The third group is the smallest
and, for its size, the most pointed: the texts in which Jesus, including the
risen and glorified Jesus, has a God of his own. On the morning of the
resurrection he tells Mary that he is ascending to the Father and her Father,
to his Son and her God (John 20:17), ranging his own relation to God alongside
hers and naming God as his. Paul speaks of the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of glory (Ephesians 1:17). God is the God of the Lord Jesus. And the
exalted Christ of the Revelation, speaking from heaven in glory, refers four
times in a single verse to “My God,” promising to write upon the faithful the
name of his God and the name of the city of his God (Revelation 3:12). The
inference the Unitarian draws is blunt and not easily blunted. The one who has
a God is not that God. Distinction might be borne, and even rank; but worship
is owed to God, and one who himself worships, who names another his God after
his exaltation and in the height of heaven, stands among the worshippers and
not among the worshipped.
These texts do not merely
undercut the high Christology; the Unitarian offers them a positive home, and
the home is the framework the Old Testament had already supplied and the Second
Temple period elaborated—the framework of the supreme agent. A king’s
plenipotentiary may bear the king’s own authority, act and speak in the king’s
name, and receive honours that in another mouth would be treason, and none of
it makes him the king. So, the Unitarian argues, with Jesus, God has made him
both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36); the authority he wields is given to him, the
name above every name is bestowed on him, the judgment is committed to him, the
kingdom is handed over and will be handed back. Wherever the exalted language
is examined, a giver stands behind the gift, and the giver is God. On this reason
the worship of Jesus is the honour rightly paid to the one whom God has raised
to his right hand and through who God not acts and will judge—worship that
terminates, as the Philippian hymn says in so many words, in the glory of God
the Father. Jesus is the unique image and agent of the one God, the main in
whom God’s purpose is accomplished and through whom God’s reign is exercised,
exalted above every creature and worthy of the homage due to God’s appointed Lord,
and a creature still, the highest of God’s work and not the uncreated God
himself Tuggy, 2025). The strength of the construal is that it accounts for the
evidence of the previous chapter without straining against the evidence of this
one. It can grant the exaltation, the authority, and even the worship, and
still hold the line the whole New Testament appears to hold: that the one God
is the Father, and that Jesus is his Christ. (Geoffrey Clarke, Christian
Concepts of the Godhead: The Unitarian-Trinitarian Distinction [2026], 35-36)