Some, whom I already read, I have already invited to post. Others, whom I do not (yet) read, can submit posts here. If I receive more entries that I can reasonably post, I have a small group of people (not me) who will sort through and select the entries.

Each post will be unedited. Criticism of me and my work is acceptable, as is criticism of the emergent movement. I’d prefer it if ad hominem criticism were avoided. Ad hominem criticism of others will not be accepted.

For those who have validly wondered if this blog is a safe space for female voices, I will not be actively moderating the comments. Nor will I be commenting. I will be reading, and listening.

If you are a Christian (or post-Christian, or non-Christian) feminist (or womanist), I hope that you will consider contributing a post.

Also, be sure and bookmark Fred’s Bonfire List.

This question comes from Mark, and it provoked some thoughtful dialogue this week:

Hi Tony, I just recently discovered you, and thankful to do so. I appreciate the way you think! As an aside, in one of your threads, you brushed upon the gender of God. (Holy Spirit was feminine.) I think it would be of great value, to discuss the entire issue of “the intrinsic gender(s) of the Divine.” Any thoughts, or comments?

Thanks, Mark. And thanks for being engaged in the comments, which always makes it more enjoyable, including the one in which you clarified:

I think that most Christians would agree, that God does not have some current biological form. (Although, the incarnate Christ did.) God is not currently a female, or a male. However, this does not rule out the possibility, that as a “person”, God has a “personality” (as do humans, hopefully). Can’t a “personality”, be both feminine and masculine, just as a character, or aspect, of their “personhood”? This view makes form of being, or form of substance, almost irrelevant, or not terribly important.

It’s really a great question, and one that has many layers. For me, I immediately thought of my kids. At their ages, they know the world in two categories: female and male. Dave had the same experience,

I’m nearly 10 years into a personal discipline of trying to change how I think about this, and have had literally hundreds of conversations with people about it. I’m stunned by how difficult it has been to alter my intuitive level thinking on this, which makes me think it is culturally ingrained from a very young age.

I’m raising a daughter with the explicit intention of enculturating her differently. In explicit, intellectual conversation she’ll describe God in ways that transcend gender or incorporate both genders, and she’ll freely express disagreement with people who speak of God in ways that are reserved for men or males. And yet when she herself is speaking about God, she says “he” or “him” nearly every single time, despite being corrected every time she’s ever done this over the course of her whole life.

My daughter’s 6, and though her experience is anecdotal, it makes me think a very deep and subtle force is at work.

For the record, I think this force, whatever it is, is for the most part harmful. I think it’s on balance a negative thing that God is gendered in the minds of most people.

I’ve done the same thing, working hard to disabuse my children (13, 11, 8) of using the male pronoun for God. They hear that plenty, so we use the female pronoun in our house, or the awkwardly constructed “Godself.” I think I’ve made an impression when they catch themselves referring to God with the male pronoun and glance at me sideways, with a smile.

One of the the biggest temptations of any human being is to anthropomorphize God. Honestly, I think it’s unavoidable — so much of our language is referential to our own human lives. We want to talk sensibly about God, and we naturally do so in language that describes God relatively to us. That’s a particularly acute problem when one thinks — as I do, and as Mark pointed out in his follow-up — that God is a personal being.

In fact, at this point in my journey, I think that God is not only personal, but in some way a self-enclosed being. This is what keeps me from embracing process theology, in which God’s personalness seems to bleed out into all creation. If God is everything, how can God also be personal? How can God have a personality?

The same can be asked of my version of the God-creation relationship, called panentheism. But in panentheism — at least Moltmann’s version, which I advocate — God is a distinct being who, in trinitarian love, embraces all of creation. Thus, the oneness that happens between God and creation happens at the volition of God.

Well, this may seem far afield from God’s gender, but it goes to show the relationship between God and our conceptions of ourselves. More to the point that what genitalia God has is what characteristics God exhibits. Honestly, I am loathe to assign particular traits to one gender versus the other. To say that women are “sensitive” or men are “dispassionate” is not only false but insulting. In certain contexts, males and females may be socialized to behave in certain ways, but I don’t think that there are particular, gender-based character traits that are baked into our genes.

