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| T.F. Torrance |
When Jesus tells Philip, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9), can he be believed?
Is God really like Jesus? And what about its corollary: Is Jesus really like God? Note T.F. Torrance's comment in Reality and Evangelical Theology:
Only if God really became man in Jesus Christ, and really made our human nature his own in him, may we say that [biblical] statements [about God]... are related to what God is in himself in a real and not in a merely conventional or fictional way... (p110, 1982 edition).
At issue is Jesus' divinity. Is he merely a "godly man" or is he God come in the flesh, and thus
Really God? Again quoting from
Reality and Evangelical Theology:
This is precisely the problem that faced the fathers of the church at the Council of Nicaea, when they found themselves forced to come to a more precise understanding of what it meant to say about Jesus Christ that he is of God, for as they realized it is upon the answer to that question that the whole evangelical interpretation of the New Testament, and indeed of the Bible, depends. In what sense is Jesus Christ Son of God the Father?...Are the images of sonship and fatherhood...no more than empty names conventionally related to God as detachable, imaginary imitations of divine Reality and therefore quite changeable and relative with no permanent value? Or are they terms which, inadequate as they are in themselves, point ostensively to real relations in God beyond themselves, since they are economically rooted in God's own self-giving and self-revealing in Jesus Christ and are therefore ultimately real and valid in God as well as for us? As they sifted through the New Testament Scriptures, those who met at Nicaea were convinced that the relation of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father constitutes the basic ontological relationship or reciprocity in the Godhead in which all the language of the gospel is finally rooted and shaped. "All things have been delivered unto me of my Father: and no one knows who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son, and he to whom the Son wills to reveal him" (Luke 10:22; Matt. 11:27). That is to say, a mutual relation of knowing and being obtains between the Father and the Son in the Godhead, and it is as that relation is actualized through the incarnation between Jesus Christ and God the Father that it becomes possible for us to know God in and through Jesus Christ in such a way that our knowledge terminates on the ultimate Reality of God himself (pp111-112).
Yes, thank God, Jesus really is like God and God really is like Jesus! Torrance famously puts it this way: "There is no other God behind the back of Jesus."
Hallelujah!