy and natural disaster could not be caused by a nonexistent God, but must be the result of randomness in the universe that never had a manager of any sort. We would be alone in a sort of well-regulated universe—except for the occasional glitch. Such a situation accommodates regularity, natural disasters, and bird poop on the forehead.

            The five possibilities for explaining bird poop and divine management of the universe boil down to this. Do you choose to believe in an uptight micromanager, a lax general manager, a God gone missing, a mischievous deity or in no God at all? I suppose one could choose to ignore human experience (which the Bible is), and fashion a God of one’s own imagination. I suspect that is what most of us do.*

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*This essay appeared originally in Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Cascade: Eugene, OR, 2009), 13–15.

What Do Gods Do?

There is more than one God being worshipped around the world, so answering this question will depend on knowing which God one is referring-to and what is being said about that God, since all Gods do not behave alike. With those two caveats stated, this (it seems to me) is the rule: Gods do what they are thought to do—no more, no less! Basically, God is an idea that "exists" in most human minds. Hence, God has no "objectified existence"—that is, an "over-there-ness away from me" that can be pointed-to. God "is" (only in a sense) akin to an invisible immaterial spirit—and even that is too concrete. There is no spot in the entire universe where God can be located as a "material existing thing" as a person might be. Nor is God spread pervasively throughout the universe "in all things." To think in such a way is to objectify God by identifying God in some way with living creatures and plants (flora and fauna), and inanimate objects. A saying in the Gospel of Thomas attributed to Jesus, however, says precisely that: "Split a piece of wood; I am there. Take up a stone and you will find me there" (77b; cf. Colossians 1:17). All Gods (if Gods there be) do not inhabit a space time continuum in the universe as human beings do.

Primitive societies, however, did make one-to-one identifications between their idols (things representing God) and the spirit of mana thought to infuse their idols. The Greeks and Romans also objectified their Gods, representing them in statuary and even thinking that sometimes the God had taken human form. They even believed their statuary possessed some of the essential power of the God. For example, in the council chamber of the city of Stratonicea (West Coast of Asia Minor) there stood the statues of Zeus and Hecate, which were said in a formal city decree to "perform good deeds of great power." The citizenry celebrated their miracles daily by sacrifice, burning incense, praying, and giving thanks.

Christians, on the other hand, generally have not objectified God, with one noticeable exception. In the 5^th century Nicene Creed Jesus, the Jewish sage, is elevated to "true God of true God" and worshipped and glorified. This is apparently a dual movement consisting of God becoming man and man becoming God: it may be thought of as an instance of divine spirit "infused" into flesh and blood, or the materializing of immaterial divine spirit into human matter. He was not always the Son of God (Rom 1:3).

An easier answered historical question, however, is what is God represented as doing in the Bible? That question can at least be investigated. The Bible is divided into two divisions: Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Among other things these divisions are characterized by two completely different thought worlds: Semitic (Hebrew Bible) and Hellenistic (New Testament). Hebrew Bible describes what God does from the perspective of Old Testament faiths according to Hebrew tradition, and the New Testament, drawing on the Old Testament, describes what earlier followers of Jesus believed about God's behavior from the perspective of New Testament faiths.

"Christian" ideas about what God does come much later as expressed in the early Christian creeds of the fourth and fifth centuries and later, which are not part of the biblical tradition, although Christians argue that both the Hebrew tradition and the early Jesus tradition inform Christian beliefs.

Between the two divisions of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament lies Jesus of Nazareth. The thought world (how he expressed himself) of Jesus is indebted to the Hebrew/Jewish traditions. Christian theology is partly based on the sayings of Jesus, the Jewish sage, and partly on Graeco-Roman ideas of divinity. The question becomes: according to Jesus, the Jewish sage, what does God do? The most critical sifting of all sayings attributed to Jesus in early Christian literature of the first and second centuries by the Jesus Seminar suggests that there is only modest God-language to be found in the residue of Jesus sayings that survived the lapses of memory of his earliest followers, and what was attributed to him in the piety of the later church. What little there is suggests that God is not sectarian but cares for good people and bad people alike (Matt 5:45b), even to the extent of providing for their daily needs, like feeding and clothing them (Matt 5:25–30; 7:11; 10:29–31). Jesus prayed for the daily provision of the basic necessities of life, as though he himself were indigent (Matt 5:11), and he thought that God's watch-care over the world extended to "numbering the hair on peoples' heads" and micromanaging the deaths of sparrows (Matt 10:29-31). He knows how to give good things to those who ask him (Matt 7:7–11). People of means, on the other hand, will have difficulty entering God's imperial rule (Mark 10:28; Matt 6:24).

When it comes to Gods, the biggest mistake most people make is thinking that their personal beliefs control what God does. As Job said, in a sudden flash of understanding, "Shall we receive good at the hand of God and not evil" (Job 2:10, cf. 30:26). In short, the ways of the Gods (if Gods there be) are inscrutable.¹

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹This essay first appeared on this blog on June 13, 2013. It later appeared in print in Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths (2019). It appears here again reedited and expanded.

