Unsure of Where I Belong

[FireDragon76]

So I guess my question is: Can a girl be Christian if she follows Jesus's teachings, but doesn't see Jesus as the Messiah or the Son of God, but instead just as a prophet or philosopher?

With all respect to your spiritual quest, you cannot be a Christian in good standing and regard him as merely a wise human being. The worship of Jesus Christ in his divinity is part-and-parcel of Christian faith in most of our various church traditions.

In addition, the divinity of Christ is very important to how most Christians think about salvation. In our church we talk about salvation as God's work done through Jesus. Only God can save us from sin and death, so it was necessary for God to take on our human life and live as one of us, and he did so through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus divinity is essential to that work of God and essential to our own salvation.

 

[seeking.IAM]

My friend, I have always liked this quote from C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”​

 

[FireDragon76]

Here's an explanation of Jesus divinity by Bishop Robert Barron:

Just last Sunday we talked about Jesus exorcising the demoniac at the synagogue, and our pastor did a meditation on what it means for him to be one who "spoke as one having authority". And that's sort of where we can start thinking about Jesus divinity.

Jesus did the stuff only God had the authority to do. He had command over nature and evil spirits. He said he was greater than the temple of God. He had power over life and death. He proclaimed the forgiveness of sins. Those are all statements that only make sense in the context of divinity. They may not be philosophical statements, but they are things a first century Jew would have understood as identifying himself with God.