McGrath asserts that \u201cwe would surely have expected Paul to express himself differently\u201d had he meant to identify Jesus as the one God of the Shema. McGrath suggests that Paul \u201ccould have written, \u2018There is one God: the Father, from whom are all things, and the Son, through whom are all things\u2019\u201d (40). This would make the point in modern English, all right, with its convenient use of the colon, but it would have not said what McGrath is suggesting in ancient Greek (which ran words together with no spaces and rarely used any sort of punctuation).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
All those who are familiar with church history will know that there were plenty of Trinitarians in the Greek-speaking world. It wasn\u2019t necessary to have the colon in order to make the distinctions they did. It was only necessary to use a different way of putting things than Paul did. My point was that Paul does not use any of the sort of language that he might have been expected to if he wanted to clearly and unambiguously affirm a Trinitarian (or even binitarian) perspective. <\/p>\n
McGrath proposes that verse 5 distinguishes \u201cgods\u201d as heavenly figures from \u201clords\u201d as their earthly representatives, setting up verse 6 to distinguish between the Father as God and Jesus as his representative Lord. He presents the following outline in support of this explanation (41):<\/p>\n
in heaven . . . or on earth
many gods . . . many lords
one God . . . one Lord<\/p>\n
There are several reasons to reject this explanation. (a) Paul refers to the \u201cgods\u201d as being both in heaven and on earth: \u201cFor even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth\u2026.\u201d This shows that McGrath\u2019s outline is flawed; Paul was not distinguishing between \u201cgods\u201d in heaven and \u201clords\u201d on earth. (b) According to the Christology that McGrath appears to favor (and that you explicitly defend), Jesus did not become \u201cLord\u201d until his exaltation to heaven. Thus he is not an earthly representative of God but is, like God the Father, a heavenly figure\u2014making McGrath\u2019s proposed distinction of no relevance. (c) McGrath cites no evidence to show that such a distinction between \u201cgods\u201d and \u201clords\u201d was in play in the first century, and for good reason: from all the evidence we have, it was not. The terms \u201cgod\u201d and \u201clord\u201d were overlapping in their semantic domains, with \u201cgod\u201d favored more often in some contexts and \u201clord\u201d in others, but never so far as I know distinguished in the way that McGrath proposes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This statement clearly flies in the face of the relevant evidence from outside a Jewish context. \u201cLord\u201d was not commonly used as a way of referring to deities (with some exceptions within the mystery cults), and was certainly used far more frequently in reference to human rulers. The latter were often believed to have been posthumously exalted to heaven, as was also believed about Jesus, and so my claim is not that the heaven\/earth distinction is absolute, but that it is characteristic and indicates something about the primary domain, or perhaps the domain of origin, of gods and lords respectively. Be that as it may, Paul\u2019s language clearly has the Shema in view inasmuch as he uses the characteristic Jewish summary of it, \u201cone God.\u201d But he explicitly is contrasting the Greco-Roman so-called gods and lords with God and the Lord Jesus, and so it is the explicitly-mentioned Greco-Roman use of \u2018lord\u2019 that Paul is interacting with first and foremost. <\/p>\n
McGrath cites 1 Timothy 2:5, \u201cone God and one mediator,\u201d as a parallel to 1 Corinthians 8:6, suggesting that the meaning of both texts is the same (41-42). You liked this argument and quoted it in your comment. The problem with this argument is that the word \u201cmediator\u201d is not in the Shema, whereas the word \u201cLord\u201d is\u2014twice. Again, there is no basis for interpreting \u201cLord\u201d to mean a mediator or representative.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The idea of mediation is present in 1 Corinthians 8, since Jesus is the one through whom are all things<\/i> while God is the one from whom are all things<\/i>. Besides that, strictly speaking the noun or title \u201cLord\u201d is not<\/i> mentioned in the Shema except to the extent that this word was used as a circumlocution for the divine name. But to assume that every instance of \u201cLord\u201d has that specific Jewish usage in view (or at least, every occurence that one wants<\/i> to consider theologically relevant) cannot be justified without detailed argument. Whether in Semitic languages or Greek, the term \u201clord\u201d was more widely used, and thus unless it was being substituted in the reading of a text that used the divine name in the original, it cannot be taken for granted that the tetragrammaton \u201cYHWH\u201d was what was intended.<\/p>\n
Finally, Bowman writes:<\/p>\n
McGrath also cites an OT text as another example of a text supplementing the Shema: \u201cFor there is none like you, and there is no God besides you\u2026 And who is like your people Israel, the one nation on earth whom God went to redeem to be his people\u201d (2 Sam. 7:22-23). McGrath is almost sarcastic: \u201cI doubt whether anyone has ever suggested that in this passage the people of Israel are being included in the Shema\u201d (42). You also liked and quoted this argument in your comment. In response, perhaps the reason why no one has ever suggested that Israel is included in the Shema is that \u201cthe one nation on earth whom God went to redeem to be his people\u201d is obviously not even remotely synonymous with \u201cGod,\u201d whereas \u201cLord\u201d is the divine name emphasized in the Shema itself!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The aforementioned point also relates to this one, and so I\u2019ll simply add that I was not almost<\/i> sarcastic in the passage quoted, I was sarcastic<\/i> in it. Because the addition of \u201cone Lord\u201d alongside \u201cone God\u201d sounds much more like \u201cone God, one mediator\u201d, \u201cone God, one people\u201d, and \u201cone God, one temple\u201d than \u201cHear O Israel, the Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one.\u201d<\/p>\n
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