Does God care about Baseball?

Judging from life among the thorns in the Vale of Tears we call earth, it is at least questionable that God is concerned with the minutiae of individual human lives, or for that matter even with the mega problems that plague whole nations on the globe. During the second world war the belt buckles of German soldiers were etched with the slogan, “Gott mit uns” (God is with us). Of course, the allied troops thought the same thing, because they too believed their cause was just. And this clash of claims for God’s concern and support in the enterprises of our lives naturally raises my question about the minutiae of individual lives. For example, the nation cares about baseball. It is referred to as our “national pastime,” part of the minutiae of our lives. But does God care about baseball, about who wins and loses?

            Are we to suppose that God follows baseball and the individual statistics of each athlete, perhaps has a favorite baseball team, and even decides the outcomes of games? I once saw a pitcher, who, after throwing the winning pitch in a baseball game, made the sign of the cross, kissed his fingers, and pointed upward, thanking God for the win. In American popular religion most of us believe God does get involved in the minutiae of human life, even numbering the hairs on certain human heads and deciding the deaths of sparrows (Matt 10:29-30). But with such a complicated universe to run, surely God has weightier concerns than sparrows, hairs in the drain—and the Cardinals/Royals game. In terms of universal importance, which team wins the pennant seems a rather insignificant event. Other events clearly have a more profound impact on human life than baseball games. True, the outcome of a Cardinals/Royals game is more significant than the number of hairs that showed up in my drain this morning, but totally insignificant when compared to the Israeli/Hamas war and the plight of families in the war zone. Some diehard fans may disagree, but in terms of significant impact on human life baseball games fall completely off the radar screen for everyone, except, perhaps, for those involved in the industry.

            It comforts us to think there is a master plan to life. Believing that life is “scripted” helps us cope with tragedy and loss. Life must make sense, and our individual tragedies must have some meaning in the grand scheme of things—or so we insist. Even the death of a butterfly must have a place in God’s “master plan” for the universe. The alternative—thinking that we live in an “unscripted” and arbitrary universe is a frightening concept. In an arbitrary universe no master plan exists. What happens, just happens! Under those conditions, life’s meaning is what each of us makes of the random events that constitute our lives. I personally do not like that alternative and hope, as everyone else, that affairs in my life are part of some grand benevolent design for the universe. Yet, I am a little dubious when someone tells me God spends time counting the hairs in my drain, marking the demise of individual sparrows, or following the progress of a favorite baseball team. Such micromanaging will not work for CEO’s in large organizations—and the universe, if anything, is large. Effective management gives priority to the more significant. In a global crisis, I don’t want to think of God worrying with minutiae, like the welfare of the one barren tomato plant in my garden. Micromanagement on God’s part may be why we have natural disasters, like floods, earthquakes, and epidemics—because God has taken his eyes off the big picture. Other disasters, like wars, are inevitably the result of human contrivance, although even God is given credit for starting wars in the Bible.¹

            One should not too quickly criticize the divine Administrator of the universe, however, since we have only the barest inkling of what’s involved in running the universe. The universe may be unlimited, and if so, that is a lot of turf to cover, even for God—or so God suggested to Job (Job 38–41) when Job bitterly complained that God had treated him unfairly. If God is weighing the outcomes of ballgames and neglecting the causes of war, he has likely fallen out of touch with what is really happening in the universe—or at least in this small corner of an out-of-the-way galaxy. Surely God can find better things to do with his time than ponder the pennant.²

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹See, for example, Numbers 31:1–31, the war God began with the Midianites. Why did God begin the war? See Numbers 25:16–18.

²This essay first appeared sometime before 2006 as an editorial in the Springfield, Missouri Newsleader. It was published later, in 2009 in a collection of essays: Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009), 7-9. It appears here edited, revised, and updated.

The Human Genome, Gene Therapy, and the Irrelevancy of God

Roots. We all have them, embedded somewhere in our past. I don’t recall my birth father and have never visited his grave in Biloxi, Mississippi. My parents were married in 1932, when he was 41 and she 27. I was born in 1934, and he died in 1939. I never had a chance to observe him for the ways in which I might be a chip off his old block. Nevertheless, a good part of who I have become has been determined by who he was and his contribution to my inherited gene pool.

Who we are physically is heavily rooted in the combined gene pool of our parents. Such features of ourselves as the color of our eyes, hair, and skin, our height and gender, and our susceptibility to various diseases are all an outgrowth of our parental gene pool. Your inherited genes can even influence such things as mental abilities, personality traits, and predisposition to certain kinds of talents and abilities. If a person, upon looking in a mirror one morning, is pondering the image that stares back, s/he might check out some old family photos. On the other hand, s/he might consider gene therapy. As incredible as it may sound, gene therapy can involve replacing a defective gene in your present genetic code, silencing a faulty gene, or editing specific DNA sequences.¹

Depending on your politics and/or religious persuasion, gene therapy may sound like science fiction to the unpracticed ear but, like it or not, gene therapy has quietly moved into real life. Messing about in the human genome may evoke images of Dr. Mengele² or Victor Frankenstein (a character in Mary Shelley’s 1818 fiction novel Frankenstein), but if such treatment can improve the human situation, why not?

