God — who died out of love for us

In Passion Week, God dies for us. Graham Sutherland's Crucifixion 

New Testament writings scream out that Jesus is God, if one is prepared to accept the message the written word seeks to convey. An accidental crossing of paths with the outfit called Spirit and Truth, which has created its own Bible version, drew my attention anew to the number of "Christian" outfits that have gone their own way and believe neither that Jesus is both man and God, two natures in the one person, nor in the existence of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, three persons in the one Godhead.  

Local churches or groups like Spirit and Truth celebrate their modern-day exegetical brilliance but, in fact, are merely harking back to the theories espoused by Alexandrian priest Arius (died 336) that the Council of Nicaea of 325 condemned as not part of the deposit of teaching of the Apostles. Typical of the Unitarian brand of Protestantism, which, as a whole, labors under the burden of sola scriptura, where everyone wants to be their own rabbi, as Luther himself put it, is this from Spirit and Truth:

GOD 

Yahweh our heavenly father alone is God. He is loving, kind, good, just, merciful, faithful, and righteous.

JESUS

The son of God and Messiah whom God made Lord over all. He was born of the virgin Mary and did not personally exist prior to his birth. He lived a sinless life, and through his sacrificial death on the cross, he atoned for sin and inaugurated a new covenant.

HOLY SPIRIT

One of God’s many titles in Scripture is the Holy Spirit. Scripture also uses “holy spirit” to describe God’s gift to all who believe. The holy spirit unites believers together as his people in Christ. Believers with God’s holy spirit can demonstrate that spirit in a variety of ways to show the power and presence of God in them as God inspires and energizes them.

I'm not going to give a link to this group because its distance from the apostolic deposit of what Christians belief is so great, and its exegesis is so wayward. I'm using it somewhat as a strawman. As one writer put it:

The Bible very seldom says in so many words “Jesus Christ is God” [cf. John 1:1, Matt11:27, Matt 16:16, John 20:28]. For the most part, we have to be willing to follow the implications of the language to see what the authors are really saying.

It’s possible, of course, to try to avoid the implications of this language by reinterpreting titles such as “Son of God,” “Lord” and so forth to refer to something other than divinity. Arian-type sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons do it all the time.

To dwell a little on the gospels' language referring to Jesus, the divine person – Jesus is not a human person, though he has both human and divine natures; his humanity was united to the divinity of the pre-existing God the Son, and God did not change.

Spirit and Truth uses Matthew's account of Jesus before the Sanhedrin as a proof that Jesus is not God. According to that group's perspective, the high priest was convulsed with anger at Jesus' response because Jesus claimed to be the messiah.

However, it is clear the text shows that it was the subsequent statement that the Sanhedrin would "see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power" and  "coming on the clouds of heaven" that drew the dramatic rending of garments and loud condemnation of Jesus as a blasphemer.

As the Jerusalem Bible states in its footnotes at this point, "the blasphemy lay not in Jesus' claim to be the Messiah but in his claim to divine rank". It explains why this is so: 

"The Power" is equivalent to "Yahweh". At this critical moment Jesus abandons his policy of "messianic secret" (cf. Mk 1:34), and unequivocally acknowledges – as he had already acknowledged to his intimates (Matt 16:16) – that he is the Messiah. But he goes further and reveals himself not as the human Messiah of traditional expectation but as the Lord of Psalm 110 (cf. Matt 22:41 fol), and the mysterious personage of heavenly origin whom Daniel had seen in vision (Matt 8:20). Henceforth the Jews will not see him except in his glory which will be manifested first in the victory of the resurrection and subsequently in the victory of the Church (cf. Matt 23:39 and 24:30).

Scripture scholar Raymond Brown (died 1998), not always a stalwart of moderate biblical readings, all the same gives a valuable overall view of how the Church's historical insight into the ontological (concerning being) reality of Jesus is crucial to understanding God's love for human beings. He writes in An Introduction to New Testament Christology (1994):

If Jesus is not "true God of true God", then we do not know God in human terms. Even if Jesus were the most perfect creature far above all others, he could tell us only at second hand about a God who really remains almost as distant as the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle. Only if Jesus is truly God do we know what God is like, for in Jesus we see God translated into terms we can understand. A God who sent a marvelous creature as our savior could be described as loving, but that love would have cost God nothing in a personal way.

Only if Jesus is truly of God do we know that God's love is so real that it reached the point of self-giving. This is why the proclamation of Nicaea was and is so important — not only because it tells us about Jesus, but because it tells us about God. Indeed, were it otherwise, the Nicene proclamation would scarcely be faithful to a Jesus who preached the kingship of God.

So also  the proclamation of Chalcedon about Jesus as true man (as well as true God) has enduring value, even for those who cannot pronounce Monophysitism*. Again, unless we understand that Jesus was truly human with no exception but sin, we cannot comprehend the depth of God's love. If Jesus' knowledge was limited, as indicated prima facie in the biblical evidence, then God loved us to the point of self-subjection to our most agonizing infirmities. 

A Jesus who walked through the world with unlimited knowledge, knowing exactly what the morrow would bring, knowing with certainty that three days after his death his Father would raise him up, would be a Jesus who could arouse our admiration, but a Jesus still far from us. He would be a Jesus far from a humankind that can only hope [as to] the future and believe in God's goodness, far from a humankind that must face the supreme uncertainty of death with faith but without knowledge of what is beyond.

On the other hand, a Jesus for whom the detailed future had elements of mystery, dread, and hope as it has for us and yet, at the same time, a Jesus who would say, "Not my will but yours"— this would be a Jesus who could effectively teach us how to live, for this Jesus would have gone through life's real trials.

Then his saying, "No one can have greater love than this: to lay down his life for those he loves" (John 15:13), would be truly persuasive, for we know he laid down his life with all the agony with which we lay ours down. We would know that for him the loss of life was, as it is for us, the loss of a great possession, a possession that is outranked only by love.

In the 4th and 5th centuries the question of Jesus as God and man was not an abstract question debated in the scholars' chambers; it was a question of what God and Christianity were all about.  

* This is the thesis condemned as heresy that Jesus had only a divine nature, not two, namely, human and divine.

To conclude, but staying with Brown's understanding of who Jesus Christ is arising from his exegetical research, we can come to know God in his essence because of the revelation of the life of God that Jesus reveals. Brown writes in the text cited above:

For John, Jesus' previous existence with God is more than a creedal dogma; it is the linchpin in understanding the whole Christian life. 

A human child gets life from a father and mother and has the same kind of life that they have. The divine Son has the same kind of life that the Father has, and so Jesus not only brings a word to be believed but embodies a life to be shared. We may sum up Johannine christology in these words of Jesus (6:57):

Just as the Father who has life has sent me,
and I have life because of the Father,
so the person who feeds on me
will have life because of me.

 What a future awaits us! The nature of the transformation of our entering into his own divine life that Jesus speaks of is termed "divination" or "deification" or theosis in Greek. This aspect of our future has a long history in Christian mediation. Though we never share ontological union with God, by our striving to "feed on" the divine Jesus, we are endowed with intimate fellowship with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and with Jesus Christ himself, God who became human to reveal the depth of God's love for us.

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