“You Are Gods”? Spirituality And A Difficult Text -- By: Stephen L. Homcy
Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 32:4 (Dec 1989)
Article: “You Are Gods”? Spirituality And A Difficult Text
Author: Stephen L. Homcy
JETS 32:4 (December 1989) p. 485
“You Are Gods”? Spirituality And A Difficult Text
e. e. cummings wrote: “No man, if men are gods; but if gods must be men, the sometimes only man is this… a fiend, if fiends speak truth.”1 The idea that men could be gods appears in the first few chapters of the Bible, and in that setting indeed it was fiends that the serpent sought to create with his enticement.
Yet in the near vicinity of the text we find that man was created in God’s image (Gen 1:27). In 1:26 God says, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” The NT reinforces this teaching. Man is the “image and glory of God” according to 1 Cor 11:7, and Jas 3:9 affirms that people “have been made in God’s likeness.” So far so good. Although lively theological discussion concerning the nature and implications of the imago Dei continues,2 the Biblical understanding that man bears the image of God is an accepted fact among evangelicals.
In John 10:34–36, however, a related but more problematic issue surfaces:
Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’? If he called them ‘gods’ to whom the word of God came—and the Scripture cannot be broken—what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’ ?”
The address “you are gods” on the lips of Jesus raises a new question: Does this indicate that human beings in general, or Christians in particular, are in some sense “gods”? A recent popular-level response to the controversial Seduction of Christianity claims that “according to this scripture [John 10:34–36], believers are gods.”3 This is by no means an isolated opinion; it represents a growing consensus in some circles of the evangelical community. In view of this kind of mishandling of the text,
* Stephen Homcy is instructor of New Testament and Greek at Christ For The Nations Institute of Biblical Studies in Stony Brook, New York.
JETS 32:4 (December 1989) p. 486
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