1 Cor. 8:6 - "yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist."
Eph. 4:4-6 - "There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."
Eph. 1:17 - "that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him,"
1 Tim. 2:5 - "For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,"
Phil. 2:5-10 - "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,"
1 Cor. 15:28- "When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all."
Titus 2:13 - "waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,"
Rom. 9:5 - "To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen."
Rom. 10:9 - "because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
Rom. 1:3-4concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,
And Jim pointed out the subordinate and mediating role of Jesus in these passages, and that Jesus doesn't need to be God to mediate the Father's presence to us.
And that the title "Lord" doesn't imply divinity.
Yet, at the same time, Eph. 4:4-6 doesn't necessarily mention Jesus at all, prompting the question from Claire as to whether the New Testament ever uses kyrios of God the Father.
Since Eph. 4:4-6 could go either way, I cited 1 Tim. 6:15 where the title "King of kings and Lord of lords" is used of God the Father. The title is used again in Rev. 17, in reverse order, of Jesus.
On the 1 Tim. 2:5 passage, a reading of the verse that follows was requested and provided - "who gave himself as a ransom for all" - and I asked whether Jesus wouldn't need to be God to ransom all. Jim thought it was worth considering.
I made some use of White's KJ Only Controversy booklet for its list of christological verses and I was taken aback to read that, while White enthusiastically endorses what he calls "modern translations" (i.e., the NIV) even over more traditional ones like the King James1, he cannot recommend the modern NAB, claiming that it provides "poor translations" of Romans 9:5 and Titus 2:13. (The NAB mimics the KJV in those instances.)
But White is bringing his christology to the text, in expecting how those verses ought to be translated, in desiring that all passages that treat the relationship of the Son Jesus to the Father God be clear and unambiguous on the nature of Christ, on Christ's divinity.
We spent the most time on the Philippians hymn, not only because it's the longest pericope of the bunch but also for its use of kenosis, a feature shared with St. John's Prologue.
Using my parallel enabled me to survey Phil. 2.6 in the more obscure translations: JB reads "His state being divine." Jim chuckled at the heavy-handedness of the JB translation here. We also laughed at "robbery" in the RNT, though I suspected it matched the KJV (and it does).
But we picked up on morphe in 2.6 and Jim said the word is used elsewhere only in Mark 16.12, Mark's version of the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13ff). One might expect ikon instead of morphe, I thought, because we talked about the creation account in Genesis 1, the LXX's use of ikon in 1.26.
I wish I could have remembered Fr. Haight's name because I wanted to ask Jim whether we weren't treading too close. But one has to be patient ... and listen very, very carefully - two things I'm not really good at.
Next time we do the Infancy Narratives.
1 This article, "Why Should You Read Only the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible?" brought me to the brink of physical illness.
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