Bunyan Conference Houston 2008: Session 2B

Adoptionism and Early Christological Heresies

Somewhat related to that, you have what's called adoptionism, and that is the idea that basically God adopted an especially godly man, by the name of Jesus, and a divine spirit came to dwell in him. This is not the incarnation.

This is the idea of finding a particularly godly individual and the spirit of God coming to dwell in that individual in a particularly unique or special way, to where Jesus becomes the son of God at a point in time.

Normally they would identify that with the baptism of Jesus when the Holy Spirit descends as a dove. It is somewhat understandable how some of this arose, because remember, unlike our day, where as soon as something is written, it can be literally read around the world.

I mean, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm pretty much a geek. I just realized, for example, I left my blackberry on in my bag, so if anybody calls me, you're going to hear some music in a moment.

That blackberry, I went to Norfolk recently and I left it in the car when my daughter dropped me off at the airport. We had to overnight that thing to me, because it's my brain. I'm lost without it. Not only is it a modem for my computer, but it has all of my schedule, all of my contacts.

It's how I call people. It's my alarm clock, and I was showing pictures to the pastor before our time this evening on it. It's everything. I'm a bit of a geek, and it's amazing how much information I get through it.

I can surf the web, I've got my RSS Reads and Feeds that I can read on that thing. And I've even got in the bag down there what's called the Amazon Kindle. Have any of you seen the Kindle? Do any of you have a Kindle?

Really cool. It's so easy to read, it's so easy on the eyes, and my eyes need to be taking it easy these days. It's so wonderful to read, and I can be sitting there, either on my computer or on the Kindle, and there's a book I want to read.

I wanted to read A Lone Survivor, the story of Marcus Latreau, that you seem to be familiar with. And all I do is I click on Buy Now on Amazon. Within one minute, I'm reading it on my Kindle. One minute.

It's just amazing how we can do things like that. But that's a pretty new phenomenon. In other words, when Mark writes his gospel, not only does it take him a long time, but once he's written it, now what do you do with it?

I mean, you can't run down to Kingo's and run off a bunch of copies. It takes time, and then even if you want to get it across to Ciderone, that's going to take time too. Remember in the Book of Acts, sometimes you don't end up where you thought you were going to be going anyways.

And so, it takes time for written documents to be distributed and to be collected into one whole. And so, it's understandable, some of these early heresies, not a justification for them, but it's at least such an understandable.

In the context that, if you only had certain portions of the New Testament, you only had a little bit of the New Testament, and you started speculating about one statement in that book, not knowing the Gospel of John actually answers all your questions, but you don't have the Gospel of John.

It's understandable what was going on in that period of time, and that's why Paul is so emphasizing to Timothy, sound doctrine, exhort in sound doctrine, be aware of these things. And so, these things come up, and adoptionism, one of those early ideas, that if you didn't have all of the New Testament, if you only had a certain number of books or something like that, you could see how someone might come up with an idea like that.

And of course, as I mentioned last evening, a lot of these people were deeply influenced by non-biblical sources, deeply influenced by them, so much so that it ends up warping their understanding even of the biblical scriptures.

I mentioned modalism and monarchianism. A monarch, of course, is a king or a ruler, so the idea of modalistic monarchianism is one term that would be utilized. All go back to the complex of heresies, where people would believe that there is not three divine persons, but that there is one person in some way manifesting himself.

Sometimes it would be the actor idea, sometimes the idea would be that before the Incarnation, we're talking about the Father, and then in the Incarnation, we're now talking about the Son, and now in the Church Age, after the Resurrection, we're talking about the Spirit.

And so you'd still hear someone speaking of Father, Son, and Spirit, but they're not talking about co-equal and co-eternal persons, they're talking about ways of describing the way that God has interacted, the modes that he has taken on in interacting with his world.

And as I mentioned, before Arianism came along, before the denial of the deity of Christ, this was, especially in the churches of the East, that would be in Syria, in the area of what we would call today Israel, in those churches, up in Constantinople, those churches struggled with this idea.

Patrapassionism and Docetic Christology

In fact, I don't have it on the screen here, but there is a way that I can get around that. I didn't get to do this last evening, so we're going to show you something here. Screen, switch programs, and go to this.

There is something else, in fact, I was accused of this, I should have thought to play this for you, I apologize. You can go to the same YouTube page upon which the pastor is now starring, and much to his, I think, chagrin.

