Quotes About Theology

In Arius's view, everything except for God himself had a beginning. Only God is "without beginning.

Thus, for Reimarus, the disciples started the Christian religion.

Thus the Son who was not, but existed at the paternal will, Is only begotten God, and he is distinct from everything else.

The Father alone has existed forever. The Son was begotten by God before the world was created. But this means that he "is neither eternal nor coeternal . . . with the Father." God is above, beyond, and greater than all things, including Christ.

study, Alan Segal, a scholar of ancient Judaism, argues that early rabbis were particularly concerned about a notion, which was evidently widespread in parts of Judaism, that along with God in heaven there was a second power on the divine throne. Following these Jewish sources, Segal refers to these two—God and the other—as the "two powers in heaven."14 The Son of Man figure whom

how Jesus came to be considered God. The short answer is that it all had to do with his followers' belief that he had been raised from the dead.

The idea of the rapture has not been taken from the Bible; it has been read into the Bible.

He came to believe in the preexistence of souls. In this view, not only did Christ preexist his appearance on earth as a human, so did everyone else.

The Synoptics simply accept a Christological view that is different from Paul's. They hold to exaltation Christologies, and Paul holds to an incarnation Christology.

The books we call the New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after the books themselves had first been produced.

The decisions about which books should finally be considered canonical were not automatic or problem-free; the debates were long and drawn out, and sometimes harsh.

I have often wondered what would have happened if Paul and Matthew had been locked up in a room together and told they could not come out until they had hammered out a consensus statement on how followers of Jesus were to deal with the Jewish law. Would they ever have emerged, or would they still be there, two skeletons locked in a death grip? If

Back, then, to my original question: Is this the God of the New Testament?

the God of Revelation cannot be the true God.

In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.

It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity and "of the same essence" as the Father.

Arguably it is also the most thoroughly misunderstood, especially by the lay reading public.

Give Gnostic scholars a new Gnostic text filled with aeons and cosmic mysteries and they think they're in hog heaven.

Justin's Logos Christology is more advanced and philosophically developed than that found in the Fourth Gospel.

It will become clear in the following chapters that Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development.

The earliest Christians held that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status at his resurrection. (This shows, among other things, that this is not simply a "skeptical" view or a "secular" view of early Christology; it is one held by believing scholars as well.)

there is not a single word in all of Revelation about God loving others and no instruction to the followers of Christ to do so, either.

Later orthodox theologians would have found this view completely inadequate. In stressing that the Father was "greater" than the Son, Tertullian articulated a view that would later be deemed a heresy. Theology, in these early years of the formation of Christian doctrine, could not stand still. It progressed and got more complicated, sophisticated, and refined as time went on.

One of our driving questions throughout this study will always be what these Christians meant by saying "Jesus is God." As we will see, different Christians meant different things by it.