So what does it mean when the Bible says that God rules with a “mighty arm,” or that God is like a “mother hen.” It means that humans in days past relied on anthropomorphic (and zoologic) metaphors to express their understandings of God. And I can’t blame them. But I don’t need to copy them.

Or, I can say this: God subsumes all characteristics. All characteristics of humans — including those traditionally considered “male” and “female” — are a part of God. They all live in God, and emanate from God.

In the end, it’s probably best to avoid gender-based pronouns for God as much as possible. Since that’s not always possible, let’s always remember that God embodies all characteristics that we know as humans, plus surely many that we don’t comprehend.

The first was a courageous post.

The second was even more courageous, and I’d like to echo it here, for my readers:

Forgive Me

The context of this post is the following: Last week, Dr. Christena Cleveland wrote a post reflecting on something I’d said at a conference last month. In short, I said that those of us in the room had a “better version of the gospel” than the regnant view in the West. Dr. Cleveland misheard me, thinking I said we have the “best version.” Nevertheless, she was critical of my statement, arguing that to assert that one’s version of the gospel is “better” or “best” necessarily excludes a diversity of voices.

Dr. Cleveland’s post hinted at an accusation of racism, which I vehemently denied, albeit in a manner that was overly defensive. Nevertheless, I continue to disagree with her assertion that preferring one version of the gospel over another — and proudly proclaiming that — is necessarily exclusionary. That’s an argument that is simply impossible to defend, unless one is prepared to embrace the completely syncretized relativism that has overwhelmed much of liberal Protestantism in America. I, for one, am not prepared to do that.

So, I am taking a couple posts to write about the two themes that I think are central to the gospel of Jesus Christ, insofar as I understand it, today, and from where I sit. Whether this version that I espouse is, indeed, “better,” and whether it is “exclusionary,” I will leave it for you to judge. Read the prologue here and the post on liberation here.

Part One: Context

Years ago, when Emergent Village was going strong, evangelicals were starting to have doubts about us, and critics of us were starting to go public, Doug Pagitt and I made a pact: We would meet with anyone, anywhere, no questions asked. If someone wanted to meet with us — to question us, berate us, or attempt to convert us — we would meet with them. Since that time, we’ve had innumerable breakfasts at Original Pancake House, some of them with readers of this blog.

As well as being on the receiving end of meeting requests, I’ve also been on the proactive end of meeting even with those with whom I disagree. I’ve been in Al Mohler’s super-secret office. I’ve met with Tim Keller a couple times in NYC. I’ve had lunch with John Piper. Every time I go to Seattle, I reach out to Mark Driscoll and ask to meet in public or private (every time he refuses). I’ve offered to talk with one of my most outspoken feminist critics, [name redacted], to hear her concerns (she has refused).

When we were starting Emergent Village, one thing that stood out to us is how different streams of American Christianity didn’t talk to one another — hell, sometimes they didn’t even know about one another. I once asked Walter Bruegemann what he thought about the Prayer of Jabez at the height of that book’s popularity, and he hadn’t even heard of it. I regularly meet Episcopal priests who’ve never heard of Bill Hybels, and evangelical leaders who cannot name the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. And if they did know about one another, they had little respect and no friendship for one another.

We thought that there was a tragic lack of reconciled friendship in the leadership of the American church. And we endeavored to fix that in our generation of leaders. In spite of my outspokenness on theological topics — my preference for a particular version of the gospel — that is all trumped by my fundamental belief in reconciliation as core to the gospel. I’m being totally candid when I say: I’m always surprised when someone doesn’t want reconciliation.

Part Two: Reconciliation

When I speak, I’m often asked about Solomon’s Porch, the church of which I am a part. One of the most important elements of SP that I try to impress upon people is that the way that we do things is not an attempt to reach out to 20-something hipsters in South Minneapolis. Not at all. Instead, what we do is usually a direct result of a theological conviction.

