Is the Lord Jesus absolutely unique?

NOTICE: Some Christians might find this post offensive. CONTINUE

(I say "the Lord" Jesus in order to avoid giving the impression that I am discussing some kind of laboratory specimen.)

The orthodox Christian idea that Jesus is God rests on a selective reading of the New Testament, which itself is not an entirely reliable record of Jesus's ministry (as is evident in the contradictions between different Gospels). This idea has some bad effects. It cuts off Christianity from Judaism, which considers Jesus-worship to be idolatrous, an admixture of paganism into Judaism, to be condemned much as other forms of idol-worship had to be condemned in Biblical times. It weakens Christianity in the face of challenges from Islam, which likewise can claim that Christianity is idolatrous, that Islam alone stands for pure universal monotheism, revering Jesus as a prophet but not confusing him with the Divinity. If Jesus is of another order of being than ordinary humanity, it also seems unreasonable to expect people to imitate him with any degree of success—even if we are all made in the "Divine image". And yet there is also in Christianity the idea that Jesus is the "New Adam", the first of many of his kind, and that these successors who will work wonders as great as or greater than his own.

As far as I can tell, the idea of Jesus as God also irretrievably confuses the (notoriously "mysterious") idea of the Trinity. The Trinity seems to be a productive concept in that it acknowledges different forms of the One God: God is both absolute (the Father), personal (the Son) and (?) immanent (the Spirit). Some Christians also emphasize that the triune God, with His inner communion, is a model for loving relationships in the world. But the close association of Jesus with God-the-Son means that prayer to the Father becomes an incomprehensible form of prayer to a remote absolute being, while prayer to the Son becomes idolatrous Jesus-worship. I think that William Temple pointed out that the "Father" to whom Jesus prayed, the personal God, was actually closer to the Son of the Trinity than to the absolutely transcendent Father. So we seem to have the "Son" praying to the "Son". What a mess!

On the other hand, attempts by liberal Christianity to regard Jesus as a mere man, as a great moral teacher, seem to have been disastrous to those denominations that have made them. The Unitarians, the oldest group to adopt this position, seem to have for the most part turned into a political agitation group. Other liberal Christian denominations are following the Unitarians down the same path. Whatever spirituality such groups retain seems likely to be a primitive pantheistic kind.

What is really essential to Christianity? Is it the belief in Jesus as uniquely God, or something else which has been missed by the liberals?

The key is whether we are to interpret Jesus's actions, and in particular his self-sacrifice on the Cross, as the actions of God or of a man. If Jesus is merely human, we might still tend to worship him for his self-sacrifice on our behalf, but then this worship would clearly detract from what is owing to God. Alternatively, we may decide to put little emphasis on his self-sacrifice. Then we are left with an empty, "liberal" religion, in which Jesus is no more than a moral teacher. Either way, if the sacrifice is something performed by a man only, we are left with something which is no longer Christianity. The Church seems to have recognized this in developing its fairly elaborate doctrine of Jesus's dual Divine-human nature. Jesus in both his human and Divine aspects decided or consented to sacrifice himself. His sacrifice was that of a man as well as that of God. He can be both loved as a man and worshiped as God. But, as just pointed out, this doctrine is also alienating, both in the sense that Jesus is turned into a member of a different species and in that it is unacceptable to those whose background is in other forms of monotheism.

It seems to me, however, that there is nothing here (other than the desire of the Church to retain a spiritual monopoly) which demands that Jesus be the sole being with a dual nature of this kind. I think most Christians would acknowledge that an alien species, on some other planet, could well receive its own Incarnation of Christ, rather than having to wait until some distant date when missionary astronauts brought the Gospel to it. But why shouldn't different human cultures also receive such incarnations? And, more generally, why should we not all share, actually or potentially, in the dual Divine-human nature? Such a concept seems no more difficult to grasp than the orthodox idea of Jesus's dual nature. It would, though, have been quite novel as far as pre-Christian religions were concerned. Judaism never thought of human beings as God, though man was supposed to bear the Divine "image". Classical paganism believed that some human beings might become "gods", but these gods were still created beings, not the Creator of monotheistic religion. The idea of man as God seems least remote from Eastern religions, but I think that in this case the idea has gone along with the view that human individuality is illusory. Perhaps such an idea would have been incomprehensible in the environment in which the early Church found itself.

Such an idea of universal Divine nature would seem to carry a certain risk of encouraging pride and self-worship. But Jesus (in contrast, I believe, to most Hindu gurus, at least until recent times?) provided a standard of great humility for those in whom the Divine nature was highly developed or evident.