If you are religious in a traditional sense (an avid church/synagogue/mosque attender), gene therapy may also suggest that those involved in genome research are playing God. At bottom, such an accusation “refers to the powers that science, engineering, and technology confer on human beings to understand and to control the natural world, including you.”³ In aiming at the ability to create life in a petri dish such researchers encroach on a role that has traditionally belonged to God (Gen 1:1-31, for example). And in fact, they have successfully created a kind of artificial life, the first synthetic cell: “it is the first self-replicating cell on the planet [whose] parent is a computer.”⁴

If (or when) they succeed in discovering how to create life de novo, however, they will not have proven the non-existence of God but rather threatened the relevancy of the concept of God. If human beings can create life, even artificial life, and change the human genome so as to alter what God is believed to have accomplished through Mother Nature, God becomes something like a good luck charm to which many may turn in times of crisis—when the limits of human knowledge and ability are reached.

All of what I have just described evokes aspects of the biblical Tower of Babel story (Gen 11:1-9). The sons of men built a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.” And Yahweh, upon coming down to see the city and the tower, said: “this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Gen 11:5 RSV). The story portrays Yahweh and his court (“Let us go down and confuse their language so they may not understand one another’s speech,” Gen 11:7 RSV) being intimidated by human accomplishments. Hence, God destroyed their ability to communicate and scattered them around the world (Gen 11:8-9). Apparently, Yahweh sensed that given their present course the sons of men would render the divine Self irrelevant.

Losing relevancy is a genuine, practical, existential threat to a God. Just consider how many Gods through history have fallen into irrelevancy and, eventually, into oblivion. Irrelevant Gods wait, one assumes, in a kind of mythical Nirvana to be rediscovered, to wait until someone calls upon them again and thereby renders them relevant. Or does irrelevancy mean actual death for a God? Has anyone out there ever heard of an irrelevant God being restored to relevancy to “run” the world again?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/cellular-gene-therapy-products/what-gene-therapy

And: en-wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-therapy

²en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele

³https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/playing-god

⁴newscientist.com/article/dn18942-immaculate-creation-birth-of-the-first-synthetic-cell/

Does God Wink?

The ancient writers of the Bible tended to describe God anthropomorphically, meaning they generally described God as having humanoid characteristics (having an appearance or character resembling that of a human). The ancient Greeks and Romans even represented their Gods as humans in statuary, only the statues were much larger than humans, suggesting they conceived their Gods as oversized humans who behaved in a similar human manner. The ancient Israelites were forbidden to make graven images (Lev 26:1), but that apparently did not stop them from conceiving God anthropomorphically.

My brief comment above points out the difficulty of conceiving and describing Gods (if Gods there be). Language fails when it comes to describing God. In the later New Testament postscript, God is spirit (John 4:24), which means God is unseen (John 1:18).¹ Although the writer of Exodus may have described Moses as having seen God's backside (Exod 33:17-23), spirits don't have backsides, or even front sides, for that matter.

I was prompted to raise the question posited in my title last week when a checker (a fiftyish attractive lady) at the grocery store winked at this nonagenarian. It has happened before with grocery store checkers, usually accompanied by a term of endearment with which one would address a child, like "sweetie" (a sort of tribute to my advanced age). But in this case, the wink did not seem age-related. I am told there are many reasons one may wink. It is after all a non-verbal act, so the wink's recipient must guess its meaning.

            Here is what I got from Google's AI when I googled winking:

People wink to communicate subtly, expressing things like friendliness, sexual interest, or that they're not being serious. It can also be a way of indicating shared knowledge or a secret. Essentially, winking is a deliberate, subtle signal that can convey various meanings depending on the context.²

There are at least three words in the Bible of which I am aware that translators have rendered into English using the word "wink." In Hebrew, they are qarats (Ps 35:19, Prov 6:13, 10:10) and razzam (Job 15:12). In the New Testament the Greek huperoraō (Acts 17:30), and in the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books there is one, the Greek word dianeuō (Sirach 27:22). None of the passages in Hebrew Bible represent God winking, but they all portray winking as a negative act. For example, Sirach 27:22 RSV reads, "He that winks with the eyes works evil…"

