Welcome to the Summer 2006 study for the Koinonia Class of Calvary Baptist Church, Denver, Colorado. We’re looking at the issue of Jesus and Salvation, using the book “Is Jesus The Only Savior” [James R. Edwards, Is Jesus The Only Savior? (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: 2005)]. We encourage each person to buy a copy and follow along.
Did Jesus Consider Himself To Be God? (Section A)
What did Jesus think about Himself as He was growing up? As He started His public ministry? As He was teaching, healing, and training His disciples? As He hung on the cross? Did He at any time think of Himself as Divine?
The question of Jesus’ self-image may, or may not, be one that everyone who reads about Him asks, but it seems to be central to the arguments in the quests for the historical Jesus. This is the longest chapter in Edwards’ book. We’ll look at it in sections.
The fact that the New Testament does not have any record of Jesus saying, “I am God.” does not answer the question. Edwards makes a good point that such a statement would have ended His mission immediately with both the Jews and the Romans.
In fact, the New Testament does not present a psychological profile of Jesus. It is not written as a novel with a protagonist revealing his thoughts as he moves from scene to scene. About the only way we can discern what Jesus thought is to see what He did and what He said as He interacted with others.
There are two main questions Edwards presents that get to the heart of the matter: (1) “Why does Christianity alone exalt its founder to the status of God?”; and (2) did the early Christians, or we, “have any way of knowing whether their statements about Jesus re-present Jesus’ own self-understanding?”
One section of Chapter five is entitled, “A Window Into Jesus’ Soul”. In it Edwards shows both that some of the people opposed to Jesus believed that Jesus committed blasphemy by claiming to be the Son of God (John 10:36 & 19:7 and Matthew 27:43). Then there is Jesus Himself in Matthew 11:25-27 and the parallel passage in Luke 10:21-22 "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
If others around Jesus (not His disciples) said that He claimed to be the “Son of God”, and if Jesus’ prayers, in Matthew above and in John 17, show that He believed that He had a special relationship as the unique “Son of God”, then perhaps there is a small window with frosted glass, at least, that gives us a peek into Jesus’ mind.
We really can’t read Jesus’ mind, though—and those who use long-distance psychology to try to pinpoint what He thought end up only revealing what they themselves think. The best we can do is to read the Gospels and, from what Jesus did and said, come to some conclusions about why His contemporaries believed He was uniquely the Son of God.
N.T. Wright argues in “Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense”
(HarperCollins, 2006) that Jesus probably didn’t “know” that He was divine, but He knew that the mission He was called to involved doing some things only God was supposed to be able to do (e.g. forgive sins, defeat evil) and involved revealing God in the most personal and intimate way possible. More on this next time.
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