For example, one of the things we do is sit in living room furniture (couches, lounge chairs, coffee tables) in a concentric setting. At first blush, this would seem like a clear pander to hipsters who hate pews. But in fact it is in keeping with what I consider to be the core conviction at Solomon’s Porch: that the gospel is reconciliation.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes,

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

If the Lukan passage in yesterday’s post sits at the heart of Jesus’ understanding of the Good News, then this passage in Paul — and particularly the phrase in bold — clearly shows Paul’s understanding of the Good News, as it is shown in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The best I’ve ever heard this explained is by Scot McKnight, who I once heard say that Jesus accomplished a fourfold reconciliation:

1. Reconciliation between God and me;
2. Reconciliation between me and other humans;
3. Reconciliation between me and myself;
4. Reconciliation between humans and all of creation.

This is the very best of the evangelical understanding of the power of the gospel to effect change, to provoke metanoia. In my book on the atonement, I’m attempting to answer how, exactly, that happens in the death of Jesus on the cross. It’s not easy to explain…

Part Three: Marrying Context and Reconciliation

…and it’s not easy to live. Those who know my personal story know that I went through a divorce several years ago, and so there is still a glaring example of irreconciliation that stares me in the face every day. My kids are affected by that irreconciliation, as are my spouse, my parents, my siblings, and others. The ripples caused by that rock have spread far across otherwise placid waters.

So, in spite of my best efforts to live a reconciled life in the professional realm, as catalogued above, my personal life has not borne out the fruits of my convictions.

Nevertheless, I continue to believe that reconciliation is at the very core of the Christian life — that reconciliation, along with liberation, is the heart of the gospel.

The context of this post is the following: Last week, Dr. Christena Cleveland wrote a post reflecting on something I’d said at a conference last month. In short, I said that those of us in the room had a “better version of the gospel” than the regnant view in the West. Dr. Cleveland misheard me, thinking I said we have the “best version.” Nevertheless, she was critical of my statement, arguing that to assert that one’s version of the gospel is “better” or “best” necessarily excludes a diversity of voices.

Dr. Cleveland’s post hinted at an accusation of racism, which I vehemently denied, albeit in a manner that was overly defensive. Nevertheless, I continue to disagree with her assertion that preferring one version of the gospel over another — and proudly proclaiming that — is necessarily exclusionary. That’s an argument that is simply impossible to defend, unless one is prepared to embrace the completely syncretized relativism that has overwhelmed much of liberal Protestantism in America. I, for one, am not prepared to do that.

So, I am taking a couple posts to write about the two themes that I think are central to the gospel of Jesus Christ, insofar as I understand it, today, and from where I sit. Whether this version that I espouse is, indeed, “better,” and whether it is “exclusionary,” I will leave it for you to judge. See the prologue to this post here.

Part One: Context

As readers know, my favorite theologian is Jürgen Moltmann. One of the reasons that I so love Moltmann is that he is keenly aware of his social location. Here’s what I mean:

Moltmann’s first major book, Theology of Hope, took the theological world by storm when it was first published in 1967. Here was a German theologian, on the preeminent theological faculty of Tübingen, who had grown up a German humanist and fought with the Germans in World War II who was, it seemed, embracing the themes of the nascent liberation theology. His was an deeply eschatological theology, to be sure, but the hope about which he wrote was as real and material as the liberation theologians of Central and South America.

By the time his next major book, The Crucified God, was released in 1973, the 47-year-old Moltmann was being flown around the world to speak at conferences with other liberation theologians. It was heady stuff. His third major book, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, came out just two years later, but things had begun to change in his mind. He closed off that trajectory of his theological career with that trilogy and began work on a six-book cycle. Here’s what he wrote about that change in 1990:

Always using the same method leads to rigidity on the part of the author and to weariness in the reader. It also became clear to me between 1975 and 1980 that I personally could not authentically frame a “theology in context” and a “theology in movement” (liberation theology, black theology, feminist theology), for I am not living in the Third World, am not oppressed, and am not a woman. In those years, I tried as best I could to let the voices of silenced men and women be heard in the world too — the world in which I myself live. I initiated translations and provided them with commendatory prefaces. I wrote essays supporting liberation theology and feminist theology, African theology and Korean Minjung theology. But all this did not blind me to the fact that my life and my context are not theirs. So for my own work, I entered into a certain self-critical disengagement and began to write my “systematic contributions to theology.”

