Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Apologetics three fifteen podcast with
your hosts Brian Auten and Chad Gross. Join us for
conversations and interviews on the topics of apologetics, evangelism, and
the Christian worldview.
Speaker 2: Great when someone asked you if Jesus is God, you see.
Speaker 1: Yes, Hello and welcome to the podcast. This is Brian
Auten and I'm Chad Gross. We want to welcome you
to today's episode where we'll be interviewing our guest, Rob Bowman.
He's the president of the Institute for Religious Research R
in Cedar Springs, Michigan. He's the author or co author
of fifteen books and numerous other published works on apologetics,
historical Jesus studies, Christology, the Trinity, and various religious movements.
So we're looking forward to this interview. So, Chad, in
preparation for this interview, I went back and I listened
to my previous interview with Rob Bowman. I was fifteen
years ago.
Speaker 3: I know, twenty ten, Yeah, because when I put it
on kind of the you know, the sheet that we
kind of make up to prepare, I was so surprised
that it was twenty eleven when you did that interview.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I listened to it and like, this is
a good interview. It's like an evergreen topic, apologetic methodology.
We talk about one of his books on that topic
and it was like, great, I can still point people
to this episode. It's it's a great, great resource. Now
I think today's topic is super important and will probably
unpack some of the reasons why it's a really great topic.
We're sort of basing some of what we're talking about
on works that doctor Bellman has written. The current book
we're looking at is the Incarnate Christ in his Critics
a Biblical Defense, but the prior book, which is a
little bit more accessible for people, is called Putting Jesus
in His Place, The Case for the Deity of Christ.
These are epic works, Like if you just wrote one
of these, you'd be like, yeah, I'm done, and this
is this is great, this is but no, they kept
going and so it's amazing. These are amazing books. But
the topic is basically the deity of Christ. How do
we show that? How do we demonstrate that? Is there
an easy sort of way we can communicate that to others?
And these books provide that. So we're going to explore
that in the interview.
Speaker 3: I'm really looking forward to this. I got the opportunity
to hear doctor Bowman speak years ago at a nearby
church in mount Airy, Maryland, and I remember even then,
and this was before I did the Apologetics three fifteen podcast,
I thought, man, it would be really fascinating to sit
down and talk with him, and so to have the
opportunity to do it is really exciting. Also, one of
the things I love about doctor Bowman, and if you've
seen him interviewed elsewhere you'll pick up on this, is
that he doesn't see what he does as solely an
academic endeavor, and I really appreciate that. So in other words,
his academic slash scholarly work kind of informs his walk
with Christ. And certainly don't mean to suggest that in
other cases with other thinkers that isn't the case, But
I just mean he's a little bit more explicit with
that and willing to talk about it, and I really
appreciate that about him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So listener, what you're going to come away with,
hopefully by the end of this interview is this conversation
is a really easy way that can help you to
be equipped to explain why the new Testament teaches Jesus
with God incarnate.
Speaker 3: And so that's what we're hoping you walk away with
a real tool that you can use in actual conversations.
Speaker 1: Chad, if you just turn around real quick, I'm going
to switch on that power pack and we'll get started.
Doctor Robert Bowman, thanks for joining us for the podcast.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Well, I was just saying prior to the interview starting
that you know, it's been like fourteen years ago you
were on the Apologetics three fifteen podcast. We were talking
about Apologetics methodologies, and I was telling Chad, you know,
I could just go back and listen to that like
today and it would be fresh and really helpful.
Speaker 2: So your work endures. So thank you for that. Well,
thank you, that's very kind. If you appreciate that.
Speaker 1: You know, you're written a couple of amazing books with
your co author. You've written Putting Jesus in His Place,
the Case for the de Day of Christ, and now
the Larger Tome if you want to call it that,
The Incarnate Christ and his critics a biblical defense, and
we're going to talk about that, but I'm just want
to start right out of the gate. Someone comes to
you and they say, you know, Jesus never really claimed
to be God explicitly, so if he was God, why
wouldn't he just be explicit and just tell him plainly.
I think that's something a lot of people might think.
Speaker 2: Sure, well, in a conversation with a real person, one's
way of starting a response that might vary, but where
you want to get at some point is to say, look,
Jesus didn't say a lot of the things that various
religions have claimed were the proper identification of Jesus. So,
for example, Jehovah's witnesses say that Jesus is Michael, the Archangel. Well,
Jesus never claimed to be Michael. He never claimed to
be an angel of any sort. In fact, and this
is surprising to many people who just don't know the
Gospels very well. Frankly, Jesus never went around saying I
am the Messiah. And yet almost everybody today who professes
some kind of belief in Jesus would agree that, yes,
he was the Messiah and thought he was. But Jesus
avoided making that direct claim. He said yes a couple
of times when he was pass point blank, but he
generally avoided making first person singular claims in an explicit fashion.
I think the reason why is that Jesus knew that
who he was and what he was was going to
be something rather difficult for people to process until he'd
shown who he was by his actions, and so Jesus
performed his ministry. He performed healings and exorcisms. He spoke,
He spoke in ways that really sounded, you know, in
many people's ears at the time, borderline blasphemous, and in
a few instances he was directly accused of being blasphemous.