I'm just doing the introduction, it's mostly me up there, actually. But anyway, you can go to my YouTube page, and go back a few months, and a Muslim apologist put up this video of me, he took one of my videos, he's got my face, and I'm sitting there talking, and he says something where the screen keeps changing colors, so I'm green, and red, and yellow, and blue, and purple, and it's very interesting.

I suppose I could make something out of that, but anyways, and then he's flashing on the screen one word over my face, heretic, heretic, heretic. And what he's trying to accuse me of is an ancient heresy, known as patrapassionism.

Pater means father, and passion means to suffer. So patrapassionism was an ancient heresy that said it was the father who suffered on the cross. Patrapassionism. And he misunderstood, well, not so much misunderstood, something I said is twisted, something that I said.

And he was accusing me of being a patrapassionist, that I somehow was indicating the father had suffered on the cross, when of course I had done nothing like that. Then there were others who sort of took the adoptionistic idea, and they maybe mixed some Gnosticism in with some of the Docetic idea, and what they would have at the cross was when Jesus cries out, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

They would say that the deity part of Jesus left him at that time, and so the human aspect of Jesus is all that is dying upon the cross. Part of that would be because there would be people going, this idea of God giving his life in this way is not going to go there.

And so they came up with that kind of an idea as well. At the beginning of the second century, around 130 or so, you have the development in Alexandria of a theory that the Muslims have now picked up on today.

And that is since the Gnostics did not believe that Jesus was truly God, that he truly had a physical body, then they came up with the idea that it was somebody else who was crucified in the place of Jesus.

And that Jesus actually, they were made to look like Jesus, and so they were crucified, Judas being the primary culprit there as a punishment for what he did in betraying Jesus. And Jesus has now taken a different form, and the story is literally told that he's standing a distance from the cross, laughing at Judas as he cries out upon the cross, so on and so forth.

And so this develops from the Gnostic concept that is prevalent at that time. Let's see, I think we're right there. Okay. Now, then we have Arius. I apologize, I should have had Arius on here, but you'll need to add that in.

Arianism and the Council of Nicaea

Arius is a presbyter at the end of the 4th century, so that's, I'm sorry, end of the 3rd century, beginning of the 4th century, around the year 300, who is well known as a very good-looking man. Evidently he wrote songs and could sing.

I think he would have done well on TVM. And he came up with the idea, following after Origen, that there was a time when the sun was not. There was a time when the sun was not. That was the Arian credo.

There was a time when the sun was not. Now, they would use all sorts of Biblical language. They would describe Jesus as God, because he represents God. This is very much like how Jehovah's Witnesses function today.

They'll say that Jesus is the mighty God of Isaiah 9 -6, but he's not the almighty God. Even though the very same Hebrew phrase, El Gabor, is used in Jehovah in Isaiah 10 -21, the very next chapter. They will use all the Biblical terminology, but they insisted that there was a time when the sun was not.

Therefore, whatever kind of deity is possessed by Jesus is not of the same nature as that of the Father. Again, he was following and developing Origen's perspective. In essence, what Origen had differentiated, he had differentiated between theos, the God, and just simply theos.

And so, Arius would be saying, the Father is ha-theos. This is theos, without the organ. And this is what Arius basically takes, and he runs with it. And he is opposed by Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria.

He is deposed by a council there shortly after what's called the Peace of the Church in 313 AD. That's when the persecution ends against the Christian Church under Constantine. The council of Isaiah is in 325.

So, over the next 12 years, Arius causes a lot of difficulties, a lot of problems. And finally, Constantine, who by the way, did not establish the Roman Empire as a Christian empire. That does not happen until 380 of the Theodosius.

But Constantine calls himself a Christian, even though he was not baptized until his deathbed. That wasn't uncommon in that day. He recognizes that this Arian controversy is causing a tremendous schism amongst the Christian Church.

And he's a politician. And as a politician, he wants there to be peace amongst this vastly growing religious group in the society. And so in 325 AD, he calls the first what is called Ecumenical Council at Nicaea, what's present-day Turkey.

And 318 bishops by tradition attended that council in the summer of 325 AD. Unlike what you have heard, what you will hear all over YouTube and the internet, the Council of Nicaea was not run by Constantine.

He did not tell the council what to do. He was pretty much a theological ignoramus as far as that goes. He had people who counseled him, but he did not tell the council what to do. The Council of Nicaea did nothing about the canon of scripture, though Mormons and Muslims both will tell you that the Council of Nicaea, the canon of scripture was determined and the Gospel of Barnabas was kicked out.

It depends on what wacky theory you're listening to, but the Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with canon of scripture whatsoever. Their focus was upon one thing, and the question was, what is the relationship between the Father and the Son?