To judge from the several English translations on my shelf, only the King James Version of 1611 represents God as winking (Acts 17:30), a translation rejected by the New King James Version of 1982 that reads "overlooked" for huperoraō. The Bauer/Danker Greek-English Lexicon (3^rd ed., 2000) recommends as translations for huperoraō: "to indulgently take no notice of, overlook, disregard." It appears that the 1611 King James Version has translated the Greek by rendering huperoraō metaphorically, for "to wink at" is defined in the dictionary as "to pretend not to see, as in connivance"³—or to disregard. The Modern Greek version of Acts 17:30 reads in part: Ho Theos pareblepse to chronia tēs agnoias (God turns a blind eye to the times of their ignorance…"), which is another metaphorical way of saying "winks at" or disregards.⁴

Does God wink? Well if he has eyes, as some biblical writers seemed to think (Gen 6:3; Deut 11:12; 2 Chron 16:9; Amos 9:8; Heb 4:13), I suppose he could have managed a wink or two. The biblical writers do not chronicle God's activities 24/7.

Describing God as having human feelings and physical characteristics, is surely far off the mark. God (if God there be) is the Indescribable Other, whom "no one has ever seen" (John 1:18). The fact of the matter is that we only know about God from what we read and from what others tell us, or from what we conjecture, which is surely conditioned by information from reading and the testimony of others.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 172-77.

²Compare Wikipedia's statement on winking" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wink

³Webster's New World College Dictionary, under wink.

⁴A metaphor is describing one thing in terms appropriate for another thing—like describing God in terms appropriate for a human being.

A Discrepancy in John’s Gospel

A discrepancy is defined as "a lack of agreement."¹ This essay ponders an interesting disagreement in the Greek manuscripts at the end to the prologue (1:1-18) to John's Gospel. The issue is the following: what did the original flesh-and-blood author of the Gospel write in the original author's copy (the autograph) of John 1:18? As most regular readers of this blog are aware no autograph (original author's copy) of the Greek New Testament is known to exist. Only later copies (and copies of copies) of the autographs made through the years exist. A very few of the over 5000 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are dated in the second century but most (one might even say, virtually all) date from the third century and later.

            In the late fourteenth century, the English translation of John 1:18 by Wycliffe-Purvey read (in Middle English, translated from the Latin):

No man sai euer God, no but the 'oon bigetun sone, that is in the bosom of the fadir, he hath teld out.²

            In the sixteenth century the King James translation read (translated from the Greek):

No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.³

The phrase in which I am interested appears here as "the only begotten son." The two English words "only begotten" are used to translate one Greek word, monogenēs, which carries the meaning of the only one of his kind, or the one and only. Thus, a clearer translation is "the only son." The term "begotten" is misleading since it suggests that the son had a beginning, which is specifically denied in John 1:1-3.

Here, however, the problems begin. Although the translation of "only son" corresponds well with the similar readings in John 3:16, 18 and 1 John 4:9, text critics consider the reading "son" (huios) to be an early scribal change of John 1:18 to agree with the passages just cited above.⁴ The earliest manuscripts to preserve this verse in John (P⁶⁶ and P⁷⁵), however, have the reading  "unique God" (monogenēs theos) not "only son":

Unique God, the one being in the bosom of the Father— that one has made [him] known.⁵

What this unique God in the bosom of the Father makes known is the God whom no one has ever seen. This reading of John 1:18b was thought by a majority of the text critical committee considering the verse to be the earliest reading, although P⁷⁵ (dated at the beginning of the third century) reads "the unique God" (o monogenēs Theos). The word "him," lacking in the Greek, refers to the invisible God whom no one has ever seen in the first half of verse 18. And that makes the conundrum facing the translator of John 1:18 evident:  The sentence has [the] unique God revealing the God whom no one has ever seen. The reading "the only Son" (o monogenēs uios), which makes better sense, is regarded as a scribal correction because of the obvious difficulty. In textual criticism, the more difficult reading is to be preferred.

            One member of the committee thought it doubtful that the original author would have written monogenēs Theos ("Only God") and suggested in an addendum to the full committee's report that even this earliest reading might itself be a primitive transcriptional error. This suggestion was printed in square brackets and signed A. W. (Allen Wikgren?).

            As most text critics are aware, a reconstruction of the earliest reading is "if not the original, at least of the most reliable form of the text that can still be reached on the basis [o]f the material that has been preserved."⁶ Hence, the text situation in John 1:18 in the light of Wikgren's corrective comment points out the limitations of textual criticism as a critical study: it does not restore the original author's copy. In this case, however, the text-critical judgment of the Editorial Committee neither restores the original, nor restores the most reliable form of the text attainable given the material preserved from antiquity. And it raises the specter of a flawed original author's copy. Errors are something that every author knows only too well, as my correction of the quoted material in the first sentence of this paragraph demonstrates. Someone's typo there, after eluding the eagle eye of its author and the professional proofreaders of volume five of the NIDB, entered the print media world flawed.

            Faced with this difficulty, modern translators of the Gospel of John find different ways to resolve the difficulty. The translations, to judge from those Bible translations on my shelf, print later scribal corrections to the Greek text in some cases. The reading that seems to occur with frequency is "the only son" (o monogenēs uios).

