Chapter 3 — Honoring the Son (Part 1: Divine Honors)
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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One of the most natural ways to investigate whether someone is God is to ask: does the Bible say to treat them like God?
It's a deceptively simple test. And when it comes to Jesus, the New Testament's answer is far more decisive than many people realize.
The first major section of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics examines what the authors call Jesus' Divine Honors, the HANDS framework's "H." The idea is this: in the Bible, certain kinds of honor belong to God alone. Worship. Prayer. Reverence. Sacred devotion. Placing unconditional trust in someone. Calling on their name for salvation. These aren't things you give to angels, to prophets, or even to the most exalted human beings. They're reserved for God.
If the New Testament directs those honors toward Jesus, not by mistake, not metaphorically, but seriously and repeatedly, then it's placing Jesus in the category of God.
The Scholarly Landscape
In recent decades, much of the most serious academic work on Christology has focused on exactly this question: what kind of honor did the first Christians give to Jesus? Scholars like Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham have argued compellingly that within the earliest Christian communities, Jesus was honored in ways that had no parallel in Jewish practice for any being other than God himself.
This is remarkable. The first followers of Jesus were Jews. They were fiercely monotheistic, heirs of a tradition that had set itself apart from the entire ancient world by refusing to worship any god but YHWH. For these same people to start giving Jesus the honors they'd given to God wasn't a gradual drift or a Gentile corruption. It was an immediate, explosive, theologically costly confession that something had happened with Jesus that demanded a complete rethinking of what God was doing in the world.
The Argument from the Alternative Christologies
Most of the alternative views of Jesus we discussed in the previous post agree on at least one thing: Jesus isn't the proper recipient of all the religious honors due to God. A Muslim believes Jesus was a great prophet, but worshiping him would be idolatry. A Jehovah's Witness believes Jesus is the greatest of God's creatures, but praying to him directly, as opposed to through him, is inappropriate. A progressive Christian honors Jesus' teachings, but the idea of singing hymns to him as God feels like missing his point entirely.
The one glaring exception is Oneness Pentecostalism, which agrees Jesus deserves all the honors due to God, precisely because they believe Jesus is the Father incarnate.
But here's where the rest of the alternative Christologies run into trouble. The New Testament doesn't share their hesitation. The first-generation Christians prayed to Jesus, sang to Jesus, called on the name of Jesus for salvation, feared him with a reverence reserved for God, and worshiped him, all without any apparent sense that they were crossing a line.
A Foretaste: John 5:22-23
One of the clearest early texts comes from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says: "The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him" (John 5:22-23).
Let that sink in. Jesus isn't asking for respect, admiration, or appreciation. He's claiming that the same honor given to the Father must be given to the Son, and that failing to honor the Son is failing to honor the Father.
No prophet ever spoke like this. No angel ever claimed this. Moses never said, "Honor me as you honor God." This is either the most breathtaking blasphemy imaginable, or a statement from someone who genuinely occupies a unique position in relation to God the Father.
The chapters ahead will fill in the details: worship, prayer, singing, faith, reverence. Each of these honors, we'll see, is directed toward Jesus in the New Testament with the full weight of what it would have meant directed toward God in the Old Testament.
What This Means for Us
I think one of the things that strikes me most is how naturally the first Christians gave Jesus these honors. They weren't debating it or defending it. They were just doing it. The church gathered, prayed to Christ, sang to Christ, broke bread in remembrance of Christ, baptized in his name, called on him in their dying moments. This is what Spirit-filled faith looks like when it encounters the risen Lord.
We can do the same. Not because we've won a theological debate, but because we've met the same Jesus they did.
He's worth all of our honor. He's worth all of our praise.