And there were three positions. There were two positions that were very clear. The Arians obviously believed in the idea that since there was a time when the Son was not, his deity, however you describe that, is not the same as the Father's.

And so theirs was called the heteroousios position. Oousios means substance or being, so hetero means different, heterogeneous, heterosexual, different being. He is of a different substance than the Father.

The, what we would call today the Orthodox Party, which was not represented by Athanasius at this time, Athanasius was only a deacon at this time, he was not a bishop yet, he did not become a bishop until 328, promoted the idea of homoousios, of the same substance as the Father.

And whenever you get people together, you always have the Rodney Kings. And the Rodney King theologians, the compromisers, decided, well, there's a middle road, there's got to be some way here. And they came up with homoousios, and that is of a similar substance.

Which never actually answers the question, but that's the essence of compromise. So you have these. The council, initially, the people in the east were afraid of that word, homoousios. Why? Because they were the ones who had been fighting against modalism.

And homoousios had been used only about 70 years earlier by modalists to promote their beliefs. And so they were very leery of what was being meant when someone said that Jesus is of the same substance as the Father.

Also remember something else. What's the language of the eastern church and the language of the western church at this time? The eastern church is Greek, the western church is Latin. And so many of the times, especially in the next century, many of the controversies were due to the fact that sometimes it just wasn't a good translation you were reading of what somebody else had written.

Amazing how that worked. So eventually, however, the people from the east are convinced that the use of homoousios is not presenting the idea that Jesus is the Father, that Jesus can be exchanged with the Father, any form of modalism whatsoever.

And once that is overcome, only two of the bishops out of the traditional 318 did not sign the Nicene symbol or the Nicene Creed, and they were expelled by Constantine along with Arius himself. Now you would think that that was the end, but let me just mention very quickly, and I really would like to complain right now about the fact that someone put a battery back into the clock right now.

Because it is moving, and it is moving far too quickly for my taste this evening, though maybe not for yours. So I understand that. Don't think that Nicaea settled this. There's an article, it's on the web, I wrote it for the CRI journal a number of years ago, called, What Really Happened to Council of Nicaea?

I had to fight to get it published. Because some of the people editing the journal at the time did not like the fact that I spent a fair amount of time documenting that from 325 to about 381 or so, actually by 381 things had gotten better, but as late as the 370s, the Arians were in control.

Even though Nicaea had spoken to this issue, it is during this time that the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, is kicked out of his church five times for continuing to hold the Nicaean faith. Even the Bishop of Rome signs the Arianized Sirmium Creed during this period of time.

You have the famous phraseology during this time,.

Athanasius contra Munda.

Athanasius against the world. Because he would not give in. And that's what's exciting to me to read. Athanasius' works today, there's an entire volume of them in the Nicaean and post-Nicaean fathers.

And to see that he argues against Arianism the very same way we argue against Jehovah's Witnesses today. The same text he's focusing upon that we utilize today. He's going to scripture as his fundamental proof of the deity of Christ.

And obviously, what's really important, especially, and I don't have time to develop this, but think with me for a moment. When even, when the majority, as Jerome put it, the world awoke and was shocked to find itself Arian.

The vast majority of the Bishops of the external church denied Nicaea during this time period. Now, if the Roman Catholic idea of the church is true, Athanasius was wrong. You don't stand against the Bishop of Rome.

You don't stand against councils that had more Bishops in them than Nicaea had. Nicaea only had 300. You had councils of 500 Bishops saying you were wrong. And he said, no, I'm not. Now, how do you defend that from the Roman Catholic perspective and the Roman Catholic ecclesia?

Even when the Bishop of Rome is silent, how do you defend that? I've never figured out how to do it. You can't. But Athanasius was right because Athanasius stood on the foundation of scripture. He believed scripture was sufficient as a testimony to God's truth.

And so, the Arians, once they did take over, turned on each other. They were primarily politically motivated. And by 381, the Council of Constantinople, the Nicene faith, is reasserted and affirmed at that period of time.

Based again upon biblical argumentation. It was provided by Athanasius and Hilary of Poitiers. But Hilary was really, really old. He really wasn't able to do as much as Athanasius was at that particular point in time.

So, please keep that in mind. So, that's the Arian controversy. Finally, and I'm going to just hit these real quick and then I want to get some biblical stuff. Historianism and Apollinarianism. Wow. These are terms that if you actually figure out what they are, you can win any version of Bible trivia you will ever encounter.

