Matt Slick often defends the Trinity by asking the following question:
Recently on a facebook thread, Daniel McClellan (PhD [cand.] University of Essex) responded rather cogently, so I believe it worthwhile to repeat it here:
For an informed, scholarly discussion of "Son of God," see Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship and Political Context (Oxford, 2012).
If Son of God means you're not God, then does Son of Man mean you're not man?
Recently on a facebook thread, Daniel McClellan (PhD [cand.] University of Essex) responded rather cogently, so I believe it worthwhile to repeat it here:
His question is laughably fallacious and uninformed. He interprets "son of God" to mean "Son of THE God," while he interprets "son of Man" to mean "son of a human." That's mixing a reference to a specific entity with a reference to a generic category. "Man" is actually adam in the Hebrew, so if we interpret "son of Man" the same way he's interpreting "son of God," yes, it would mean that "son of Man" means you're not Adam himself, just like "son of God" means that you're not THE God himself. If we interpret both statements to refer to membership in a generic category, they're still parallel. "Son of God" means you're a deity just like "son of Man" means you're a human. Slick's rhetorical snare fails because it's just grotesquely ignorant . . . Originally it referred to second-tier gods. In Second Temple Judaism that reading fell out of favor and they briefly suggested they were angels, but quickly transitioned to thinking it referred to humans. Philip Alexander wrote a great paper on the development of those readings entitled "The Targumim and Early Exegesis of 'Sons of God' in Genesis 6."
For an informed, scholarly discussion of "Son of God," see Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World: Divine Sonship and Political Context (Oxford, 2012).