But he didn't say I am God. He didn't say
I am the Son of God, except there's one time
when he indirectly says that in John ten thirty six.
Jesus didn't use those kinds of statements. In fact, Jesus'
favorite title for himself, the Son of Man, appears in
all four Gospels, but Jesus is never quoted as saying
I am the son of Man, which is why some
scholars play interesting games with the gospels and try to
argue that Jesus didn't actually think he was the son
of man. But to get that conclusion you have to
exclude a lot of the statements in the Gospels, where
it's pretty clear Jesus talking about himself. Now, I'm sorry
I've kind of gone around your question a bit, but
the bottom line is this, Jesus wasn't God, the Father,
and in order for people to process the idea of
him being deity and yet distinct from the Father, certain
things had to happen, especially his death and resurrection. When
he conquered death by his own death and resurrection, then
it became clear that when Jesus told Martha, I am
the Resurrection and the Life, he wasn't kidding that Jesus
was life incarnate. He was deity. And so there is
this reticence on the part of Jesus to speak openly
about his identity in every aspect, because this is something
that needed to be shown rather than just told. I
think if he'd said I'm God, people would have thought
he meant he was the Father. If he tried to elaborate,
you know, using maybe fourth century theological vocabulary, you know,
or even later vocabulary, I'm God, the second person of
the Trinity, people would have said, what would you say?
Speaker 1: Maybe people have it's easy for us with our theological understanding,
or like taking certain things like the Trinity, for granted
to wonder, Hey, why do these people not get it back?
Speaker 2: Then? Yeah, well, we find people in the Gospels reported
as asking who does this guy think he is? Who
is this man? How can he do these things? Why
would he say these things? You know? And so Jesus
was a bit of a puzzle to people in his
own day, according to the Gospels. And because I mean, frankly, anybody,
any physical human being walking around saying things that sound
like he's claiming divine prerogatives is going to get something
of a pushback, is going to be regarded as either
off his rocker, a megalomaniac, or something that it's going
to be difficult to process. And so jess doesn't make
first person claims like that, but he lets what he
says and does add up in people's minds, and so
that when he's risen from the dead, Thomas can say,
according to John twenty twenty eight, my Lord and my God,
I really want to say one other thing about this.
And I mean, we could talk about this for an
hour easily. There's a lot to unpack here, but I
do want to say this, This is crucial, This is key.
Critics now I'm not just talking about regular people who say, gee,
how come Jesus wasn't clearers of I'm talking about people
who advocate an anti trinitarian, anti incarnational view of Jesus.
Their arguments really typically come down to this sort of
thing that, well, why doesn't the Bible say it this way?
So instead of dealing with what the Bible does say,
they carpet what it doesn't. It's the old fallacy of
an appeal to silence writ large, because they'll say, well,
wel come, Jesus didn't say he was good. Well, then
I point out, well, Thomas, John, Paul, the Hebrews, they
all call Jesus God. Well, it doesn't say that he's God,
the Son, second person, the Trinity. So it doesn't You
can't win. You know, They've got this mindset that if
I can just point out something it doesn't say, I
won the I've won the argument that that isn't the
way this works. You need to deal with what the
texts do say and not merely carpet what they don't say.
Speaker 3: So that can almost be used as a type of
red herring of almost like oh, well, but we should
have this, and it's almost like look, over here at
what we should have instead of directly dealing with what
we do have.
Speaker 2: I can't I can't over emphasize how common this kind
of argumentation is in Biblical arguments and theology. People constantly
are appealing to silence or appealing to ignorance, which is
a similar sounding thing. Well, you can't prove this isn't
so well, that isn't how this is done either. You
need to show reason why we should accept your view.
You know, it's odd Jesus never went around saying I
am a man, but of course everybody knew he was.
Now you may say, well, that's silly, rob but there
have been religions through the throughout church history, particularly in
modern times, that have questioned whether Jesus really was human,
and there were you know, confused. There was some confusion
about this even in the second century, about whether Jesus
the Man was identical with the Christ. And so even
at the end of the first century, John is saying,
you know that this is the spirit of the Antichrist
that's dying, that Jesus Christ has actually come in the
flesh verse John chapter four. So what seems obvious to
us may not seem obvious to somebody else. And that's
another really important point here. It may be obvious to
the Jehovah's witnesses that Jesus isn't God, but to the
Ones's Pentecostals, it's quite obvious that he is. In fact,
they think he's the Father, and they don't understand why
other people don't recognize, including Trinitarians, that Jesus is the Father. Well, see,
what you think is obvious to you as a reader
of the Bible may not be obvious to somebody else.
So we need to get past this kind of fascile
assumption that our reading of the Bible is the obvious
and correct reading and get down to dealing with everything
that scripture says about Jesus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and as before, we start kind of digging into
the actual evidence of why there's good reason to believe
Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, the god Man.
