the view from Kadikoy – a vibrant district of modern-day Istanbul on the site of ancient Chalcedon
How did a group of Jewish men in the 1st century go from following their rabbi to worshiping Him as their Creator? How could belief in the divinity of Jesus and the actual practice of devotion to Him take root among the early believers without any breach of their rigid, defiant monotheism? In the previous post we considered why we must not hurry past these questions. The confessions that would come forth from the church centuries later in Nicaea (AD 325) and Chalcedon (AD 451) were important, but they will not suffice. The creeds provided the conclusions of orthodoxy rather than the reasons for it. And in passing over the obscurity of Jerusalem in favor of the familiarity of Rome, we have actually missed the hermeneutical key for New Testament Christology.
The first step in our journey toward clarity is to scrutinize what would appear relatively straightforward – the definition of monotheism. Of course, monotheism in any context means a belief in only one God. Yet the real issue is related to what God actually means. To say that the Jews believed in one God is a very important beginning point, but does not actually address the crux of the issue. We must understand the view of God presented by the Old Testament, and how He was differentiated from all other reality.
If we can discern the way in which God and the unique monotheistic faith were understood and spoken about by the people of Israel, then we can locate the ways the apostles incorporated Jesus into that definition through the inspired texts of the New Testament. This is opposed to beginning with our own varied conceptions of what “God” means and then evaluating the evidence of the New Testament based on the degree to which the description of Jesus aligns with our paradigm of divinity. Through the answer to the Judeo-monotheistic riddle we will acquire the full, rich, beautiful picture of the deity of Christ that the Holy Spirit bestowed upon the early Church and intends for us to possess in our day as well.
