Tag Archive - Christology

“When I Say God…”

August 29, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 14 Comments

“When I say God, what I mean is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

This statement of Geoffrey Wainwright was a favorite among the Divinity Students at Duke when I was there–it invariably showed up in each of their sermons prepared for Trinity Sunday.

The Christian God has an identity. That identity is Father, Son, and Spirit. This is our starting point. This is who (and what) our God is.

So what happens when we turn to the Bible and read the word “God”?

When Paul said God, he meant the Father only.

Similarly, when we read Mark, for example, God is the sender, the power, the authority giver, the father.

The burden of my various threads of thought over the past couple of weeks (and months and years!) on the blog has been to clear out space to answer this question: “What does it mean to say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ before Christians were proclaiming, ‘Jesus is God’?”

Surprising Image

July 3, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the one who is firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15).

Of course he is. That’s the whole point of Genesis 1. There is a firstborn, or first created, son of God. It was humanity. And God created them to be overall creation, the image of God standing before the world, ruling the world on God’s behalf.

But no. There’s a surprise here. The Colossians hymn goes on:

“Because all things were created by him: both in the heavens and on the earth, the things that are visible and the things that are invisible” (Col 1:16, CEB).

We discover here that Adam was not simply the image, he was the image of the image. Whereas much of the NT operates with an Adam Christology, such that Jesus is seen as fulfilling the role God gave Adam at creation, we discover here that before Christ stood in the place of Adam, Adam stood in the place of the eternal Son. The one who is God’s original image not only rules over all creation, he created all the powers he made:

Whether they are thrones or powers, or rulers or authorities, all things were crated through him and for him. (Col 1:16)

The original image-bearer is the one who holds all things together.

But for all the “alls” and “everythings,” there is more. While we tend to see that the divinity is all, and sufficient, for the identity of God and God’s son, there is more to be had.

This ontological status was not sufficient for the Son to be head over all things. There was a second Adam to whom rule was given. And this human rule over the earth had to be joined to the divine. There is a new creation with a second Adam at its head.

He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the one who is firstborn from the dead, so that he might occupy the first place in everything. (1:18)

“So that.” First place in everything was obtained by an action here on earth–a faithful death and death-conquering resurrection. The enthronement now over all is not so much a testimony to his preexistent preeminence, but to his human fidelity to God even to the point of death on the cross. Humanity was created to play the role of the Son. And the Son came to fulfill the role that was always his.

He rules the world for God because he took those who were supposed to be like him, but were alienated, and recreated the cosmic space within which they might be one with God again:

“All the fullness of God was pleased to live in him, and he reconciled all things to himself through him–whether things on earth or in the heavens. He brought peace through the blood of his cross.” (Col 1:19-20)

The extent of the Son’s reign is the extent of his reconciling death: the whole cosmos has been reconciled to God. The original image did what the image of the image failed to do: faithful execute the rule of God, in God’s name and on God’s behalf, upon the earth for the sake of the whole cosmos.

The author is out of town. Comments are welcome, but I will not be participating in blog conversation this week. Also, previous installments on Colossians 1 can be found here and here.

Reframing Divine Identification

June 21, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 19 Comments

Yesterday I expressed some reservations about using “divine identity” as a means by which to argue that the New Testament contains early, high Christology. That is to say, telling a story in which a being participates in activities or prerogatives that God otherwise seems to reserve for Godself does not necessarily mean that you wish to communicate that the being is, in some “ontological” sense God himself.

I always struggle to express precisely what I want to affirm and what I want to deny here. You see, the problem with Richard Bauckham’s argument about divine identity Christology is not the observation that Jesus participates in the prerogatives of God. Jesus clearly does.

And the problem with his argument isn’t even that Jesus, by participating in the prerogatives of God is thereby associated with God such that he is tangible embodiment of the God of Israel. This is true as well.

The problem is in asserting that these narrative dynamics are a Jewish way of articulating a Christology as high as the later Chalcedonian fathers’.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Here’s the point: in the biblical narrative, human beings are regularly set aside to play the role of God on God’s behalf here on earth. When God sends Moses to Pharaoh he says to Moses, “I will make you as God for Pharaoh, and Aaron will be your prophet.”

