604. Did Jesus Really Have All the Divine Attributes? (Brandon Duke)

This is part 2 of our response series on The Incarnate Christ and His Critics.

Most of us understand of what deity means. Generally we think to be God is to be eternal, uncaused, and indestructible. This gets at the word aseity, which is a fancy philosophical term for a being that doesn’t depend on anyone or anything else for existence. To be a se (from the Latin a = from, and se = self) is to be uncaused and non-contingent. This cuts to the very essence of what it means to be God in the proper sense of the word. So, if Jesus is God in the same way in which the Father is God, then Jesus, too, must have aseity. Right? We’ll see about that in today’s episode.

But, here’s the thing. It’s actually even harder than establishing Jesus’s aseity. To claim Christ’s deity, entails claiming he has all the other divine attributes as well. Deity-of-Christ apologists like Bowman and Komoszewski know that this is a problem. In fact, in part two of their book, The Incarnate Christ and His Critics, they outline seven conflicting attributes between Jesus’s alleged divine and human natures. They say he is both eternal and born, immutable and able to grow, impeccable and tempted, omnipresent and able to walk, omniscient and not knowing something, omnipotent and capable of sleep, and lastly, immortal and mortal–all at the same time. Although they revel in such “paradoxes,” this list presents grave difficulties for the classic dual natures view from Chalcedon that we covered last week. In this episode we’ll consider several of these contradictions as part of our second episode on whether or not Jesus had the divine attributes.

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—— Links ——

• Check out Andrew Perriman’s book, In the Form of a God for an in-depth explanation of Philippians 2.6-10
• Read Wisdom Christology in the Gospel of John by Dustin Smith for an excellent exploration of the prologue of John
• Also on John 1, watch What John 1 Meant by Dale Tuggy on YouTube
• Check out episode 503: The Dual Natures Controversy of the Fifth Century to learn more about the politics behind the development of the Chalcedonian definition of the dual natures of Christ
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