OF THE seven billion world population today, 2.2 billion are adherents of Christianity. But the thousands of Christian denominations and organizations disagree on the godhead of Jesus Christ.
I was a small boy when I saw my father disputing the belief of his friend Gerardo that Jesus Christ is not God but “Son of God.”
“If the son of man is man,” my dad countered, “then the Son of God must also be God.”
Their debate dragged on for an hour, unresolved.
Scholars and clergymen still quarrel over the godhead of the central figure behind Christianity. Some of them have strayed away from the traditional dogmatic doctrines in favor of “scientific and verifiable evidence of the faith.” They agree only on one historical nugget: Jesus, a Jew who lived in the 1st century in Palestine, was crucified to death – just like other common criminals in his time. But his resurrection has remained debatable since the first century of the Christian era.
In that century, the Gnostics – members of movements with “secret knowledge about God” – rejected the notion that Jesus had an ordinary impure human body. The priest Arius of Alexandria, however, postulated that Jesus, although the Son of God, was not equal in status or nature with God the Father.
The religious patriarch Nestorius, on the other hand, taught that Jesus had two separate natures – one divine, the other human.
In 451 AD, debate over Jesus’ nature was largely put to rest when leaders of the Christian church at the Council of Chalcedon – not far from modern Istanbul, Turkey – declared that Jesus possessed both human nature and divine nature. All other notions of Jesus’ were declared heretic.
During the 16th-century Protestant Reformation in Germany, ex-priest Martin Luther stressed the “Biblical divinity” of Jesus.
It was not until 1778 that another scholar, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, caused a stir by publishing “The Aims of Jesus and his Disciples,” which presented Jesus as entirely human. He branded the authors of the Gospels as “deceivers.”
Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German theologian who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, portrayed Jesus as having been divinely inspired, but not God incarnate.
The famous Albert Schweitzer, a 20th century medical missionary in Gabon, wrote the book “The Quest for the Historical Jesus” (1906), where he argued that Jesus was an apocalyptic-minded Jew who preached the imminent arrival of God’s Kingdom within a wholly Jewish context without intending to launch a new religion. However, he admitted that it was impossible to say with certainty what is and what is not historically accurate about Jesus.
In modern times, news reports allude to a former Roman Catholic American priest, John Dominic Crossan, as having said that Jesus could not have come out of a virgin birth, died and resurrected because “he was just a charismatic shaman or an expert in healing the sick.”
Crossan stressed that the church needs to admit that what it teaches as historical fact is really an act of faith and that such honesty is required to keep the Church from becoming completely irrelevant to the majority of contemporary Christians.
On the opposite extreme, a Filipino televangelist in Davao City, Apollo Quiboloy, has “promoted” Jesus as the “present-day Father” and he (Quiboloy himself) as the new “Son of God in the Gentile setting.”
Strange as it seems, he has already gained hundreds of thousands of followers worldwide. Undeniably, he is proof that it is never too late to start a new Christian flock. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
