Full Debate

1. God cannot be born and die;
2. The origin of the Son was by procreation;
3. The word of God is not a person;
4. Phil 2:6-11 not about a pre-human Messiah;

1. God cannot be born and die

In the scriptures the human Son of God was born and died. Therefore, he cannot be God!

In Gal 2.20b Paul says: “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” i.e., died for me.

In Rom 5:10 Paul says that “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.”

And however you want to define death, scripture says God cannot do it! 1Tim 1.17; 6.16 describes the only God as eternal, the one who alone, by nature, has immortality!

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2. The origin of the Son by procreation

Matthew 1:1, 18 and Luke 1:35 describe the genesis of Jesus by a miraculous procreation of God’s spirit.  And, as we know, from the book of Genesis, the word means creation of beginning. Translations obscure the original meaning by mistranslating genesis as either genealogy or birth. But genesis means the beginning of the Son not just his birth.

In Matthew 1.20 the angel says to Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, “because what is begotten in her is from the Holy Spirit.” But once again, most mistranslate here by using conceived instead of the Greek gennao, to procreate. Thus, translators hide the action of God the Father as the one who miraculously procreated the Son in the womb of Mary. This means the beginning, origin of the person, the Son of God!

The angel Gabriel is witness to the same event he says to Mary in Luke 1:35 “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cover you. For this reason the baby will be holy and will be called the Son of God.”

The Apostle Paul also describes the procreation of the Son, therefore his origin in the womb of Mary, in Gal 4.4a. The Greek translated as “born” or better yet “made” is from the Greek verb ginomai, which Bauer’s Lexicon defines as: “To come into being, existence through the process of birth.” And Thayer’s Lexicon as: “To become, i.e. to come into existence, begin to be, receive being.”

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3. The word of God

John 1:14 says “the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Note what John did not say: The Person of the Son of God became human, which would mean a person became another person! As the late Dr. Colin Brown, from Fuller Theological Seminary, rightly observed: “It is a common but patent misreading of the opening of John’s Gospel to read it as if it said: In the beginning was the Son, and the Son was with God, and the Son was God (John 1:1).”[1]

The wrong assumption comes from a millennia old misreading of the opening lines to John 1 where the “word” (Greek logos), grammatically a masculine gender noun, is accompanied by masculine pronouns like he (outos) and him (autou). It can better be translated as “all things were made through it,” as all English translations from the Greek before the KJV show. But it’s a mistake to confuse grammatical gender with biological gender, the inanimate object “word” with an animate object, a person, a human male person no less! In Greek the word for “paper” is grammatically masculine but no one would suggest the paper is a he or a him! This has led to most translators wrongly capitalizing “Word,” when they full well know the original Greek is written in either all lower case or all upper case letters. If you check any standard lexicon or dictionary you’ll find that “word” in the Bible (Heb. davar; Gk. logos), simply means a word, i.e., “a speech, reason, plan,” etc., and never a person.

Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the OT defines dabar (more than 1400 times in the OT) as “a single word, in the proper sense (LXX logos, rhema] 2 Kings 18.36; Job 2.13. Also “decree, plan, proposal 2Sam 17.6; 1 Kings 1.7.”

Anchor Bible, vol. 4, Logos is “used 331 times in the NT and in most of the same ways in which it is used in the LXX and in Greek literature in general. It can mean a statement (Luke 20:20), an assertion (Matt. 5:12), a command (Luke 4:36), a report or story (Matt. 28:15), a proverb or saying (John 4:37), an oracle or prophecy (John 2:22), a speech (Matt. 15:12), or the matter under discussion (Mark 9:10).”

