It is sometimes objected that the ascription of the name God to Christ proves nothing as to his absolute deity, since angels and even human judges are called gods, as representing God's authority and executing his will. But we reply that, while it is true that the name is sometimes so applied, it is always with adjuncts and in connections which leave no doubt of its figurative and secondary meaning. When, however, the name is applied to Christ, it is, on the contrary, with adjuncts and in connections which leave no doubt that it signifies absolute Godhead. See Ex. 4:16—“thou shalt be to him as God”; 7:1—“See, I have made thee as God to Pharaoh”; 22:28—“Thou shalt not revile God, [marg., the judges], nor curse a ruler of thy people”; Ps. 82:1—“God standeth in the congregation of God; he judgeth among the gods” [among the mighty]; 6—“I said, Ye are gods, And all of you sons of the Most High”; 7—“Nevertheless ye shall die like men, And fall like one of the princes.” Cf. John 10:34-36—“If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came” (who were God's commissioned and appointed representatives), how much more proper for him who is one with the Father to call himself God.
As in Ps. 82:7 those who had been called gods are represented as dying, so in Ps. 97:7—“Worship him, all ye gods”—they are bidden to fall down before Jehovah. Ann. Par. Bible: “Although the deities of the heathen have no positive existence, they are often described in Scripture as if they had, and are represented as bowing down before the majesty of Jehovah.” This verse is quoted in Heb. 1:6—“let all the angels of God worship him”—i. e., Christ. Here Christ is identified with Jehovah. The quotation is made from the Septuagint, which has “angels” for “gods.” “Its use here is in accordance with the spirit of the Hebrew word, which includes all that human error might regard as objects of worship.” Those who are figuratively and rhetorically called “gods” are bidden to fall down in worship before him who is the true God, Jesus Christ. See Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:314; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 10.
In 1 John 5:20—ἐσμεν ἐν τῷ ἀληθινῷ, ἐν τῷ υἱῷ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ. οὗτος ἐστιν ὁ ἀληθινὸς Θεός—“it would be a flat repetition, after the Father had been twice called ὁ ἀληθινός, to say now again: ‘this is ὁ ἀληθενὸς Θεός.’ Our being in God has its basis in Christ his Son, and this also makes it more natural that οὖτος should be referred to υἱῷ. But ought not ὁ ἀληθενός then to be without the article (as in John 1:1—Θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος)? No, for it is John's purpose in 1 John 5:20 to say, not what Christ is, but who he is. In declaring what one is, the predicate must have no article; in declaring who one is, the predicate must have the article. St. John here says that this Son, on whom our being in the true God rests, is this true God himself” (see Ebrard, Com. in loco).
Other passages might be here adduced, as Col. 2:9—“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”; Phil 2:6—“existing in the form of God”; but we prefer to consider these under other heads as indirectly proving Christ's divinity. Still other passages once relied upon as direct statements of the doctrine must be given up for textual reasons. Such are Acts 20:28, where the correct reading is in all probability not ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ, but ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Κυρίου (so ACDE Tregelles and Tischendorf; B and א, however, have τοῦ Θεοῦ. The Rev. Vers. continues to read “church of God”; Amer. Revisers, however, read “church of the Lord”—see Ezra Abbot's investigation in Bib. Sac., 1876: 313-352); and 1 Tim. 3:16, where ὅς is unquestionably to be substituted for Θεός, though even here ἐφανερώθη intimates preëxistence.
