Welcome everyone to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. We’re going to continue our study tonight of the Watchtower booklet “Should You Believe In The Trinity?” We’re right now looking at the objections that the Watchtower raises and tonight we’re going to discuss how the Watchtower says Jesus is distinguished from God.
The problem the Watchtower has is similar to one addressed earlier. The Watchtower does not realize that generally in New Testament usage, God was used to refer to the Father and Lord was used to refer to Jesus Christ. One could say that God is distinguished from the Lord in the New Testament, therefore God must not be the Lord. This is fallacious, but it’s the same kind of argument that the Watchtower is presenting.
Thus, we do not expect to find Jesus referred to as God explicitly many times as that would have led to confusion. Why call two persons within the same sentence God? There are other ways to say that Jesus has ontological equality with the Father and I believe that those have been done. However, this is not the place for that as we are here simply examining the arguments the Watchtower puts forward.
The Watchtower states that Paul had no problem speaking of God and Jesus as separate and cites 1 Cor. 8:6. Indeed, this is the kind of example I am speaking about. By their standard, God is separate from the Lord and therefore God cannot be said to be the Lord.
What’s more problematic however is the scholarly work of Richard Bauckham in “God Crucified” where he argues persuasively that what Paul is doing in a text like this is in fact Christianizing the great Shema of Israel. Lord and God were both referred to and Paul is making a strong statement of monotheism. If Bauckham is correct, and I think he is, then Paul is not arguing against Jesus being ontologically equal with God, but is rather going to great lengths to show that Jesus fits into the divine identity.
The Watchtower also gives us John 8:17-18 which has Jesus saying that he is one witness and the Father is another. How could this be unless they were two separate entities? The irony I find in this is that this is a passage that I regularly use when I argue against modalists and point to this passage to show that Jesus and the Father are two separate persons. Indeed, this is what Jesus says. He says his Father is one witness and He is another. He does not say God.
Finally, Mark 10:18 has the rich young ruler referring to Jesus as good teacher and Jesus says “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” The Watchtower says Jesus is denying that He is as good as God. Where is the denial? Jesus is just stating that only God is truly good. He is not saying outright that he himself is. Note also that in the ancient world, one would not answer this question saying “Yep! You’d better say I’m good!” That would be seen as trying to claim honor unjustly for oneself. Jesus gave a humble answer and left it to the man to work out the implications.
Again, I am not convinced by anything the Watchtower has said so far. It’s also worth noting that so far no Trinitarians have been cited in these arguments.
We shall continue later.
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