One creative solution is to punctuate the sentence differently so that there are three separate designations for the son: "monogenēs,⁷ God, the One That Is, in the bosom of the Father—that one has made him known"⁸ But few translators of the English language Bible have followed this suggestion.

How does your Bible read for John 1:18?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Webster's New World College Dictionary (2002), under "discrepancy."

²Wycliffe Bible PDF, "Wycliffe Bible PDF Middle English," https://ebible.org/pdf/engWycliffe/

³The word him is written in italics because it is not in Greek.

⁴Bruce M. Metzger, ed. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2^nd ed.; Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 2000), 169-70. The text critics in this case have also published the 28^th revised edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament edited by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Germany.

⁵My translation.

⁶Joseph Verheyden, "TEXT, NT," in NIDB 5.540.

⁷The word monogenēs is actually an adjective but this solution reads it as if it were a noun.

⁸E. A. Abbott, Johannine Grammar (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 42, 55-56.

The Privative Life of God

Can it be true that God has a private life? Folks at my church seem to assume that God is always on duty, 24/7—particularly to receive all prayers. People seem to think God is even available to make spiritual house calls and hospital visits on a moment’s notice. Imagine; going to God in prayer and sensing a message glimmering in your mind: “call back in a week; on vacation!” Yet there are hints in the Bible that God does have something like a private life—moments when he is away from being hands-on (so to speak) running the world. The ancient Graeco-Roman Gods, on the other hand, are regularly depicted as having private lives.¹ I grant you that Yahweh’s free moments are all depicted in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (OT). The New Testament (NT) writers are not much-given to reflecting on God anthropomorphically (i.e., depicting God as being human).² Nevertheless these hints are there in OT.

            One indisputable attestation of God’s private life is revealed at the creation when God “finished his work and rested on the seventh day from all his work” and immediately “hallowed the seventh day” of the week (Gen 2:2-3), presumably as a day of rest (Exodus 20:8-11). What do you do when you are resting? The answer is, anything but work!³

The depiction of God as “walking in the garden [of Eden] in the cool of the day” (Gen 3:8) and making innocuous chit-chat (before the conversation got serious, Gen 3:9-13) with Adam and Eve sounds as if God’s refreshing pause in the heat of the day was spoiled by the coming of age of Adam and Eve.

            For some reason, God attempts to kill Moses as Moses is on his way to Egypt. God meets Moses at a lodging place on the way and tries to kill him (Exodus 4:24). It does not appear that God is acting in the performance of his official duties, however. Apparently, this act is “off the books” (not an official act) but a clandestine act, if you will, for God fails to kill him—Is this kind of thing something God does in his spare time, do you suppose? Perhaps! God’s all too casual “back-room bargain” with Satan (Job 1:6-12; 2:1-6) to allow a testing of Job’s piety appears similar to the incident with Moses. No wonder Jesus followers prayed that they not be put to the test (Matt 6:13=Luke 11:4). God’s bargain with Satan to prove Job’s piety to Satan appears pointless and hence a waste of God’s time.

            There is one kind of thing that God is represented as doing quite frequently in the Bible. One finds repeated references to God “changing his mind,” or “repenting” about things he has done or things he intended to do.⁴ For example, God “was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Gen 6:6-7). He later changed his mind again, even about his previous change of mind to destroy everything he had created, because Noah subsequently found favor in his eyes (Gen 6:8). God must have spent a great deal of time mulling over his deeds and pondering what his next course of action should be in the circumstances. One mulls and ponders in the spare moments that one has available—not in the busy moments of life. The frequency with which God ponders certain of his actions suggests that he spent a lot of time reflecting, pondering, and being inactive while in self-recriminating thought.

            There is also “evidence” from sherds, pottery, and the Bible that God may have had a wife (or significant other) at some point in the dim past. It has been suggested by an Oxford scholar, who now teaches at Exeter, that at one time the goddess Asherah (Deut 16:21; I Kgs 14:23) was considered a consort (wife, significant other) of the Hebrew God, Yahweh.

Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to [Francesca] Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th-century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.

"The inscription is a petition for a blessing," she shares. "Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from 'Yahweh and his Asherah.' Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife."⁵

This is an interesting development that, if true, certainly support the idea that God at one time was thought to have a private life.

            I think, however, I can hear someone thinking quietly: “But you haven’t proven God has a private life. All you have shown is that an ancient semitic tribe at one time suspected the God they worshipped had odd moments when he might have been doing something other than ‘God-like’ things.” And that someone would be correct! When talk of God commences, we are always at the mercy of human imagination. For all God-talk has little to do with factuality. All words about God, like grass in its season, pass with each generation that coined them, like the dissonance between old and new covenants (Heb 8:1-13). Unless members of the tribe get together and canonize their words about God as an iconic object.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹See, for example, Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (2 vols.; George Braziller, 1959), vol. 1. 53-55. This section describes Zeus’ philandering ways, and his home life with Hera, his wife.

