The Lord our God is One Lord

Mark reports an incident in which a scribe asked Jesus, “What commandment is first of all?” Jesus replied using the words of Scripture, “Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Mark 12:29; Deut 6:4). In Mark this statement introduces the first commandment. The statement is the beginning of what Israelites called “the Shema” (Deut 6:4-9) from the Hebrew word for “hear.”

This part of the answer in Jesus’ response, oddly, is omitted by Matthew (22:36) and Luke (10:26-27), making Matthew and Luke disagree with Mark by their omission of the idea of the oneness of God. This statement (the Lord is one) was voted gray by the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar by a mail vote. There were no red votes; 40 persons voted it pink, 53 voted it gray and 7 black (the weighted average of the vote indicated the saying had a 0.44 percent chance of being original with Jesus), which necessitated a gray color in The Five Gospels.¹ The color gray signified that “Jesus did not say this but the ideas contained in it are close to his own.”² The principal rationale for the negative vote is that the saying has singular attestation; that is, it only appears in Mark.³ Singular attestation for the saying, however, should not disqualify the saying, since the Seminar voted numerous sayings with singular attestation as originating with Jesus (for example, Luke 10:30b-35). A second objection to the saying being something Jesus said is that it is an integral part with the dialogue in which it is embedded. But that is also true of other sayings of Jesus approved by the Seminar (for example, Luke 9:59-60, Mark 2:27-28, Matt 22:21).

            Had Jesus grown up in a social context that was even nominally religious he could scarcely have helped being familiar with the Shema or even speaking its words numerous times:

“You shall teach [these words] diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be a frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:6-9).

That “the Lord is one” became Judaism’s confession of faith; it both stresses Yahweh’s exclusiveness, and emphasizes that Yahweh is “an integral person, not divisible into a number of other Gods or forces.”⁴ If the Book of the law discovered in the temple (2 Kgs 22:8-13) and that was responsible for the reforms of Josiah in 622 BCE (2 Kgs 23:1-25) was the Book of Deuteronomy, as is generally assumed,⁵ the Shema subsequently would have played an important role in the religious life of the Israelite. I see no serious argument causing me to doubt that Jesus shared the view of the Shema that “The Lord, our God, is one Lord.”

            Mark 12:29, however, surfaces a serious clash between Jesus (if he actually shared this idea) and contemporary Christianity. Jesus’ statement “the Lord, our God, is one Lord” seems to me to be something very different from Christianity’s the Lord, our God, is three persons in one.⁶ What do you think?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹“Voting Records,” Forum (6,3-4 September/December 1990), 271.

²Robert Funk and Roy Hoover, eds., The Five Gospels (Macmillan, 1993), 36-37.

³Five Gospels, 104-105.

⁴J. A. Wharton, “Shema, The” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 321-22.

⁵ J. Kenneth Kuntz, The People of Ancient Israel (Harper & Row, 1974), 317-27.

⁶ C. W. Hedrick, “Public Image and a Triune Deity,” Blog: Wry Thoughts about Religion: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/searchq=public+image+and+a+triune+deity

The Heresy that became Orthodoxy

I recently heard a Baptist minister claim during a Sunday morning sermon that "Jesus is God!" This claim is heresy, if one judges by the views of the earliest followers of Jesus. Heresy is defined as "dissent or deviation from a dominant theory, opinion, or practice." (I have deliberately cited a less ecclesiastical definition.) Prior to the 4th and 5th centuries, there was no "church" in the sense of a larger officially organized religious body. The word translated as "church," ekklēsia, in the New Testament is better rendered as simply a gathering or assembly, as it is properly translated in Acts 19:32, 39, 41.¹

            The idea that Jesus is divine is an idea that eventually led to the post-biblical dogma of the Trinity and eventually to the worship of Jesus replacing the worship of Yahweh.² Jesus is not Yahweh; he is Jesus, the son of Mary. To think of him in any other way robs him of his humanity. At the First Council of Constantinople in 381 the Christological controversies of the preceding centuries were finally resolved for the churches considering themselves orthodox.³ This Council formulated the doctrine of the Trinity, which

defines God as being one god existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit—three distinct persons sharing one essence.⁴

