It’s time to come clean.  I was gullible.  I took someone else’s word for it and didn’t do the research for myself.  I should have searched the Scriptures “see whether these things were really so,” but instead I took the word of a man I highly respected.  He was wrong and so was I.

In 1992, I read an article in Clarion about why we shouldn’t just use the name “Jesus” by itself.  The author argued that proper respect for our Saviour demands that we always write or say, “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” or “Christ Jesus,” but never just “Jesus.”  He had arguments to try and support this, arguments from Prof. Seakle Greijdanus, a highly esteemed New Testament professor from the Netherlands.  He argued that the New Testament, after the resurrection of our Lord, almost always referred to him with some kind of honorific(s).  Only rarely is he called “Jesus” outside of the Gospels.  Moreover, said the author, the early church fathers continued to combine his personal name with respectful titles.  He argued that this was a matter of respect for the majesty of the Son of God.  I was fully persuaded.

So, a short time later, when I reviewed some books by Philip Yancey, a popular evangelical author, I was horrified to discover him almost always referring to the Saviour as just “Jesus.”  In fact, the title of one of his books was The Jesus I Never Knew.  I took him to the woodshed for that, using the 1992 Clarion article as my paddle.  For the longest time in my writing and preaching, I’d never refer to the Lord without some honorific.

But over time, as I studied the Scriptures for myself, I began to see that this wasn’t a sustainable position.  As I read more widely in church history, I began to see that this was out of step with much of the historic Christian church.  I had been duped by someone else’s idiosyncrasy.

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Wes Bredenhof | “I Was Wrong” | November 20, 2023

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