One of the things in the beginning early on in
your book, your latest One, The Incarnate Christ and his Critics,
that you point out that I found alarming, if I'm
being honest, is how many Christians are actually confused about
who Jesus is. Particularly, one thing that's out is the
fact of how many Christians who claim to be evangelical
believers actually think Jesus is a created being. And so
as I'm listening to you talking about those who are
confused about who Jesus is, whether they be in a
cult or a false religion, or even just a you know,
a lay person who's just trying to figure out who
he is, it occurs to me that we his followers
should at least we've got to get that right. And
so my question is is why do you think that
is the reality that so many people don't know what
it means to say that Jesus is God.
Speaker 2: A lack of teaching is obviously obviously going to be
the prime culprit here. Evangelical churches generally don't teach theology
to their congregations. They teach how you can have a
better marriage and family life. They teach, you know, maybe
how to share your faith with somebody else without necessarily
helping you understand the content of what you're trying to share.
You know, there's a lot of things that do get taught,
but there isn't much in the way of theology. There
isn't much in the way of actual biblical exposition. Even
though many evangelical pastors preach through books of the Bible,
they don't really preach the book. They take a verse
in a passage and they use it as springboard for
some kind of moralizing or some kind of spiritual pep talk,
and rather than actually getting into what this passage is
saying in its context, how it applies to us today,
I think pastors are afraid that their congregation won't track
with what the text says, assuming the pastor is able
to do that himself, which sometimes isn't the case as well.
So there's a serious lack of theological education going on
in the congregations, but also to some extent before the
pastors and other people in the church who are teaching
get in there. So we've got to encourage and urge
and beg and plead with people in leadership in Christian
churches to make this a priority. Not to dumb down
the Gospel, not to dumb down the doctrine of scripture,
not to dumb down Christian theology, but to challenge their congregation,
challenge the members of their churches to get into this
stuff and think hard and long about these things, and
clearly about these things. And the reason why they need
to do it is because if they don't, any wind
of false doctrine can blow them away very easily. Any also,
a skepticism can knock them off their feet, as people say, well,
now that isn't that's not really what the Bible says.
There are people on TikTok and YouTube and whatnot that
are getting lots and lots of people watching them who
are saying that the Bible doesn't teach there's only one God.
It doesn't teach that Jesus is God incarnate. Uh, you know,
on and on and on, and there's not enough pushback
on that. And so we need to be very very
intentional in the churches and make sure that people are
learning Christian doctrine. Unfortunately, many people they're there the entirety
of their Christian education comes in a half hour, forty
five minute sermon Sunday morning and that's it. Uh. And
many pastors are under the impression that they have to
serve milk every Sunday. We just need to work against
that trend. We need to we need to push for
stronger teaching that challenges people's minds. Jesus quoting the Great
Commandment you know said. What he said was the greatest commandment, said,
you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind,
and strength. The mind of the Christian is a terrible
thing to waste. We've got to Christians how to think
and how to understand their faith so that they can
live it and so they can share it with others.
Speaker 1: Let's say I'm talking to someone and I'm trying to
witness to them, and I'm trying to explain to them
what Jesus has done and.
Speaker 2: Who he is.
Speaker 1: What sort of weight does the idea of the divinity
of Christ or him being God incarnate? What role does
that play apologetically and as you understand it well.
Speaker 2: I don't know that I want to go into a
conversation with somebody who doesn't yet believe in Christ with
the goal that that person has to come to understand
the doctrine of the Trinity adequately before he or she
can become a believer. I don't think that that's a
reasonable or necessary expectation. The basic story, which is found
throughout the New Testament in various places and explained in
various ways, it's pretty easy to understand, even if in
the details the logically we get a little tripped up,
and that is that God sent God, the Father, sent
his son Jesus Christ into the world. He came, came
down from heaven. He was just like the Father in
his eternal divine nature, but he wasn't the Father. He
came from the Father, humbled himself to become a human being,
live a perfect life, die on the cross for our sins,
rise from the dead. He's gone back into heaven and
is with the Father ruling over all creation and bringing
people into a restored relationship with God through faith in him.
And that story doesn't require a lot of theological explanation
up front. It may engender some theological questions which we
should be prepared to address, but you know, I think
it's pretty straightforward. I mean, John three point sixteen in
a way can be unpacked to lay all that out.
It's very clear from passages like Galatians four verses four
to six. God sent his son fullness of time, born
of a woman, born under the law, so that we
might become God's children through faith in him and have
His spirit, have the spirit of His Son in us.
So the Christian message isn't just a message of sort
of a get out of Hell free card. But it's
a message of coming into a new relationship with God,
who will be our father and who will transform us,
who will change us, who will help us to become
the kind of people that are fit to live forever
in His kingdom. And this is wonderful news. It's not
something that you know, we should be in any way
embarrassed by. But admittedly, when we get into the details,
people are going to have some theological questions. We should
be prepared to address those. I didn't understand or even
necessarily accept in any kind of clear fashion the Doctor
in the Trinity when I first became a believer, I
had to go through a process. When it first got challenged,
I really had trouble. And I not only had trouble
because it's a difficult doctrine, but because people in my
church didn't know how to explain it adequately. I mean,
I had a leader in my college age group telling me,
an adult, older adult leader, telling me that Jesus was
the father I believe, and I knew that wasn't right. Yeah,
you know, I was what I was, I eighteen or nineteen,
I mean, you know, and I just knew that wasn't right.