The difficulty with the dogma is that the New Testament does not reflect such an idea. It is an idea at which the church arrived at the end of a long process of divinizing Jesus. The Gospel of Mark (written around 70 C.E.) maintains a healthy distance between the distinct figures of Jesus and God. Jesus is portrayed as a man of humble Galilean origins: his mother was named Mary (Mark 6:3; Matt 13:55-56; Gal 4:4); he had brothers and sisters (Mark 6:3), was a skilled craftsman (Mark 6:3), was baptized by John the baptizer, who preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:4; what do you suppose Jesus confessed?); Jesus prays to God (implicitly recognizing God's otherness, Mark 14:32-42); his last words from the cross were "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" (Mark 15:34). This final statement of Jesus in Mark clearly resonates with the absence of God. All this information echoes in my ear as "Jesus is human."

There is, however, reflected in the New Testament the outlines of a process leading toward the idea of a Trinity.⁵ For example, the names of  "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" are linked together in a baptismal formula (Matt 28:19, Didache 7:1), and a benediction (2 Cor 13:14). In the earliest Gospel, Mark, Jesus is portrayed as the Spirit-filled (Mark 1:9-13) announcer of the nearness of the reign of God (Mark 1:14-15), not his reign. At the end of the first century, on the other hand, the Gospel of John begins with "the Word" being in an intimate relationship with God from the beginning (but does not identify the Word as Jesus): "In beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word" (John 1:1-2).⁶ The shocked utterance of Thomas upon encountering the resurrected Lord is "my Lord and my God" (John 20:28). In this instance Thomas appears to announce the evolving faith of the church. And the high Christological confession of faith in Col 1:15-20 regards Jesus as divine but still short of being God (he is only the image of the invisible God, not God himself, and in him only the fulness of God was pleased to dwell). In Phil 2:5-11 Jesus is only in the form of God but enjoys equality with God. But nowhere is it claimed that Jesus is God.

The advancement of Jesus to the principal Deity is paralleled in Greco-Roman religions. Zeus replaced his father, Cronus, as the king of the Greco-Roman Gods, just as Cronus earlier had replaced his father, Uranus, as the king of the Greco-Roman Gods. Why should anyone in the Greco-Roman period be surprised that Jesus might replace Yahweh in Christian faith. It seems to be how people treat their Gods, or how Gods act between themselves.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹The word ekklēsia does not appear in Mark, Luke, and John and only a few times in Matthew (Matt 7:38; 16:18; 18:17), where it is better rendered "assembly" or "gathering."

²Being divine is not the same thing as being a God in Greco-Roman culture; see Hedrick, "Is belief in the Divinity of Jesus essential to being Christian," The Fourth R 24.5 (September-October 2011), 15-20, 26.

³https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Council-of-Constantinople-381

⁴https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Constantinople

⁵See Hedrick. "Belief in the Divinity of Jesus."

⁶Ernst Haenchen translates John 1:2 in the following way: "and divine (of the category divinity) was the Word." A Commentary on the Gospel of John (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 108.

Is the Trinity found in John’s Gospel?

             For the first essay on the Trinity see "Is the Holy Spirit Part of a Trinity?" Nov 26, 2015.            

 

            Toward the end of the first century the situation is remarkably different from what I found in the letters of Paul at the middle of the century.  Around the end of the century, the Gospel of John makes a definite advance in defining the relationship between Jesus and God, but there is no stated concept of a Triune God—i.e., Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons conceptualized as One God.  Conceptualizing and describing a divine Trinity requires abstract logical thinking and systematic description, which are not found in John.

