Thursday, May 14, 2020

John 20:17 and Trinitarian Gymnastics



Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. (John 20:17)

John 20:17 is set after Jesus' resurrection and super-exaltation. I mention this as many Trinitarians claim that Jesus emptied himself (not in the sense of setting aside his divine attributes and abilities, but did not choose to use them at times) while in mortality and only returned to his former glory afterwards (see John 17;5; cf. Phil 2:5-11). I mention this as many Trinitarians try to explain some difficult texts by making such an appeal. Notwithstanding, in this passage, not only does Jesus have a "Father" (unobjectionable to Trinitarians and non-Trinitarians alike [lest perhaps some Modalists]) but that he also has a God. Furthermore, Jesus states that God the Father is His God just as the Father is the God of believers! So we have a text here, like Hebrews 1:8-9 (on this text, see Latter-day Saints have Chosen the True, Biblical Jesus) where the exalted Jesus has a God above him. This is not mere "functional subordination" to the Son, but a numerical distinction between Jesus and, not his Father merely, but "God."

Hippolytus (170-235), referencing John 20:17 and 1 Cor 15:20-28 (another strongly anti-Trinitarian text), while calling Jesus “Lord of All,” in the same text, says that the Father is Lord of Jesus:

If, therefore, all things are put under Him with the exception of Him who put them under Him, He is Lord of all, and the Father is Lord of Him, that in all there might be manifested one God, to whom all things are made subject together with Christ, to whom the Father hath made all things subject, with the exception of Himself. And this, indeed, is said by Christ Himself, as when in the Gospel He confessed Him to be His Father and His God. For He speaks thus: “I go to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God. (Against the Heresy of One Noetus, 6 [ANF 5:226])

Latter-day Saint theology allows for this and makes sense of it, but Trinitarians have to engage in all types of dodges and eisegesis to overcome the implications of this text. Don't take my word for it. Here is what one Trinitarian wrote on this issue:

Remember the maxim: Difference in function does not indicate inferiority of nature. Here the Father is described as Jesus’s “God.” Since this is so, Jesus must be some inferior being, and therefore, John 20:28 can’t mean that it so obviously says (Another element of the argument is that if Jesus says the Father is the “God” of the disciples, then He himself could not likewise be their God, as Thomas would confess. Yet, this again assumes what it means to prove: Unitarianism, the idea that both the Father and the Son could not, simultaneously, be “God” to the disciples). Note how one writer has expressed it:

Such a confession, as in the case of Thomas, is qualified not only by the context (John 20:17), but also by the whole of Scripture. The use of later Chalcedonian christology does not come into play in verses such as john 20:17, either. Here, Jesus, in the same state Thomas addressed him, says that the Father is his God, again differentiation between the two in terms of theos, as well as acknowledging the Father’s superiority over him, as his God. (Gregory Stafford, Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended, 205)

And just here we see the circularity of the arguments of those who deny the deity of Christ: why can’t Thomas mean what he said? Because, of course, the Father is different from the Son. I was the Son who became Incarnate, and since the Son, as the perfect man, acknowledged the Father as His God, He, himself, can’t be fully deity. The argument assumes that God could not enter into human form. Why? Well, what would the God-man be like? If one of the divine persons entered into human flesh, how would such a divine person act? Would He be an atheist? Would He refuse to acknowledge those divine persons who had not entered into human existence? Of course not. Yet when we see the Lord Jesus doing exactly what we would expect the Incarnate Son to do, we find this being used as an argument against His deity! So those who put forward such arguments have already made up their minds. They are not deriving their beliefs from the Scriptures but are forcing those beliefs onto Scriptures. Thomas’s confession is in perfect harmony with the fact that the Incarnate Son spoke of the Father as His God. As long as one recognizes that the word “God” can refer to the Father, to the Son, to the Spirit, or to all three persons at once, the asserted contradiction is seen to be nothing more than a circular argument designed to avoid having to make the same confession that Thomas made lone ago. (James R. White, The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief [2d ed; Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 2019], 68-69)