The Coneheads

Apostate Dale Tuggy has been laboring to respond to a post of mine:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2018/04/did-jesus-call-himself-god.html

That includes direct comments on my post as well as a separate post of his own:

http://trinities.org/blog/losing-patience-with-the-hint-hunters/

I'll respond to both:

I’m starting to lose patience with our present-day confused and confusing tradition of “high christology” exegesis. 

A unitarian apostate is losing patience with Christians. Why does Dale imagine that his patience or impatience was ever the standard of comparison? 

I think of it as a new Gnosticism – reading the NT gospels as if they were esoteric texts, texts written so that their main or most important meaning is hidden from plain sight, waiting to be uncovered by only the more spiritual, more insightful reader – like you, you beautiful man, you.

Does Dale seriously think that when we interpret the NT, we should exegete the text in a literary and historical vacuum? Does he think we should construe the NT in isolation to the OT? Does he think we should ignore how the NT would resonate in the context of Greco-Roman culture? 

That's just standard grammatico-historical exegesis. When you interpret a text from the past, especially an ancient text, you need to consider the cultural preunderstanding and literary precedents. This isn't even unique to biblical exegesis. Why do we have annotated editions of Shakespeare and Dante? Because it requires some background knowledge to understand some of their statements. What was common knowledge to the original reader can be lost on modern readers.

This isn't distinctive to high Christology. Take the atonement of Christ. That has a subtext in the OT sacrificial system, the redemption of Israel from Egypt, &c. 

And this isn't esoteric. Commentators and NT scholar appeal to evidence that's in the public domain. You don't have to be a 33rd degree Freemason to have access to this information. It's available in monographs, commentaries, reference works, &c. 

Jesus had to mumble and gesture at his being God himself; but this was all a deliberate plan on his part, so as to be more persuasive. How clever!

There's nothing Gnostic or esoteric about the idea that Jesus needs to lay a foundation for his elevated claims before he begins to make elevated claims about himself. Even from a unitarian standpoint, it won't be persuasive to go around calling yourself the Messiah without supporting evidence. 

Take the narrative strategy in John's Gospel. It opens with an introduction that clues the reader into the identity and mission of Jesus. That advance knowledge gives the reader an edge, a frame of reference, to grasp the ensuing narrative. By contrast, figures within the narrative must discover the identity and mission of Jesus by stages. A series of speeches, miracles, encounters, which have a cumulative effect. They flesh out the Prologue. One thing builds on another in a steady culmination. 

In Matthew and Luke we have something similar. The nativity accounts flag Jesus as a very special child. When he begins his public ministry 30 years later, most folks aren't privy to his remarkable conception and childhood, but it provide a reading guide for the Gospel audience. They expect Jesus to be and do amazing things in adulthood. 

Granting that Jesus would (if he believed it) have to keep such a claim on the down-low, clearly…

Notice Dale's hurried, backdoor admission that what I said was right.

…there is no reason to think that the gospels’ authors c. 50-95 AD would have also muttered and hinted! If they thought the point of it all was that Jesus is God himself, they could have and would have clearly asserted that! 

There are different ways in which the Gospels indicate the deity of Christ. Some are more implicit while some are more explicit. 

To pat that message on the head and stride right past it, rushing towards the hidden gems, the sneaky indications, clever hints, and oblique suggestions that “Jesus is God”… that is a kind of learned ignorance, pointy-headed point-missing. 

i) To begin with, the Coneheads take umbrage at Dale's bigoted attack on pointy-headed humanoids. 

ii) In addition, Dale keeps acting as if NT exegesis should be insulated from the society in which it was revealed. Are unitarians so desperate that they think NT exegesis must confined itself to the bare text, shorn of any cross-referencing to the OT, the political milieu of the Roman Empire, paganism, &c.? 

An obvious problem with that approach is that by excluding ancient background information, a modern reader unwittingly recontextualizes the NT–because his own subconscious cultural conditioning supplies the hermeneutical grid. He unconsciously substitutes his own cultural assumptions in lieu of the original audience. It takes a conscientious effort to become aware of our social conditioning and screen that out when we read a text from a different time and place, so that we aren't imposing foreign assumptions onto the text. Take The Tale of Genji. Does Dale think you should jump straight into that text without bothering to know anything about medieval Japanese court life? 