Moltmann’s subsequent theology is no less liberatory in its message, but it does take a different tack toward the subject.

Part Two: Liberation

Key to my understanding of this primary theme of the gospel is Jesus’ inaugural sermon, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke:

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

It seems very clear that, in Luke’s telling, Jesus is setting the course for his ministry as that of emancipatory proclamation and action. That’s what Jesus is about: telling people that they are free of the things that bind them, and actually freeing them of the things that bind them. Luke’s Gospel — more than any other — goes on to explicate this theme of liberation both in the teachings of Jesus, and of his interactions with others, including his healing miracles.

Throughout the history of the church, people have found liberation in the message of the gospel. Some of that is proclamatory liberation: people are reminded that they are not actually bound by the things that they think bind them. To proclaim “release to the captives,” does not mean to free prisoners from prison. I’ve preached several times in Minnesota’s largest prison, and to proclaim the liberating gospel to those prisoners is to tell them — remind them, actually — that the walls and bars and concertina wire and guards cannot keep them from experiencing freedom in Christ.

Sometimes, however, the gospel is material liberation: we work to free people from those things that are actually oppressing them. That might be oppressive poverty, an abusive relationship, or an addiction to gambling, pornography, or drugs. We work to make our government more fair, or we travel overseas to feed people, to be witnesses for peace, and to be sure that women can vote unhindered. Each of these is an act of material liberation, consonant with the liberating gospel.

Part Three: Marrying Context and Liberation

My life isn’t that dissimilar to Jürgen Moltmann’s — the relative ease and wealth of a white, Western, male scholar. I would be hard-pressed to come up with anything that is materially oppressing me. Nevertheless, the liberative power of the gospel needs to be something I both proclaim and activate.

While in seminary, I read Gutierrez and Cone; during my PhD, hooks and Friere. Like Moltmann and others, I have struggled with how to implement these radical visions, which I find so much more compelling than most theologies, into my own life. I was helped a great deal in that when a friend in seminary gave me a book for graduation: The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul. Ellul, too, calls upon Christians to be a radical presence in the world. But the most helpful part of that book for me is that he makes clear that each of us should use the avenues of power given to us to affect the liberation of others. Indeed, to abdicate those avenues of power is itself a sin.

Whether or not I’m doing that, I suppose, is a judgment best left to God.

Today’s the last day of my Twible project, which I can scarcely believe. When I first started this in 2009, I was daunted to discover that there are 1,189 chapters of the Bible. (Did we know this?) That meant 1,189 days of my life doled out in tweets.

But [kairos] time flies, so this week finds me putting the finishing touches on the trippy Book of Revelation:

#Twible Rev 19: Time for the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. (Just so we’re clear, lamb is not what’s on the menu. It’s kind of a metaphor.)

#Twible Rev 20: Satan’s bound for 1,000 years, then hurled into the Lake of Fire & Brimstone for 24/7 torment. Talk about your just deserts.

Kudos, Jana!!!

This question comes from Mark — you can submit your questions here – and it’s one that’s trickier than it might seem at first blush:

Hi Tony, I just recently discovered you, and thankful to do so. I appreciate the way you think! As an aside, in one of your threads, you brushed upon the gender of God. (Holy Spirit was feminine.) I think it would be of great value, to discuss the entire issue of “the intrinsic gender(s) of the Divine.” Any thoughts, or comments?

You respond in the comments. I’ll respond on Friday. See all of the past questions and answers here.

I spent a lot of time sitting quietly in the woods this weekend, waiting to shoot a wild turkey who never arrived — he just gobbled at me from behind some trees, mocking my attempt to plate him. So I had a lot of time to think.

Then, I ran my ideas for a blog response to last week’s kerfuffle by Courtney, who had been out of town all weekend, and she gently told me that they were all bad ideas.

As an Enneagram 8, my overriding desire is always always always for justice. Justice for others, justice for me. In years past, I became incredibly morose over the injustices in the Family Court System during my divorce — in fact, in Minnesota it’s called the “Family Justice System,” but my therapist told me to stop calling it that because it’s not really about justice, at least not in the sense that I understand it. (That therapist also refers to me as the “Big Boy Scout” for some of the same reasons.)

