Sermon Tone Analysis

I. The Messianic Heir

All of God’s covenantal purposes converge in Jesus Christ.

The Son is the eternal Mediator of the covenant of redemption which already in eternity rendered him, by anticipation, the one who would become incarnate and give his life for his people (1 Pe 1:20–21; Eph 1:4–5, 11).

He is also the Last Adam, who undoes the curse of the first Adam and fulfills the covenant of creation for his elect, thereby winning the right to be not only the risen head but the resurrection-life-giving Lord.

Therefore, the covenant of grace of which Christ is the mediatorial head is secured eternally in the covenant of redemption.

“For all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Co 1:20).

eph 1 4-5

A. The Faithful Adam and True Israel

Christ succeeds in keep God’s Law where Adam failed.

Christ drives out the enemies of God while the children of Israel fell under their idolatrous spell.

B. Messianic Savior: Son of David

Like the Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant is an unconditional adoption.

It is not David who will build a house for God, but God who will build a house for David.

In spite of the unfaithfulness of David and his heirs, God unilaterally pledges to give him an everlasting dynasty (2 Sa 7:11–17).

2 sa 7

The royal son of David would not be a puppet of the Roman Empire.

According to the common eschatological expectation of Second Temple Judaism, N. T. Wright explains, “the long night of exile, the ‘present evil age,’ would give way to the dawn of renewal and restoration, the new exodus, the return from exile, ‘the age to come,’ ” and the messianic king would somehow fulfill this

However, according to the terms of first-century Jewish expectation, Jesus was just another disappointment.

To be sure, he rode triumphantly into Jerusalem with great fanfare (claiming fulfillment of Zec 14:21), but in his last week he brought growing confusion and consternation.

C. Son of Man - Second Adam

Under the rubric of Messiah appear related designations.

As the Lord’s earthly representative, the Messiah figure is also designated “Son of Man/Adam.”

While in the canonical texts of Psalm 8:4, Ezekiel, and Daniel, “one like a son of man” appears as a description, by the time of Enoch it appears to become a messianic title (see 1 Enoch 46 and 62; 2 Esdras 13).

However, among others, Craig A. Evans has offered a persuasive argument for interpreting Daniel 7 and its New Testament interpretations as referring to one representative person, as understood even by Second Temple sources.

Wright renders a similar judgment.21

In Daniel 7 especially, “the picture is very sharp: this Messiah-figure will bear the brunt of gentile fury, and will be vindicated.”

He adds, “The last Adam is the eschatological Israel, who will be raised from the dead as the vindicated people of God.”23

On one hand, we recognize this title, Son of Man, as the fulfillment of Adamic sonship; on the other hand, it is a reference to his divine identity—his unity with the Father.

Therefore, we cannot neatly correlate “Son of Man” and “Son of God” with his p 455 humanity and deity, respectively.

As we will see, “Son of God” is as much a reference to his humanity as “Son of Man” is to his deity.

His humiliation is not simply a predicate of his humanity: it was the Word who humbled himself to become flesh, recover what was lost in Adam, and raise it to heaven in glory.

And his exaltation is not simply a predicate of his divinity; as the victorious Last Adam, the Son of Man takes his throne in our name.

The Son of Man is the Lord who is Servant and the Servant who is Lord.

I have suggested that we cannot assume that “Son of Man” refers to Jesus Christ’s humanity while “Son of God” refers to his deity.

The Son of Man is God as well as human and the Son of God is a human figure who is also Lord.

Jesus Christ is both the one who speaks the divine law and the one who answers the summons with full and perfect obedience as our representative.

D. The Servant of the Lord

Here the “servant of the Lord” is identified with eschatological judgment and salvation.

Isa

II.

The Son of God: The Son of the Father in the Spirit

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Horton has said that we cannot assume Son of Man refers to Christ’s humanity while Son of God refers to his deity.

The Son of Man is God and the Son of God is also human.

A. Sonship: Ontological and Official

In the New Testament, as in much of the Second Temple literature, the messianic concept brings together the Adamic and Abrahamic bases of sonship, the former stressing adoption by obedience, the latter underscoring his sonship as unconditional and everlasting.

What is different, however, especially in the case of the New Testament, is that Jesus’ sonship in this second sense comes not by adoption but by eternal generation.

