What it means to call Jesus “Lord” has been a big bone of contention over the last decade or so. I have had a lot to say on the matter here, there, etc., and on Facebook recently. Many people are convinced by a syllogistic Trinitarian logic: YHWH = Lord, Jesus = Lord, therefore Jesus = YHWH. Others, myself included, think that Jesus is confessed as “Lord” because the authority entailed in lordship has been graciously bestowed upon him by God (cf. Phil. 2:9-11).

This latter ante-Trinitarian line of thought can be made to serve different theological agendas. My own view is that it is not an argument against Trinitarianism (that is, anti-Trinitarian). It is an argument for a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament that foregrounds the kingdom-political significance of Jesus in the first century context. This is not the whole story, but it is by far the most important narrative thread in the New Testament, running from the announcement to Mary that her son would receive the “throne of his father David” (Lk. 1:32) through to the fall of Babylon the great in Revelation 18-19. I think it needs to be better understood—at the expense of the classic Trinitarian paradigm if necessary.

I’ve had a couple of different types of response to my “Did God die on the cross?” post. Not a lot, but enough to justify a follow-up, I think. There is a biblical response based on the view that the New Testament directly equates or identifies Jesus with YHWH as kyrios; and there is a more deductive theological argument grounded in atonement theory.

This has been giving me a headache.

Luke has Paul say to the Ephesian elders: “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). In a sermon posted last week on The Gospel Coalition site Jason Helopolous insists that the last part means what it says—or, at least, what it appears to say: God saved or preserved the church “through his own blood” (dia tou haimatou tou idiou).

This has to be wrong, surely?

In good off-the-cuff biblical language Donald Trump has warned that North Korea’s recent salvo of threats “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.

Jesus said that the Roman assault on Jerusalem would result in “such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, and never will be” (Mk. 13:19). Josephus shared his view: “Accordingly it appears to me, that the misfortunes of all men, from the beginning of the world, if they be compared to these of the Jews, are not so considerable as they were” (War 1.12). Both of them, I imagine, were recalling Daniel 12:1: “there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time”.

What did the centurion at the cross believe about Jesus? Did he believe that Jesus was the true Son of God? Did he believe that he was equivalent to the divinised emperor? Or did he merely agree with popular Jewish opinion that Jesus was a righteous man (and not the first), who had been unjustly put to death by the corrupt régime? In other words, why was last week’s post about “a son of God” and not about “the Son of God”?

The problem for interpretation, in the first place, is that in this type of sentence it can be difficult to know whether the Greek phrase huios theou (“son of God”) is definite or indefinite—“the Son of God” or “a son of God”.

When the centurion, who stood opposite him, saw that he expired in this way, he said, “Truly, this man was a son / the Son of God (huios theou ēn).” (Mk. 15:39)

This is a quick response to Mark Nieweg’s question, following yesterday’s post on Jesus as the Son of God, whether Hebrews 7:13 is an argument for the eternal existence of the Son of God: “He is without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest forever” (ESV).

It is, and it isn’t.