I had a long trip home after being away with QC. I listened to the debate on the divinity of Jesus between Michael Bird and Dale Tuggy hosted in Melbourne.
Here’s my take:
- Tuggy showed the Trinity is hard to explain.
- Bird showed the NT is hard to explain without it.
- Tuggy’s strategy: Start with a philosophical definition of God, filter the Bible through it, reject anything that looks contradictory to your philosophical definition.
- Bird’s strategy: Start with what the NT does with Jesus, face the tension head on, explain why the church articulated things the way it did.
To me, the decisive issue in the entire debate was the matter of worship. And here’s where Tuggy’s particular kind of “unitarianism” lacks its “biblical” preface. If Jesus is not truly divine in the same sense as the Father, then the NT presents us with something unthinkable in Jewish monotheism: the universal worship of a creature. And not cautiously, but unreservedly – from heaven, earth, and under the earth (Rev 5).
Tuggy’s answer was basically: God authorised it. But that creates a far bigger problem than the one he’s trying to solve. Because now:
- we have a case where God commands what the entire biblical tradition condemns – worship of a non-God
- the apostles participate in what should be idolatry, and
- early Christians (devout Jews) suddenly abandon the most basic boundary of their monotheism… without explanation.
That’s not a tension… its a theological implosion. Bird pressed this point, and it was never satisfactorily answered.
At the end of the day, the question isn’t: “Can I construct a clean philosophical model where Jesus isn’t God?” It’s: “Why does the NT treat Jesus in ways reserved for Yahweh, and why did the earliest Christians think that was not blasphemy, but truth?” Until that question is answered without philosophically redefining “God,” making your “worship” fit, and hollowing out Jewish monotheism – the biblical unitarian position doesn’t just struggle, it collapses at its centre.
More thoughts to come in the coming weeks.