To heed the voice of Moses would be to heed the voice of God. To resist the voice of Moses would be to resist the voice of God. To fall before Moses and worship would be to fall before God and worship.

Does Jesus participate in the identity of the God of Israel, by playing the role of that God in forgiving sins, commanding nature, and purifying uncleanness?

Yes, absolutely.

And to say this much is to say that Jesus is the Christ. He is the anointed one, given the specific and epoch-shifting task of reconciling the world to God. In this sense, we might say that it is a “high” Christology: Jesus is the pinnacle of humanity, the Lord over all, and the one through whom those who bow at his feet worship the God of Israel and the one through whom the God of Israel exercises dominion over the world.

But to say this much is not yet to say that Jesus is God. And it’s not yet to say in a Jewish way what the later Chalcedonians said in their more Greek philosophical categories.

To say this much is to say that Jesus is The Man, the fulfillment of the vocation of humanity in general and Israel in particular, the Messiah and therefore the Son of God, the Lord who, precisely because he is faithfully human, lays hold of the imago Dei afresh and rules the world on God’s behalf.

What Only God Can Do?

June 20, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 13 Comments

“If Jesus isn’t God, then we are worshiping God and a human being.”

“If Jesus isn’t God, then Christians are infringing on God’s right to sovereignty over everything in order to assign Lordship to Jesus.”

These are the sorts of claims that lie behind some attempts to prove that the NT presupposes the divinity of Jesus throughout. For example, Richard Bauckham argues that the way a Jewish person would express a high Christology would not be through the language of “being,” but instead through an identity of function with the God of Israel. If Jesus does what only YHWH can do, he is being so identified with him as to say that this is God directly at work. Jesus is written into the divine identity–therefore, Jesus is (as later theologians using different categories would say) God.

In response to these sorts of claims, I have a very simple litmus test that I am in the process of applying, and would invite you to do the same:

Do other Jews say these sorts of things about other people?

As theological outworkings, such claims are fine. You can say that our worship of Jesus is an expression of what we all (myself included) confess as traditional Christians about Jesus as preexistent God-the-Son.

But as historical claims these claims should be measured, as best as we possibly can, by the criteria of early Jewish ways of speaking about God and God’s agents.

If other Jews, who did not think of themselves, their hoped-for Messiahs, their teachers as God in any sense used this same sort of language to describe other humans, then we cannot claim that use of such language by first century Jews, in their descriptions of Jesus, intends to depict him as “divine.”

The Similitudes of Enoch are a great example.

In these, a figure known variously as the Elect One, the Son of Man, and the Messiah looms large.

This figure sits on God’s own throne, executes the final judgment on God’s behalf, receives worship, and is the agent of humanity’s salvation.

Sovereignty. Worship. Glory.

All things that belong to God, that God does not share–are shared with the Elect One in order that, in praising this Messiah, God Himself might receive glory and honor and praise.

The criterion of “participation in the divine identity” by playing the role of God in worship and rule, is insufficient to demarcate a figure in early Jewish literature as God Himself.

Instead, it demarcates the Human One who is restoring the world through judgment and salvation and thereby bringing all glory and praise to God.

Christmas Mystery

June 15, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 4 Comments

Barth wraps up part II of the Church Dogmatics with an exposition of the Christmas mystery: Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.

The last two sections of §15 had me scratching my head, saying, “hmmm…”, and generally reflecting on how theological categories control our reading and create rabbit trails that never quite seem to be the rabbit holes their creators promise.

The Christian confession that Jesus the Christ is also the God-Man causes Barth to put too much into the event of the virgin birth–which, for KB, is tantamount to incarnation.

Bart says that this becoming human of the word is God’s revelation and is therefore “the prime mystery” and “our reconciliation” (§15.3; pp. 172, 173).

Barth Experiences God by Listening to Mozart on His iPod

But for all Barth’s insistence that we follow the Biblical testimony, he neglects to see that in the biblical testimony incarnation is neither “the prime mystery” of our faith nor “our reconciliation.” Incarnation is not salvific, not the act of reconciliation.

