Introduction
This article is written primarily for Muslims interested in understanding the rationale behind Christian belief in the divinity of Christ. In my experience, this is one of the most difficult facets of Christian faith for Muslims to grasp, perhaps because Muslims also hold to definitive teachings about Jesus Christ. These agree with the Christian position in some ways but are radically opposed to it in others. In particular, the Quran is unequivocal in teaching that Jesus is not God, (5:72) that he is not in any sense the Son of God (4:171), and that even referring to him as the Son of God is a grievous departure from truth. (9:30) On the other hand, it is incontestable that belief in the divinity of Jesus, including the assertion that he is the Son of God (appropriately understood), is central to Christianity.
It is perhaps a little less clear exactly what positive assertions about Jesus the Quran endorses. In many verses, Jesus is described as a messenger of God, and even as “only a messenger.” (5:75) However, in a partial account of the annunciation to Mary, he is also described as “a word from him [God]” (3:45); this phrase recurs in 4:171: “. . . Christ the son of Mary is a messenger of God, and his word which he cast on Mary, and a spirit from him.” An obvious question then arises: if Jesus is “only a messenger”, then what could it mean for him to be God’s word (or even a word from God?) The goal here is not to discredit Islam or the text of the Quran. It is rather to show that Christianity offers a coherent explanation of how Jesus is not only a messenger of God and his Word, but also the Son of God and God himself, all in a manner consistent with the data of the Old and New Testaments. Many terms need to be defined and explained (at least at some level), so much of this article will be devoted to providing the necessary background.
One element notably absent from the preceding discussion yet central to the Christian message is that Jesus is also the Messiah, the Redeemer of Israel prophesied in the Old Testament. This very important facet of his identity provides a crucial link between the Old and New Testaments. It deserves an article of its own, so it will not be explored in depth here. In the interest of focusing attention on a single theme, this article will only discuss Messianic motifs in connection with the question of the divinity of Christ.
The Judaeo-Christian model of progressive revelation
Muslims tend to be more comfortable with the Old Testament than the New, perhaps because they perceive the theology of the Old Testament to be closer to their own. They view verses like Deuteronomy 6:5 (“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone”) or Isaiah 45:18 (“I am the Lord, and there is no other”) as supportive of their own unipersonal understanding of God and even use them in arguments against the deity of Jesus. The predominant view of New Testament theology among Muslims is that it is as an innovation out of line with the doctrine of the Old Testament. They use this perceived incongruity as evidence for the position that God later sent the Quran to clarify the truth following the corruption of earlier revelations. Muslim readers, therefore, may be surprised to learn that Christians can provide a robust defense of their position that draws from both the Old and New Testaments and moreover illuminates the consonance between the two.
As explained in a previous article, Christians view revelation as progressive: God does not reveal all essential truth at once, but rather chooses points within human history in which to promulgate his message. Revelation is also cumulative, in the sense that it builds on itself to form a consistent whole, and reaches its fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ. The point of mentioning these facts now is to emphasize that an authentic Christian understanding of scripture must be internally consistent. Having decided on an interpretation of some passage from Exodus, one cannot adopt an interpretation of the Gospel of John that is at variance with it, or vice versa. Furthemore, because the Bible is not self-interpreting, Christians – at least, Catholic and Orthodox Christians – rely on the Church to interpret the text of the Bible. The Church’s understanding of sacred scripture grows and develops over time through the effort of many individuals, but it never contradicts itself. (To be clear, individuals within the Church may offer their own interpretation of elements within the Bible, and some of those are at variance with each other. However, the interpretation adopted by the Church as a whole – which is necessarily conservative and avoids speculation on matters that are less than clear – is free of such contradictions.) Particular rules for human conduct may vary as circumstances change, but the principles proceeding from eternal truth remain constant.
Muslim readers may well be skeptical of the claim that one ought to defer to any group of people for the interpretation of God’s revelation. They may also find little value in considering the Church’s understanding of the Bible because God has already corrected it in the revelation of the Quran. I am not asking those readers to abandon their faith, but only to consider the vantage-point of a observer from the sixth century, when the Church was already well-estabished but the Quran had not yet come on the scene, and to ask this question: is the Church’s understanding of the Bible – which was substantially the same then as it is now – coherent and internally consistent? In other words, if we consider only the content of the Church’s reflection and not its source, is that content more likely the result of purely human effort or is it more likely to have been divinely inspired? Perhaps in a later article we can take up the (very relevant) question of whether or not the Church really has any authority to interpret scripture, or if the Church ought even to exist as a human institution.
