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Originally Posted by lch
Why does he need to be God? Everything works out perfectly fine without that.
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God alone has the power to forgive sins. Without that power, Jesus wouldn't be much good as a Savior.
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Originally Posted by lch
I do believe that Jesus has ascended and that there is a trinity in spirit, if that's the right word, but I don't agree that God and Jesus are the same entity.
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Jesus (God the Son) is not the same entity as God the Father. They are both members of the Godhead, but they are different from each other. Three persons, one God.
That's why the Holy Trinity is such an essential piece of Christian doctrine. Without a clear understanding of the Trinity (as much as humans can ever understand it), we would be forever confused about God.
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Originally Posted by lch
And I don't believe in the virgin birth either. I think that's not that uncommon, and that's what I meant when I referring to catholics where they have a big cult around the holy Madonna, but this would then be a problem for me if I wanted to believe that Jesus is/was God.
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To be fair, the Catholic Church doesn't encourage or require any Cult of the Madonna. But yeah, plenty of actual Catholics seem to go overboard in their devotion for Mary. All I can do is to point to the official Catholic teaching, which does not encourage such behavior. Mary was a special person, and God chose her for a unique role to bear His Son ... but Mary was still a human being.
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Originally Posted by lch
How and when did he become God? I'd consider it blasphemy that a man can become God, and that God becomes a man as well. I have to say that I connect a lot more with the Old Testament than with the New Testament, by the way.
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Jesus was always God. He didn't "become" God. All the way back in Genesis, when God spoke the world into being, His Word was Jesus. That's the point that John makes in the first chapter of his Gospel:
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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
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It goes back to the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus has always been God the Son, along with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.
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Originally Posted by lch
As I said before, I don't take the bible literally. Partly because what I read in the bible has gone through at least two translations of different languages and has been written down years after it happened, a generation later, but that's not my point. And I don't want to set at defiance the rigorous work of the people who did the transcriptions and translations. Jesus has often been speaking in similes. Jesus Christ is holy, that is without question, but I do not believe that he is God.
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I won't address the reliability of Scripture, but only because I've already spent so much time writing about it on this thread.
If you don't believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, what
do you believe about it? Are some parts true and other parts false? How do you know which are which?
Also, as I mentioned before, the divinity of Jesus is one of the major themes of Scripture. You'd have to do away with an awful lot of the Bible to get around it....
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Originally Posted by lch
Just out of curiosity, if you believe that Jesus and God is the same, or at least that he forcefully claimed that, then why would he despair on the cross and call to God, asking why he had forsaken him?
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Back to the doctrine of the Trinity. God the Son (Jesus) became sin on our behalf. As He hung on the Cross, He became the sins of the entire human race. As God is holy, He cannot be in communion with sin. For those agonizing moments, the eternal unity between the Father and the Son was interrupted, and the Father turned His back on the Son. When it was finished, Jesus said so [John 19:30], and then He surrendered His spirit to the Father's care [Luke 23:46]. The Father and the Son were in unity once more, never to be separated again.
By the way, that was perhaps the ultimate punishment of the Cross: Jesus endured separation from God, which is the fitting punishment for all of us. Because He took it for us, we don't ever have to suffer that horrible separation. We can be united with God -- all three Persons -- forever.