ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 18 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Okay. I've got a real tough question. At least it's one I've heard before. And I have to admit it threw me. I attempted an answer but I would like you to answer it to see how well I did. Here it is: At what moment did Jesus become God? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: You know, this question is more contemporary than what you might think. And instead of answering that question at what moment did Jesus become God, in other words, was he God in the womb? Did he become God at his baptism, let's put the question in a more modern context. And that is if you've taken any course on Christianity in a secular college or maybe even a religious college, they are going to give you an answer that might surprise you. They are going to say that Jesus didn't think of himself as God. The first disciples didn't think of Jesus as God. And mainly the second generation didn't think of Jesus as God. That this was a gradual process that people had high admiration Jesus. And the more they remembered him, the more they thought of him as God. I would like to go down to the Lincoln Museum here in Ft. Wayne. They have -- I like those artifacts from the 19th Century. And they have a painting of the apotheosis of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. They have a picture of them dieing and then being carried up by angels to heaven. Apotheosis means they were made God. And in a certain sense if you visit Washington, D.C. and you look at the monuments, you see the Lincoln Memorial and you see the Jefferson Memorial. They kind of resemble probably the temples that might have existed in Athens in the ancient world. They are sort of divine figures. That's not an exact comparison. But it might kind of help us how many people think that Jesus became God. He was a figure of their admiration. And so the highest honor they could give to him is that he became the Son of God and well he was the Son of God -- he became God. You are going to find that to be the standard father in many courses on religion and comparative religion in secular, in public and in private universities, we answer the question that Jesus became God at the very moment of his conception. At the moment in which he was conceived, all the glory that belonged to God was in that initial cell by which he developed into a full man. And this question really became a point of controversy during the history of the church. There was a heresy called adoptionism. Adoptionism held that Jesus gradually became God. A little of him became God when he was conceived. A little bit more of him became God when he was baptized. And when he was resurrected from the dead, the process went even a little further in that it was completed when he ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father. We believe that Jesus was God from the moment of his conception. There was never a time when he was not completely God. Now, this question is going to come up many times. But in various forms. And it is important that you recognize what the problem is when the question arises. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***