Gored by the horns of a dilemma

In response to a post of mine, apostate Dale Tuggy said:

What folks like Steve here imagine to be obvious to the reader - that Jesus is claiming to be the one God, the god of Israel - was not obvious to Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, etc. - all of whom explicitly hold the one God to be the Father - not the Trinity, not Jesus, and not the Logos. What not obvious right away to careful, smart, informed readers, is just not obvious in a text! 

We know that the 'logos' theorists of the 100s and 200s held the logos to explicitly be 'another god,' 'a second god' (or: a second 'god' - see the difference?), and less than the one God in (for various authors) power, knowledge, authority, divinity, and even (for theorists before Origen) less old than him, having come into existence.

I've already responded to this at length, but I'd like to approach it from a different angle:

1. I didn't claim that the deity of Christ is "obvious" in every NT writing. And my position doesn't require that.

2. But if we're going to cast the issue in those terms, then Dale's argument is counterproductive. It isn't that they thought just one thing was obvious–rather, they thought two things were obvious, and they were struggling to harmonize them. On the one hand they thought Scripture obviously teaches monotheism, while on the other hand they thought Scripture obviously teaches the divinity of Christ. 

Even by Dale's own admission, they obviously didn't think Jesus was just a human male. That's not how you characterize "another god" or a "second god". So their position is far removed from Dale's humanitarian unitarianism. 

3. Let's put this is a larger context. In principle, there are several different strategies for dealing with dilemmas:

i) You can affirm the dilemma. You can say this is paradox that surpasses human reason. There's nothing we can do to mitigate the tension. That's the position of Christians like John Owen and James Anderson.

However, you can defend it by saying that if we have good reason to believe both horns of a dilemma, then we're warranted in affirming both horns even if that generates a dilemma. Moreover, you can say that high Christology is not exceptional in this regard. Paradox is commonplace in physics, mathematics, and logic. 

ii) You can affirm both horns of the dilemma, but deny that it's a dilemma. You can marshal arguments to relieve the tension. You demonstrate (to your own satisfaction) that it's not paradoxical.

iii) You can deny the dilemma by denying one horn of the dilemma. There are Christological heresies that say Jesus was apparently human but really divine, or–conversely–that Jesus was apparently divine but really human.

iv) You can relieve the tension by relativizing both horns of the dilemma. Take a chain-of-being ontology in which divinity is quantitative rather than qualitative. Trees have more divinity than rocks, animals have more divinity than trees, humans have more divinity than animals, angels have more divinity than humans, while the Son has more divinity than angels but less divinity than the Father. It's a matter of degree rather than kind. Gradations of divinity. That works in Neoplatonism. What makes God differ from creatures is that God has more God stuff than creatures. It's not an absolute categorical distinction. 

That's what the logos-theorists seem to be doing. On the one hand they affirm monotheism, but not in the absolute monadic sense (e.g. Maimonides, Al-Ghazali) . On the other hand they affirm the deity of Christ, but not in the absolute sense of co-equality, auto-theos (e.g. Helm, Warfield). It's a mediating position. A compromise position.

4. Finally, the NT is addressed to Jews and gentiles alike, but that presents a challenge. Gentiles had no objection to affirming the divinity of Christ, but the danger is to recast that in polytheistic terms. (The same problem persists today when evangelizing Hindus.) So the NT uses traditional monotheistic language, which reaffirms OT theism, yet it then extends that exclusive language to Jesus. NT writers have to strike a balance to avoid falling into either one of two opposing errors. Using traditional formulations that exclude polytheism while including Jesus within the same formulations. That generates a prima facie dilemma, yet the NT is not an exercise in philosophical theology, but a witness to history in the self-revelation of divine action.