On a Sunday afternoon, you have nothing better to do because it's between seasons. And here in Texas, there's no football being played. But other than that, the next century is taken up into the middle of the 5th century.

The Relation of the Divine and Human in Christ

So, the Council of Calestine in 451. The next century is basically taken up with the next question. Alright, we confirm the full deity of Christ. How does the divine and the human relate in Jesus? And you've got to realize, from the earliest decades of Christian experience, people wanted to ask questions the Bible does not answer.

You've maybe heard of the infancy books that were written in the 2nd century, especially by Gnostics. Everybody wanted to know what in the world is a perfect child like? What is it like to have Jesus as your brother?

How does that work? What does a perfect incarnate individual look like in school? And people want to sit around and speculate about things that God in his wisdom never wanted to get into with us. And I don't know that we'll ever know that in eternity.

To be perfectly honest with you, I sort of believed in Deuteronomy 29 and 29. The secret things belong to the Lord our God. The things revealed belong to us and to our children. So, I don't think we have any right to tell God exactly what it is that he has to reveal to us.

And the ins and outs of the life of the Holy Family, as it is called, really isn't something that should necessarily be taking up a lot of our thought. But it did for a lot of people. And so, it wasn't new to speculate on these things.

But now, on the theological level, since it had been asserted clearly that the Word became flesh, what was the relationship between the Word and the flesh? Athanasius had argued very, very firmly that Jesus had to be fully God and fully man for the atonement to have any meaning.

He had to be able to redeem humankind if he only seemed to have a body. Or if he wasn't truly God, then the redemption itself would not be salvific. But what's the relationship? Now, Nestorius was probably much more orthodox than Nestorianism.

And it is true. And we're going to see Wednesday night that one of the assertions that is made is that Calvinists are more Calvinistic than Calvin. I'm not sure how true that is. But it is true that almost always, when you have a particular religious leader who enunciates a particular position, the next generation of his followers will answer questions about his position that he himself never got around to answering.

And as such, a systemization of that kind of thought will take place. The same thing is true with, for example, Nestorius. For many of these people, we're not fully certain what it was they believed, because their writings haven't come down to us.

They may have even been destroyed on purpose by a church that was growing in authority, civil authority, generation by generation. And often, what we know about them is recorded by their enemies. And unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily give us really good solid ground for necessarily knowing what they themselves believed.

Your enemies are not the first people to give you the benefit of the doubt. But Nestorius had a real problem with one particular term that had become very common in the church at that time. And that was the term Theotokos.

Stop that. Oh, I know what I'm doing. Theotokos. I keep hitting the button on the side. Theotokos. It means literally God-bearer. And initially, this was a Christological term. That is, it was a term to describe who Jesus was.

It has since become the foundation for the term Mother of God, and is fully a description of Mary in the Roman Catholic experience. But historically, when it first appears, it is an assertion that Mary bore God.

In other words, that Mary didn't just bear a human that then the Logos is just attached to maybe at the birth. But that in some sense, there is a union, what is known in Orthodox theology as a hypostatic union between the Logos, the eternal second person of the Trinity, and the human nature that is born in the womb of Mary.

It doesn't result in a mixture to where you are 50 God and 50 man. It is not the divine driving out the human. But there is a relationship between the two so that the one that is born is Emmanuel, God with us.

And Nestorius said no. Christotokos, bearer of the Christ, that's great. That's fine. But to use Theotokos is to go too far. And so Nestorianism, as it continues to exist today, and it was probably the primary theological system that Mohammed would have encountered many centuries later.

Nestorianism rejected any meaningful connection between the divine and the human and Christ, basically making them two persons. Distinct from one another, and lended itself to a form of adoptionism later on.

And Nestorius didn't go there. And one of the guys he's taking on was clearly politically motivated. Cyril of Alexandria was not a nice guy. Not a nice guy at all. And unfortunately, as we get into this century, you're getting more and more politics inserting itself in these things, and that's why we have to go to the Word to try to answer as many of these questions as we can, not just simply to what some individual like Cyril of Alexandria had to say.

But this was the focus of the Nestorian controversy. And the same thing with Apollinarianism, Eutychianism, all of them have to do with where you fall in balancing the relationship of the divine and human.

And whether you allow for the idea that the child who was born was truly the God-man, or whether you go so far as to, in essence, divinize the humanity. Was the human nature of Christ just the physical body, or did he have a human spirit, a human mind?