Muslims and Christians both agree that God is Truth. This means that every instance of God’s self-revelation is expressed in truth. If both the Old Testament and the New Testament are his revelation, then no passage of the New Testament is more or less true than any passage from the Old Testament. Nevertheless, owing to the logic of the process, older revelations are more fundamental than new ones, in the sense that the truth of newer revelations builds on and adds to the truth of older ones. For example, Deuteronomy 6:5 and Isaiah 45:18, the verses referenced several paragraphs ago, assert unequivocally that God is one and there is no other god. No amount of exegetical gymnastics can lead to another conclusion. Therefore, the truth of the unity of God must undergird all understanding of later revelation. Yet this is precisely the obstacle Muslims find the greatest difficulty in overcoming: how can doctrine like the divinity of Christ, which Christians claim is grounded in the New Testament, be consistent with the unity of God? Where is the rationale for it in the Old Testament?
God’s revelation: from open to hidden
If someone asked you to rank God’s mighty acts in the Old Testament in order of impressiveness, the Exodus and the events surrounding it would likely rise to the top of the list. It is hard to imagine anything more stunning than the miracles Moses performed for Pharaoh, the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the manna in the wilderness, and the smoke and lightning on Mt. Sinai. Indeed, after seeing so many explicit signs from God, one wonders how an entire people could be so stupid as to worship a golden calf made by human hands.
What we tend to forget is that the Israelites had been living in Egypt for hundreds of years, and had lived there for decades (at least) as slaves. They did not have access to the fullness of divine revelation that we now possess, so they needed an explicit display of God’s power in order to learn who he was and so place their trust in him. Once the Israelites reached the promised land and developed some measure of faith in him, the miracles became less numerous and less showy. Instead of a smoking mountain, one sees sacrifices consumed by fire; rather than an entire population struck with disease, individuals are healed. More often than not, the primary purpose of these (later) miraculous occurrences is to authenticate the credentials of the person performing them rather than as a display of raw power. The number of witnesses to them also seems to be smaller. Why the change?
The change came about because God works “from the outside in.” On the journey from Egypt to Sinai, he began by focusing on externals. He drew the Israelites’ attention to himself through extraordinary displays of power and gave them explicit laws to regular their external conduct. But as history progresses through the Old Testament era and into New Testament times, one notices that God starts to turn his people’s attention inward: instead of performing big miracles, the prophets urge – through their preaching – interior conversion of the individual soul. This interior conversion requires something more compelling than acts perceptible by the senses. The primary vehicle God uses for this conversion is his word. How do we know this? One sign was just mentioned: God calls people to him through the preaching of the prophets. Preaching is simply the word of God proclaimed in human speech. Humans are intellectual beings, so it is natural that the most important communications we receive – both from each other and from God – should take the form of words. Another indication is found in an episode from 1 Kings 19:11-13, in which Elijah, hounded by the idolatrous King Ahab, is sent by God to a cave on Mt. Horeb, another name for Mt. Sinai. God tells Elijah that he is going to pass by. Elijah experiences a great wind, so strong as to break mountains and rocks, but God is not in the wind. He then experiences an earthquake and a fire, but God is not in either of them. Finally, there is a “sound of sheer silence.” Elijah somehow knows to move to the entrance of the cave, and it is then that God speaks to him in words. The lesson here is that God comes to us in his Word. One cannot hear silence with one’s ears, but yet in silence the Word of God comes. Needless to say, this is very different from the smoke and lightning the Israelites witnessed on the same mountain centuries before, when God ratified his covenant with them. Thus, we see that communication from God – in other words, revelation – often does not the assume the form we might consider the clearest and most explicit.
