Evidence · Case 04 · The Trinity
The submission texts, John 14:28, Luke 22:42, Philippians 2:6-7
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Sources
John 14:28, NASB.
Luke 22:42, NASB.
Philippians 2:6, NASB.
Philippians 2:6-7, NASB.
Objections & responses
- “Did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” can mean Jesus didn’t reach for an equality he lacked, not that he possessed and set it aside. Some lexical studies support that reading.
The lexical debate is real. Roy Hoover’s influential study argued that harpagmos in this construction means something to be exploited, which implies possession: Jesus had equality and did not exploit it. That reading is now the majority one and fits the phrase in the form of God that precedes it. The reach for what he lacked reading was common in older scholarship and survives among unitarians. Both should be on the table; the majority reading has the stronger grammatical case.
- Jesus says the Father alone knows the day of his return (Mark 13:32) and that the Father is greater than he is. A being who is ignorant and calls another greater is not equal. That’s nature, not role.
Mark 13:32 is the hardest text for any high Christology and it should be quoted, not avoided. The classical answer is that the incarnate Son, living a genuinely human life, had a genuinely human mind that did not access everything the divine nature knows; that is what fully human costs. Whether that answer is coherent is a real philosophical question with a large literature (Thomas Morris’s two-minds view, for example). What can be said without overreaching is that the same Gospel tradition that records Jesus’s ignorance also records him forgiving sins, accepting worship, and claiming preexistence, and any theory must explain both sets of texts, not one.
- The role-versus-nature distinction is a rescue. Whenever a text says Jesus is less than the Father you file it under role; whenever a text says he is equal you file it under nature. That’s unfalsifiable.
The distinction is an interpretation of the data, not a bare fact, and that should be admitted. But it is not arbitrary: the New Testament itself supplies it. Philippians 2 says Jesus had equality with God and took the form of a servant; John 17:5 has Jesus asking for the glory he had before the world existed; Hebrews 2 says he was made lower than the angels for a time. The texts present the subordination as something entered into, not as a permanent condition. That is the difference between a rescue invented to save a theory and a category the sources themselves use.