The Jesus Question

Jesus Christ today is the most extraordinary, the most loved and hated, the most widely considered person in all of human history. More songs have been sung to him, more paintings painted of him, and more books written about him, than anyone who has ever lived in the history of the world.

—Mark Driscoll

“Vintage Jesus” is a twelve-part sermon series given by Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle in 2006. In 2007 the series was published as a book by Crossway, coauthored with Gerry Breshears. Because it covers the major questions people tend to ask about Jesus, I thought it a fitting series for this blog. As I move through each sermon video, I will be highlighting only a few main ideas, so please, watch the videos and/or read the book for a fuller treatment of the question “Who is Jesus?”

Disclaimer: Mark Driscoll has a polarizing personality. He’s orthodox in his theology but unorthodox in his preaching style, which is casual and contains humor that’s sometimes crass. (He uses slang expressions and likes to make fun of people.) Even though I don’t endorse everything he says or how he says it and am particularly turned off by his machismo, I have learned from his teachings over the years. He very clearly asserts and explains the evangelical perspective (or one of them, anyway) on a variety of issues and makes Christian history and theology interesting. Furthermore, he’s not afraid to preach parts of Scripture that offend our modern-day sensitivities, and for that I commend him.

The first sermon in the “Vintage Jesus” series addresses the question “Is Jesus God?”, and if so, “Is Jesus the only God?” Driscoll, of course, answers in the affirmative. He focuses on twelve different claims Jesus made during his earthly ministry, each one more extraordinary than the next, that differentiate him from all the other spiritual leaders in the history of the world. He demonstrates that Christians are narrow because Jesus was narrow; his claims to Godhood were singular, exclusive, and still remain unparalleled: I alone am perfect. I alone have the power to forgive sin, and the right to judge it. I alone am the way to heaven. And so on. No wonder they killed him!

Driscoll opens up with some Jesus-inspired quotes by pop culture icons and political and religious figures, ranging from Gandhi to Hitler to Pamela Anderson, but then he lets Jesus speak for himself. If you were a victim of slander, he points out, you’d want the opportunity to tell people who you really are and what you have and have not done and said and believe. We should afford to Jesus that kindness, he says, and so we turn to the Gospels. Some of you might object: How do we know that the four canonical Gospels accurately record what Jesus said and did? Couldn’t Christians have added those bits about Jesus’s divinity later on, for ideological reasons? This is a very good and important question, one on which there is a great breadth of scholarship, but I am going to save it for another series. For now, let’s just work from the assumption that the words attributed to Jesus in the canonical Gospels were really his own.

Back to the question at hand: Did Jesus ever claim to be God?  Continue reading →