Question 1

Does 1 Corinthians 8:6 make the Father alone God?

Accepted Answer

Read the whole verse and the argument inverts. Paul is quoting Israel's creed — 'the LORD our God is one LORD' — and distributing its two divine titles: 'God' to the Father, 'LORD' to Jesus, with all things from the one and through the other. If naming the Father 'one God' excludes Jesus from deity, then naming Jesus 'one Lord' excludes the Father from lordship — which no one believes. Paul has not subtracted Jesus from the Shema; he has included him inside it. That is why the apostles could hand Yahweh's own verses to Jesus: 'whosoever shall call upon the name of the LORD' and 'every knee shall bow' both land on Christ.

Question 2

Does John 17:3 — 'the only true God' — exclude Jesus?

Accepted Answer

The contrast in Jesus' prayer is between the true God and the idols of the nations — and eternal life requires knowing the Father AND the Son he sent, a pairing no prophet ever claimed. Two verses later the same prayer asks for the glory Jesus shared with the Father 'before the world was,' though Yahweh swears he gives his glory to no other. And John closes his first letter naming Jesus Christ directly: 'This is the true God, and eternal life.' The verse they lead with sits five lines from the verse that answers them.

Question 3

Is the Word of John 1 just God's plan?

Accepted Answer

Follow what John says the Word does: the Word WAS God, all things were made BY him, he WAS in the world, the world knew HIM not, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us — and we beheld HIS glory. Plans do not create worlds, go unrecognized in them, or take on flesh that can be beheld. Jesus speaks the same way of himself: 'I came down from heaven,' 'I came forth from the Father,' 'glorify me with the glory I HAD with thee.' A figurative preexistence cannot remember its glory.

Question 4

'Before Abraham was, I am' — just a way of identifying himself?

Accepted Answer

Common self-identification does not get a man stoned. The crowd reached for rocks because the grammar was a claim: not 'before Abraham was, I was,' but 'before Abraham WAS, I AM' — timeless being set against Abraham's becoming. John builds the theme deliberately: 'except ye believe that I am he, ye shall die in your sins'; 'that ye may believe that I am he' — the very words Yahweh speaks in Isaiah: 'that ye may know and believe me … I am he; before me there was no God formed.' And when he says 'I am he' in Gethsemane, the arresting party falls to the ground. Ordinary identification does not do that either.

Question 5

Did the Son of God begin at his conception?

Accepted Answer

Luke 1:35 explains the origin of the Son's humanity, not of his person. Micah had already said the Bethlehem Ruler's goings forth are 'from of old, from everlasting.' Jesus describes his own arrival in words no merely conceived man could use — 'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world' — and Paul gives the order of events: existing in the form of God first, then taking the form of a servant, then found in fashion as a man. God 'sent forth his Son, made of a woman': the sending precedes the making. The manger is where the eternal Son took our flesh — not where he started to exist.

Question 6

Is the Holy Spirit only God's power?

Accepted Answer

Scripture keeps doing to the Spirit what cannot be done to a power. Ananias lied to him — 'thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.' He can be grieved. He speaks in the first person: 'Separate ME Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.' He hears, guides, and distributes gifts 'as HE will' — and Jesus, breaking Greek grammar to do it, calls the neuter 'Spirit' by the masculine pronoun: 'when HE, the Spirit of truth, is come.' One does not baptize the nations into the name of a Father, a Son, and a wattage.

Question 7

Does 'the man Christ Jesus' rule out his deity?

Accepted Answer

Paul did say it — two letters over: 'the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.' The mediator text proves what it states: a go-between for God and men must truly stand with men, which is why 'in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren.' His full humanity is not the unitarian's discovery; it is the church's confession — the question was never whether Christ is man, but whether the man is also more. The same Paul who wrote 'the man Christ Jesus' wrote that in him 'dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.'

Question 8

God cannot die or be tempted — so Jesus is not God?

Accepted Answer

The apostles walked straight into this 'contradiction' and wrote it down as gospel: they 'killed the Prince of life'; they 'crucified the Lord of glory'; God purchased the church 'with his own blood.' The answer is the incarnation the syllogism leaves out: the Son took flesh and blood precisely 'that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death.' He died in the humanity he assumed — which is the whole point of having assumed it — and was tempted in that same humanity, 'yet without sin,' while his deity remained what James says God is. Deny that the one who died is the Lord of glory, and the cross loses the very weight that saves.

Question 9

Was the Trinity invented at Nicaea?

Accepted Answer

Date the evidence. Around AD 107, Ignatius of Antioch — a pastor who had known the apostles' generation — wrote of 'Jesus Christ, our God' and 'our God, Jesus Christ, conceived in the womb by Mary,' while being marched to his death. Thomas's confession is earlier still. What is fourth-century is a word, homoousios, adopted because Arians had learned to sign every purely biblical phrase while meaning something else. Concede the history honestly: the church spent centuries finding adequate language — but worship of Jesus as God is there in the first generation, in the prayers, hymns, and martyrdoms, long before any emperor cared.

Question 10

Do Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1 call Jesus God?

Accepted Answer

Peter settles his own grammar. The construction of 2 Peter 1:1 — 'our God and Saviour Jesus Christ' — is letter-for-letter identical to 2 Peter 1:11, 'our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,' which every reader on every side takes as one person. The same construction recurs at 2:20 and 3:18. To split 1:1 into two persons while reading 1:11 as one is not grammar; it is necessity. And Titus's 'blessed hope' is the appearing of one glory — the apostles awaited the appearing of Jesus, never of the invisible Father.

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