JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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"If Jesus Christ is only morally related to God himself, then the best he can be
is a kind of moral Leader who through his own example in love and righteous-
ness points us to a better moral relationship with the heavenly Father, while the
atoning sacrifice made by Jesus Christ on the Cross can be understood only in
terms of an external moral relationship, as a demonstration of the love of God
operating as some kind of judicial transaction between God and Jesus for the
sake of mankind. Moreover, if we draw out the consequences of that basic
assumption further, we find that the doctrines of the Church and sacraments,
and of the Christian life, have all to be understood only in terms of moral
relations.
The Church then becomes little more than a way of gathering people together
on moral grounds or socio-ethical issues, a very human society formed out of
individuals who are externally connected with each other through common
ideals and a common way of life, while the sacraments are 'means of grace'
only in the sense that they help to cement moral relationships and promote
Christian patterns of behavior in brotherly love in response to the Fatherhood
of God."18
Torrance goes on to identify those who fall into this category:
"I have in fact been describing views of salvation, church, sacraments and a socio-
moral way of life, uprooted from or related only in an attenuated way to the
evangelical and Christological substance of the Faith, that are characteristic of
modern Liberal Protestantism but also of ways of thinking that have affected a
host of theologians and churchmen in the Roman Catholic Church in our day as
well."19
Added to these would also be members of cults since they do not fully embrace the deity
of Jesus Christ.
In his summary of his study of New Testament Christology, British New Testament
scholar I. Howard Marshall shows that it was the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth that provided
the basis for Christology. He concludes:
"The evidence supports the view that it was the resurrection of Jesus which gave
the decisive stimulus to Christological thinking . . . The earliest Christology
stressed the way in which he fulfilled the Old Testament promises of a coming
deliverer. It saw in Jesus the agent of God entrusted with the power to save and
to judge, and it confessed him as the Lord to whom was given absolute authority.
From these statements it was a short step to the application to him of the same
authority and nature as God, and to the realization that, in whatever weak sense
these traits might be seen in other messengers of God, he possessed them in a
unique way as the Son of God."20