²This gap between the OT and NT in God-thought happens between the more primitive anthropomorphic thinking of the OT authors and the slightly-more “philosophically” oriented NT authors. Even one ancient Hebrew prophet recognized the wrong headedness of thinking of God in human terms (1 Sam 15:29).

³Some of the kinds of things God did in his “creation work” are reflected in God’s answer to Job (38-41). Today, God is generally thought-of as doing “religious” work, like answering prayer (or not), rewarding the faithful, and punishing the wicked.

⁴Repent, means to change one’s mind; sometimes translated as “relented”: Exod 32:14; I Sam 15:11, 35; 2 Sam 24:15-16; 1 Chron 21:15; Jer 8:8; 15:6; 18:10; 26:3, 13, 19; 42:10; Amos 7:3, 6; Jonah 3:9-10.

⁵Jennifer Viegas, NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42154769

"A Power came-out from Him": Healing and Exorcisms in Luke

Last Sunday morning as the minister was reading the text I was following along in the Greek and was immediately struck by a statement in Luke 6:19, which only appears in Luke.

The whole crowd sought to touch him because power came-out from him and healed all.

What struck me was that Jesus was not portrayed as the source of the healing of the crowd, rather “a power (dunamis) that came-out from (para) him” brought-about the healing. Jesus was the source for the power but the power itself was the source of the healing. The same phrase appears in Luke 8:46, “a power had come-out from (apo) him,” and that is also the case in Mark’s parallel passage (Mark 5:30), “A power (dunamis) had come-out (ek) from him.” In this latter passage the woman had touched his garment, which triggered the emanation of power from him. Jesus did not know who had touched him and was only aware that power had suddenly emanated from him.¹ It seems that the power operated independently of the will of Jesus (Mark 5:30-32).

            It appears that Luke conceived the power in Jesus as the power of God: “And there was a power of the Lord [present] for him to heal” (5:17). Again, it was not his power but the power of the Lord. This sentence is lacking in the parallel passages Mark 2:2 and Matt 9:1. In Luke’s source, Mark (1:25) reads “With authority he commands the unclean spirits,” whereas Luke (4:36) reads “With authority and power he commands the unclean spirits.” One might almost say: Jesus’ authority and God’s power. When Jesus sent out his disciples on a mission, Matthew (10:1) and Mark (6:7) read that Jesus gave them authority over unclean spirits. Luke (9:1), on the other hand, reads: Jesus “gave them authority and power over the unclean spirts.” In his second volume (the book of Acts) of his two-volume work (Luke-Acts) Luke makes a point of emphasizing the role of the power of God active in the community of Jesus followers (1:8; 10:38; compare Luke 24:49).

            In other healing or exorcism stories in Luke, it is not a power emanating independently of Jesus without his intentionally directing it that heals. Jesus heals by a laying on of his hands (4:40; 13:12-13), by a touch (5:13) by words or a word (5:24-25; 6:10; 7:14-15; 8:54; 9:42). In some cases, there is no description as to how he healed (14:4; 17:14). Once, the healing is at a distance but no description of how the healing occurred is given (7:9-10).

            Luke appears to conceive of this power of the Lord present in Jesus but not totally controlled by Jesus. It acts in a similar way to demons, and unclean or evil spirits, when they are exorcised. Luke describes the emergence of the power of the Lord from Jesus with the same expression that he uses in describing the exorcism of a demon or spirit: “it came/went-out from him” (4:35-36, 41; 8:33; 11:14; 11:24). Luke 9:42 does not contain the phrase: “it came/went-out from him,” but such is suggested by 9:40.

These descriptions of the activities of Jesus are simply another reminder² to the reader that in Luke’s Gospel we are not reading a historical account of Jesus’ career as it actually happened but rather we read what Luke thought had happened from the disparate bits of oral tradition s/he gathered from oral reports, or that s/he had read in the written reports of others (Luke 1:1-4).³ And that brings me to the rubric “Word of God” used to describe the Bible. At its worst, the expression is a learned religious confession elevating the Bible to an iconic status in the religious community. At its best, it is a metaphor converting the human wisdom of its authors and texts into a divine guide for faith and practice. Nevertheless, calling the Bible the “Word of God” dismisses the human role in the production of the Bible.⁴

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹See W. L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark (NICNT; Eerdmans, 1974), 192-93.

²See Charles Hedrick Blog, Wry Thoughts about Religion: “The Challenge of the Proverb”: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2024/02/the-challenge-of-proverb.html

And “Euphemisms in the Bible”: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2024/02/euphemisms-in-bible.html

³Modern scholars have identified three of those written sources as the Gospel of Mark, the hypothetical source Q, and Luke’s special source, dubbed “L” (written or oral is unknown”). See Vincent Taylor about sources in Luke, “Luke, Gospel of” in G. A. Buttrick, et al., The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (4 vols.; Abingdon, 1962), vol. 3. 184-85.