He is the monogenēs theos—“the only begotten God,” “the only begotten [Son] from the Father” (Jn 1:18, 14; NASB)

To summarize this point, then: Jesus Christ is the Son of God in both senses: (1) as the eternally generated Word of the Father and (2) as the true image-bearer, the faithful Adamic “son” and the loyal “firstborn son” that Israel was intended to be.

Therefore, to say that Jesus is the Son of God because he is divine is true, but it is also to say that he has fulfilled his office as a human representative, in the place of Adam and Israel.

B. Preexistent Son

The liberal trajectory leading from Reimarus’s Fragments to D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Adolf von Harnack’s Essence of Christianity is essentially Arian p 465 (or Adoptionist).

First Quest

1788–1906

Reimarus to Schweitzer.

The Christ of faith (confessed by the church in the creeds) is fundamentally different from the real Jesus of history.

In his Life of Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) argued that the high Christology found in the New Testament is mythological.

Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) ended this initial quest by arguing that Jesus expected an imminent establishment of a kingdom that failed to arrive.

No Quest

1906–1953

Schweitzer to Bultmann.

Following Martin Kähler (supplemented by Martin Heidegger’s existentialist categories), Bultmann argued that the Jesus of history is of no significance to the Christ of faith.

Second (or New) Quest

1953–present

Especially associated with Ernst Käsemann but also with the Jesus Seminar.

Third Quest

1980s to present

The phrase was coined by an advocate of this quest, N. T. Wright.

With the work of G. B. Caird, E. P. Sanders, and others, interest arose in contextualizing Jesus within his Jewish (Second Temple) milieu.

As we have already seen, the Synoptics report the charge against Jesus of blasphemy for claiming to be equal with God; Jesus and the evangelists call people to place their faith in Christ and to receive forgiveness of sins through Christ.

Jesus himself calls his people to invoke his name in prayer, in baptism, in receiving forgiveness of sins, and in worship throughout the Gospels.

Given the covenantal freight of that phrase “in the name of,” there is no doubt that Jesus was claiming to be no less than Yahweh incarnate.

We have already encountered the conundrum Jesus presents to the religious leaders in Matthew 22:41–45: How can David call “Lord” one who will be his future descendant?

At least implicitly, Jesus is claiming to have existed as the Lord prior to David himself.

III.

Two Natures in One Person: The Incarnation

With the preceding lines of development in view, we arrive at the center of Christology: the doctrine of the incarnation.

The faith of the church, summarized by the Chalcedonian Creed (451), is directed to “one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably …”

A. Exegetical Summary

B. Dogmatic Development

1.

The Frist Controversies

The first reported challenges within the church itself from Jewish influences denied the deity of Christ.

Emphasizing the continuing significance of the Mosaic law for Gentile converts, the Ebionite heresy (ʾebeyônîm, Hebrew for “the poor ones”) also regarded Jesus Christ as the Messiah but as an exclusively human person who justified himself by the works of the law and by his example leads his followers to do the same.

According to Eusebius, some Ebionites held that he was supernaturally conceived though not preexistent.

Similar was the heresy of adoptionism, p 471 which held that although Jesus was essentially nondivine, he was adopted by the Father—perhaps at his baptism or even his birth.

As we will see, the effect (perhaps even the motive) of rejecting Christ’s divinity is the reduction of his work to that of providing a superior moral example.

Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 470–471.B.

Dogmatic Development

If the challenge from a Jewish perspective was attributing full deity to Jesus Christ, the Hellenistic (Greek) problem was with his full humanity.

How could God become flesh, which in Greek thought was tantamount to saying that the Good became trapped in evil matter?

2. Two Natures in One Person

Based on its view of human beings as composed of three parts—body, soul, and spirit (trichotomy), Apollinarianism taught that Jesus’ human spirit was replaced with the divine Logos.

2 17-18

Monophysitism: The view that Jesus had only one divine nature.

Nestorianism (named after the fifth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, a student of the Antiochene theologian Theodore of Mopsuestia) held that the Logos indwelled Jesus morally rather than essentially.

Therefore, he differs from us only in degree.

Refusing to use the liturgical expression Theotokos (God-bearer) for Mary, Nestorius insisted that she was only the mother of Jesus’ human nature.

Nestorianism:

Nestorianism essentially held that there were two separate persons in Christ.

CHRISTOLOGICAL HERESIES SPECTRUM:

Denying Christ’s Divinity

Ebionitism Subordinationism Adoptionism Arianism/Semi-Arianism

Denying Christ’s Humanity

Docetism/Gnosticism Apollinarianism Monothelitism