The NET Study Bible on Acts 11.16 defines the phrase the word of the Lord (synonymous with the word of God) as “a technical expression in OT literature, often referring to a divine prophetic utterance (e.g., Gen 15:1, Isa 1:10, Jonah 1:1). In the NT it occurs 15 times: 3 times as ῥῆμα τοῦ κυρίου (here and in Luke 22:61, 1 Pet 1:25) and 12 times as λόγος τοῦ κυρίου (Acts 8:25; 13:44, 48, 49; 15:35, 36; 16:32; 19:10, 20; 1 Thess 1:8, 4:15; 2 Thess 3:1). As in the OT, this phrase focuses on the prophetic nature and divine origin of what has been said.” And Ellicot’s Commentary adds that the “phrase, used so constantly afterwards to signify revelation, occurs [in Gen 15.1] for the first time.”

The word is sometimes also said to be “with” God, e.g., 2K 3:12 “The word of the Lord is with him.” We find similar language used for other qualities of God in the OT:

• God says “His arm,” or “His reward” is “with Him”: cp. Isa 40:10; 49:4; 53:11; 62.11;
• God is said to be “with Wisdom,” “with Might.” Job 12:13a; cp. 12.16; Prov. 8:12.

Similarly, John 1:1 says “the word was with God.” The Greek pros ton theon is always used in the NT to show things “with God” and never another person “with God”:

• Heb. 2:17; 5:1; Rom 17:15 “things with God”;
• Acts 24:16 “conscience with God”;
• Rom. 5:1 “peace with God”;
• 2Cor 3:4; 1 John 3:21 “confidence with God”;
• 1Thess 1:8 “Faith with God.”

This is similar to the old English Proverb: “An honest man’s word is as good as his bond.” And obviously no one would ever think the honest man’s word or his bond were persons!

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4. Philippians 2:6-11

In Phil 2:5 Paul says: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” It’s clear from this verse and the context that Paul has in mind the human Messiah of history. Paul is not telling us to emulate some pre-human being who decided to become another being, the Messiah.

Many Trinitarian scholars have proposed an alternative reading to this passage that fits the NT view of the human Son of God as the last Adam. Dr. Walter Hansen, in his commentary on Philippians, notes parallels between Phil 2:6-11 and the suffering “servant songs of Isaiah” (chapters 42 to 53).

In Phil 2:7 Paul says the Messiah was in the “form of a servant.” And Isaiah 52:13-14 says “Behold my servant, his form marred beyond human likeness.”

In Phil 2.8 Paul says the Messiah “humbled himself” and Isaiah 53:8 says the servant of the LORD in “In his humiliation justice was denied” him.

In Phil 2:7-8 says the Messiah “poured” or “emptied himself by becoming obedient unto death” and Isa 53:12 says the servant “poured out his soul [i.e., himself] unto death.” According to The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament the Greek phrase translated emptied himself [Phil 2:7] is an expression “not attested elsewhere in Greek…an exact translation of [the Hebrew of Isa 53:12, his soul…he poured out].” In other words, “the use of Isa 53.12 shows that the expression he emptied himself implies the surrender of life, not the kenosis of the incarnation.”

Then in Phil 2:9 Paul says “God has highly exalted” the Messiah and Isaiah 52:13 says the servant “will be exalted and lifted up, and will be very high.”

The hymn ends with the famous “every knee will bow…every tongue confess” that Jesus is the lord Messiah. Paul did not say that another YHWH became human! If we have one who is God who became human and two who are God who did not (Father, Spirit), that’s two too many!

For Paul, and the rest of the NT, there’s one God, the Father, period! The scriptures never say one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The 19th century German Lutheran theologian Isaak Dorner was right to ask:

“How shall we determine the nature of the distinction between the God who became man and the God who did not become man, without destroying the unity of God on the one hand, or interfering with Christology on the other. Neither the Council of Nicea, nor the Church Fathers of the 4th century satisfactorily answered that question.”[2]

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[1] “Trinity and Incarnation: in Search of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Ex. Auditu; (7); 1991; p. 88-89.

[2] Person of Christ, Div. 1, Vol. II, p. 327, 330-331.