Jesus divinity
This doctrine affirms that Jesus Christ was not merely an extraordinary human being but the incarnate Son of God, who by nature is coequal and coeternal with God the Father.
The divinity of Jesus lies at the very heart of Christianity, and the origin of this doctrine goes back to what Jesus affirmed about himself. While Jesus rarely made explicit claims to be the Son of God, or Lord, or used such christological titles found in the Gospels, Jesus made implicit claims about himself that amount to strongly implying virtually the same thing. Jesus used the Aramaic word abba (“father”) to address God in prayer (Mark 14:36), imparted forgiveness to sinners (Mark 2:5), displayed an independent authority toward the law of Moses (Mark 2:27; 7:15; 10:2–12), and professed to be the Danielic “Son of Man” whom God would enthrone, glorify, and make kingly ruler over Israel and the nations (Mark 14:63). These and many other examples recorded in the Synoptic Gospels reveal Jesus’ sense of intimacy with the Father and his claim to being the unique Son of God.
Spurred by Jesus’ resurrection as a decisive and undeniable validation of Jesus’ claims regarding his ministry and unique identity (Rom 1:4), the belief that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19) and that “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9) arose quite early after Jesus’ death. Already in the pre‐Pauline fragments of hymns and confessions, the earliest Jewish Christians exalted Jesus as “Lord,” a term that signified divinity due to its association with the Hebrew names of God, Adonai and YHWH, through the Septuagint.
Applying characteristics of preexistent Wisdom, the apostle Paul greatly advanced the church’s understanding of Christ’s divine preexistence, mediatorship in creation, and the sending and giving of the Son of God into the world (Phil 2:6–11; Col 1:15–20). It is in the Gospel of John, however, where the most developed affirmations of Christ’s divinity are found in Scripture, including explicit references to Jesus as God (John 1:1; 20:28).
Historically, the two significant heresies that denied the divinity of Jesus were Ebionism and Arianism.
As an early heresy that derived from the Christian Jewish sect embodying strong monotheism, Ebionism viewed Jesus as spirit-filled but still a mere human being who was justified, adopted, and elevated by God to divine messianic sonship through scrupulous obedience to the law.
Arianism, a more ontologically sophisticated heresy, viewed Jesus as the semidivine Logos who did not share the same nature as the one true God but was preeminent among created beings.
Rejecting both of these views, the First Ecumenical Council held in Nicaea (AD 325) affirmed that the Son of God incarnate, Jesus, is “very God of very God, begotten not made, of one substance [Greek: homoousion] with the Father.” The Nicene Creed became the orthodox statement of the church regarding the full divinity of Jesus Christ.