 

            In John God is understood as spirit (John 4:24), which seems to describe God's nature or character (spirit; not the spirit, which indicates identity).  Jesus is presented as God's "son" (1:49; 5:18; 10:36; 11:27; 19:7; 20:31).  The son (1:14), was "with God" and "was God" (1:1-2, 18), and came forth from God, having been sent here by God (8:42).  He became flesh (1:14; not quite the same as being born a human being). The essential identity of God and Jesus is made certain by the confession of Thomas: "My Lord and my God" (20:28).  Other less certain clues appear in John reflecting an identity (10:30; 17:11, 21-22). The unity is apparently primordial (17:24). No attempt is made by the writer, however, to explain how that unity/identity could be so.  In John there seems to be a duality of two distinct personae conceived as One God.

 

            How the holy spirit should be conceived in relation to the divine Duality, however, is complicated, and unclear.  At the beginning of Jesus' public life, John the baptizer testifies that he saw the spirit descend and remain (1:32) on Jesus, who as a result baptizes with (in?) the holy spirit (1:33).  The descending spirit must also be holy, for the "Father" is holy (17:11) and is apparently the source of the holy spirit with which Jesus baptizes. The spirit is thus involved in the activities of Jesus (3:3-8; 4:23-24; 6:63), and God is not stingy in giving the spirit (3:34).

 

            On one occasion, however, surprisingly an intrusive explanatory voice interrupts the narrative, asserting that there was no spirit yet, for Jesus had not yet been "glorified" (7:39) ("glorification" is a cryptic allusion to the crucifixion/resurrection, 12:23-24, 27-33; 17:1-5).  Hence 7:39 clearly contradicts 1:32-33, for spirit remains with Jesus through his career enabling his words (6:63), making true worship possible (4:23-24), and generating new birth (3:3-8). Opposed to this idea that the spirit is active in the public life of Jesus is the surprising statement at the end of the Gospel that the holy spirit is finally given (20:22-23).

 

            Before the crucifixion, Jesus tells his followers that he is going to the one who sent him (16:7) and at his departure the paraclete (16:4b-11) will come to them. The meaning of this word is unclear and translations vary.  Immediately following this statement his followers learn that another figure is also coming to them: the spirit of truth (16:13).  The temptation is to harmonize and read the paraclete and the spirit of truth as one and the same, but the figures have different functions: paraclete (16:8-11); spirit of truth (16:13-14).  Nevertheless the two figures are awkwardly identified as one and the same at (14:16-17)—how seriously should one regard the reference to "another paraclete" (14:16)?  Should one consider the spirit of truth as an additional (second) paraclete?

 

            The holy spirit is awkwardly identified as the paraclete in 14:25-26, almost as an afterthought.  Its appearance in 14:26 seems like an intrusion into the sentence, similar to the explanatory observation at 7:39 (among many others).  All three figures paraclete, spirit of truth (i.e., paraclete #2?), and holy spirit have different functions, but they all come to replace Jesus, the son (14:25-26, 16:7-8, 16:12-13).  This/these figures are not clearly identified as one with Jesus in the same sense that Jesus was identified with God; rather they are cast as performing Jesus' role in the community after he is gone. The language the writer of John employs to describe Jesus in relation to them puts a certain distance between Jesus, the paraclete, and the spirit of truth.  John 14:25-26: "paraclete, whom the father will send in my [Jesus'] name; he will remind you all I have said"; 16:14: "He [spirit of truth] will glorify me"; 16:7: "I will send him [paraclete] to you. . ." This language, carefully distinguishing between Jesus and the figure(s) who replace him, does not encourage a reader to sense a close unity or union between the son and his replacement(s).

 

            There are no Trinitarian formulae in John, the closest statement to such an idea being John 1:32-34, and John does not seem to be aware of the later theological concept Father, Son, Holy Spirit—three figures in one Godhead.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

Is the Holy Spirit Part of a Trinity?

The Nicene Creed describes the third person in the Trinity this way:

 

We believe...in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-giver, that proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is worshipped together and glorified together, who spoke through the prophets.

 

Thus in contemporary orthodox faith the Holy Spirit is believed to be a persona of a Divine Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; "God in three persons blessed Trinity," so the hymn goes.

