Re: Do all Christians believe Jesus is God and or God's Son
Meanwhile, Jesus's denials that he is not God is VERY explicit.I'll give you one first (there are countless others but I don't have the time now): The most important one, answered Jesus, is this: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Again, as this thread is about what Christians believe and not what non-Christians believe such a post is out of place. However, I'll receive it as a question as to how do Christians understand Jesus to be God and/or God's son in light of this statement by Jesus?
To begin with, we don't take Jesus' statements in isolation, but read them in context with one another and the rest of scripture. A statement like this affirms that we worship just one God. And this Christians do, but other passages tell us that this one God came down to earth and incarnated himself in the human body we know as Jesus. (Now, some will mistake this to mean that God somehow left heaven in coming to earth. We believe no such thing. We understand that God is not like human beings who can occupy only one set phyiscal space at a time. We believe that God is fully capable of being in and ruling heaven even as he incarnates the human body known as Jesus.) And even though existing in a human body, we see Jesus behave as if he were God in extending the sort of forgiveness of sins that only God had the right to do. We see Jesus refute false accusations that are leveled at him, but never refute or deny the accusation that he has made himself equal with God by his words and actions. And ultimately it is for these acts, that the Jewish leaders of his day term blasphemy, that Jesus is turned over to the Romans to be executed. Then following his resurrection, Jesus is recognized as both "Lord and God" by one of his disciples, a labelling he not only accepts by commends, and the first sermon of the nascent church lifts Jesus up with God himself reported to have declared Jesus as worthy of being called "Lord", a title that the Jews did not use as an equivalent for our English "sir", but was reserved for God alone.
So, it is, that we Christians have both the expressed and implicit testimony of scripture (including much of it from Jesus himself) that there is just one God AND that Jesus is God. How both could be true at the same time was not always the easiest to understand, but understanding that both statements are true is what is expressed in scripture. And so the Christian belief, from the first generation of Christendom on, is that indeed all Christians believe Jesus is God. In the early church this was not even questioned, it was simply assumed. The more difficult question for the first 300 years of church history was, "Was Jesus really human?". But that is not the question posed in this thread.
This thread poses the question, "Do all Christians believe Jesus is God and/or God's son?"
Answer: If they are genuinely Christian they do.
Those groups and individuals that do not make this confession attribute the moniker "Christian" to themselves falsely. Indeed, that is why those supposed Christians, referred to in the above post, who would not make that confession in the early church were ultimately labelled heretics.