It is not Jesus’ ontology but the works that Jesus does upon the earth that reconcile God with the rebellious creature. Throughout, Barth insists that the virgin birth is but the sign pointing to the true mystery behind it of Jesus as incarnate God Man. What I think he misses is that Jesus as incarnate God man is but a sign to the true mystery of reconciliation accomplished.

What is “the mystery” in the NT? In the Gospels, the only mention of it is when the disciples are told the mystery of the Kingdom concealed in Jesus’ parables–which parables have nothing to do with Jesus as incarnate God Man. In 1 Cor it has to do with the foolishness of the cross as God’s saving wisdom and our coming participation in the resurrection. In Ephesians it primarily refers to Jews and Gentiles as one people, then also the union of male and female in marriage. In Colossians it’s “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” 1 Tim 3:16 is a holistic confession of Jesus’ life, resurrection, and subsequent proclamation.

Not even the one book that makes much ado about Jesus as God incarnate, John, indicates that the revelation of God in Christ is, itself, humanity’s reconciliation.

I find that all of the focus on Jesus as God-Man ends up detracting, in Barth’s theology thus far, from the significance of Jesus’ life as man on earth. And that can create huge problems down the line.

Here’s an example.

Barth keeps comparing the virgin birth to the resurrection, as though both are revelatory signs of Jesus as God Man.

But if the resurrection means that Jesus is God Man, the rest of us have no hope. The reason why we as humans have hope of resurrection life is because the resurrection of Jesus means that, though human, he has entered bodily into the eternal presence of God. If resurrection reveals that Jesus is actually God Man, then it simultaneously reveals that those who are not God Man have no hope of sharing in such newness of life unless, of course, God chooses to make us gods as well.

No, the resurrection, at least in so far as it is a source of Christian hope, is all about Jesus as human.

Similarly, Barth fails to see where his exegesis points when he associates Jesus as son because of the Spirit with the baptism in Mark 1 and resurrection in Romans 1. Those latter scenes indicate that to be a person to whom the Spirit has come, a person empowered by the Spirit, is to be God’s representative human upon the earth.

Saul receives the Spirit so he can be king. It passes from Saul to David so that David can rule the people in wisdom and power. And the Davidic psalm prays for the Holy Spirit not to be taken away–as it was taken away from Saul when Saul was faithless!

I know that I cause my readers angst at times due to my insistence that no all the Christology in the NT is high Christology. This is not because I don’t believe in high Christology (i.e., that Jesus is truly God incarnate). I do believe in that.

It’s because I don’t think the doctrine of Jesus as God is the presupposition or argument for most of the NT–and that it therefore has the power to make us bad readers of the NT when we bring it with us to every NT text, or when we use it to develop every Christian doctrine.

Barth in this section of CD manifests the problems I’m concerned with.

The heart of the NT is not that Jesus is God. The heart of the NT is that in the man Jesus God was reconciling the world to Himself. When we get the accent wrong, we not only create innumerable unanswerable theological conundrums for ourselves, we also misassign the place of salvation to an ontology that does not, in and of itself, reconcile.

Theological Adams: Kings

June 15, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

If we hold out on turning to the New Testament for a day or two longer, what will we find by digging into the creation of humanity narratives in Gen 1-2?

What does it mean to read Gen 1 as a true story while knowing that it cannot be the remnants of a blueprint for how the earth was constructed?

How can we know the latter? Well, the sun is where our light comes from, not a reflection of another light. The sun and moon are needed for the earth to have its air and light and plant life.

But the sun and moon are created as “rulers” of the lights. The light that was is gathered up into them and governed by them.

Humanity comes in at the end, the final act in God’s creation.

Humanity, we are told, is created in God’s image and likeness to rule the world on God’s behalf.

One thing that we need to keep in mind is that “image and likeness” is not ontological language, but functional language. In the Ancient Near East, to be the image of God is to be the one charged to rule as king.

This means that Genesis 1 does not require God to have created humanity with reason, artistic ability, eternal souls, or any such. It means that God creates humanity to rule the world for God.

I believe that the language is also evocative of filiation: to be “image and likeness” in Gen 5 is to be the son of someone. Once again, function is likely in view: to be son of God in the OT is to be God’s elect, the people or person who represent God’s reign to the earth.

The Gen 1 story seems geared toward placing humanity upon the earth: a people who rule the world for God.

