Chapter 9 — Monotheism and the Divine Attributes (Part 2: Divine Attributes)
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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It's one thing to say that Jesus receives the honors due to God. It's another to say that Jesus is God by nature. And for critics of orthodox Christianity, that second claim is where things really break down.
You can imagine someone saying: "Fine, the early Christians worshiped Jesus — but isn't that because they were projecting divinity onto him? Maybe they were just using divine-sounding language as a way of exalting a great man. That doesn't mean Jesus actually was divine."
This is a serious objection, and it deserves a serious answer. Part 2 of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics addresses it by shifting from what Jesus receives (honors) to what Jesus is (attributes) — the "A" in the HANDS framework.
The "FUNCTIONAL" Versus "ONTOLOGICAL" Debate
Critics of the classic doctrine of Christ often use a technical distinction to sidestep the question of Jesus' divine nature. They argue that the New Testament presents a "functional" Christology — describing what Jesus does and how he functions in God's plan — without making "ontological" claims about what kind of being Jesus actually is. In their view, the question of Jesus' essential nature (whether he is truly God) is a later philosophical intrusion, not a biblical concern.
But this distinction doesn't hold up. As scholar Michael Bird points out, there is "a significant amount of explicit ontological language for describing Jesus in the New Testament." More importantly, the claim that Jesus was "just" a man through whom God worked is itself an ontological claim. You can't dodge the question of Jesus' nature by saying you're only interested in his function. What Jesus does reveals what Jesus is.
What Are the Divine Attributes?
When we talk about the attributes of God — the characteristics that belong to God alone — we mean things like:
- Eternality: God has no beginning and no end
- Omniscience: God knows all things, including the human heart
- Omnipresence: God is present everywhere simultaneously
- Holiness and moral perfection: God cannot sin or be deceived
- Creative power: God alone made the universe from nothing
- Life-giving power: God alone can give or restore life
The question Part 2 will answer, chapter by chapter, is: Does the New Testament present Jesus as possessing these same attributes? Not some of them — all of them.
If Jesus is merely a great human teacher, or even the greatest of created beings, we would expect the New Testament to present him as limited in his knowledge, subject to time, morally developing, and entirely dependent on God for any power he exercises. In some ways, the Gospels do present Jesus as fully human — and we'd expect no less from God truly incarnate. But alongside that full humanity, the New Testament also presents Jesus with characteristics that can only be described as divine.
Monotheism and the Identity of Jesus
One important clarification before we dive into the evidence: defending the divine attributes of Christ doesn't require abandoning monotheism. This is a common objection — "If Jesus is God, doesn't that mean there are two gods?"
The answer is no, if we understand what the New Testament is actually teaching. The New Testament does not introduce Jesus as a second deity competing with the God of Israel. It presents Jesus as belonging to the identity of the one God of Israel — as the Son who is in relationship with the Father, sharing the divine nature fully while remaining genuinely distinct as the Son.
This is admittedly a difficult concept. But the difficulty is inherent to the subject matter, not a sign that the doctrine is incoherent. If God is who the Bible says he is — infinite, transcendent, beyond all our categories — then we shouldn't expect his inner nature to map neatly onto human categories of "one" and "two."
What we should expect is to follow the evidence where it leads — and the evidence, as the next several chapters will show, leads unmistakably to the conclusion that Jesus shares in what it means to be God.
A Preview of What's Coming
In Part 2, we'll look at:
- The preexistence of Christ: Did Jesus exist before his birth? (Chapters 10-12)
- The question of whether Christ is a creature or the eternal Creator (Chapter 13)
- The sinlessness of Christ (Chapter 14)
- What Jesus knew — and didn't know (Chapter 15)
- The paradox of one person who is both fully God and fully human (Chapter 16)
These aren't abstract puzzles. They matter because they tell us who we're trusting with our lives. The Jesus who saves us is not merely an impressive human or a powerful angel. He is the eternal God who entered his own creation to rescue us.
That's who we're getting to know in all of this. And that's a Jesus worth every effort to understand.
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