Sigh:
This is called “assuming the conclusion in the question”, much like “When did you stop beating your wife?” Precisely what the actual Christian tradition asserts and asserted from the very start is that, to the amazement of the people who actually knew him and came to believe in him, Jesus never “became God”. Rather they came to the shocking discovery that, (as one of them put it) “He was with God in the beginning” and that, in assuming a human nature, it would be closer to the truth to say “God became Jesus”. All that happened in the formulation of the Creeds was that the Church worked out a more precise way to say, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) and “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16. From a Christian perspective, saying that Jesus “became God” is something analogous to saying “Isaac Newton invented gravity.” The Church discovered, not invented, the deity of Jesus.
This is not to say unbelievers cannot have a crack at trying to understand Christianity. But trying to understand a thing while refusing to understand it is a mug’s game. If you are going to try to understand a belief system while absolutely refusing to stand in the shoes of those who believe it, you are wasting your time.
One of the reasons I respect the work of unbelievers like Tom Holland is that he respects the fact the past is another country, that people who live there are not all fools, and that the interior logic of pre-modern ways of seeing the world has its own integrity–an integrity from which we can learn an awful lot. Patronizing classes like the one above approach their subject with a built-in narrative of pride that corrupts the conversation with the past from the outset by declaring the teacher and his student possessed of certitude that the deity of Christ is an illusion and the people being studied are obviously inferior for believing he is God and not (as the all-knowing teacher assumes) that he became God.
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One Response
With apologies to Upton Sinclair who said:it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding”…I argue that it is difficult to get an atheist to understand something when his atheism depends upon his not understanding.