One interesting question that came up in the comment sections a while back was what a non-historical reading of Gen 1-3 might do for gender relationships. One interesting dynamic of Gen 1 is that humanity as male and female are given this role of “children of God” who rule the world on God’s behalf. Although it would likely be anachronistic to charge the writer of Gen 1 with being an egalitarian, it is a striking inclusion of both man and woman in the task of ruling the world for God.

Genesis 1 would then set a trajectory for a story in which what humanity in general did would be focalized in Israel and, specifically, the Davidic king–the begotten son of God.

As a Christian reading of the narrative builds on this picture, we find that Jesus is The Man who comes to rule the world on God’s behalf, acting in God’s name and authority and ultimately being enthroned at God’s right hand.

Why is “image of God” in Rom 8 language of redemption rather than creation? Because it is the language of new creation–God is fulfilling humanity’s purpose by making us like the resurrected Jesus: adopted and resurrected children who rule the world on God’s behalf.

Shema Christology in 1 Cor 8

June 10, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 17 Comments

The illustrious James McGrath has raised the question of how we are to take the allusion to the shema in 1 Cor 8.

Here’s the verse in question:

There is one God the Father.
All things come from him, and we belong to him.
And there is one Lord Jesus Christ.
All things exist through him, and we live through him.

The issue, then, is what are to make of its apparent use and transformation of the language of traditional Jewish piety in its affirmation of YHWH as the one God:

Hear O Israel! The Lord is God, the Lord alone.

Does the reference in 1 Cor to Jesus as “the Lord,” in a sense, write him into the shema’, such that he participates in the divine identity? In other words, is this an early Jewish way of indicating that Jesus is God?

The view that this so identifies Jesus with God that Jesus becomes identified with the works of the God of Israel has a couple of things to commend it. First, there is the calling of Jesus “Lord,” which was how Jewish people were rendering YHWH from the OT, how YHWH would have been rendered in the shema’ itself.

So the pairing of the Father and the Lord with this shema’ language might point in that direction.

Second, Jesus seems to be associated with creation: all things exist through him.

There is one major point against this theory, however, and in my estimation it is decisive: Paul says that there is one God–the Father.

For all the “identification” of Jesus with God, for all the acting in God’s name and exercising God’s dominion over the cosmos through his resurrection Lordship that Paul affirms, he consistently refers to the Father as God. It seems to be irresponsible exegesis to say that Paul was saying in a Jewish way what the later creeds would affirm.

The Father is God. He alone.

Jesus is the Lord over all things.

How, then, are we to take this “Lord, through whom are all things”?

First, there is no problem at all with a Jewish person referring to someone, a King, as Lord alongside YHWH who is the Lord. In fact, as Ephesians can say that there is one Father in heaven from whom all families on earth derive their name, a Jewish person would probably say that there is one kurios in heaven–which is precisely why this Lord’s people can have a king whom we call The Lord.

The Lordship of the Messiah is derivative of the Lordship of Israel’s God.

What, then, are we to make of all things existing through him?

This comports well with what Paul says elsewhere about the advent of new creation with the death and resurrection of Jesus as Messiah.

“One died for all, therefore all died… so then, if anyone is in Christ–New Creation! The old things have passed away, behold! the new things have come!”

To say that all things are through him, that he sustains all things, that all rulers and powers are for him and under him–all of this is new creation language. It is a new creation that comes about through the death and resurrection of Jesus, as he is enthroned as Lord at God’s right hand.

We exist through him–he died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who died and rose again for them.

If the shema’ is altered in 1 Cor 8, it happens through the Christ event per se rather than as a description or realization of Jesus’ pre-existent ontological identity.

Jesus, the God-Man

June 3, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

Either start with Christ and say something Christian, or else start with something else and wind up subsuming Christ into your idol.

That’s the warning Barth levels as he begins his lengthy discourse on Jesus the God-Man (Church Dogmatics §1.14).

Barth is defending his take on Christology in particular and the Christian narrative in general against numerous fronts. His keeping of those in view helps the chapter hold together.

