Jesus Christ: My Lord and My God! - Part 1
1. INTRODUCTION
The importance of recognizing that the New Testament identifies Jesus as deity, and yet as completely one with the Father, cannot possibly be over-stated. For the authors of the NT, this Christ himself became not only the interpretive grid, but also the sun at the centre of their scriptural universe, around which everything else has its orbit. Reflecting on the centrality of Christ in the Scriptures as displayed by these NT authors, Trejer states,
It is a Christian truism that Jesus Christ is central when reading the OT and NT as Scripture: he is their basic content, the Word of God; he gives them their form (in a certain sense Old and New Testaments); he himself is the aim toward which their reading should be oriented.[1]
Schlatter, likewise, speaks of the importance of the identity of Christ in the apostles’ teaching, saying that the early Christian message “in all its forms” focused on Jesus’ identity—in particular, his “oneness with God.”[2] This was so because “their success depended completely on their ability to transcend the notion that they worshipped the man Jesus in place of God or beside God. If they could not utterly discredit this charge, their work would disintegrate.”[3]
[1] Daniel J. Trejer, “Jesus Christ, Doctrine of,” in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (
[2] Adolf Schlatter, The Theology of the Apostles: The Development of New Testament Theology, trans. Andreas Köstenberger (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 33.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Obviously an exhaustive answer cannot be conducted here given our present constraints. We will rather work within the limits presently laid out.