Although it is transcendent, the incarnation has secured forever the historicity of our faith. Our confessions are grounded in events that unfolded on the earth, and the belief in the divinity of Christ did not hatch in a vacuum. In seriously addressing the subject of the deity of Christ we cannot conveniently skip ahead four-hundred years and set our sights upon the patristic bishops as they sat gathered at the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), bypassing the emergence of the doctrine in its historical context.
Instead we must force ourselves to fix our gaze upon a small band of Jewish men reclining around the Paschal supper and grapple with the question of how faith in the divinity of Christ took root within the rigid monotheism of those in view.
“What became Christianity began as a movement within the Jewish religious traditions of the Roman period, and the chief characteristic of Jewish religion in this period was its defiantly monotheistic stance. I contend that any consideration of early Christ-devotion must set it in the context of this central feature of the religious matrix out of which the Christian movement sprang.” (L. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, p. 29)
We may hurl words like “Trinity” and “mystery” at the problem but that will do no more for the questions that lurk in the caverns of our mind than it does for a liberal scholar or an unbelieving alcoholic who needs salvation. If this confession of the divinity of Christ is in fact as central as we have claimed then the question is paramount, for upon the answer to this riddle rests the tenability of orthodoxy if in fact we are to uphold the essential continuity of the apostolic faith with its Jewish background. Yet the purpose is not merely apologetic, for unless we understand the deity of Christ in the historical and theological context of Judaism we will be ill-prepared to recognize the ways that the apostles would express their conviction, which is ultimately the goal of these posts on the divinity of Jesus.