Jesus’ divinity proclaimed in parables
We now turn to the question of Jesus’ divinity. On what evidence does it rest? In the Gospels, Jesus often sounds deliberately vague and sometimes even evasive when questioned about his identity. “How long will you keep us in suspense?” his Jewish interlocutors ask, “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus responds: “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me, but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.” (John 10:24-30) As the proverb goes, actions speak louder than words. Jesus’ point is that he does not need to state explicitly that he is the Messiah; his works give a far more compelling testimony to that claim. And when he does get explicit with his listeners and asserts that he and the Father (i.e. God) “are one,” their response is to stone him. (John 10:31) Jesus often has to deal with people who find his claims incredulous, because – whether due to pride, stubbornness, or greed – their hearts are not truly disposed to received God’s revelation; yet he must still proclaim the Gospel to them. Which, then, is the more effective strategy: to speak in parables and symbols whose depths can only be plumbed after considerable pondering and prayer, or to come out and declare openly: “I am the Son of God and the Messiah foretold by the prophets. Believe in me, or else you’re going to hell.”? The facts of the message are the same in both cases, but only the first approach communicates God’s care for his people and has the potential to effect a lasting conversion of heart. Indeed, when asked why he spoke in parables, Jesus quotes Isaiah (speaking of the people of Israel): ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn — and I would heal them.’ (Matt 13: 14-15, cf. Isaiah 6: 9-10)
Jesus’ divinity proclaimed in action
Given that Jesus proclaims his message in deeds as well as words, one might well ask: if Jesus really is God, how (if at all) does he communicate that in his actions? There are in fact many episodes from the Gospels in which he acts thus, although recognizing them requires a degree of acquaintance with Jewish customs that the first readers of the Gospels would undoubtedly have had, but is perhaps lacking to modern readers of Gentile stock. One such episode occurs in Luke 4:14-20, in which Jesus, returning to Galilee after forty days in the desert, enters a synagogue on the Sabbath and reads from the scroll of Isaiah. When he is finished, he sits down and addresses the assembly, telling them “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Lk 4:21) Sitting down is a sign of authority, but the people cannot identify how Jesus acquired his authority. He was not only claiming that a prophecy from Isaiah was fulfilled that day, but that it was fulfilled in him! The people are amazed: Jesus did not have a scholarly pedigree; he was not taught by the leading rabbinical scholars of the time. They ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” (Lk 4:22) His claim to authority seems to come out of nowhere.
The way Jesus works miracles and healings also differs significantly from those performed by Old Testament figures. Moses also wrought miracles for Pharaoh, but he was specifically instructed by God to do so. We also know that the prophets Elijah (1 Kings 17) and Elisha (2 Kings 4) brought recently deceased people back to life, but in both cases they prayed to God before performing the act. Jesus, on the other hand, simply performs these works, sometimes on people who just happen to be in his path. (The one time a miracle is preceded by prayer is the raising of Lazarus in John 11; however, the prayer is primarily one of thanksgiving and is definitely not for the power to perform the miracle.) Now consider healing of the deaf and mute man in Mark 7: 31-35. Observe that the text indicates that following the healing, the man was able to speak clearly without any additional instruction. Thus, the healing was not only physical but also mental. All of these factors point to Jesus’ acting with independent authority, not as someone deputized or authorized by God to perform extraordinary acts.
It is well-known that one of the Ten Commandments is to observe the Sabbath. Yet, there are episodes in the Gospels where Jesus, a Jew, seems on the surface to be flouting this commandment. On one such Sabbath. Jesus heals a man who had been ill for 38 years and tells him, “Rise up, take up your pallet, and walk.” (John 5:1-9) Jesus’ opponents immediately pounce on the healed man, chastising him for violating the Sabbath by carrying his pallet. When the man points out that Jesus told him to carry it, they go after Jesus for dishonoring the Sabbath. Jesus’ response to them is telling: “My Father is working still, and I am working.” (John 5:17) His point is that the Sabbath was made for humans; God does not stop his “work” of sustaining the universe on the Sabbath. Yet Jesus also identifies himself in that work. John (the Evangelist) makes clear his interpretation of this exchange in the following verse: “This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God.” (John 5:18) This is not simply John claiming that Jesus is God; it is John pointing to Jesus’ words and his deeds as clearly reflecting his divinity. A similar exchange is recounted in Mark 2: 27-28, when Jesus says: “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” The Son of Man must therefore hold an authority higher than that of man.
