Apologies for resurrecting a discussion, but it should be fun to kick around these questions with a different group of people.
After Jesus' resurrection, the earliest Xians sat down to try and make sense of it all. There was just no movement of any kind on the oneness of God. Monotheism was simply not up for debate.
Yet they had seen Jesus do things that God had always said He would do- sort out the problems of sin, save His people, return as King to Jerusalem etc. In short, Jesus filled a God shaped hole.
Within the Jewish story, the transcendent God had appeared to humanity before. The Pillar of cloud and fire, the Presence in the tabernacle, and the Burning Bush were all examples of where God had been present in a perceivable form. They concluded that God had appeared to them once again in the series, in human form this time.
Further, their ongoing experiences lead them to believe that the Holy Spirit continued to be an ongoing presence of God with humanity.
The NT writers don't get into detailed debates about the nature of God. Not for them arguments about subordinationism or Greek punctuation. This seems to me to be a sensible way ahead.
After Jesus' resurrection, the earliest Xians sat down to try and make sense of it all. There was just no movement of any kind on the oneness of God. Monotheism was simply not up for debate.
Yet they had seen Jesus do things that God had always said He would do- sort out the problems of sin, save His people, return as King to Jerusalem etc. In short, Jesus filled a God shaped hole.
Within the Jewish story, the transcendent God had appeared to humanity before. The Pillar of cloud and fire, the Presence in the tabernacle, and the Burning Bush were all examples of where God had been present in a perceivable form. They concluded that God had appeared to them once again in the series, in human form this time.
Further, their ongoing experiences lead them to believe that the Holy Spirit continued to be an ongoing presence of God with humanity.
The NT writers don't get into detailed debates about the nature of God. Not for them arguments about subordinationism or Greek punctuation. This seems to me to be a sensible way ahead.