But this is how you know this. This is often
how things get explained by people that don't have any
kind of, you know, solid teaching on this. If I
may get on another pet peeve of mine, I hear
people praying in churches all the time who jump back
and forth between the Father and the Son without realizing
that's what they're doing. So they'll say thank you Father
for coming into the world and dying for us on
the cross, or some something that sounds very much like that.
That that's not right now. I don't think they are
aware of the fact that they're even saying that. I
think extemporaneous prayers in public is not something everybody is
necessarily going to be very comfortable doing or know what
they're doing. And if you ask them, do you think
Jesus is the Father, they'd probably say no. But the
fact of the matter is is that this kind of
thing does happen an awful lot. And so it's crucial
that in the church, as people are being discipled, that is,
as they are being taught what the Christian life is
all about, what the Christian faith actually affirms, that these
things get explained so that people are have a more
secure and solid understanding that they can apply in their
own lives and in their own prayers, and in their
own conversations with other people who don't yet believe.
Speaker 1: So there's a couple of things where I want to
go here. The first thing is, we do want to
get to the hands acronym because it's such a useful
way of remembering and sort of working through the various
lines of argument for the deity of Christ. But before
we get there, just to wrap up what you were
saying about the role of this, understanding this or using
this in evangelism or apologetics. It's not essential for someone
to understand everything like that, or you know, the Trinity
and these certain doctrines. But where what do you think
is the benefit of having a good understanding of Let's say,
if someone read your book, the first one, for instance,
you know, putting Jesus in His Place? Yes, exactly, if
they read putting Jesus in His Place, what's that going
to equip them with? How will that build them up
or equip them to share with others?
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I think either book has the
potential to enhance and enrich a Christian's own personal understanding
of who Jesus is and what he did for us,
what kind of a person he was, humanly speaking? Even
I have to tell you that in working on these books,
I found myself from time to time and I'm I
tend to approach these things very much as an academic,
you know, in terms of my style and what i'm
you know, my mode of thinking at the time. You know,
I'm sort of tunnel vision. I've got to solve this
exegetical problem and I've got to explain it. Just so,
I found myself frequently just moved by by the person
of Christ. And so do you mind if I give
you an example. I'm reading Mark. I'm reading Mark and
his Marx account of Jesus casting out the legion of
demons from the demoniac, who was so strong they couldn't
hold him down, they couldn't keep him tied up. He
was just beating everybody up, and he was running around nude,
and he was just out of control, and nobody could
do anything about it. Jesus comes and says, what's your name, Lesion?
Because we are many? Well, that means something in the
neighborhood of a couple thousand demons, Maybe not quite that many,
but a lot of demons, so Jesus doesn't have to
do much of anything. He just tells the legion of
demons to go jump in the lake, or go jump
in the water into the pigs. The pigs. They jump
into the pigs, the pigs jump into the water. That's
how it actually goes down. So he basically just tells
them what to go do with themselves, and they do it.
He has effortless control in these circumstances. Likewise, when he's
asleep on the boat on the Sea of Galilee and
they wake him up saying, we're drowning here this terrible storm,
Jesus looks out on the sea and he tells it
to shut up, and it does. I mean, it's just effortless.
And that is an accurate English equivalent of what Jesus
is recorded as saying in Greek is basically shut up.
Now fast forward in Mark, when Jesus is being tormented
by the soldiers before his crucifixion. There's a sizable but
smaller detachment of soldiers. We don't know exactly how many,
we don't know if they were all there, but there
was enough that they were hitting him and spitting on
him and you know, kicking. Basically, they were just physically
abusing him, and it occurred to me, and I think
Mark deliberately crafts his narrative so that you won't miss
this if you're reading straight through, rather than just you know,
doing the verse of a day thing. Jesus had the
power to blow those soldiers away with an effortless word.
He could have had them all just gone, and he
stood there and took it. And now, look, there's a
lot of ways that we talk about the deity of
Christ and how it's revealed, but that kind of personal character,
self control, self discipline, the willingness to stand there and
take the abuse for you and for me, by the way,
voluntarily submitting to that abuse when he could have stopped
it at any moment, speaks to me very loudly about
what kind of person he was and how glorious his
moral fiber and character were. Jesus sinlessness isn't just a
matter of not doing bad things. It's a matter of
being a positive, definitive expression of God's holy character in
a human being. It's astonishing. And so what I'm getting
at here is I hope that as people read either
one of these books that they will personally be enriched
in their appreciation for who Jesus is in terms of
what kind of person he was as a human being
on the earth and is now, and how marvelous his
love is for us, and astonishing his power is. And
of course we want them to understand the doctrine. But
the doctrine is a means to the end of coming
into a relationship with Jesus Christ in which we honor
him and worship him and glorify him and love him.
