For those who don't have the patience for the video, their website quickly makes clear what they believe:
https://21stcr.org/subjects/jesus-the-messiah/. Their Christology sounds close to that of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Jesus - or JUH-EEE-ZUS! - idolatry is one of my pet peeves. Among some women, it seems almost quasi-sexual and slightly creepy. But even at the more mainstream level, Jesus idolatry seems to have largely supplanted any other notion of God. Even among gung-ho Trinitarians, the Father and Holy Spirit seem largely lost to Jesus idolatry (with Bibliolatry a close second). I have a vague sense that Jesus would be flabbergasted and aghast.
(One of my little jokes is that the measure of your spirituality in the evangelical community is how many syllables you can milk out of "God" and "Jesus": "GA-AW-DUH-UH" and "JUH-EEE-ZUS-UH" - yep, four syllables is the mark of a real Christian! If you think God is one syllable and Jesus is two, you need to spend more time on your knees, bub.)
I have now watched three 24-episode offerings by The Great Courses on various aspects of early Christianity. The lead instructor is Dr. David Brakke,
https://history.osu.edu/people/brakke.2, a world-class scholar with no obvious agenda. I don't know how much was completely new to me, but the format really helps put things in focus.
The fact is, the Platonists, Jews and all early Christian groups - Gnostics, Hellenists, "orthodox" and everything in between - all had some notion of an ineffable, incomprehensible Deity that revealed Itself to humans through aspects or emanations like Its Word, Wisdom and, yes, Jesus. All the early Christians struggled with exactly the same issues we struggle with today - how did the OT relate to the NT, who and what was Jesus, what was Jesus' core message? The notions of Jesus as Fully God and of a Father-Son-Spirit Trinity as being the "orthodox" position were heavily negotiated over a l-o-n-g period via a process that was more political than theological.
My sense is that most internet forum Christians think something like 21st Century evangelical Christianity is what they would encounter if they could time-travel back to the first, second, third or fourth century. This is complete nonsense, a simple-minded fantasy.
When I exercise in the mornings, I listen to two or three programs on American Family Radio. Yesterday was startling - Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, All Jesus All the Time. Our lives are to be about Glorifying Jesus and nothing else. The Father and Spirit were literally never mentioned. I don't know what Jesus would think, but I found it weird and offputting.
As I have matured, I find that I relate far more to this ineffable, incomprehensible Deity that I typically address as the Creator and Trinitarians would call the Father. Jesus may somehow "be" God, but this is certainly far from clear in the Bible (which seems exceedingly odd) and was far from clear to many, many of the early Christians. I don't deny the divinity of Jesus, whatever "divinity" may mean in this context, but it isn't one of my core doctrines and certainly isn't a litmus test for whether one is a Christian.
Many Christians across the entire spectrum seem to have a psychological need for their pet doctrines to be "correct" at the expense of all others being "wrong." I'm willing to chalk up large swaths of Christianity to ineffable, incomprehensible mystery, ambiguity and uncertainty.
