Status Updates From Biblical Reasoning: Christo...

Second read for class - glad i underlined the first time

As the transcendent and immutable God, he became what we are without ceasing to be what he is. So we must acknowledge that the one Son who is homoousios with the Father and the Spirit in his divinity became also homoousios with us in his humanity. And this was for our sake, that we might be adopted into the life he eternally enjoys with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Doctrine is therefore chiefly divine teaching: being taught by God, about God, to lead us to God. Discourse about God—theology—is thus poorly conceived if it is divorced from the presence and activity of the God who discourses about himself. . . . Beholding Christ by faith requires that we hear and obey Christ’s teaching. In order to understand Christ’s teaching, we must reason both exegetically and dogmatically.

Exegesis is not merely the analysis of historical background and cultural encyclopedia, the situations of writer and recipients, word meanings, grammar, flow of thought, intracanonical connections, and the unfolding of redemptive history. Exegesis is also, inescapably, reasoning about the subject matter of the text: God and all things in relation to God

By calling Christ “the Lord of glory [1 Cor 2:8]," Paul identifies him as the one who possesses the unique, unshareable divine glory (cf. Isa 48:11). And Paul asserts that this divinely glorious Christ was crucified. Paul predicates an inescapably human fate of the divine Lord. Paradox? Yes. Contradiction? No. Why? Because it was precisely by becoming incarnate that the Lord of glory became crucifiable.

The Spirit sent into our hearts enables us to call God now what the Son has always called him: Abba! Father! By sending his Son and Spirit, the Father did not merely reveal the intradivine fellowship—he extended it to include us [Gal 4:4-7].

Hence, the warrant for scriptural statements that imply any inequality between the Father and the Son is not the bare fact that the Son was sent but the form of a servant the Son took to himself in the sending. After all, the sending of the Spirit does not imply any inequality or inferiority on the Spirit’s part.

So when God [the Father] sends God [the Son], sending is not commanding, and going is not obeying. Why not? Because commanding belongs to a superior, and obeying belongs to an inferior. But there is no superiority or inferiority within the single, undivided, consubstantial divinity of the Trinity.

Scripture sometimes attributes to only one divine person a perfection, action, or name common to all three, because of some contextual fit or analogy between the common attribute and the divine person in question. Read such passages in a way that does not compromise the Trinity’s oneness and equality.