 

The confession in creed and hymnal sounds plausible, but when one goes to the biblical texts to confirm that the earliest Christians actually shared this fourth/fifth-century belief in a Triune Godhead there is a significant problem.  The Trinity (i.e., belief in a three-in-one-God), as such, is not in the Bible—at least not in so many words, although all three of these figures are mentioned together in 2 Corinthians 13:14 (except that the earliest Greek manuscript omits the word holy). They appear side by side in a benediction that does not claim these three figures as the Trinity of orthodox faith.

 

               In the earliest Christian literature (the Pauline letters) Paul maintains a healthy distance between God and Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:27-28; 8:4-6; Philippians 3:3); Paul clearly conceives God as one (i.e. as a singular unity: 1 Cor 8:4, 6; Romans 3:30; Galatians 3:19-20).  His emphasis on the unity of God ultimately derives from the Israelite faith (see the Shema, Deut 6:4-5).

 

               Paul is a writer of letters and not religious handbooks; and does not usually express himself systematically, which means that ideas must be tracked here and there throughout his letters.  When Paul calls God "spirit" he is describing the essential nature of God.  Spirit is not an appendage of God, so that one may distinguish it as an entity independent from God.  God is spirit. That seems clear from Paul's appeal to Exodus 34:25-35 when arguing for the new covenant in Christ (2 Corinthians 3:4-18).  "The Lord (i.e., Yahweh, God of Israel) is the spirit" (2 Cor 3:17a) to whom people turn (2 Cor 3:16-18) to have the veil removed from their minds when the books of Moses are read:

 

And we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another (as happened to Moses, Exod 34:29-30, 35); for this comes from the Lord who is the spirit (2 Cor 3:18).

 

God as spirit is described by Paul in various ways: "the spirit" and "his spirit" (Rom 8:11), "the spirit of God" (Rom 8:9), "the spirit of holiness" (Rom 1:4), "the spirit of the living God" (2 Cor 3:3), "his holy spirit" (1 Thess 4:8), the "holy spirit" (Rom 5:5).  Spirit and holy spirit are used interchangeably in 1 Cor 12:3.  He even uses the expression "spirit of Christ" interchangeably with the "spirit of God" (Rom 8:9-11; Gal 4:6-7).

 

               Here is how I make sense of the interchangeableness of God's spirit and the spirit of Christ in the Pauline letters.  Jesus was a human being appointed son of God "by the spirit of holiness" at the moment God raised him from the dead (Rom 1:3-4; compare Rom 5:15-17).  He, the human being, was the "first fruit of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Cor 15:20; 1 Thess 4:23), and as the first fruit became the means through whom God "was reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor 5:19). Thus, he is the "precursor" whose spirit, having been first transformed by the spirit of holiness, enabled other human beings to share that experience (1 Thess 4:8).  Through the transformed spirit of this human being (Christ) other human beings become sons of God (Gal 4:4-7; Romans 8:9-11) by sharing in the divine spirit—yet the divine spirit remains a singularity and undivided is how Paul's reasoning must have gone (cf. 1 Cor 8:6; 12:4-13), even though he is hardly clear in his expression and terminology.

 

               God's "Anointed" (i.e., Christ), as precursor, became the conduit through whom the blessings of the divine spirit are shared (1 Corinthians 8:6;compare Hebrews 6:20, where a later writer uses the term "precursor"): grace (Rom 5:2, 21; 1 Cor 1:4); peace (Rom 5:1), reconciliation (Rom 5:11; 2 Cor 6:18), deliverance (Rom 7:24-25), sanctification (1 Cor 1:2), victory (1 Cor 15:57), all God's promises (2 Cor 1:20), justification (Gal 2:16), righteousness (Phil 1:11), salvation (1 Thess 5:9)—all come through Christ.

 

               It does not appear to me that Paul conceived God as a Trinity, as later orthodoxy did.  But then, to judge by his letters Paul was scarcely an orthodox Christian in the sense of the later creeds, as some already suggested in the second century (2 Peter 3:14-17).  Perhaps my essay might even have been construed by the writer of Second Peter as a twisting of Paul's words?  What do you think?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University