Grudem on the Deity of Christ

Wayne Grudem's theology book Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine is one of the best-selling and most widely read theology books today and for good reason.  I have used this book throughout our study of Theology Proper and Christology and this week is no different.  In his chapter on the Person of Christ (which we are exploring this month), Grudem offers three reasons why the Doctrine of the Deity of Christ and rightly understanding it is necessary:

1.    Only someone who is infinite God could bear the full penalty for all the sins of all those who would believe in him – any finite creature would have been incapable of bearing that penalty.  -553

2.    Salvation is from the Lord (Jonah 2:9 NASB), and the whole message of Scripture is designed to show that no human being, no creature, could ever save man 00 only God himself could.  -553

3.    Only someone who was truly and fully God could be the one mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5), both to bring us back to God and also to reveal God most fully to us (John 14:9).  -553

Grudem then concludes:

Thus, if Jesus is not fully God, we have no salvation and ultimately no Christianity.  It is no accident that throughout history those groups that have given up belief in the full deity of Christ have not remained long within the Christian faith but have soon drifted toward the kind of religion represented by Unitarianism in the United States and elsewhere.  ‘No one who denies the Son has the Father’ (1 John 2:23).  ‘Any one who goes ahead and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have; he who abides in the doctrine has both the Father and the Son’ (2 John 9).  -554

Grudem is right.  The full deity of Christ is imperative and to reject it is to reject Chrsitianity.