Jesus said to his disciples, if you don't love me
more than you love your parents, you're not worthy of me. Now.
In an honor shame culture, particularly the Jewish culture, in
which parents were at the top of the heap in
terms of human beings and the honors that they deserved,
the only one that could be higher than your parents
in terms of the the pecking order of deserving honor
would be God. And here Jesus saying, if you don't
love me more than you love your mom and your dad,
you're not worthy to follow me. You can just leave
right now. So this isn't just about getting the doctrine right.
It's coming into a love relationship with the son of God,
who gave himself, who showed how much God loves me
and how much He loves me by dying on the
cross for my sins. It's about coming into a relationship
with him and loving him and honoring him. Jesus said
in John five twenty three that all are to honor
the Son just as they honor the Father. We are
to give Jesus the same honor that we give to
God the Father, the same honor. We're to honor him
in the same way. And throughout the New Testament you
see Jesus receiving worship, being the object of prayer, being glorified,
all of these things, because he is worthy of all
of it. So that's the first thing I'd want a
Christian who's reading either of these books to get. I
want them to come at it first and foremost for
themselves to learn more about Jesus, to understand the New
Testament better, because the New Testament's all about Jesus, right,
So you're going to understand the Bible better, You're going
to understand and appreciate Jesus better. You're going to be
encouraged to foster a closer and more meaningful relationship with
Jesus and then that will then hopefully spill out into
you being better equipped and better fit personally to tell
other people about Jesus. It's no good telling people well,
now that you're a Christian, you need to go out
and tell other people about Jesus just that alone, you know,
without the cultivating of the relationship, the development of the
faith and the trust and the love for Jesus that
we are to have, it's going to be barn. It's
going to be difficult for that to bear fruit. It
needs to come out of a heart, out of a
mind that is just immersed in a relationship with Jesus,
where he is in fact more important to you than
anybody and anything else, and then it's going to be
much more effective.
Speaker 1: Yeah, A man, well put reading through the book. I
mean I started in preparation for the interview. I sometimes
I put book PDFs or books into text to speech
and I listen to them because I can fill the
more time. And I've only got eight hours done of
twenty nine hours.
Speaker 2: Because it's a big book.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's all the footnotes, but you know, I can
say that just even in reading a small portion, and
you know, I've read your previous book, but this one
again in reading it, it's like so edifying and I
just feel like when I'm reading it, like, man, this
is brilliant. And maybe that's part of the reason I'm
thinking of it being an evangelistic thing, like where can
this work evangelistically or apologetically? Because for me, when you
see the piece is fitting together so well, like it's
almost like, you know, if you were with Jesus seeing
him do all of these things, there's going to come
a point where you're like, my Lord and my God.
You know you're you're the Christ, you know, because just
to the cumulative the cumulative case there, so yes, I
can attest that it is very edifying and wonderful.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I think when we talk to people, we
need to try to find out kind of what makes
them tick and what maybe is keeping them from a
relationship with God, or what's keeping them from trusting God,
or what's blocking their mind from taking this seriously or
whatever it is. And you know, we might find out
any number of things. They might say, well, you know,
I'm a scientist, and I've been taught that you can
only believe in what you can see in touch and
taste and well, and so we might have to address that.
Or they might say, well, there's so many different beliefs
about Jesus, I don't know how to decide which one's right.
Or they might say, well, God seems so far away.
You know, things happen, bad things happen, and he's not
doing anything about it, and I just don't understand that,
And I don't know how to relate to a God
that seems so distant. Whatever it is, we need to
find out what that is, kind of what is driving
them into this mindset of I just can't come to
grips with it, I can't believe it, And then we
can address that. And Jesus is the answer to practically
every one of those things. You know, there's actual physical
and historical proof evidence, strong evidence that Jesus rose from
the dead. That ought to satisfy anybody who's got a
rational mindset and just wants to know what the facts
Jesus shows us that God cares John three point sixteen.
We've mentioned that already Romans five eight, For God commends
his own love toward us in that whole we were
yet sinners. Christ died for us to know that God
loves you, so much that he was willing to send
his son, who voluntary, voluntarily came, humbled himself and went
through all that for you and for me should help
the person come to realize God isn't that far away
as I thought. You know, he's not as far away
as I thought. He does care. He's not just letting
things go and not getting involved. He has got involved.
Every time he got whipped by those soldiers, God was involved.
God was feeling the pain of the world so that
we could be free from the consequences of our own sin.
And so I just I think we need to in
our talking with people who don't yet believe, who are unbelievers,
we need to find out kind of where things have
tripped up for them, and not necessarily that they're always
going to come around, but at least we can address
that and give them something to think about, something to
to cogitate on and reflect on, and maybe at some
point later they may say, you know, that was a
good point, that maybe I should be taking this more seriously.