What felt unjust to me last week and over the weekend is that I felt unjustly accused, and I felt that I was not heard. David Miller, a frequent critic of mine, wonders the same thing in a less-than-totally-affirming post (that I nevertheless encourage you to read). But Courtney convinced me that spilling more pixels trying to make everyone understand that I really am quite aware of my privilege and my social location won’t help.

So, I am instead going to respond to the heart of Dr. Cleveland’s objection to my talk in Springfield last month: that claiming one version of the gospel is preferable to another version is necessarily exclusionary of diverse voices.

For years I have refused to answer the question, What is the gospel? I’ve been asked that question hundreds of times, since my first book came out. Back in those days, evangelical youth pastors would become absolutely apoplectic when I’d say, “I don’t need to answer that question; just read your Bible,” or, “If Jesus didn’t feel the need to sum up the gospel in a pithy maxim, then I don’t either.”

To answer that question is to foreclose dialogue, and my entire theological career is bent on opening dialogue whenever possible — even catalyzing dialogue through provocation.

Nevertheless, some have asked if I assumed too much when, at Subverting the Norm 2, I asserted, “We have a better version of the gospel than the regnant view in the West.” So, later this week (on Wednesday and Thursday), I will post on the two major themes in my understanding of the gospel: liberation and reconciliation. These two ideas, I am convinced, lie at the heart of the gospel.

But before I write those posts, some prolegomena:

The Medium Matters: A blog post is not a book. They are different media, and should be understood and interpreted differently (just as a talk at a conference should). This is why I sometimes ask my fiercest critics on Twitter which books of mine they’ve read. In a book-length work, an author has the opportunity to work through an idea much more thoroughly. My books also tend to be written with a different voice — one that is more circumspect and less, um, prickly.

I will be painting in broad strokes. I’m reticent to write definitively about the gospel for the reasons above. Nevertheless, I’m going to attempt it, and to attempt it in a way that will create openings for others to debate my thoughts on their merits. If you have a stake in the argument about What Is the Gospel? — which most readers of this blog undoubtedly do — then I hope you will be involved in the ensuing conversation.

I am writing a book on the heart of the gospel. My current book project is on the reason for and efficacy of the crucifixion of Jesus — what theologians call the “atonement.” It’s going to be about 85,000 words. The blog posts are going to be about 1,000 words each. See the difference?

Finally, I appreciate much of the commentary around last week’s post. Did I communicate my thoughts perfectly? No. Was I too defensive, or too aggressive? Probably. But please know that there are private channels of communication, too, so reading a couple blog posts and the related commentary is not the entirety of the picture. And please know that, even when I push back on your comments and ideas, I am always listening and learning — debating is how I learn.

As always, thanks for reading.

All this week, animate.faith is the focus of the Patheos Book Club. It’s a product that I worked on and am proud of. All week, you can read other bloggers’ reviews of it, see interviews with Paul Soupiset and me, and download a sample. Check it out!

This week, Andrew asked us to consider the claims of divinity that are attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel:

In the Gospel of John, Jesus makes many confident self-proclamations (conservative Evangelical’s favorite verses which seemingly demonstrates the exclusivity of Jesus). Now, I’m sure that claiming to be God in 1st century Judiasm is a really big deal; however, how is it that none of these self-proclamations make it into any of the synoptic gospels? Is it possible that Jesus never made these self-proclamations? If not, how does this effect our understanding of Trinitarian theology in the gospel accounts?

There’s been a very robust conversation about this post, and I encourage you to read it. In the 1,000 words I afford myself on these responses, I simply cannot reprise all of those arguments.

First, in case you are new to this kind of question, here’s the background. Most reputable scholars think this about the four Gospels:

• Mark came first, probably in the late 50s or early 60s.
• Matthew and Luke were both written in the mid- to late-60s. They both use Mark as a source, a source that scholars refer to as “Q,” and their own source material.
• John comes much later — probably in the mid-90s — and uses mostly unique material.

