i was born a catholic. i will die a catholic. but for the sake of argument, how come the iglesia ni manalo has a potential maximum of 10 million members if his claims are not to be taken seriously.
Iglesia ni "cristo" is the modern day Arianism. They reject the divinity of Jesus, demoting him to just being a human being, though according to them they accept Jesus as Savior of Humanity.
They base their low Christology on Hosea 11:9 which says "I am God, and not man". They supported it with verses from John 13:16 which says, "a slave is not greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than the one who sent him."
According to the Manalonians (or members of INC), the phrase in John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and THE WORD WAS GOD." - AND THE WORD (Logos) WAS GOD does not prove Jesus as God because, the word "God" in that phrase is not a noun but an adjective - which could mean, "like God, with God-like qualities"...
The problem with that proposition is that, historically, the development of the Logos philosophy tells us otherwise....for the Jewish philosophy, Logos itself is God's very extension. In fact, those who translated the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic (Targum) even go farther...to consider Logos itself as God.
St. John's Logos was probably influenced by the Logos Philosophy, that is why many Biblical scholars considers John's Christology as High Christology.
His Gospel begins with acknowledging that the Word was God and it ends with another confession on John 20:24-31, "ho kurios mou kai ho theos mou" - My Lord and my God. According to the commentary on New American Bible, "My Lord and my God: this forms a literary inclusion with the first verse of the gospel: "and the Word was God."
Another strong evidence of Jesus divinity, is the Book of Revelation which obviously confesses that Jesus is true God: in Revelations 1:8, John wrote, "'I am the Alpha and the Omega,' says the LORD GOD, 'the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty.'" and on John 1:17-18, "When I caught sight of him, I fell down at his feet as though dead. He touched me with his right hand and said, 'Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld'"
INC claims that it was the Council of Niceae which made Jesus as God...but again, this is not true because even Pliny the Younger (governor and persecutor of Christians in 112 A.D.) reported that Early Christians worship Jesus as God. He wrote to Emperor Trajan, "They [Christians] were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to A GOD, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to do any wicked deeds…"
By Biblical exegesis or by Church history, evidence is against the belief of INC that Jesus is mere human. Felix Manalo is the one who is mere human, but they elevated him to being an "Angel".
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