Speaker 1: Well, let's transition down to the sort of this overall
five point case, or if you want to put it
that way, that you have an acronym called hands and
there's five lines or categories of argumentation you use to
make a case for the deed of Christ. Now we
don't want to unpack each one right now, but if
you could give us the overview of what each one
of those are, like what does the H, A, n
DS stand for, and what each one of those means,
and then maybe we'll go through and give a few
examples later on after you answer that.
Speaker 2: Sure, Well, first of all, I want to give a
shout out to my co author Ed Kamashevsky, who's the
one that came up with the acronym before we even
started working on the first book. And it's it's very
it's it's very helpful because it brings together these different
ways in which the New Testament reveals Jesus to be
God incarnate in a very effective and easy to remember fashion.
So he gets some serious credit for having come up
with this.
Speaker 3: Real quick, if I could interject, just real fast. I
came across this acronym for the first time in the
Apologetic Study Bible for Students. You guys have an article
in there, and that's been my go to ever since
because I used to kind of use John one and
try to kind of exegete john one, which I'm not
saying is a bad way to go, but I just
think that that the hands acronym, it's so cumulative, yes,
that the more you continue to go through it, the
more powerful the case becomes.
Speaker 2: Right well real quickly, so that people get the big
picture here. Each of the five points, the name of
it starts with the first letter of If you put
the first letter of each name together, it spells out hands.
So honors, h attributes, a names, and deeds is the
d and then s is the seat of God's throne,
which may be the least familiar to many people, but
it's an important points, sort of a crowning point really
in the whole picture. So Jesus receives divine honors, worship
and prayer and glory and all the rest of that.
He has divine attributes, like he's all powerful and all knowing.
He's eternal. That's really the critical one. I would argue
that Jesus is not a created being, but he's eternal.
Jesus has divine names. God is used sparingly, but it
is used of Jesus Lord in the sense of and
in the context of the divine name from the Old
Testament Yahweh or Jehovah savior in the sense of being
the savior of the world, the first and the last.
I mean, we could go on and on. Jesus performs
divine deeds. All things came into being through him. John
one three, and similar statements in Colossians and Hebrews first
Corinthians eight six. Jesus is the Savior. He saves us
from our sins. He forgives us of our sins, not
as merely a delegate pronouncing that God has forgiven you
of your sins. But Jesus says, your sins are forgiven famously.
The story of the paralytic Jesus said that and describes
that there saying, well, only God can do that. And
then the s is the seat of God's throne. Jesus,
after his resurrection and ascension, sat down at the right
hand of God, the Father in heaven. He sits on
the throne of God. He rules over all creation, heaven
and earth with all authority. From the very throne room
of God. He receives worship according to Revelation five. And
all these points, by the way, kind of go together.
In some fashion. They tend to appear in groups in
short passages like Revelation five and clausans Wan and John
one and Hebrews one Philippians too. Now, if I could
just explain how these all kind of fit together with
an analogy, because if you take any one of these
by itself, you might think, well, he could mean something
else other than he's really God. It could mean that,
you know, he's acting on God's behalf or something. So
if you find out that a particular individual resides at
sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, d C. And he
sits behind the big desk in the Oval Office, and
he signs federal legislation into law, which only one person
is allowed to do normally, And although he doesn't wear
a military uniform, whenever he's walking by military members of
our military will salute him even though he's not in
the military. And you know, we could go on and
on with all these different things about this individual. After
you've got enough of these pieces of the puzzle put
together about this individual, your conclusion is going to be, well,
this must be the President of the United States. So
just because the term president can be used to refer
to the head of a company, somewhere, and people do
get saluted in the military. They don't have to be
the president. Could be a general or even a major
or something, or you know, somebody could be allowed to
a family member, could be allowed to have a little
fun and sit in the chair in the oval office,
you know. And all that. There's only one person who's
allowed to do all those things. Who say about whom
all those things are true, There's only one individual, and
that's the President of the United States. Whoever that happens
to be at the time. Well, likewise, Jesus receiving divine honors,
exhibiting divine attributes, having divine names, performing divine deeds, and
sitting on the seat of God's throne, all of that
put together, he can only be God. He can't be
anything less than God. Now he's not the Father, but
so he is distinct from the Father, but he shares
in the divine identity and function of God, the Father
as creator, Lord, redeemer, and judge at the final day,
Jesus is the one. He occupies that position. He receives
those honors, and anyone about whom all those things are
true must be God.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it puts me in my wife and my daughter
like to put puzzles together, and it's kind of like,
you know, each puzzle piece tells you something about the
whole picture, but once you put them all together, it's
clear what the image is.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So I know that's not a perfect analogy because in
this case, some of for example, the attributes would be
much bigger pieces of the puzzle, right, But it's almost
like the acronym serves as like puzzle pieces, and when
you keep putting them together, it's very clear who we're
talking about.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I want to also call fire clarify that
when we talk about this with the analogy of a puzzle,
we're not talking about pulling different parts of the Bible
out from their context and jamming them into a picture
that can wrap them. You're not saying that at all.
