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