Please tell me it isn’t true

by Eugene Shubert 26 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Eugene Shubert

  Kenneson,

  Jesus compared his relationship to the Father in terms of an intimate human father/son relationship. Communicating, thinking and understanding by analogy is reasonable. I presented a second analogy. Logic is mathematical and so is rank.

  Unmistakably, the rational communication of thought demands that the Revelation given to Jesus was given to John. The transmission of this revelation through a chain of command is obvious. Father to Son to an angel to the apostle.

  I have stated precisely what the Father possesses that the Son does not.

  The Father knows the end from the beginning but the Son only knows all possible futures with perfect comprehension plus all that the Father reveals to Him.

  I cited the entire content of the book of Revelation as an example. The introductory title says,

  The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John. Rev 1:1.
• 

  Eugene Shubert

  Kenneson,

  Jesus compared his relationship to the Father in terms of an intimate human father/son relationship. Communicating, thinking and understanding by analogy is reasonable. I presented a second analogy. Logic is mathematical and so is rank.

  Unmistakably, the rational communication of thought demands that the Revelation given to Jesus was given to John. The transmission of this revelation through a chain of command is obvious. Father to Son to an angel to an apostle.

  I have stated precisely what the Father possesses that the Son does not.

  The Father knows the end from the beginning but the Son only knows all possible futures with perfect comprehension plus all that the Father reveals to Him.

  I cited the entire content of the book of Revelation as an example. The introductory title says,

  The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John. Rev 1:1.
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  Eugene Shubert

  The second post is my mistake. Please delete.
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  NeonMadman

  Jesus could easily be infinite, not equal to the Father, and have an understandable rank like one of the infinite cardinal numbers.

  Then I would have to disagree, and to retract my previous statement that your teaching seemed to be mostly orthodox. What you are postulating is not the normal Christian understanding of the Trinity, which teaches that the one God exists eternally as three coequal Persons.

  The question of "rank" is one of position, and, as I have pointed out in my previous posts on this thread, position affects only function, not nature. To say that the Son is of a lower rank than the Father is not to say that He is of a lower nature.

  I then received an unusually strong flash of insight. The Father knows the end from the beginning but the Son only knows all possible futures with perfect comprehension plus all that the Father reveals to Him. I then remembered Revelation 1:1:

  I see no support in scripture for that position. True, Revelation 1:1 does say that Jesus was "given" the Revelation, even as Matthew 28:18 says that He was "given" all authority. But remember that He had divested Himself of His glory when He came to earth as a man (philippians 2:5-11), and that He asked the Father to restore the glory that He had previously had (John 17:5). So He was "given" these things as his right, because He, as God, was returning to His exalted position from which He had lowered Himself.

  All that said, I still wouldn't say that your position is very similar to that of the JW's (though I consider some aspects of it to be erroneous), so you can take heart on that front, at least.
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  Eugene Shubert

  The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John. Rev 1:1.

  Was the revelation given to Jesus given to John? Yes.

  What was the purpose of the revelation given to Jesus? It was to show his servants what must soon take place.

  Was omniscience given to John? No.

  Could an angel deliver omniscience? Probably not.
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  Eugene Shubert

  A wonderful confirmation of what I’ve been trying to say is given by Barclay, W. The Daily Study Bible- The Gospel of John vol.1 III. [Revised Edition ISBN 0-664-21304-9]:

  Finally John says that "The Word was God". There is no doubt that this is a difficult saying for us to understand, and it is difficult because Greek, in which John wrote, had a different way of saying things from the way in which English speaks. When the Greek uses a noun it almost always uses the definite article with it. The Greek for God is ‘theos’, and the definite article is ‘ho’. When Greek speaks about God it does not simply say ‘theos’; it says ‘ho theos’. Now, when Greek does not use the definite article with a noun that noun becomes much more like an adjective; it describes the character, the quality of the person. John did not say that the Word was ‘ho theos’; that would have been to say that the Word was identical with God; he says that the Word was ‘theos’ —without the definite article— which means that the Word was, as we might say, of the very same character and quality and essence and being as God. When John said ‘The Word was God’ he was not saying that Jesus is identical with God, he was saying that Jesus is so perfectly the same as God in mind, in heart, in being that in Jesus we perfectly see what God is like.
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  Eugene Shubert

  Are there any JWs around here that appreciate my previous post?