I'm just saying some people might mis understand and have
Actually it's used Christians of doing that. So one of
the things that we do in the book is we
show that all five of these points are present in
a number of different passages, all in the same context.
So Matthew twenty eight sixteen to twenty all five points
are there. John one one to eighteen, The prologue of
the Gospel John. All five points are there. Colossians One's
twelve to twenty, Hebrews one one to thirteen or fourteen.
I mean it goes on it. There are several of
these passages in which you can find in many cases
all five or at least four of these coordinated in
one seamless exposition of who Jesus is. So this is
not this five point model that Ed came up with
with the acronym hands. Is not something that's being superimposed
on the Bible from outside. But it's an inductive understanding
of what the New Testament actually teaches about Jesus that
we find epitomize in several of the classic christological texts
of the New Testament. I love that.
Speaker 3: Well, you've already given us some examples of the honors
for age, like, for example, you talked about the parents
and how Jesus said, you know, to honor him above
all else and that would only be God's place. What
about the a the attributes could you name in maybe
an attributor to that Jesus displays that you can't just
explain away saying, oh, that's just a title or that's
just a role. Or something like that.
Speaker 2: Well, as I said mentioned earlier, the New Testament teaches
that all things came into existence in the created order
through the Sun, also called the logoss or word and
John one. So John one three, first Corinthians eight, six,
Colossians one sixteen, Hebrews one two, Hebrews one ten. Also
quote Psalm one hundred and two about that in the beginning, Lord,
you made the heavens and the earth, and applies that
to Jesus. So the New Testament teaches that all things
were created in through and for the Lord Jesus Christ,
for the son of God. It teaches us that I
mentioned this earlier, that he forgave people's sins on his
own prerogative as the divine son of Man. Jesus casts
out demons without going through any kind of prayer or rigmarole.
You know, he just says, get out of here on
his authority. Boo. Now, when the apostles cast out demons
or performed healings, they would say, in the name of
Jesus Christ, get out of here. Exactly in the name
of Jesus Christ, be healed. And Peter even went on
and on about this in a kind of almost awkwardly
redundant fashion in Acts three, explaining it isn't anything about us,
but it's in the name of Jesus that these things
that this man was healed. So Jesus heals people in
a very different way than his own disciples healed people.
Jesus healed people without having to say, Father, if it
be your will, you know, we beg you to heal
this person. He never did anything like that. He just
healed people. Jesus said, and this is in more than
one gospel, that at the end of history, at the
end of the age, he will be sitting on the
throne of judgment and determining your eternal destiny. That's a
divine work. If there ever was one, whoever's going to
be deciding where I spend eternity, That's the one I
want to make sure I'm reconciled with and is happy
with me. And you know that I'm on his good side.
Speaker 3: You know that seems reasonable.
Speaker 2: I'll worship him because he does deserves it, because he's
in charge of the eternal future of every human being
that has ever lived or ever will live. That's, by
the way, you can't do that effectively properly authentically if
you don't have the power to do it. You have
to know people from the inside out. You have to
know their hearts, you have to know their whole story.
You have to be able to make a fair, just
judgment about that person. And to do that you have
to have omniscience. So just being able to It's not
like Jesus is sitting up there on the throne and says, well,
you look like a nice enough person. You know, he
knows everyone inside and out. He knows. That's why Jesus
could take one look at this paralyzed man that got
lowered through the roof physically had never laid eyes on
him before as far as we know, and could immediately
say to him, my son, your sins are forgiven. How
could he do? Who does he think he is? You know? Yeah,
So Jesus just demonstrates divine ature also by the divine
deeds that he performs. These are correlated facets of Jesus
deity in scripture. Now, of course, Jesus isn't just God
or just divine. Jesus is also human. In the incarnation,
he took on human flesh, human weakness. Jesus fell asleep
in the boat before he performed that astonishing miracle, Jesus
ate and drank and walked and all these other things.
So Jesus experienced human limitations in his especially particularly in
his mortal life on the earth. Jesus is still human,
but he's resurrected and glorified. And to what extent those
limitations would apply now, we're not really clear, but they
probably don't because Jesus is exalted and glorified above all creation.
So Jesus has these human attributes and these divine attributes
at the same time when he's on the earth that
don't seem to fit together. I like to call Jesus
this is the paradoxical person. Everything about Jesus is a
bit of a mystery, but that's what we see in
the Gospels. Jesus is puzzling to people during his own lifetime.
Speaker 1: So you've made a case with this acronym of hands
and listed all of those things and shown that the
New Testament paints this picture because you're taking all these
different lines of evidence, if you want to call it,
that construct this And I'm wondering if maybe maybe skeptical
response might be, well, you know, the New Testament letters
and things. These were all theological elaborations. Well, if you
just took the Gospels, you wouldn't come to that conclusion.
So I'm just wondering, can you get all the hands
other the letters of the hands acronym Can you get
all of those from the gospels alone? Can you make
the same case that way?