Who is the Good Shepherd?
There are many passages in the Old Testament in which God likens himself to a shepherd and Israel to his flock. One of the most prominent among these is Ezekiel 34, which begins with God chastising the shepherds (i.e. leaders) of Israel for exploiting the sheep (people) rather than caring for them, and identifying himself as the true shepherd who cares for them. Later in the passage, God declares: “I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken.” (Ez 34:23-24) In these verses, “David” refers to the Messiah awaited by Israel, who in other places is called the “Son of David.” (It could not possibly refer to the actual King David, since the Book of Ezekiel was written around four hundred years after David’s reign.)
Jesus applies the title of Good Shepherd to himself, explicitly in his famous discourse reported in John 10:1-19, but also obliquely in the parable of the lost sheep (see Matthew 18: 10-14 and Luke 15:3-7.) A careful reading of these passages reveals an undeniable similarity between Jesus’ language and that of Ezekiel 34. There is no doubt that he is drawing his listeners’ attention to that prophecy. It is even more striking that, while Ezekiel 34 identifies both God and the Messiah as shepherds, the language Jesus applies to himself aligns very closely with that used by God in Ezekiel 34 to describe himself. Here again we see Jesus exhibiting his divinity without declaring it openly.
Son and Word
Having seen scriptural evidence for the divinity of Christ, we now turn to another question that often puzzles Muslims. If the divine figure of the Old Testament who talked to Moses is God, then how can Jesus Christ also be God? Perhaps the best way to understand how is this possible is to ponder an analogy with human thinking originally proposed by St. Augustine. To prepare for this, we need a bit of philosophy. It is a central assumption of classical philosophy (and, one might say, common sense) that no entity can be its own cause; in other words, no entity can bring itself into existence. Another important assumption is that the effects of any cause cannot be greater than the cause itself. For instance, humans cannot create something greater than themselves. (Speculation about Artificial Intelligence robots taking over humanity is fantastical nonsense.) Humans, in particular, are distinguished from all other terrestrial creatures in having an intellect and a will. Both Muslims and Christians believe that God has endowed us with freedom to use these to make decisions on our own. But what or who caused our intellect and will? The ultimate cause of our intellect and will is God himself; therefore, God must have something like an intellect and a will. (Muslim readers in doubt about this last point should recall that Quran explicitly references the will of God. Even though the Quran may not use the word “intellect”, it certainly characterizes God as the judge of humanity, and judgment is an act of the intellect.) Of course, God is a perfect being and we are far from perfect, so our intellect and will are only pale reflections of his. Nevertheless, the point is that God is in a sense actively “thinking” and “willing”. This sort of language needs to be qualified appropriately so that our imagination does not run away with an incorrect interpretation. As the creator of time, God dwells outside time, so he does not think about things the way we do before resolving to do something. His intellect comprehends everything in an instant, and yet he is not static. As both the Quran (2:255) and the Bible (Ps 42:2) attest, God is living; he is in fact the source of all life. His intellection is but one aspect of his being the “living” God.
Before proceeding with the discussion, a word of caution is in order. In the following argument, the words “person” and “nature” are used in a precise philosophical sense, not in a colloquial sense. The twentieth-century Catholic author Frank Sheed gives a nice definition of the terms person and nature, free of philosophical jargon: “The person is that which does the actions, the nature is that by which the actions are done, or better, that from which the actions are drawn.”¹ Imagine a (human) person who thinks about herself. Within her mind, an image of herself forms. It is not a perfect image, because she does not know everything about herself. It may even be a distorted image, but it nevertheless reflects her own understanding of herself. Now imagine God thinking about himself. He, too, conceives an image of himself in his “mind”, but it is a perfect image. It reflects everything about himself because God, being perfect, understands himself perfectly. Since God is a person, this perfect image is also a person. On one hand, the image is not a creation, since it is conceived by and within God’s own being; moreover, because God is unique and absolutely simple (i.e. he does not have parts or components), this image must itself be God. On the other hand, the person who is the subject of that act of intellection is not the same person (the “perfect image” referred to above) who is the object of that act. When Christians refer to God as the subject of his act of intellection, they are referring to the person of the Father. When Christians refer to God as the object of his act of intellection, they are referring to the person of the Son. Both are God in that they share a common nature, but they are distinct persons. (In the interest of brevity, we will postpone discussion of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, to another article.) There are at least two reasons for using the terms “Father” and “Son”, both of which come from analogies with the natural world. The first is that the act of conceiving a thought in one’s mind is analogous to the conception of a baby in the mother’s womb. The second is that there is a certain resemblance between a (natural) father and his son. In the theological context of God thinking about himself, the resemblance between the Father and the Son is perfect; this is why scripture refers to the Son as the image of the Father. (cf. Heb 1:3)
One more comment is in order. The Son, as the conception of the Father in the divine mind, is also called the Word, again by analogy with the operation of the human mind. (In Greek, the term is logos, which connotes not only the written or spoken word, but also a message or account.) Thus, John the Evangelist uses the epithets “Son” and “Word” interchangeably in the first chapter of his Gospel.
