I recently debated Pastor Samuel Green on the topic of, “An Incarnate God: Fact or Fiction”. I argued that the Incarnation of a God, in this case – Christ, was fiction using the following reasoning:
- The Jews have no concept of the hypostatic union or of theophanies in their religious literature.
- The earliest Christians debated the nature of Christ and each group ascribed their view to a disciple/ apostle.
- The earliest Christians were primarily Greek gentiles who were familiar with incarnation philosophy and theology.
- The early Church therefore read the Jewish books with a Greek philosophical and theological understanding.
- In both the Greek and Jewish cultures, men of fame and great public interest were declared to be of divine birth/ natures.
- The Greek concept of a Theophany is at odds with the Jewish belief of Shali’ah.
- The Church unfairly forced a fixed vote promoting one Bishop’s arguments for a pro-hypostatic union Christ.
- The members of the Church revolted and in 359 CE Arius’ position (ante-Nicene) was adopted.
- Athanasius’ hypostatic union/ dual natured Christ was declared a heresy under larger Ecumenical councils throughout the Christian world.
- My conclusion therefore is that an incarnate Christ as a God was a theology developed by Greek minded elements of the early Church, adopted by the Church, refuted and declared heretical by the Church and later re-adopted, thus showing it’s early development into a doctrine as opposed to something which was initially and always believed by the majority of Christians.
Pastor Samuel’s arguments were:
- The incarnation theology can be found in the Torah, Prophets and Psalms.
- Daniel 7 is an evidence of this.
You can view the debate here in its entirety:
and Allaah knows best.
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Good job Ijaz !
Samuel has a fantasy of seeing Christian believes in the Old Testament , no scholar says soo!, such a deluded guy .
Can any one tell me something on the grammar in the original Greek text saying : “before Abraham was I AM”
Huge issue is that no sect of Children of Israel believe in God that will be born as human on earth to liberate misery of mankind or God will come in form of prophet to save Israel.
But the Greek gospels written by Romans after the Jew-Roman war (70A.D) posses this weird tales of God coming in form of human / prophet.
It is also important to mention that the liturgy of the Jews during 2nd temple era especially the followers of Jesus (pbuh) , the Nasorean jews were in Hebrew/Aramaic not Greek.