Echoes and Christology

Modern-day Arians have answers to the standard NT texts on the deity of Christ. They aren’t good answers, but they have answers. What they don’t have are answers to the many texts that demonstrate the deity of Christ through intertextual echoes.

Paul says in Philippians 2 that Christ existed in the “form” of God. Ah ha! say the Arians. He’s not God but only the form of God. But as Paul’s summary of Jesus’ history comes to its climax, he says that every knee will bow and every tongue confess Jesus as Lord. That echoes Isaiah 45:23, where Yahweh is the one to whom all will bow and to whom every tongue will swear allegiance – and this comes just after a couple of verses where Yahweh declares that He is Lord, and there is no other (vv. 21-22). In short, to say all will bow and swear to Jesus is to say that Jesus is Yahweh.