Speaker 2: Well? Yes, In fact, I mentioned earlier that you get
all five points crowded together in a five verse span
at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the Great
Commission passage in Matthew twenty eight sixteen to twenty. In
John twenty twenty eight, Thomas calls Jesus my Lord and
my God. There's two divine titles right there. Now. Of
course these are all these are after the resurrection. And
I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that Jesus
did not go around using divine names for himself in
a direct fashion, That did not generally call himself the
son of God, although there's one place where that does
come up. Certainly never called himself God. But he left
that to be understood or discovered through the process of
what he was doing on the earth in his sinless life,
his miracles, his death, his resurrection. All of these things
led to Thomas's confession and to the early Church understanding
these things to be true. Now, you know, some people,
including scholars, who are desperate to get around the idea
that Jesus was divine, have tried to argue that this
was some kind of later development Christianity, that sometime maybe
twenty thirty years or longer, after Jesus died and resurrected
from the dead, if they acknowledged that much. These skeptics
or people of other religious persuasions have suggested that Paul
or maybe somebody after Paul, came up with this idea
that Jesus was divine, that he was a God incarnate.
The problem is is that worship and adoration and other
religious honors of Jesus were being given to him by
the very first believers, for example, from the very beginning,
and we just have I mean, there's several lines of
evidence to show that this is the case and nothing
to suggest otherwise. From the very beginning of the Christian movement,
people were being baptized on the authority of Jesus Christ.
We're told this in Acts First Corinthians. Of course, Matthew
twenty eight people often question that, but I mean, we
have several lines of evidence that this is the case,
and there's no realistic argument that this was a later development.
People were baptizing people as new believers from the very
beginning in Jesus' name. It was a confession of Jesus
as Lord, and that's quite clear. Paul refers to the
honors being given by the Aramaic speaking disciples before him
when he quotes, for example, at the end of First
Corinthians in chapter sixteen Maranatha, that is an Aramaic expression.
It means O Lord come. It's a prayer to the
Lord Jesus asking him to come. Quote. Paul uses that
in the Aramaic which often gets obscured in modern English versions.
But it's in Aramaic, even though he's writing in Greek.
Why does he do that Because this was a routine
part of the liturgical expression of the first Christians that
got to the Corinthians when they first were introduced to
the Gospel. So it goes back right to the beginning
in the first generation. Martin Heinckel, the German New Testament scholar,
made the observation that there was more development. If you
want to use that term of Christology, of belief about
Christ in the first twenty years of Christianity than there
was in the subsequent six hundred WOW. Larry Hurtado called
this the Big Bang of religious devotion to Jesus as divine.
It just emerges immediately upon the beginning of the Christian movement.
It's not something that, as people often argue or claim
without really any evidence, that Paul or somebody else started
making this stuff up to try to get more gentiles
to believe in Jesus. That is not true. The Aramaic
speaking Jewish Christians thought of Jesus as divine. They prayed
to him, they adored him, they loved him. It was
all about Jesus from the get go. So that's what
these things are not terribly hard to understand. I think
that regular people can follow at least some of this,
maybe with a little bit more explanation, but it's not
too hard to understand that. The burden of proof is
on those who are claiming that this wasn't what the
earliest Christians believed, or that Jesus didn't give them any
grounds to do so. Now look, I'll be the first
to say if Jesus simply got crucified by the Romans.
That was the end of it. Then I wouldn't have
any basis for confidence that Jesus was who he said
he was and who the earliest Christian said he was.
But the evidence that Jesus rose from the dead is
overwhelming historical evidence, and that confirms it validates jesus claims
and the claims of the early Church as to who
Jesus was. It tells us that they're not just making
something up about Jesus, but Jesus actually did something that
no other religious founder has ever even claimed to do,
which is he conquered death so that we might have
eternal life. Amen. So this is not only just theologically
provocative and profound, but it's also personally amazing and important
to each one of us to know that Jesus did
that so that we could have eternal life. That eternal
life isn't just about oh, after you die, things will
be wonderful, but it's about a different quality of life
that starts now in a relationship with God the Father
through Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Well, well, you know, I knew that we're coming to
the end of our interview time here, and you know
I was thinking how how can we end this? And
you know, as you were talking there, I'm like, well
that is the perfect end to you know, the interview
just ending with a resurrection and our future hope. So,
doctor Bowman, it's been a real pleasure and a privilege
to speak with you today. Really love your work and
appreciate it. Thank you for spending the time, and we're
going to point people to your resources and hope everybody
can benefit from it as well.
Speaker 2: I just really appreciate that. Thank you. I would like
if we can, you can put this in somewhere or
you can add it. I would like to let people
know that they can find out a lot more about
the books from my personal author website, Robert Bowman dot net.
And they can also access hundreds of articles about Christianity
and other religions for free on our ministry website ir
dot org. And that will help, including a lot of
articles specifically about Jesus, about his life, his miracles, his
death and resurrection, his deity, the doctri and the Trinity
and all that they can find lots and lots of
free resources on our website IRR dot org.
Speaker 1: Perfect well, we'll point people there in the show notes
and thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Good to chat with you guys.
I'd be honored if we've got a chance to do
it again.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to the podcast. If
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