Rev. George E. Ellis, D. D., before the Unitarian Club, Boston, November, 1882—“Fifty years of study, thought and reading given largely to the Bible and to the literature which peculiarly relates to it, have brought me to this conclusion, that the book—taken with the especial divine quality and character claimed for it, and so extensively assigned to it, as inspired and infallible as a whole, and in all its contents—is an Orthodox book. It yields what is called the Orthodox creed. The vast majority of its readers, following its letter, its obvious sense, its natural meaning, and yielding to the impression which some of its emphatic texts make upon them, find in it Orthodoxy. Only that kind of ingenious, special, discriminative, and in candor I must add, forced treatment, which it receives from us liberals can make the book teach anything but Orthodoxy. The evangelical sects, so called, are clearly right in maintaining that their view of Scripture and of its doctrines draws a deep and wide division of creed between them and ourselves. In that earnest controversy by pamphlet warfare between Drs. Channing and Ware on the one side, and Drs. Worcester and Woods and Professor Stuart on the other—a controversy which wrought up the people of our community sixty years ago more than did our recent political campaign—I am fully convinced that the liberal contestants were worsted. Scripture exegesis, logic and argument were clearly on the side of the Orthodox contestants. And this was so, mainly because the liberal party put themselves on the same plane with the Orthodox in their way of regarding and dealing with Scripture texts in their bearing upon the controversy. Liberalism cannot vanquish Orthodoxy, if it yields to the latter in its own way of regarding and treating the whole Bible. Martin Luther said that the Papists burned the Bible because it was not on their side. Now I am not about to attack the Bible because it is not on my side; but I am about to object as emphatically as I can against a character and quality assigned to the Bible, which it does not claim for itself, which cannot be certified for it: and the origin and growth and intensity of the fond and superstitious influences resulting in that view we can trace distinctly to agencies accounting for, but not warranting, the current belief. Orthodoxy cannot readjust its creeds till it readjusts its estimate of the Scriptures. The only relief which one who professes the Orthodox creed can find is either by forcing his ingenuity into the proof-texts or indulging his liberty outside of them.”
With this confession of a noted Unitarian it is interesting to compare the opinion of the so-called Trinitarian, Dr. Lyman Abbott, who says that the New Testament nowhere calls Christ God, but everywhere calls him man, as in 1 Tim. 2:5—“for there is one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus.” On this passage Prof. L. L. Paine remarks in the New World, Dec. 1894—“That Paul ever confounded Christ with God himself, or regarded him as in any way the Supreme Divinity, is a position invalidated not only by direct statements, but also by the whole drift of his epistles.”
(b) Old Testament descriptions of God are applied to him.
This application to Christ of titles and names exclusively appropriated to God is inexplicable, if Christ was not regarded as being himself God. The peculiar awe with which the term “Jehovah” was set apart by a nation of strenuous monotheists as the sacred and incommunicable name of the one self-existent and covenant-keeping God forbids the belief that the Scripture writers could have used it as the designation of a subordinate and created being.
Mat. 3:3—“Make ye ready the way of the Lord”—is a quotation from Is. 40:3—“Prepare ye ... the way of Jehovah.” John 12:41—“These things said Isaiah, because he saw his glory; and he spake of him” [i. e., Christ]—refers to Is. 6:1—“In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne.” So in Eph. 4:7, 8—“measure of the gift of Christ ... led captivity captive”—is an application to Christ of what is said of Jehovah in Ps. 68:18. In 1 Pet. 3:15, moreover, we read, with all the great uncials, several of the Fathers, and all the best versions: “sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord”; here the apostle borrows his language from Is. 8:13, where we read: “Jehovah of hosts, him shall ye sanctify.” When we remember that, with the Jews, God's covenant-title was so sacred that for the Kethib (= “written”) Jehovah there was always substituted the Keri (= “read”—imperative) Adonai, in order to avoid pronunciation of the great Name, it seems the more remarkable that the Greek equivalent of “Jehovah” should have been so constantly used of Christ. Cf. Rom. 10:9—“confess ... Jesus as Lord”; 1 Cor. 12:3—“no man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit.” We must remember also the indignation of the Jews at Christ's assertion of his equality and oneness with the Father. Compare Goethe's, “Wer darf ihn nennen?” with Carlyle's, “the awful Unnameable of this Universe.” The Jews, it has been said, have always vibrated between monotheism and moneytheism. Yet James, the strongest of Hebrews, in his Epistle uses the word 'Lord' freely and alternately of God the Father and of Christ the Son. This would have been impossible if James had not believed in the community of essence between the Son and the Father.
It is interesting to note that 1 Maccabees does not once use the word Θεός or κύριος, or any other direct designation of God unless it be οὐρανός (cf. “swear ... by the heaven”—Mat. 5:34). So the book of Esther contains no mention of the name of God, though the apocryphal additions to Esther, which are found only in Greek, contain the name of God in the first verse, and mention it in all eight times. See Bissell, Apocrypha, in Lange's Commentary; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 93; Max Müller on Semitic Monotheism, in Chips from a German Workshop, 1:337.