Some people would have us believe that Jesus never claimed to be God, but you cannot read the Gospels thoughtfully and come to that conclusion. Christ Jesus made authoritative claims about Scripture and the people around him. He said, you have heard it said … but I say to you. Well, who is he to be claiming such authority of the text and its traditional interpretation? A crowd took up stones at least twice, because they knew what he was saying. “The Jews answered him, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God'” (John 10:33).
But maybe appealing to the reaction of the crowds is deeper in the weeds than we need to go. Jesus’s teaching ministry was not lightweight moralism that could sound true to anyone. He called for repentance and the coming of the kingdom of God.
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher,” C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity. “He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.”
Let me jot down some blogroll links.
Social Media: Chris Martin has been writing a newsletter about social media for a while. Last summer, he wrote, “Social media and the internet are being used to perpetuate sin in ways that some sermon series on ‘technology and the gospel’ isn’t just going to fix.” In November, he said censorship isn’t the big problem with social media among Christians; it’s the way this technology is discipling us.
Martin released a book this month on this topic, called Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media.
Johann Georg Hamann “gives us a way forward from both the deadends of modernism and the deadends of postmodernism.” Hamann calls us ultimately to the Bible.
Trending: Merriam-Webster reports a sharp increase in searches for the definition of infrangible, which means “unbreakable, not able to be separated into parts” or “not to be violated.”
Trueman: “As the medieval world granted tremendous spiritual power to its priesthood and indulged its sins because of that, so we do with our celebrities.”
Photo: Paul’s Market, Franklin, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.