AP

Naming the Second Person of the Holy Trinity

In this article I want to highlight that there may be some deficiency in the way in which we name Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, not realising some unintended consequences.

I was converted with great joy at age fifteen without too much prior Christian teaching, certainly not in the home where blasphemy was the only time the deity was named. Fortunately, school (Trinity, Summer Hill) made up for the deficiency. Back in those days I remember ministers referenced our Saviour as ‘our Lord’, when I wanted him named – ‘Jesus’ or ‘the Lord Jesus’, such was the intensity of my devotion to Him.

Well, over the course of my lifetime we have moved to the position where for preachers and service leaders and the evangelical Christian community more generally, He is simply named ‘Jesus’.

This is not a Scriptural pattern and may represent a nascent Unitarian understanding – unwittingly for sure, but dangerous!

The Scriptural pattern is that He is referred to as ‘Jesus’ when His humanity is to the fore. This means the four Gospels, but also those portions of Acts and Hebrews, whenever the earthly life of Jesus is referenced, and Revelation where ‘the testimony of Jesus’ is referred to.

Otherwise, in the Epistles of Paul, James, Peter and John with their focus on the salvific work of our Saviour and its implication for godly living, He is invariably referred to as ‘Lord’, ‘Lord Jesus’, ‘Lord Jesus Christ’, ‘Jesus Christ’, ‘Christ’, or ‘Christ Jesus’, with ‘our’ often added as a prefix. To take one example, Paul’s letter to the Colossians mentions the name of Jesus six times, and never once without adding ‘Lord’ or ‘Christ’ or both to ‘Jesus’. Additionally in Colossians there are a further twenty instances where he is named simply as ‘Christ’.

What is the point I’m making?

The naming of our Lord and Saviour in the Bible as ‘Jesus’ draws attention to the events, teaching and tapestry of His everyday earthly life, that is, to His humanity. However, in the epistles in which the Apostles reflect and teach on the purpose of His life, they add His titles, because he is more than just ‘incarnate by the power of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, and made man’.

Yes, He is that, but so much more! Before He took on our frail human flesh, He was and remains forever, in the words of the Nicene Creed, ‘the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father’.

From all eternity and forevermore, the Son of God is the only begotten Son of God the Father, and together with the Holy Spirit, is the one God – three persons sharing one power, all authority, all possessing one nature, all exercising one will and all working distinctly, yet inseparably.

There is obviously mystery and difficulty of comprehension for us in the richness of the glory of knowledge of our great God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Calvin in discussing the distinction of the unbegotten Father, eternally begotten Son and procession of the Holy Spirit writes:

‘The greatness of the mystery warns us how much reverence and sobriety we ought to use in investigating this. And that passage in Gregory of Nazianzus vastly delights me: ‘I cannot think on the one without being encircled by the splendour of the three; nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one’.’[i]

When we preach and teach and believe things concerning our Lord Jesus, His saving work and prescription for godly living, we are referencing the One who is both God and man, who possesses both divinity and humanity. He is the One we follow and the One we worship and adore.

Referring to Him as Jesus, without qualification, this friendly, kind and helpful guy, and sure, Saviour too, simply does not in any way measure up to the person who He is. He is clothed in majesty; He is the Judge on the last day. He is almighty God, ‘He is the radiance of the glory of God, and the exact imprint of his nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of his power’.

Yes, we will always want to call Him just ‘Jesus’, if only because of the heartfelt intimacy we experience in so naming Him. But would that we could more often, far more often, name Him according to His divinity – as Lord, our Lord Jesus, Jesus Christ my Lord and Saviour, high King over all.

On St Bartholomew’s Day, 1662 across England and Wales, some 2,029 clergy, lecturers and University fellows, including nearly a thousand clergy with livings were deprived of their posts for refusing their “unfeigned assent and consent” to everything contained in the Prayer Book. Of the 2,029 ejected, 194 were known to have been Independents and 19 Baptists. Of the remaining 1,816, many were committed Presbyterians but equally many eschewed sectarian labels, though broadly went under the label, Presbyterian. Between the period 1715-1718 and 1851, dates for which data exists, Independents (Congregationalists) increased in number from 60,000 to 655,000, Baptists from 60,000 to 500,000, while 180,000 Presbyterians had shrunk to 84,000.[ii] By 1851 Presbyterian chapels were largely Unitarian chapels.

How did this happen? Essentially, it was down to the rejection of creeds and confessions of faith, if not in whole, then in part. No less a Puritan than the highly influential Richard Baxter held negative views concerning some of the teaching of the Westminster Confession of Faith.[iii] Matthew Henry, author of a six-volume commentary on the Bible, recorded in his Journal: ‘My only creed is the Bible’[iv]. By the early 1700s, the Confession was being rejected, many times over, in favour of the call to be ‘Bible men’, ‘the Bible and only the Bible’. Men felt at liberty to interpret the Bible as they saw fit, free of the constraints that creeds and confessions might impose. Change when it comes has small beginnings – Matthew Henry remained orthodox to the end of his life – but then the change accelerates, as with his chapel in Chester, no longer Trinitarian fifty years after his death, but Unitarian.

– David Palmer

[i] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited John T. McNeill and translated Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), Book 1, Chapter 13.17, p. 141

[ii] The statistical information is taken from Michael Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Volume 1.

[iii] Further details on the contribution of Richard Baxter to the growth of Unitarianism can be found in the history of English Unitarianism, rather tellingly entitled The English Presbyterians by Gordon Bolam et al.

[iv] For this quote I am indebted to Allan Harman who has transcribed Matthew Henry’s Journal.