Here’s how the four Gospels look in somewhat twisted mind of Paul Soupiset, as I asked him to make a Venn Diagram of the overlaps for the next Animate course:

It’s generally acknowledged that John, coming so late and having so much unique material, reflects the theology of a more evolved church than do the three synoptic Gospels. And the theology in the Fourth Gospel supports this conclusion. Whereas the Synoptics portray a more earthy Jesus — more of a peripatetic rabbi — the Fourth Gospel gives us a cosmic Christ, more interested in teaching than healing. In fact, almost half the John’s Gospel takes place on a single day, with Jesus giving his most esoteric teachings.

Among skeptical scholars, like Bart Ehrman, the assumption is always the same: the later the writing, the less accurate it is. But let’s think about that for a minute. It’s estimated that about 15,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln. Are you willing to say that a book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin in 2005 is less accurate than the magisterial 1917 biography of Lincoln by Lord Charnwood?

Is older always more accurate? Obviously, the answer is no. So, while we need to acknowledge the relative lateness of the Gospel of John, that in no way sentences it as a compendium of inaccuracies and theologizing.

But, for the sake of Andrew’s question, let’s assume that the claims of divinity that come out of Jesus’ mouth in the Fourth Gospel were put there by the late-first-century church, but were never actually iterated by Jesus of Nazareth.

As a case study on this kind of thing, we can look at the post-resurrection appearances in the Gospel of Mark, or the story of Jesus with the woman caught in adultery in John. Both of these are missing from the oldest extant manuscripts. That could mean that they were missed upon transcription and that, if we were to find older manuscripts, they be in them. But it seems more likely that they’re later additions, which is what most scholars assume. Then you’re left with the dilemma that someone added them to make the book more theologically palatable to a later reader — or that they were original stories that were somehow missed by the original compilers.

Again, you see that we’ve got dilemma on top of dilemma. At each fork in the road, you can pretty much guess which way a guy like Bart Ehrman is going to turn, just like you can pretty much guess what road a professor at an evangelical seminary is going choose.

The point at hand in Andrew’s question is that in the Synoptics, Jesus primarily refers to himself as the “Son of Man,” a title that did not imply divinity. In John, he’s more likely to call himself the “Son of God,” which, at least to modern ears, sounds like a claim of divinity — scholars debate this point, noting that it’s a title that’s used in the Hebrew Bible (for example, Genesis 6:2); in other words, it’s not unique to Jesus.

There are other instances in the Fourth Gospel that leads to its higher Christology. It’s in John where Jesus refers to himself as:

• “the bread of life”
• “the light of the world”
• “the gate of the sheep”
• “the good shepherd”
• “the resurrection and the life”
• “the way, the truth, and the life”
• “the real vine”

Each of these, and other statements, implies that Jesus has a special relationship with God. But it’s hard for us to get our mind around first century notions of divinity. (For those who want further reading on this topic by NT Wright, see here. HT: Andrew Mason.)

Anyway, that’s a lot of talk about the historicity of the Fourth Gospel. The fact is that anyone who’s a Christian and considers the Bible authoritative has to put a lot of faith in God’s providential hand. The canon wasn’t closed until three centuries after Jesus — that’s 18 generations of people after Jesus. That’s a lot of people to mess with things, edit stories, and update theology. If you consider the Bible a sacred text and authoritative in your life and the life of the church, you don’t necessarily need to overlook the complicated history of the canon, but you’ve probably got to put some trust in God for directing canonization in spite of its messiness.

Finally, this. The prologue to John’s Gospel is not only one of the most lyrically beautiful pieces of theology in the Bible, it’s one of the best ever written. And it’s from that prologue that we get the core of our belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, and the resulting and admittedly later doctrine of the Trinity. As I’ve argued here before, I appreciate the aesthetics of theology — I think that if something is beautiful, it’s more likely to be true. Thus, the prologue of John, universally acclaimed as a beautiful hymn to the divinity of Christ, has a particular claim on truth. (This is just the opposite from Ehrman, who argues that if something seems in keeping with later theology, it is less likely to be true.)

And I do not think that something that is later is less likely to be true. In fact, I think that something later is probably more likely to be true. Therefore, I have no problem with Jesus’ claims of divinity in the Fourth Gospel, whether or not he ever said them.

See all of the past questions and answers here, and submit your own here.