⁴See Charles Hedrick Blog, Wry Thoughts about Religion: “The Bible’s Story: A Brief Summary”; for the part of human beings in making the Bible a book, see: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2023/10/the-bibles-story-brief-summary.html

And “Inspired Writings”: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2023/11/inspired-writings.html

Once upon a time, a Man Became God

How in the world did that happen, do you suppose? Well, as with all good stories, there are several different accounts in the New Testament. The best known appears in two different versions (Matt 1:18-25 and Luke 1:26-2:20).¹ These narratives are blended and celebrated annually every December in Christian church and family settings. The narrative leads the reader to think that the God-Man (or man-God) was born naturally like all human children, as a flesh and blood child through the vaginal canal of his birth mother. The conception of the child by the birth-mother, however, is most unusual. Matthew says that the child’s mother conceived by a holy spirit (Matt 1:20) in fulfilment of Scripture. The child was to be called Emmanuel (Isaiah 7:14), which Matthew interprets as “God with us” (Matt 1:23). Luke also describes the child’s conception through a holy spirit that “comes upon” the mother and a “power of the Most-High overshadowing her,” suggesting that conception occurs in fashion similar to human conceiving, by a spiritual sperm.² This child, Luke opines, shall be holy and called a son of God (Luke 1:35).

            In John’s Gospel, there is a third version of the story in the prologue to John’s Gospel (1:1-18) for how a divine figure came to be man. The fragmentary narrative (John 1:1-2, 14) lacks in clarity. A figure, described as logos,³ who was from the primordial beginning alongside God and “what God was, the logos was.”⁴ Hence, the logos shared God’s essence, while being distinguishable from God (cf. Phil 2:6). In John 1:14 this spiritual figure “was made flesh” (cf. John 1:3).⁵ I take this to mean an incarnating or “enfleshing” of the logos in the sense of Phil 2:7: “taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of men, and being found in form as man…” How ever the author of the introductory poem to John may have conceived the event, it seems clear that conception and birth in the Matthaean and Lukan sense is not the process being described.

            A fourth version of the story appears in Rom 1:3-4 where God’s son is “born (genomenou) from the sperm (spermatos) of David according to the flesh,” and “appointed (oristhentos) son of God with power according to a spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead.” Jesus was a human being, a descendent of David, born of fleshly sperm, and was appointed, or declared, son of God by the spirit at his resurrection. His historical life was therefore not lived as the son of God. He was only advanced to that status at the end of his life at his resurrection.

            The early period of the Jesus movements was one of speculation about the identity and nature of Jesus. The historical matrix providing the spark that led toward the regarding of Jesus as son of God was plausibly the influx of gentiles into the gatherings of the Jesus followers.⁶ The cessation of early speculation about the nature of Jesus, which effectively weeded out other views and resulted in the dominance of the stories of Matthew/Luke, was occasioned by the early confessions of the church in the fourth century and at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth,⁷ where Jesus was acclaimed as “very God and very man.” That declaration by the council is an uneasy solution, since it is challenged by other views reflected in the early Jesus gatherings and preserved in biblical texts. So, What is your thinking was Jesus a God-man or a man-God?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹They are not contradictory narratives but just completely different, but they both agree in the birthing process.

²See Charles W. Hedrick, “Early Christian Confessions and the Language of Faith,” The Fourth R 52.1 (January-February 2019): 15-20; idem, “How Do Divine Beings Procreate,” The Fourth R 36.6 (November-December 2023): 18-19.

³Logos is a central term in classical Greek culture. Its range of meaning in English is generally covered by two different ideas: speech and reason. See the entry logos in Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3^rd ed. Oxford: University Press, 1999), 882. And the discussion by Ernst Haenchen, John 1. A Commentary on the Gospel of John Chapters 1-6 (Robert W. Funk, trans. and ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 135-40.

⁴Here is the translation of John 1:1-2 in the Revised English Bible: “In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God’s presence, and what God was the Word was.” It is at once as much an interpretation as a translation.

⁵See Bauer-Danker, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3^rd ed. revised; Chicago: University, 2000), 196-99, taking ginomai in the sense of Bauer-Danker’s second entry rather than the fifth.

⁶Hedrick, “Early Christian Confessions,” 13-20.

⁷Hedrick, “Early Christian Confessions,” 17, 20.

Rhythm, Rhyme, and Religion

A Christmas Miracle?

Christmas Day,

In the roadway,

I found a Lincoln cent

That failed to glint,

because it was chocolate brown,

Not copper red, but color of the ground.

“See,” said I, “It’s a penny.”

My daughter agreed with me.

But on coming home

The penny had metamorphosed;

Not a cent, as we supposed.

It was a dime,

Colored by dirt and grime.

Can it really be,

Like a rock into a tree,

That with a little time,

A red cent became a brown dime?