It's not that ancient texts are incomprehensible without background information. We often get the storyline. But many allusions can be lost on us. And interpretation can go seriously awry if we don't try to enter the thought-world of the original audience. 

That Jesus is God’s Messiah – this is an astounding, life-changing, mind-boggling, old-order-overturning truth, when you finally understand the implications of it. If you don’t see this as revolutionary… you may have been distracted by other ideas.

There's nothing astounding or mind-boggling about God sending yet another human emissary. Yet another prophet. Yet another miracle-worker. That's just more of the same. The status quo. 

There is no hidden main meaning. 

That's simplistic. A meaning that was in plain view for Dante's social circle may become hidden from view with the passage of time. Dante contains many topical aside that are now obscure even to Dante scholars. 

I think, is just the social pressure of that set. It is unspeakably uncool to be a unitarian there. 

To the contrary, it's hip and cool to challenge traditional orthodoxy. Bart Ehrman, Elaine, Pagels, Phyllis Trible, Rosemary Reuther, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza et al. are trendy and cool, unlike that fusty old Trinitarian, Incarnational faith. 

A narrative of continuous (1st c. on) “trinitarian” theology rules unchallenged, unquestioned. They have rallied the troops, I surmise, against “liberals.” I think that too, there is fear about the strength of their case. They are aware that historically-oriented scholars, correctly, don’t want to read 4th c. ideas into 1st c. texts. 

Nicene theology isn't the frame of reference for scholars like Richard Bauckham, Gordon Fee, Larry Hurtado, et al. 

"These present-day over-readings, on which Jesus in the gospels is often going around sneakily insinuating that he's God himself…"

Jesus is often dialectically adroit in the Gospels. Opponents try to trap him, but they step into their own trap. 

"...are dashed against the rocks of the early history of Christian theology. 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!"

Merely appealing to ancient readers either proves too little or too much. There are lots of different ancient readers who offer divergent interpretations of the same texts, viz. Adoptionism, Apollinarianism, Arianism, Docetism, Ebionism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, Monarchianism, Monophysitism, Patripassianism, Sebellianism. So that's is a wash. Lots of ancient readings Dale rejects. 

"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." 

How does that help Dale? The ante-Nicene Fathers he appeals to don't believe Jesus is just a human male.

"You still see these sorts of subordinationist, non-trinitarian views being prominent in the 4th c. with people like the church historian Eusebius, and many, many others. And this is leaving aside the many mainstream Christians who rejected logos speculations."

Yeah, there's diversity? So what? If that cuts against Nicene Christology, it equally cuts against humanitarian unitarianism. 

"Again, theologians aside, in the earliest extant baptismal creeds of the 2rd & 3rd c. - the one God Almighty is the Father himself - and there is no hint in them that Jesus (or the Logos) is the one God himself. What, how'd they miss that? Evidently, these folks did not get the memo, that in the NT Jesus is asserting that he is God Almighty himself. Thus, this is a paradigm case of reading one's preferred (later) theories into a text."

There is no monolithic group that did or didn't get the memo. Early views of God and Jesus range along spectrum of disparate positions. Dale can't act as if humanitarian unitarianism was the original 2-3C position, until that was dislodged by the orthodox/Catholic party. It was very fluid in the first few centuries.

But since I'm not Greek Orthodox, that's not my standard of comparison. 

"These over-readings war against known history."

The known history doesn't select for any received reading, one way or the other. So how is that supposed to undercut my position without simultaneously undercutting your position–if consensus is your frame of reference?

"Amen to this. This reflects the intelligence of the man himself.  This is not, though, to the point - not relevant to my responses to your post here."

You act as though I mention Christ's dialectical dexterity to prove his divinity–which misses the point. Try to keep track of your own argument. You accused me of attributing "sneakiness" to Jesus. In response to your allegation, I pointed out that Jesus is often dialectically adroit in how he handles opponents. You agree. Is that "sneaky"?

