Thoughts On The Divinity And Sonship Of Jesus Christ

Why is Christ called "the Son of God"? Discover an answer so simple you'll wonder why you never saw it before, and so beautiful it'll take your breath away. What does the Bible mean when it calls Jesus "the Son of God"? Oh, no! Is this gonna be one those boring, hairsplitting theological exercises? Actually, no. In fact, if you will take this little journey with me to its end, I assure you the rewards will be rich. You may even find yourself deeply moved by the beauty of God's character and awestruck by the utter genius of the biblical narrative. Even if you find the above question boring at first glance, I promise you our time together will not be boring in the least.

In antiquity, “son of god”—meaning a ruler designated by the gods to carry out their will—was a title used by the Roman emperor Augustus and his successors as a way to reinforce their divinely appointed status. But this title was also used by early Christians to speak about Jesus, borrowing the idiom from Israelite and early Jewish discourses on monarchy. This interdisciplinary volume explores what it means to be God’s son(s) in ancient Jewish and early Christian literature. Through close readings of relevant texts from multiple ancient corpora, including the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greco-Roman texts and inscriptions, early Christian and Islamic texts, and apocalyptic literature, the chapters in this volume engage a range of issues including messianism, deification, eschatological figures, Jesus, interreligious polemics, and the Roman and Jewish backgrounds of early Christianity and the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The essays in this collection demonstrate that divine sonship is an ideal prism through which to better understand the deep interrelationship of ancient religions and their politics of kingship and divinity. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Richard Bauckham, Max Botner, George J. Brooke, Jan Joosten, Menahem Kister, Reinhard Kratz, Mateusz Kusio, Michael A. Lyons, Matthew V. Novenson, Michael Peppard, Sarah Whittle, and N. T. Wright.

Taking as the determinative concept Jesus' favourite name for God, Father, John interprets the ideal relationship of men to God as that of spiritual children, having the Life - eternal - from the Father. According to Jn this life of sonship to God, having a definite beginning other than the physical birth, and being manifested in very definite moral and spiritual qualities, defines the very being of a Christian. It is in the measure that one understands clearly, experiences personally and expounds persuasively this truth of Christian Sonship, that one lays hold upon the very heart of Christian faith and life. Hence this investigation of ours to find the formulas, the content and the meaning of the Johannine doctrine of the divine sonship of Christians. When we start investigating the Johannine doctrine of the divine sonship of Christians, we are confonted with certain questions regarding its nature and origin: Is the Johannine concept of sonship something purely juridical or moral, or does it suppose an ontological reality? If it supposes such a reality, in what does is consist? How do men obtain this reality so as to become children of God?