Or is it only the logos? I would sort of turn the human nature into a zombie, basically, that is just sort of animated by the logos. But there are people who said that. There are others who saw a complete mixture to where he's not truly fully God, he's not truly fully man.

All of this leads to the Council of Chalcedon. Some people say Chalcene, but I say Chalcedon. And since those people died a long time ago, no one can really correct either one of us. But in 451, that asserted that Jesus is fully God and fully man.

He has two natures that are joined, as I said, the hypostatic union. But he is only one person. He doesn't speak in a portent using we. He is one person with two natures, divine and human, without mixture with one another.

And in essence, Trinitarian and Christological theology has not changed since that point in time. And the battles and the differences remain the same even to this point in time as well. Okay? Now, let me, with the brief amount of time we have left, see if I can find, very quickly, I was supposed to open this up earlier, but I was on Trinity Foundation 1, and now I'm on Trinity Foundation 2.

And let me see if I can find this for you. Actually, I'll tell you what, if you would like, especially those of you on the bleachers, why don't you just stand up for a second and get some blood flowing while I pull this up, and then we'll finish the last 20 minutes.

Okay? Just go ahead and stand up a second and get yourself feeling a little better. Just stretch out. I'm not going to have you do anything where you wave your arms or sing silly songs or anything like that.

Because this is only going to take a second. Alright, there it is. Okay. Ready? Alright, let's go ahead and be seated. Alright, since it is my understanding that there is a fair presence of mobilism, oneness theology in your area, let me focus upon this element in our closing minutes, last 20 minutes, try to give you some biblical foundations to deal with.

The Bible clearly and consistently differentiates between the person, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Never does the Bible identify the Father as the Son, the Son as the Spirit, or the Spirit as the Father in any way, shape, or form.

I've mentioned before the vital distinction, one what and three whose. We must avoid the category errors that very often cloud our discussion. Saying that God is one in the category of being does not prove that He is one in the category of a person.

The oneness is fascinating. In the same year that I debated Hamza Abdul Malik defending the deity of Christ, a Muslim, only two days later I debated Dr. Sabin of the oneness Pentecostal movement, of the UPC at that time, it was before UPCI I think.

And both Malik and Sabin used the same arguments. Because they're both Unitarians. They're both Unitarians. They attacked the Trinity in the exact same way. But to prove completely different things. One to deny the deity of Christ, one to affirm the deity of Christ, but in a different way than you and I would affirm it.

Many agree that God is one. One, the Sabbath, is Muslims. The question is, does the Bible reveal that this oneness is a oneness of being alone, or a oneness of both being and person? In other words, while a Unitarian is a monotheist, a Trinitarian is a monotheist as well.

Monotheism speaks to the being of God. Unitarian or Trinitarian refers to the person's issue. Most people fail to distinguish between them. And so Muslims just go, well the Bible says God's one, so obviously there's no Trinity.

But we believe God's one. It's the nature of that oneness that is at stake. It's the nature of that oneness that we must address. Now, historically, the Bible, the church, focused upon Matthew chapter 3 and the baptism of Jesus.

After being baptized, Jesus came immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and lighting on him, and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, This is my beloved Son, whom I am well pleased.

There is a clear distinction between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit that is presented here. The Father speaks, and he uses personal pronouns. This is my beloved Son, whom I am well pleased. But then he uses the second person, this, referring to, well actually the third person, this, referring to the Son there in the river with John the Baptist.

And then both of these distinguish from the Holy Spirit who is descending in the form of a dove. In John 3 .35, the Father loves the Son. There is a loving relationship between the Father and the Son.

And has given all things into his hand. This cannot possibly be saying that the divine nature of Jesus loves the human nature of Jesus. This is a relationship that exists between two divine persons. John 5 .20, for the Father loves the Son and shows him all things that he himself is doing, and the Father will show him greater works than these, so that you will marvel.

This is clearly one person interacting with another person, distinguishing between the Father and the Son, not merely a human nature and a divine nature. The Bible teaches that the Father has eternally existed as a divine person, that the Son likewise has eternally existed as a divine person, and that the Spirit has existed eternally as a divine person.

That is the question that you have to ask. It bothers me tremendously that even some of these singing groups, and there's a number of them, they hide this for monetary reasons. I find that disgusting, to be perfectly honest with you.

They hide it for monetary reasons, and you have to know the Trinity well enough to know what questions to ask to get them to reveal themselves. But in essence, what you have to ask of them is, do you believe that the Son has eternally existed as a divine person, distinguishable from the Father?