In view of the analogy just described, why does the Bible use the phrase “Son of God” rather than “Son of the Father”? Although the latter would probably be more appropriate in the language of modern Christian theology, the early readers of the New Testament were Jews who had come to know God in the person of the Father, as he had revealed himself in the Old Testament. The Old Testament does not use the term “Father” in reference to God, at least not in the same sense that it is used in the New Testament, and it is not hard to understand why. If God had decided to refer to himself as “the Father”, people would have asked: “Whose father are you?” Prior to the revelation of the Son, this nomenclature would have made little sense, so the older usage persisted even into the early New Testament era. Therefore, in both the Old and the New Testaments, “God” in reference to a person usually means “the Father”, hence the phrase “Son of God”.
Putting it all together
We are now in a position to tie together all that has been discussed. The Prologue (first chapter) of the Gospel of John begins with exactly the same words as Genesis 1: “In the beginning”. While Genesis 1 goes back to the creation of the natural world, John 1 goes back even further and describes God in his essence: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3) Thus, we see that the Word was with God from the beginning: he is not part of creation, but is God. The last sentence expresses the relation of the Word to creation: God creates through his Word. The notion of God creating through his Word is not at all foreign to the Quran: “[He is] the Originator of the heavens and the earth. And when he decrees a matter, he simply tells it, ‘Be,’ and it is.” (2:117) However, John’s most striking claim comes later in the prologue: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) John is relating that the Word became flesh (i.e. took on a human nature) and dwelt as a man among men. His glory is “as of a father’s only son”: as the eternal Son of the eternal Father, the glory he radiates, even in his assumed humanity, is the very glory of God. Finally, why was it so important that the Word should become flesh? John tells us in verse 18: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” This means that Jesus the incarnate Son, the Word, reveals the Father to us. Just as words are the principal means by which human beings reveal themselves to us, so it is also with God: revelation comes through his Word.
The last point is often a source of difficulty for Muslims. Many of them claim that they can know God directly, without any need for an intermediary. Yet this claim is not entirely valid: these people must have come to know God through some medium of revelation. Most likely it was through the Quran, which they believe to be his word, and which even from the perspective of a Christian contains elements of truth about God. Or perhaps they encountered God through prayer. Regardless, the only way any human – Muslim, Christian, or otherwise – can know God is if he reveals himself to them in some form they are capable of grasping. The Christian doctrine that the Son reveals the Father to us is expressing the same thought, but in theological language. The sense in which Jesus is an intermediary (or a mediator, to use the language of the Bible) is that he “bridges” the gap between God and man. Jesus is not a third party standing between man and God. In his divine essence he is God, and by his assumption of a human body and soul at the Incarnation he is also man.
Conclusion
John the Evangelist makes a number of profound theological assertions in the prologue to his Gospel. Using the framework developed by St. Augustine, we have seen that the object of God’s act of self-contemplation (intellection) is the perfect image of himself. Therefore, that image must be God, but – as the object of the action – a person distinct from its subject. The subject we call the Father, and the object the Son (or the Word). Perhaps John’s greatest claim is that the Word became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. This claim is amply supported by the life, sayings, and acts of Jesus as recorded in Gospels, and provides the basis for Christian doctrine that has persisted, unchanged in substance, for nearly two millennia.
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¹Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity (London: Catholic Way Publishing, 2019), 98.
