I engaged in another back and forth with ContraModalism.
ContraModalism:
I did not say that God is dominion, but that divinity or Godhood is dominion. In other words a God is a being which possesses dominion, and deity or divinity is dominion. As for your question of if the Son shares all the ontological attributes with the Father required to exercise dominion, I have already answered you several times on this in the affirmative. And I agree that the Son possesses the same divinity as the Father, in that He shares in the Father’s dominion over all things.
Your problem as I see it is that you want to read into the Bible ideas from other sources to tell you what the Bible means when it refers to divinity. ANE paganism is a terrible place to go to determine what God means in the scriptures; there is no reason to assume that divinity in the Hebrew religion was understood the same way as it was in the various pagan nations around them. Those nations were gross idolaters with a terrible understanding of things; to suggest that we should read the scriptures through the interpretive lens of their false religions seems ridiculous. No doubt many pagans saw gods as a class of spiritual beings, basically a species, above humanity. But such a view does not fit with the relative language that I have cited from scripture. The term “god” is akin to the term “lord”, not the term “angel” as though it demarks a higher class of beings. That is why men are also called gods in the scriptures, as I have cited. This disproves the notion that in scripture godhood is some kind of angelic or spiritual race.
Now concerning God’s attributes, of course He is ontologically superior to all other gods, all men and angels and spiritual beings. But that does not mean that His ontological superiority is somehow part of what divinity is. As for the idea that sons in the ancient world were apprentices to their fathers, very well. So it will be seen then that just as the son of a King will be king, because he is the son of the king and inherits his dominion, so likewise the Son of God inherits His Father’s authority over all things, and so is God, yet while He Himself is ever subject to the Father as His God.
D.A. Carson’s quote contradicts scripture; he says that the Son “must be as great as the Father”; our Lord says the Father is greater than He.
As for the pagan witch calling Samuel a god, I do not think that this is surprising or any difficulty for our view. This pagan may have had the conception of deity you already mentioned, as being influenced not by the scriptures but by false religion; or else perhaps the term was honorific to Samuel and related to his dominion, as one who had as a prophet exercised authority in Israel, and in the resurrection, will rule the world with Christ.
The Son is truly divine as He shares in the Father’s dominion over the universe, as I have explained. There is only one God because there is only one supreme God, the Father, Who is over all absolutely, not because there is only one individual thing to which the word “God” may rightfully be applied. Christian monotheism, as the scriptures teach, is that there is a divine monarchy, with the Father at its head. You yourself seem to admit that you draw your conception of monotheism from the unbelieving Jews, rather than from Christian sources. The error of the Jews is indeed the same as yours in supposing that there is only one individual being called God, if there is monotheism. What then, since men and angels are called gods as well? You will either need to deny the scriptures, or else say that you yourself and the scriptures are not monotheists but polytheists, by your jewish standard. As for the notion that an individual being could be multiple persons, I have already addressed that issue in depth many times on this page. A person is a rational individual being. A single individual being then cannot be more than one person, for this would be a logical contradiction.
TheSire:
I don’t understand what you think you’ve actually established. Your objection that being God isn’t an ontological statement but merely one about relations is unconvincing. You already granted that the phrase is actually about ontology. I think you might even be aware that certain beings may even possess certain properties or attributes. You have even agreed that the only God that really matters is the one with certain attributes and prerogatives. You also seem to grant that only one God exists.
Second, there is a Greek term for “dominion”. It is κυριότης, ητος, ἡ and not θεός, οῦ.
I didn’t claim that pagans and the Jews had the same views about there deities. I was showing that deity was an ontological category. You seem to be arguing that it was reducible to merely having dominion. I appealed to polemical theology to show you that the God of Israel wasn’t merely about having dominion. He is ontologically unique contra your thesis. The OT is set in the background of ANE paganism. So, you are only sacrificing the historical background of the OT for your dogma. You also don’t distinguish between different Hebrew words for the term God. They all aren’t the same and they don’t denote the same thing. Elohim is different from Yahweh. You are cultically fixated on the English term God that you miss the point. In order to be the God of Israel or the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob he would have to be Yahweh. To be Yahweh is just to have the prerogatives, relationships, and attributes befitting such a being. That is why the NT goes on to identify the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as Yahweh.
This is an affirmation of what I said. So, moving to the next point.I think it is quite obvious that your interpretation of John 14:28 is different from mine and Carson’s.
The only interpretation that makes adequate sense of the context connects for the Father is greater than I with the main verb (as does the preceding option), but understands the logic of the for or because rather differently: If Jesus’ disciples truly loved him, they would be glad that he is returning to his Father, for he is returning to the sphere where he belongs, to the glory he had with the Father before the world began (17:5), to the place where the Father is undiminished in glory, unquestionably greater than the Son in his incarnate state. To this point the disciples have responded emotionally entirely according to their perception of their own gain or loss. If they had loved Jesus, they would have perceived that his departure to his own ‘home’ was his gain and rejoiced with him at the prospect. As it is, their grief is an index of their self-centredness.
Carson, D. A.. The Gospel according to John (Pillar New Testament Commentary) (Kindle Locations 10688-10694). Eerdmans Publishing Co – A. Kindle Edition.
I admire your guesses but the reason Samuel is called “Elohim” is that he is a spirit. It has nothing to do with “dominion” over Israel. So, it also has nothing to do with the eschaton. It is about King Saul consulting a witch to speak to the prophet Samuel.
The truth is that everything in this narrative conforms to ancient Near Eastern parallels that refer to the spirits of human dead as divine beings (elohim), and that have such
spirits being able to cross over into the realm of the embodied living. In the literature of the broader ancient Near East, there were a variety of terms for entities we would think of as ghosts or spirits of the dead, some of which are found in the Old Testament. The word elohim is one of those words. Another is the word ob (pronounced with long “o”).
http://www.thedivinecouncil.com/What%20is%20an%20Elohim.pdf
Well, it is hardly a mistake because a proper name used for the Father is God. God is sometimes used as a proper name for the Father. So, yes, that can only refer to one person. That person is the Father. Monotheism is just the background of the New Testament and we see monotheistic themes in it. The idea was that only one God that created all things and governs the world exists. That only one God is the God that lead the Jews out of Egypt, through the desert, tearing down the walls of Jericho, over the Jordan, and continuing through history. There is the one true God that is the God of Israel. Since you maintain that the Son and Father share no substance or anything that is numerically the same, then you have two Deities over Israel. So, my charge of polytheism applies. You assume that I agree that a person must be a conscious being that can’t share a nature. So, again, just begging the question under the guise of an artificial contradiction that arises from your preset ontological categories.
The Council 