saying, 'Who can forgive sins but God alone?' To my mind, that is one of the most striking things Jesus did." "Not only did Jesus forgive sin," I observed, "but he asserted that he himself was without sin. And certainly sinlessness is an attribute of deity." "Yes," he replied. "Historically in the West, people considered most holy have also been the most conscious of their own failures and sins. They are people who are aware of their shortcomings and lusts and resentments, and they're fighting them honestly by the grace of a God. In fact, they're fighting them so well that others take notice and say, 'There is a holy man or woman.' But along comes Jesus, who can say with a straight face, 'Which of you can convict me of sin?' If I said that, my wife and children and all who know me would be glad to stand up and testify, whereas no one could with respect to Christ." Although moral perfection and the forgiveness of sin are undoubtedly characteristics of deity, there are several additional attributes that Jesus must fulfill if he is to match the sketch of God. It was time to progress to those. After having started by lobbing softballs at Carson, I got ready to throw some curves.
Using some notes I had brought along, I hit Carson in rapid-fire succession with some of the biggest obstacles to Jesus' claim of deity. "Dr. Carson, how in the world could Jesus be omnipresent if he couldn't be in two places at once?" I asked. "How could he be omniscient when he says, 'Not even the Son of Man knows the hour of his return'? How could he be omnipotent when the gospels plainly tell us that he was unable to do many miracles in his hometown?" Pointing my pen at him for emphasis, I concluded by saying, "Let's admit it: the Bible itself seems to argue against Jesus being God."
While Carson didn't flinch, he did concede that these questions have no simple answers. After all, they strike at the very heart of the Incarnation-God becoming man, spirit taking on flesh, the infinite becoming finite, the eternal becoming time-bound. It's a doctrine that has kept theologians busy for centuries. And that's where Carson chose to start his answer: by going back to the way scholars have tried to respond to these matters through the years. "Historically, there have been two or three approaches to this," he began, sounding a bit as if he were beginning a classroom lecture. "For example, at the end of the last century, the great theologian Benjamin Warfield worked through the gospels and ascribed various bits either to Christ's humanity or to his deity. When Jesus does some thing that's a reflection of him being God, that's ascribed to Christ's deity. When there's something reflecting his limitations or finiteness or his humanness-for example, his tears; does God cry?-that's ascribed to his humanity." That explanation was fraught with problems, it seemed to me. "If you do that, wouldn't you end up with a schizophrenic Jesus?" I asked. "It's easy to slip into that unwittingly," he replied. "All the confessional statements have insisted that both Jesus' humanity and his deity remained distinct, yet they combined in one person. So you want to avoid a solution in which there are essentially two minds-sort of a Jesus human mind and a Christ heavenly mind. However, this is one kind of solution, and there may be something to it. The other kind of solution is some form of kenosis, which means 'emptying.' This spins out of Philippians 2, where Paul tells us that Jesus, 'being in the form of God, did not think equality with God was something to be exploited' - that's the way it should be translated but emptied himself' He became a nobody." That seemed a little ambiguous to me. "Can you be more explicit?" I asked. "What exactly did he empty himself of?" Apparently, I had put my finger on the issue. "Ah, that's the question," Carson replied with a nod. "Through the centuries, people have given various answers to that. For instance, did he empty himself of his deity? Well, then he would no longer be God. Did he empty himself of the attributes of his deity? I have a problem with that too, because it's difficult to separate attributes from reality. If you have an animal that looks like a horse, smells like a horse, walks like a horse, and has all the attributes of a horse, you've got a horse. So I don't know what it means for God to empty himself of his attributes and still be God. Some have said, 'He didn't empty himself of his attributes, but he emptied himself of the use of his attributes'-a self-limiting type of thing. That's getting Closer, although there are times when that was not what he was doing-he was forgiving sins the way only God can, which is an attribute of deity. Others go further by saying, 'He emptied himself of the independent use of his attributes! That is, he functioned like God when his heavenly Father gave him explicit sanction to do so. Now, that's much closer. The difficulty is that there is a sense in which the eternal Son has always acted in line with his Father's commandments. You don't want to lose that, even in eternity past. But it's getting closer." I sensed we were somewhere in the vicinity of the bull's-eye, but I wasn't sure we were going to get much closer. That seemed to be Carsons sentiment, too. "Strictly speaking," he said, "Philippians 2 does not tell us precisely what the eternal Son emptied himself of. He emptied himself, he became a nobody. Some kind of emptying is at issue, but let's be frank-you're talking about the Incarnation, one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith. You're dealing with formless, bodiless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Spirit and finite, touchable, physical, time-bound creatures. For one to become the other inevitably binds you up in mysteries. So part of Christian theology has been concerned not with explaining it all away' but with trying to take the biblical evidence and, retaining all of it fairly, find ways of synthesis that are rationally coherent, even if they're not exhaustively explanatory." That was a sophisticated way of saying that theologians can come up with explanations that seem to make sense, even though they might not be able to explain every nuance about the Incarnation. In a way, that seemed logical. If the Incarnation is true, it's not surprising that finite minds couldn't totally comprehend it. It seemed to me that some sort of voluntary "emptying" of Jesus' independent use of his attributes was reasonable in explaining why he generally didn't exhibit the "omnis"-omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence-in his earthly existence, even though the New Testament clearly states that all these qualities are ultimately true of him. That, however, was only part of the problem. I flipped to the next page of my notes and began another line of questioning about some specific biblical passages that seemed to directly contradict Jesus' claim to being God.
