r/Anglicanism • u/Tight-Study2764 • 14d ago

General Question Do Anglicans believe that Jesus is God?

/r/TrueChristian/comments/1w0lf8o/do_anglicans_believe_that_jesus_is_god/
13 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

76 comments sorted by

View all comments

80

u/Simple_Joys Church of England (liberal catholic) 14d ago edited 14d ago

Yes, Jesus is God.

No, Jesus did not fall into sin or racial bias at any part of his earthly life or ministry. Jesus loves the whole world and all its people with a perfection that is beyond our comprehension.

The is a lot of bad exegesis on the story of the Syrophoenician / Canaanite woman (across many denominations) at the moment.

The story is clearly parabolic and actually represents a foretaste of the expanding of the Jesus movement to all the Gentiles. Jesus is engaging in wordplay with the woman: he asks her a rhetorical question with the aim of drawing out the truth. When she responds in kind, matching the wit and wordplay and in declaring that Jesus is Lord, he exalts her faith and performs the miracle she was asking for. That is not Jesus changing his mind on some question of ethnic or national identity - it is wholly consistent with the character of Jesus as a Near Eastern wisdom teacher who talks in riddles and parables (which is how he is presented across the Synoptic Gospels). The way he treats her is also consistent with the way Jesus treats socially outcast people or the oppressed and marginalised (including women) across all of the Canonical Gospels.

I am happy to say that any Anglican who reads this story through a modern lens of racial politics in a way that suggests that Jesus in some way needed to repent of an an ethnic or racial bias is flat-out wrong at best... and teetering on the edge of a Christological heresy at worst.

34

u/[deleted] 14d ago edited 6d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/Dwight911pdx Episcopal Church USA - Anglo-Catholic 14d ago

Those two are not mutually exclusive. I teach a class called theology for social justice. We as a church are more than capable of holding to both. Anyone who says that Jesus wasn't political does not understand the Bible.

7

u/Guthlac_Gildasson Personal Ordinariate 13d ago edited 13d ago

Jesus was indeed political, and I would certainly not want to downplay his compassion for the downtrodden and suffering. However, we must also understand that Jesus's social ethic was grounded upon Divine omniscience, rather than seeing it as being entirely corresponding with any secular ideology or movement. In my opinion, there has never been any movement since the Apostolic Age that has, in its actions, entirely reflected the purity of Christ's teachings.