A main culprit is Schleiermacher as the father of liberalism, whose paradigm is framed by God-consciousness; there is the ensuing Protestant quest for a historical Jesus who lives up to our dehistoricized notions of what it means to be a noble and fulfilled human being.

No, insists Barth, we must begin with Jesus who is the very revelation of God, or else we end up making Jesus into a savior after our own image.

The chapter has a few particularly memorable moments. In lengthy excurses, Barth rails against Roman Catholic exaltation of Mary–a celebration of her that removes the Christological orientation of her praise by the NT writers. She is moved from one whose value comes from humbling herself, acknowledging her nothingness, and receiving the Lord’s favor, to an active agent in extending the saving grace of redemption to the world. Barth sees in this the epitomization of the Roman Catholic insistence that we cooperate, through prevenient grace, with the work of God in salvation. He sees this as fitting within a larger framework of humans’ necessary participation in God’s grace being realized–be that the church, the infallible pope, or ourselves as individuals.

The other striking section for me was when Barth was insisting upon the absolute necessity of Christ’s participation in our sinful humanity. Jesus’ flesh was sarx, participating in all the world in its rebellion against God. To say he was “very man” is to affirm this–even if to say “very God” is to insist that he is without sin, perhaps even without the possibility of sin.

Of course, with the “without possibility of sin because he was God” piece, I start to find myself less drawn to the picture. That takes the real drama out of the story, IMHO.

Overall, this was a fruitful discussion, not only for trying to make sense of Jesus but also for putting that discussion on a broader plane of theological debate. How we assess Jesus is an ultimate question in many respects.

In going through this chapter, I was struck by the ways in which Barth is still working within a rather Israel-free tradition of Christology. There have been various versions of this: some anti-Jewish, some simply non-Jewish / non-first-century in their universalism.

Barth is striving for a biblical picture of Jesus’ representation of humanity, but fails to put that person with the larger narrative of Israel in any significant sense.

There is Adam and there is Christ.

This takes account, well, of a couple of passages in Paul where Adam Christology becomes the means by which all are wrapped up in Jesus’ work. But in explaining why God became man, there is more than simply Adam at stake. There is an Adam who is Adam, and an Adam that is Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and an Adam that is David–and then there is the Second and Last Adam.

Do these others matter?

Judgment & the Story of Israel

May 22, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

Atonement is tricky. On Thursday I was wrestling with the giving of Jesus by the Father in comparison to the self-giving God of more developed Trinitarian thought. Part of the challenge is that the language and larger theological framework of God giving God’s beloved for the sake of the world is larger than just Jesus’ self-giving.

Jesus’ becomes the pattern for believers’. And, tying together earlier posts about Romans 11 and atonement, it seem to be the language Paul uses to describe how God is currently postured for Israel: “If their rejection be the reconciliation of the world…”

Karl Barth places the whole idea of judgment on God’s people within a much larger biblical story.

As the bearer of the revelation imparted to it, Israel only too clearly means catastrophe for the surrounding world. But even more clearly Israel itself as the recipient of revelation has to suffer in this world. It encounters in its history incomparably much more evil than good. (Dogmatics 1.2, 86)

Prophets can’t advocate the cause of the nation AND YHWH, but must always advocate for YHWH, and so are rejected. The constant rebellion and rejection of God means that its only hope, continually, is in deliverance and salvation, unmerited, by its God: “Between covenant and its fulfillment there is suffering and death for those in whom it ought to be fulfilled.”

And as if Barth insists on saying in its most dangerous form what is most dangerous to say, he continues about the faithful ones in Israel:

They are themselves the first to have to suffer, and they are themselves the ones who have to suffer most, for the truth of their proclamation, for the fact that the God who has ever loved Israel is such a hidden God. And the same order is repeated again in the figure of the single righteous man, who, without special office, simply lives concretely the existence of Israel before his God… Thus the end of the world, or the judgment of the world, is seen above all in Israel. To it especially God is a hidden God. It especially, the beloved, chosen, sanctified nation, the house of God, must be the place where the old aeon begins to pass in face of the coming of God and His new work. (88-89)

From the NT we might remember the saying that it’s time for judgment to begin with the house of God, or we may think of Jesus’ prophetic ministry about the coming destruction of Jerusalem–and then, also, we must think of the cross.

