19. And he finally died and was buried, like all perishable mortals. He
could not possibly, from these considerations, have been a God. It
is utterly impracticable to associate with or comprehend, in a God of
infinite powers and infinite attributes, all or any of these finite
human qualities.
20. Dark, intellectually dark, indeed, must be that mind, and sunk,
sorrowfully sunk in superstition, that can worship a being as the great
omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent "I AM," who possessed all those
qualities which were constitutionally characteristic of the pious, the
noble, the devout, the Godlike, yet finite and fallible Jesus, according
to his own admissions and the representations of his own interested
biographers.
21. The only step which the disciples of the Christian faith have made
toward disproving or setting aside these arguments, objections, and
difficulties, is that of assigning the incarnate Jesus a double or
twofold nature--the amalgamation of the human and divine; a postulate
and a groundless assumption, which we have proved and demonstrated by
thirteen arguments, which we believe to be unanswerable, is not only
absurd, illogical, and impossible, but foolish and ludicrous in the
highest degree. (See vol. ii.)
22. This senseless hypothesis, and every other assumption and argument
made use of by the professors of the Christian faith to vindicate their
favorite dogma of the divinity of Jesus, we have shown to be equally
applicable to the demigods of the ancient heathen, more than twenty
of whom were invested with the same combination of human and divine
qualities which the followers and worshippers of Jesus claim for him.
23. Testimony of the Father against the divinity of the Son. The Father
utterly precludes the Son from any participation in the divine essence,
or any claim in the Godhead, by such declarations as the following: "I
am Jehovah, and beside me there is no Savior." (Isaiah xliii. 11.) How,
then, we would ask, can Jesus Christ be the Savior? "I, Jehovah, am thy
Savior and thy Redeemer." Then Christ can be neither the Savior nor
Redeemer. "There is no God else beside me, a just God and a Savior;
there is none beside me." (Isaiah xiv. 21.) So the Father virtually
declares, according to "the inspired prophet Isaiah," that the Son, in a
divine sense, cannot be either God, Savior, or Redeemer. Again, "I am
Jehovah, thy God, and thou shalt not acknowledge a God beside me."
(Hosea xiii. 4.) Here Christ is not only by implication cut off from the
Godhead, but positively prohibited from being worshipped as God. And
thus the testimony of the Father disproves and sets aside the divinity
of the Son.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account