"What it proves, again, is that Jesus being God himself is not the clear point of any NT gospel - no, not even of John. If the hint-hunters were right, there would be just an avalanche of obvious implications that Jesus is God himself - but such are merely projected onto the texts."

No, it doesn't prove that because your appeal cuts both ways. If Jesus is clearly just human in the Gospels, then the logic of your appeal is that ancient readers would recognize that obvious fact. There should be an "avalanche" of humanitarian unitarians (your position) in the first few centuries of the Christian era. But instead there's a diversity of Christological interpretations, which range along a continuum. 

"I know that when a devastating objection impacts your view, it seems like a good time to attack competing views - but I'm not here to debate my view today, but only to point out the wild over-readings that are currently fashionable in the world of evangelical scholarship and apologetics."

If it's devastating to my position, then it's equally devastating to your own position. You backed yourself into a dilemma. And it's your dilemma, not mine. 

"Steve, you're hung up on the popularity, later 2nd c. on, of logos theories, which I reject (and which, at the time, many mainstream Christians rejected)."

Dale, try to keep track of your own argument. You're the one, not me, who interjected ante-Nicene logos-theorists into the discussion. I'm responding to you on your on terms. You brought that up, not me. When I respond, you then to an about-face and accuse me of getting "hung up" on the popularity of these Christological paradigms, yet you were the one who initiated that frame of reference, not me. 

"Still, such theorists agree with me that the one God just is the Father alone."

But they disagree with you that Jesus is merely human. You have this arbitrary notion that their partial agreement with you supports your position while their partial disagreement with your position somehow doesn't undermine your position; conversely, that their partial disagreement with my position undermines my position while their partial agreement with my position somehow doesn't support my position. It's amusing to see how blind you are to your lopsided logic. 

"Second, such Christians don't ever 'get' the currently fashionable hints, supposedly found in the NT, that Jesus is God himself"…

That's not inconsistent with my position since the church fathers, whether ante-Nicene, Nicene, or post-Nicene were never my hermeneutical touchstone. 

You, by contrast, selectively appeal to church fathers. I'm measuring you by your own yardstick. By that ruler, your own position doesn't measure up. 

"e.g. Mark 1, make straight the way for "the Lord" - aha - he's "identifying" Jesus with Yahweh. No - these ancient readers don't do that - at least, not the mainstream ones. e.g. Jesus walks on water - and YHWH is said to do that! e.g. The "one like a son of man" in Dan 7 "is a divine figure." e.g. Jesus saying "I am" is a claim that he's God himself. Paul "inserts Jesus into the Shema" in 1 Cor 8. Or the whole idea that in calling Jesus "Lord" the NT authors are saying that this man is YHWH himself. This last is just a crass mistake, ignoring the actual NT usage of "the Lord." 

Christian NT scholars provided detailed exegetical arguments for those interpretations. Because you're impotent to refute their arguments directly, you try to take a shortcut by appealing to some church fathers who don't affirm the full deity of Christ. 

That's a tacit admission of defeat on your part: you can't rebut Trinitarian interpretations directly, so you try to do an end-run around their irrefutable arguments by selective appeal to a few church fathers more to your liking, although even they don't subscribe to humanitarian unitarianism. 

"There were probably a few patripassian types who, like 'Oneness' folks today, simply collapsed together Jesus and God, that is, the Son and the Father - but the bulk of Christians in that time, whether logos theorists, monarchians, or just unsophisticated believers, habitually distinguished Jesus from the one God - and this, while having and carefully studying the four gospels. Again, this shows that there is no obvious implication in them that Jesus is God himself. Obvious implications are grasped immediately by most competent readers or hearers."

That's your habitual bait-n-switch, where you act as though, if "most competent" readers classify Jesus as "another god" or "second god", that someone constitutes an endorsement of humanitarian unitarianism. But even if, for discussion purposes, we grant that they were the "most competent" readers, that leaves us with an intermediate position which falls in-between unitarianism and Trinitarianism. It's revealing to see your persistent inability to be intellectually honest and logically consistent with the sources you yourself adduce.