This is, of course, all quite dangerous. It can lead to the problem of thinking that Israel bears all of this judgment, or is the place of all this judgment, because it is especially bad and thus especially worthy of judgment.

But there are two very good ways of heading this off.

The first is to recognize that in this pattern of giving the beloved in judgment, Jesus does stand at the middle. Jesus becomes the curse of the Law, death, thus ending the reign of the Law as the curse- and death-bringer. Jesus himself stands in this role of judged with death.

And the pattern does continue out into the church. We are summoned to take up our cross and follow. We are called to be the judgment-bearers. We are called *gulp* to fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.

This talk of being the place where judgment is made known to foreshadow the final judgment is not only about Israel, it is about the cross, and it is about the church. Perhaps getting hold of this is a first key in getting hold of a more biblical understanding of the death of Jesus and our own participation in it.

Here, in this death, in this judgment, the holy God is revealed. Because the holy God must be revealed in a world of sin and death.

Atonement: I’ve Got a Problem–But So Do You

May 19, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 26 Comments

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I had a chance to listen to the Roger Olson interview on Homebrewed Christianity’s podcast. He articulated something that I’ve heard from quite a number of theologians. It’s a beautiful answer to the problem of God giving God’s Son to die for us, an answer to accusations that the cross is tantamount to divine child abuse.

It goes something like this: the idea that God is abusing his Son misses the point that Jesus is God. This is not God sacrificing some human, but God giving Godself for humanity.

This is a challenge to me on two fronts.

First, as a biblical scholar, this is not the language that the NT uses to describe the relationship between Jesus and God as it comes to describe the cross.

Even the high Christology of John puts it like this: “God so loved the world, that He gave his one and only son.” Indeed, John’s Jesus says that the Father loves him because he does the Father’s will–going to the cross to die for his friends.

Mark is more stark, with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying for deliverance from the cross.

In the “high Christology” passage of Philippians 2 says that Jesus’ exaltation comes because he was obedient to the point of death on the cross. This is the same act of which Paul speaks in Rom 5–the one act of obedience through which the many are made righteous.

Jesus is pleasing to the Father, to God, precisely because as Son he obeys the command of the Other, the Father, to die.

When, for example, feminist critics of atonement complain about the atonement as divine child abuse, they are basing their hermeneutical dissatisfaction on a more accurate exegesis of the New Testament than the theologians who defend the cross by saying that God gave Godself.

It is, in fact, God the Father “who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all.” Those are strong and troubling words, and I’m not sure that we can hear them on the basis of the Trinitarian objection. This is not self-giving love in that Trinitarian sense, but the sacrificial love that gives the most dearly loved other for the sake of salvation.

The second reason I am hesitant to jump on board with the Trinitarian answer to the problem of atonement is this: the suffering of Jesus the son is the story of the other sons and daughters of God as well.

It’s all well and good to say that God gave Godself, not another, to suffer on behalf of the world.

But what, then, are we to do with Romans 8? There, the way that we know we are children heading toward eternal inheritance is that we are suffering with the Suffering Child.

The Trinitarian formulation makes this worse, to my mind. God chooses to suffer of God’s own accord. As incarnate God, Jesus executes this divine decision. And then, God calls those who are not God to suffer if they want to be like the God who chose suffering freely. The Messiah suffers of his own decision, but those who would follow him are bound to follow the order that Jesus had from within (not from without): to take up their crosses.

Or, again, if it’s out of character for God to give up another, to not spare this human Messiah, what then are we to make of the God “who did not spare the natural branches” for the sake of the gentiles?

To remove the scandal of the Messiah’s death by pushing the Messiah back into the divine person only takes the problem of the suffering people of God and edges it back one notch. Left behind is still the entire NT ethic that insists that the identity of us–those who are not members of the Eternal Ontological Trinity–is also cross shaped.

If the only answer to the divine child abuse accusation is to appeal to the Trinity, doesn’t that make God a divine child abuser for having us, his earthly children, suffer with Christ if, indeed, we are to be glorified with him?

So yes, my late high Christology causes me a problem. I can’t simply say that when the NT says “the Father gave the son” that this really means “God gave Godself.” But the Trinitarian answer has its problem as well.

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