Part of the sketch that Jesus must match is that God is an uncreated being who has existed from eternity past. Isaiah 57:15 describes God as "he who lives forever." But, I said to Carson, there are some verses that seem to strongly suggest that Jesus was a created being. "For instance," I said, "John 3:16 calls Jesus the 'begotten' Son of God, and Colossians 1:15 says he was the 'firstborn over all creation.' Don't they clearly imply that Jesus was created, as opposed to being the Creator?" One of Carson's areas of expertise is Greek grammar, which he called upon in responding to both of those verses. "Let's take John 3:16," he said. "It's the King James Version that translates the Greek with the words 'his only begotten Son.' Those who consider this the correct rendering usually bind that up with the Incarnation itself-that is, his begetting in the Virgin Mary. But in fact, that's not what the word in Greek means. "It really means 'unique one.' The way it was usually used in the first century is 'unique and beloved.' So John 3:16 is simply saying that Jesus is the unique and beloved Son-or as the New International Version translates it, 'the one and only Son'- rather than saying that he's ontologically begotten in time." "That only explains that one passage," I pointed out. "OK, let's look at the Colossians verse, which uses the term 'firstborn.' The vast majority of commentators, whether conservative or liberal, recognize that in the Old Testament the firstborn, because of the laws of succession, normally received the lion's share of the estate, or the firstbom would become king in the case of a royal family. The firstborn therefore was the one ultimately with all the rights of the father. "By the second century before Christ, there are places where the word no longer has any notion of actual begetting or of being born first but carries the idea of the authority that comes with the position of being the rightful heir. That's the way it applies to Jesus, as virtually all scholars admit. In light of that, the very expression 'firstborn' is slightly misleading." "What would be a better translation?" I asked. "I think 'supreme heir' would be more appropriate," he responded. While that would explain the Colossians passage, Carson went even further, with one last point. "If you're going to quote Colossians 1:15, you have to keep it in context by going on to Colossians 2:9, where the very same author stresses, 'For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.' The author wouldn't contradict himself. So the term 'firstborn' cannot exclude Jesus' eternality, since that is part of what it means to possess the fullness of the divine." For me, that nailed the issue. But there were other troubling passages as well. For example, in Mark 10 someone addresses Jesus as "good teacher," promoting him to reply, "Why do you call me good? No one is good-except God alone." "Wasn't he denying his divinity by saying this?" I asked. "No, I think he was trying to get the fellow to stop and think about what he was saying," Carson explained. "The parallel passage in Matthew is a little more expansive and does not find Jesus downplaying his deity at all. "I think all he's saying is, 'Wait a minute; why are you calling me good? Is this just a polite thing, like you say, "Good day"? What do you mean by good? You call me good master-is this because you're trying to honey up to me?' In a fundamental sense there's only one who is good, and that's God. But Jesus is not implicitly saying, 'So don't call me that.' He's saying Do you really understand what you're saying when you say that? Are you really ascribing to me what should only be ascribed to God?' That could be teased out to mean, 'I really am what you say; you speak better than you know' or 'Don't you dare call me that; next time call me "sinner Jesus" like everybody else does.' In terms of all that Jesus says and does elsewhere, which way does it make sense to take it?" With so many verses that call Jesus "sinless," "holy," "righteous," "innocent ... .. undefiled," and "separate from sinners," the answer was pretty obvious.
If Jesus was God, what kind of God was he? Was he equal to the Father, or some sort of junior God, possessing the attributes of deity and yet somehow failing to match the total sketch that the Old Testament provides of the divine?
That question comes out of another passage that I pointed out to Carson. "Jesus said in John 14:28, 'The Father is greater than V Some people look at this and conclude that Jesus must have been a