Why not,

I thought.

It happened once before,

In days of yore.

A man became God.

How odd!

For the last several years on my daily walking route of 2.5 miles, I have been writing a hasty rhyme each time I found a coin in order to commemorate the finding. I recently self-published a modest volume of these rhymes for the family.* They are not serious poetry, but aim at being whimsical. The above rhyme, however, neither made the book nor aims at whimsicality. It falls somewhere between simple rhyme and poem that takes aim at saying something serious about religion in rhythm and rhyme.

            Writing whimsical rhymes is something to do and it keeps my mind active, through what has been a difficult year.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*For other coin rhymes, see Charles W. Hedrick, Lost Legal Tender in the Streets: Ditties, Rhymes, Whimsical Verse (Storyworth; 2023).

Pondering Jesus as “Fully God and Fully Human”

This statement is not from the New Testament, and as best I can tell, it is not a quotation from an early creed or council of the Christian church. It appears to be a modern adaptation of what was stated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451: that Jesus was "truly God and truly man."¹ This statement stands somewhat in tension with the early Nicene Creed (325), where it appears that Jesus was "true God of true God…of one substance with the Father." He had no beginning since "he was begotten by the Father before all the ages" and "for us men came down from the heavens, and was made flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man."²

The Nicene creed affirms that he was originally God and later "became a person." It does not claim that he was human (in Greek, man/person is anthrōpos; human is anthrōpinos). His entry into human flesh, as described by the creed, is vastly different from human procreation or generation. If the creeds accurately describe Jesus, the only conclusion one can reach is that Jesus was not like us; that is, he was not human, at least not as we are. How many other people do you know who originated in heaven and whose birth was claimed to have been occasioned by insemination from a Holy Spirit (Matt 1:18//Luke 1:35)?

            The predecessors of the later church that created the creeds, however, were not unified in describing the origin or nature of Jesus in the late first and early second centuries.³ During this earlier period the religious marketplace brimmed with competing ideas about Jesus. One could understand Jesus simply as a human being "who was descended from David according to the flesh and appointed Son of God…" (Rom 1:3-4). In other words, he did not originate in heaven but was commonly human like us. God chose to elevate him to divinity like the Roman Senate did for the Roman Emperor:⁴ declaring that the genius (an indwelling guiding force or spirit) of the emperor deserved to be worshipped.⁵

Before the creeds in the earlier period, the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) described his career basically as a Jewish thaumaturge (worker of miracles), faith healer, and Galilean wise man. That is something very different from being God from the beginning and later becoming flesh as the Gospel of John has it. While John is similar to the synoptics, its prologue (John 1:1-18) prompts the reader to see Jesus as having a divine origin before he became enfleshed.⁶

John presents the reader with the other end of the spectrum: the belief that Jesus, as the Word was, "from the beginning," with God and "was God" (John 1:1-2). He only later "came to be in flesh" (John 1:14).  A slightly earlier description declared that although he was equal to God (Phil 2:6), he came into being in human likeness and was found in human form (Phil 2:7). He was exalted by God for his death on the cross (Phil 2:8-9). One strange idea, reflected in Paul's letters, suggests that some thought he had a special kind of flesh that was only similar to sinful flesh (Rom 8:3), such as we human beings have. His flesh would not see corruption (Acts 2:25-31/Ps 15:8-11 Septuagint, not the Hebrew).

The point I wish to make is that after the third century the view that emerged from the debates became the standard. No longer was there an opportunity to ponder Jesus with impunity. The issue was settled. If you did not share the view of the group that called themselves "orthodox," you were a "heretic" (which only means that you do not share the orthodox view).

If the pondering of the earliest followers of Jesus (as recorded in the New Testament) is your standard for determining who Jesus was, there are several options available for you to consider. A number of ideas were in the air. Here is another that I recently stumbled across: Jesus was a human being, descended from David. He became the pioneer of a certain kind of faith in God, and established that Way of faith for others to follow by being perfected through his own sufferings (Heb 2:10, 12:2).⁷ So what do you say about Jesus, and how do you explain all the other views?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/council-of-chalcedon

²The italics are mine; the source is Bettenson and Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church (3^rd ed.; Oxford, 1999), 28.

³For a survey of the diversity of views in the pre-creedal gatherings of Jesus followers, see C. W. Hedrick, "Is Belief in the Divinity of Jesus Essential to Being Christian," Unmasking Biblical Faiths (Cascade: 2019), 221-33 and "Early Confessions and the Language of Faith," The Fourth R 32.1 (2019), 15-20.

⁴Hedrick, "Belief in the Divinity of Jesus," 223-24.

⁵E. Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (3^rd ed.; Eerdmans, 2003), 209.

⁶Hedrick, "Belief in the Divinity of Jesus," 221-24.

⁷Hedrick, "Belief in the Divinity of Jesus," 221-33 and "Early Confessions and the Language of Faith," 15-20.