The Divinity of Christ, Reformation Seminary

 

The Son of God executed the commands of God the Father in Genesis 1, as explained in John 1:3.

Jesus' crucifixion was predicted in KJV Genesis 3:15

15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

The angel of the Lord spoke from the Burning Bush (Two Natures of Christ) and said -

KJV Exodus 3:6 Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God. 

KJV Exodus 3:14 And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you. 

 I AM is Jesus' declaration in Mark and used frequently as God's Name in John's Gospel.

KJV Mark 14:62 And Jesus said, I AM: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

 The High Priest tore his clothes, not because "It's me," but from God's Name, I AM.

Divinity of Christ Undermined

Strangely, Halle University was started as a Bible college, to counter the dry and verbose late Orthodoxy of the Calvinists attacking Lutherans, back and forth. [Objective Faithless Justification came from the dregs of Lutheran Orthodoxy.] However Halle's Biblical scholars were rationalistic after one generation. 

Irony - the Biblical stars of Halle University are hailed today as the rock-ribbed heroes behind the Historical Critical Method which denies the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Christ, the Holy Trinity, His resurrection and His ascension.

Pietism degenerated into Rationalism and the Biblical scholars sought to be scientific. If a miracle could not be proven in a lab, it was not evidence. My sainted friend, Christian Bruce Wenger, top of his medical school class at Yale, and also a PhD in  physiology, said or rather shouted, "That is the very nature of a miracle!"

The following double question is the best way to find out if a pastor or professor is a Christian believer or just another doubter -

1. Was Jesus actually born of a Virgin?
2. Did Jesus actually rise from death and leave His tomb?

No LCA seminary professor could answer yes about the Empty Tomb, although one said "maybe." The Virgin Birth was ignored by everyone. This is why the LCA-ALC leadership welcomed the outcome of Seminex - the short-lived AELC, becoming united as ELCA in 1987. Catastrophic losses followed and accelerated after the 2009 vote.

Some of the intellectual tricks of the current age include -

1. Scholars are divided.
2. That is a hapax - a phrase that only occurs once, so it is difficult to say.
3. Mark is the first Gospel written, so there are problems.
4. We have not found the actual Q so far, but it is there in Matthew and Luke.
5. John's Gospel was written 300 years after Jesus, and it is Gnostic, so it cannot be used in harmony with the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
6. "Contradictions" are used to dismiss a text as wrong or hazy.
7. This famous scholar, my professor, said this, and you disagree?
8. Priest and Christian Brother together - "There is no use talking to you, Jackson!" And they stormed away. The priest got married to a woman and the Christian Brother became president of a famous university for teaching.
9. The modern Bibles are much better than the KJV, three of them licensed by the National Council of Left-Wing Churches: RSV, NRSV, ESV. Other disasters are the NIV, Beck Bible, Good News for Modern Man, "Living" and "Amplified" Bibles.