"Could Jesus' exorcisms really have been psychosomatic healings?" I asked. "Yes, in some cases, but again you have to look at the whole context. What about the man who was possessed and Jesus sent the demons into the pigs and the pigs ran off the cliff? What's going on if that was a psychosomatic situation? I think Jesus really did drive out demons, and I think some people do that today. At the same time, we shouldn't be too quick to jump to a demonic conclusion when faced with a recalcitrant problem. As C. S. Lewis put it, there are two equal and opposite errors we can fall into concerning demons: 'One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased with both errors.'" "You know, Gary, that idea might fly with the American Association of Christian Counselors, but would secular psychologists consider it rational to believe in the demonic?" I asked. I thought Collins might take offense at the question, which came out sounding more condescending than I had intended, but he didn't. "It's interesting how things are changing," he mused. "Our society today is caught up in 'spirituality.' That's a term that can mean almost anything, but it does recognize the supernatural. It's very interesting what psychologists are believing in these days. Some are into Eastern mystical stuff; some talk about the power of shamans to influence people's lives. Whereas twenty-five years ago the suggestion of demonic activity would have been immediately dismissed, many psychologists are beginning to recognize that maybe there are more things in heaven and earth than our philosophies can account for."
Collins and I had drifted a bit from the original point of our interview. As I thought about our talk while I was driving home, I returned to the central issue that had brought me to him: Jesus claimed to be God. Nobody is suggesting he was intentionally deceptive. And now Collins has concluded, based on thirty-five years of psychological experience, that he was not mentally impaired. However, that left me with a new question: Did Jesus fulfill the attributes of God? After all, it's one thing to claim divinity; it's quite another to embody the characteristics that make God, God. At a stoplight, I pulled a notebook out of my briefcase and scrawled a note to myself. Track down D. A. Carson. I knew that I'd want to talk to one of the country's leading theologians about this next matter. In the meantime my talk with Gary Collins prompted me to spend time that night carefully rereading the discourses of Jesus. I could detect no sign of dementia, delusions, or paranoia. On the contrary, I was moved once more by his profound wisdom, his uncanny insights, his poetic eloquence, and his deep compassion. Historian Philip Schaff said it better than I can. Is such an intellect-clear as the sky, bracing as the mountain air, sharp and penetrating as a sword, thoroughly healthy and vigorous, always ready and always self-possessed-liable to a radical and most serious delusion concerning his own character and mission? Preposterous imagination!'
Deliberations Questions for Reflection or Group Study 1. What are some of the differences between a patient in a mental hospital claiming to be God and Jesus making the same assertion about himself? 2. Read Jesus' teaching called the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-12. What observations can you make about his intellect, eloquence, compassion, insight into human nature, ability to teach profound truths, and overall psychological health? 3. Having read Collins' response to the theory that hypnosis can account for Jesus' miracles, do you believe this is a viable hypothesis? Why or why not?
For Further Evidence More Resources on This Topic Collins, Gary R. Can You Trust Psychology? Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1988. Christian Counseling: A Comprehensive Guide. Waco, Tex.: Word, 1988. The Soul Search. Nashville: Nelson, 1998. Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Collins-Fontana, 1942.
Did jesus Fulfill the Attributes of God? Shortly after eight student nurses were murdered in a Chicago apartment, the trembling lone survivor huddled with a police sketch artist and described in detail the killer she had seen from her secret vantage point beneath a bed. Quickly the drawing was flashed around the city-to police officers, to hospitals, to transit stations, to the airport. Soon an emergency room physician called detectives to say he was treating a man who looked suspiciously like the flinty-eyed fugitive depicted in the sketch. That's how police arrested a drifter named Richard Speck, who was promptly convicted of the heinous slayings and ended up dying in prison thirty years later. Ever since Scotland Yard first turned a witness's recollections into a sketch of a murder suspect in 1889, forensic artists have played an important role in law enforcement. Today more than three hundred sketch artists work with U.S. police agencies, and an increasing number of departments are relying on a computerized system called EFIT (Electronic Facial Identification Technique). This recently developed technology was successfully used to solve a 1997 kidnapping that occurred at a shopping mall just a few miles from my suburban Chicago home. The victim provided details about the kidnapper's appearance to a technician, who used a computer to create an electronic likeness of the offender by choosing from different styles of noses, mouths, hairlines, and so forth. Just moments after the drawing was faxed to police agencies throughout the area, an investigator in another suburb recognized the Picture as a dead-ringer for a criminal he had encountered earlier. Fortunately, this led to a quick arrest of the kidnapping suspect. Oddly enough, the concept of an artist's drawing can provide a rough analogy that can help us in our quest for the truth about Jesus.
