Good grief, the answer is an emphatic “NO” for the Holy Apostle Paul attests in multiple places to the deity of Christ our God, including the verse you seem confused about (in which St. Paul is in fact naming two of the three persons of the Trinity). Not only that, but elsewhere, St. Paul writes in his Epistle to the Colossians 1:15 about our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, that he “ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created…”, (this corresponds with the declaration of Christ as the God and the Word of God Incarnate, “by whom all things were made”, in John 1:1-14).
And later in the same Epistle to the Colossians, specifically Colossians 2:9, St. Paul makes things even more clear: “In Him all the fullness of deity dwells bodily.”
Finally, lest there be any doubt, St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Phillipians, specifically Philippians 2:5-7, writes “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” And likewise in the Epistle to Hebrews, it is written, probably by St. Paul, that Jesus Christ “is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”
Thus, St. Paul provides all the proof texts we need for the deity of Christ, and based on just these four or five verses, we would be justified in thinking of God when we read the name Jesus Christ. What troubles me is that despite the other verses of St. Paul that I quoted, which are even more explicit in their declaration of the deity of Christ, you found that one verse a mental stumbling block to the essential Christian doctrine that Jesus Christ is God, together with His Father and the Holy Spirit our Comforter and Paraclete (hence the standard Trinitarian expression God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost), particularly when, in addition to the aformentioned Pauline verses, we also have Holy Apostle John beginning his Gospel, in John 1:1-18 Jesus Christ to be the incarnate Word of God, who in the beginning was with God and is God, and by whom all things were made (corresponding with Colossians 1:15), who makes the Father visible to us, and elsewhere quoting Christ self-identfying as God (“before Abraham was, I AM”; recall that the name God gives to Moses is I AM THAT I AM” referring to the unoriginate nature of the Divine Essence of the Holy Trinity), and also declaring “I and the Father are One,” and the Holy Evangelist Luke likewise beginning his Gospel with an account of the miraculous conception of our Lord by the Virgin Mary through the action of the Holy Spirit, and then proceeding to an account of the Visitation between the Blessed Virgin Mary and her cousin St. Elizabeth, the mother of St. John the Baptist, the Forerunner of Christ, during which time St. Elizabeth refers to her as the Mother of our Lord, and St. Mary prophesizes, correctly, I might add, that all nations shall call her blessed, a prophecy that has obviously been fulfilled many times over in the past 2,000 years*. And likewise the Holy Apostle Matthew begins his Gospel with an account of the Blessed Virgin Mary becoming pregnant by the Holy Spirit, and cites the prophecy of St. Isaiah, that a Virgin would conceive, and her son would be called Emanuel, which means “God With Us,” which is further proof of the deity of Jesus Christ, and St. Matthew concludes his Gospel with the Great Commission, that we are to go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
And by the way, when I refer to Jesus Christ as our God and Savior, I am simply quoting the Holy Apostle Peter, who in the first verse of his second epistle (2 Peter 1:1) addresses his readers “To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with outs by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.”
Now please forgive me, but I am trying to understand your position: how is it, that given all of the texts I have cited, by the Holy Apostles Paul, Peter, Matthew and John (who also aludes to the three members of the Trinity in 1 John 5:7-9 , even if one rejects the authenticity of the “Comma Johanneum” or regards it as a helpful gloss to identify the persons of the Trinity referred to poetically, there is still a Trinitarian expression), and by St. Luke the Evangelist and St. Isaiah the Prophet, and also the book of Exodus, traditionally regarded as being the writing of St. Moses the Prophet, you are not intuitively able to make the connection, when reading the Scriptures, between Jesus Christ and God? I ask this not in a spirit of confrontation or polemics but as a Christian pastor, because I am extremely interested in your scenario from a catechetical perspective, because with my congregations I need to ensure that that the laity is thoroughly aware of the deity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and this includes communicating this fact to people coming from outside the traditional liturgical churches who have not been catechized to think in this way, which at one time included myself when during the third grade I was confused about the nature of the Trinity because the pastor at the Lutheran Parochial school did not spend nearly enough time teaching us about theology, and I had not yet read all the way through the Gospels let alone the New Testament, but rather just bits and pieces here and there.
So I am hoping that, as a fellow Nicene Christian, for I assume you affirm the Nicene Creed, as it is the Statement of Faith required for participation on Christian forums, you can help me figure out why I find so many people like yourself for whom this hasn’t clicked, despite the Scripture being extremely clear that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully Man, as it says in the Creed. I am particularly interested to know if this is due to a visceral reaction against the Roman Catholic Church, wherein because one disagrees with the Roman Church, one is inclined to reject the phrase “Mother of God” despite the fact that Martin Luther, Thomas Cranmer and even John Calvin endorsed its theological accuracy, and furthermore to incorrectly assume that it means that Mary gave birth to God the Father, who is unoriginate, or to the uncreated divine nature the Father shares with the uncreated Son, eternally begotten of the Father, or the uncreated divine nature of the Holy Spirit who eternally proceeds from the Father, or to the unoriginate Trinity as a whole, when in fact the doctrine is clear, based on the scriptural texts, that the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to God the Son in his Incarnation, when He put on our created human nature and united it with His divinity without change, confusion, separation or division. And having rejected that phrase and thus inadvertently subscribed to Nestorianism, one perhaps becomes used to referring to Jesus Christ and God separately, to the point that the verses indicating the deity of Christ and his consubstantiality with God the Father and with mankind are ignored, and other verses such as Romans 1:7 misread so that what should be perceived as a statement of the coequality of God the Father and God the Son is instead seen as indicating that Jesus Christ is not God, but rather only the Father is God, which is a position I trust you will agree is contrary to the Christian faith. And then, as I suggested in my prior post, this Nestorian bias becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic error, wherein the accidental Nestorianism arrived at through the error of Antidicomarianism (which is the refusal to venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary in any way or to acknowledge her blessed status) compound upon each other to create a situation in which the doctrine of the Incarnation becomes negated and Jesus Christ becomes merely a sacrificial victim, and not the incarnate Word of God trampling down death by death in a moment of triumph on the Cross wherein death was swallowed up in victory, and in His glorious resurrection we see mankind remade in the image of God and glorified, so that the corruption introduced when Adam succumbed to sin has not only been obliterated, but humanity has been elevated to a new level of perfection through the hypostatic union of God and Man in the person of Jesus Christ, which is why He is called “Emanuel” - God With Us.
*Recall that India has had a Christian population since 53 AD, and Armenia, the Roman Empire, Georgia (the country on the border of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and not the US state) and Ethiopia converted to Christianity between 306 and 320 AD, and remain Christian, and the small surviving portion of the Church of the East located in Iraq, Iran, and a diaspora concentrated in North America and Australia, once extended all the way from Aleppo in Syria and Socotra, an island off the coast of Yemen, to Mongolia, China, Tibet and Sri Lanka, before the Muslim warlord killed most of them in the 12th century.
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