And that is one thing that no modelist, no one-list can ever, in any level of honesty, affirm. Now, the key text that I really want to focus on, and man, I wish we had more time, 17 minutes ain't enough, but let me at least present them to you, because I just love these texts.

To me, theology is like, the Word of God is God speaking to us. And I don't know about you, but I feel awful blessed that there are places where God, in His grace, and His love for His people, has deigned to pull aside the very veil of eternity, so that you and I can know Him better and worship Him.

If you've never thanked Him for that, may I suggest that you do so this evening. Three New Testament passages that teach the eternal pre-existence of personhood and the deity of the Son. This is the issue with one person.

This is what I presented to Dr. Bernard. He failed to respond to it. He would fail to respond to it today. And I repeat once again, since this is going on YouTube, I will show up at the Irshon Graduate School, and I'll debate this issue.

Because this is truth, and this is where the refutation of one-list theology is to be found. Three texts. John chapter 1, verses 1 -3 and verse 18. That is the prologue of the Gospel of John. We'll look at that.

John chapter 17, verses 3 -5. The High Priestly Prayer of Jesus. And then the Carmen Christi. Philippians chapter 2, actually it's 5 -11, is the entire Carmen Christi. Carmen Christi means a hymn to Christ as to God.

But it is the ancient fragment of a hymn found in Philippians chapter 2, in Paul's epistle to the Philippians. So, in the fastest time I've ever done it, let me look at those three texts. Very quickly.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him. And apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being.

Now, notice. In the beginning was the Word. Then came the Logos. The Logos has eternally existed. As far back as you wish to push, the beginning, the Word, has always existed. That particular Word that is utilized there, the imperfect form of I, Me, Ain, does not point us to any point of origin.

The Logos is not created. The Logos did not enter into this state. As far back as you wish to push the beginning, the Logos has always existed. Timeless existence is found in that term. The Word was with God.

That term, cross-tom-tom, refers to face-to-face communication. There is a relationship that exists between the Logos and Tan-Theon. Whoever Theon is, you will see when we look at the rest of the prologue, that it is, in fact, the Father who is being referred to here.

But again, this relationship is timeless. As far back as you wish to push the beginning, there has been a relationship between the Logos and God. But there is a distinction that is drawn between the two.

And finally, the Word was God. Again, I could spend literally the entire evening doing nothing more than to discuss the mistranslation of this text by Jehovah's Witnesses and others as the Word was a God.

The fact that the term God, Theos, appears before the verb, and that Logos has the article, means that by placement of the words in this way, John is telling us that the Logos is, as to his nature, deity.

He shares the same nature as Theos. He is not identifying the Logos as Theos by placing it before the verb. This is how he distinguishes, and by not using the article. If the article was there like Jehovah's Witnesses say it should be, this would be a modalistic passage.

This would teach modalism. It would make Theos and Logos interchangeable terms. You could translate it as the Word is God, or God is the Word, it would be the one same thing. You can't do that because the article can't be there.

And all the amateur Jehovah's Witness Greek grammarians, to the contrary, can't change that simple reality of this particular text. And the Word was with God. That second phrase, Who is the God with whom the Word eternally was?

This is the Father, as John tells us in John 1 .18. The bookend of John 1. Remember, those of you who have books, you have bookends. If you don't have a shelf that has a sort of a wall there, you can use bookends.

Sometimes they're very fancy. That's also a literary way of doing things. You state something at the beginning, you expand upon it, and then you restate it. That's what we have in the prologue of the Gospel of John.

You have in verse 18 a restatement of what you had in verse 1. This is the prologue of John. And therefore, we're told who the God is, as the NRSV puts it. And I think this is one of the only places the NRSV has an overly good translation.

No one has ever seen God. It is God, the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made Him known. The God who has not been seen is the Father. But it is God, the only Son, Jesus Christ, who is close to the Father's heart, who makes known the Father.

The God with whom the Word eternally existed is, likewise, the Father. And so we have here a presentation of the Logos as a divine person distinguished from the Father. He creates all things. All things are made through Him.

And it's Logos who, in verse 14, becomes flesh. Logos sarxigenetot. He became flesh. He didn't just take on what appeared to be flesh. He became flesh. And He is here described as God, the only Son, with an agnes theos in the original language.

Now, the Son has existed, therefore, eternally as a divine person. This is an exegetical certainty based upon John 17, verse 5. John 17, 5, beginning, let's go back to verse 3, especially since Muslims and others like to use John 17, 3 against the deity of Christ.

This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. Please notice. For those who try to say, See, there's only one true God, the Father. Jesus is something less.