Here's how: The Old Testament provides numerous details about God that sketch out in great specificity what he's like. For instance, God is described as omnipresent, or existing everywhere in the universe; as omniscient, or knowing everything that can be known throughout eternity; as omnipotent, or all-powerful; as eternal, or being both beyond time and the source of all time; and as immutable, or unchanging in his attributes. He's loving, he's holy, he's righteous, he's wise, he's just. Now, Jesus claims to be God. But does he fulfill these characteristics of deity? In other words, if we examine Jesus carefully, does his likeness closely match the sketch of God that we find elsewhere in the Bible? If it doesn't, we can conclude that his claim to being God is false. This is an extremely complex and mind-stretching issue. For example, when Jesus was delivering the Sermon on the Mount on a hillside outside Capernaum, he wasn't simultaneously standing on Main Street of Jericho, so in what sense could he be called omnipresent? How can he be called omniscient if he readily admits in Mark 13:32 that he doesn't know everything about the future? If he's eternal, why does Colossians 1:15 call him "the firstborn over all creation"? On the surface these issues seem to suggest that Jesus doesn't resemble the sketch of God. Nevertheless, I've learned over the years that initial impressions can be deceiving. That's why I was glad I would be able to discuss these issues with Dr. D. A. Carson, the theologian who has emerged in recent years as one of the most distinguished thinkers in Christianity.
D. A. Carson, a research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, has written or edited more than forty books, including The Sermon on the Mount; Exegetical Fallacies; The Gospel According to John; and his award-winning The Gagging of God. He can read a dozen languages (his mastery of French stems from a childhood spent in Quebec) and is a member of the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research, the Society for Biblical Literature, and the Institute for Biblical Research. His areas of expertise include the historical Jesus, postmodernism, Greek grammar, and the theology of the apostles Paul and John.
After initially studying chemistry (receiving a bachelor of science degree from McGill University), Carson went on to receive a master of divinity degree before going to England, where he earned a doctorate in New Testament at prestigious Cambridge University. He taught at three other colleges and seminaries before joining Trinity in 1978. I had never met Carson before I drove onto Trinity's Deerfield, Illinois, campus for our interview. Frankly, I was expecting a starched academic. But while I found Carson to be every bit the scholar I had anticipated, I was taken aback by his warm, sincere, and pastoral tone as he responded to what turned out to be, in some cases, rather caustic questions. Our conversation was held in an otherwise deserted faculty lounge over Christmas break. Carson was wearing a white windbreaker over a button-down shirt, blue jeans, and Adidas. After some preliminary banter about our mutual appreciation of England (Carson has lived there off and on through the years, and his wife, joy, is British), I pulled out my notebook, started my recorder, and posed a background question to help determine whether Jesus has "the right stuff' to be God.
My initial question centered on why Carson thinks Jesus is God in the first place. "What did he say or do," I asked, "that convinces you that he is divine?" I wasn't sure how he would respond, although I anticipated he would focus on Jesus' supernatural feats. I was wrong. "One could point to such things as his miracles," Carson said as he leaned back in the comfortably upholstered chair, "but other people have done miracles, so while this may be indicative, it's not decisive. Of course, the Resurrection was the ultimate vindication of his identity. But of the many things he did, one of the most striking to me is his forgiving of sin." Really?" I said, shifting in my chair, which was perpendicular to his, in order to face him more directly. "How so?" "The point is, if you do something against me, I have the right to forgive you. However, if you do something against me and somebody else comes along and says, 'I forgive you,' what kind of cheek is that? The only person who can say that sort of thing meaningfully is God himself, because sin, even if it is against other people, is first and foremost a defiance of God and his laws. When David sinned by committing adultery and arranging the death of the woman's husband, he ultimately says to God in Psalm 51, 'Against you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.' He recognized that although he had wronged people, in the end he had sinned against the God who made him in his image, and God needed to forgive him. So along comes Jesus and says to sinners, 'I forgive you.' The Jews immediately recognize the blasphemy of this. They react by