Jesus Is Not God? What the Tuggy-Bird Debate Gets Right, Gets Wrong, and Still Fails to Resolve

Why the real issue is not simply whether Jesus is God, but how God was truly present in the Messiah

Introduction

The debate between Dale Tuggy and Mike Bird on the claim “the New Testament Jesus is not God” exposes a deep problem in modern Christology.

Tuggy presses the humanity of Jesus and challenges later creedal formulas that describe Jesus as fully divine and fully human. Bird presses the divine weight of the New Testament witness and argues that Jesus must be understood in a far higher sense than a merely empowered man. Both men identify real issues. Both men expose genuine weaknesses in the other’s position. But both remain confined within categories that do not begin where Scripture begins.

That is the core problem.

The deepest issue is not simply whether Jesus is “God” or “not God.” The deeper issue is what God is, what man is, and how God was in the Messiah (2 Corinthians 5:19). Until those three questions are answered from Scripture’s own categories, the debate will keep swinging between two unsatisfying options. One side reduces Jesus. The other side folds Jesus into later metaphysical formulas that still do not resolve the underlying problem.

That is the missing center in the Tuggy-Bird debate.

What Tuggy Gets Right

Tuggy is strongest when he refuses to let later theological formulas silence the plain force of the New Testament’s presentation of Jesus as a real man.

That point matters.

The text does not present Jesus as an apparent human, nor as a divine person merely passing through human experience. It presents Him as one who was born, grew, learned, obeyed, suffered, was tempted, and died (Luke 2:52; Hebrews 2:17; Hebrews 4:15; Hebrews 5:8). The text also repeatedly identifies the Father as Jesus’s God. Jesus says, “I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God” (John 20:17). Paul speaks of “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:3).

Tuggy is also right to point out that the New Testament does not use later conciliar language. It does not speak in the vocabulary of “two natures” or in later technical formulas that emerged centuries after the apostolic writings. He is right again when he presses the problem that standard explanations often sound like two acting subjects. When one side says Jesus did this “in His human nature” and that “in His divine nature,” the explanation often appears to divide the acting subject instead of clarifying Him.

Tuggy is also correct that Jesus is not the Father. The New Testament presents distinction, relation, prayer, obedience, mission, and reception. Jesus is not identical to the one He calls Father (John 17:3).

Those are real strengths in Tuggy’s case. He sees that the humanity of Jesus must not be diluted, and he sees that later formulas often create contradictions rather than resolving them.

Where Tuggy Falls Short

Tuggy’s problem is not that he preserves Jesus’s humanity. His problem is that he explains Jesus’s uniqueness too weakly.

He treats Jesus as a uniquely empowered man, but still only a man in the ordinary sense, with exceptional mission and authority. That does not go far enough.

The text does not present Jesus as merely authorized from the outside. It says God was in the Messiah reconciling the world to Himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). That is not mere external empowerment. That is not simply prophetic agency. That is a far deeper claim.

Luke 1:35 is crucial here. Jesus is not presented as a normal human who later receives a special calling. The child is holy because of how He comes into being. His beginning is unique from the start.

John’s Gospel also resists Tuggy’s flattening. Even apart from later Trinitarian readings, John still does not let Jesus collapse into “just another prophet.” “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9) is not ordinary prophetic language. Neither are the texts that place Jesus in unique relation to divine glory, fullness, enthronement, and revelation (John 1:14; Colossians 2:9; Hebrews 1:3).

Tuggy is right to reject contradiction. He is wrong to solve it by reducing Jesus to a prophet-plus.

What Bird Gets Right

Bird’s strength is that he sees the New Testament forces the reader to say more about Jesus than a thin unitarian model can sustain.

He is right that the New Testament places Jesus in an extraordinary relation to God. He is right that the major Christological texts cannot be brushed aside. John 1:1-14, Philippians 2:6-11, Hebrews 1:1-4, Revelation 5, and 1 Corinthians 8:6 must all be faced. He is also right that early Christian devotion to Jesus is real. The text does present reverence, confession, invocation, and honor directed to Jesus in a unique way (Philippians 2:9-11; Revelation 5:8-14).

Bird is therefore correct at the point where he resists the idea that Jesus can be explained as merely a man externally empowered by God. The apostolic witness presses harder than that.

Where Bird Falls Short

Bird’s problem is that he reads those truths through later categories that still do not solve the underlying problem.

He imports later metaphysical structures into first-century texts. Even when he says the Trinity is a hermeneutic rather than a proof text, he is still organizing the evidence through a later framework. He also treats the options as though the only choices are Trinitarian divinity or bare humanity. Scripture gives a third way. God can be truly present in the Messiah without the Messiah being the Father and without requiring a second divine person alongside the Father.

Bird also does not solve the anthropological question. If Jesus is a divine person who assumes humanity, is He a real human being like us, or not? Tuggy presses that question, and Bird’s framework still leaves the tension intact. Once the center of the person is placed in a preexistent divine subject, the humanity of Jesus is always in danger of being thinned out or functionally overridden.

The text does not say that the Father simply became Jesus. Nor does it say that a second divine person merely put on flesh. The text says God was in the Messiah (2 Corinthians 5:19), and it says that Jesus came into being in history (Luke 1:35; Galatians 4:4). Bird is right to resist reduction. He is wrong to resolve the issue by forcing Jesus into later Trinitarian formulas.

The Scriptural Alternative

The real question is not simply, “Is Jesus God?” Nor is it simply, “Is Jesus only a man?” The real question is this: How was the one God truly present in the Messiah while the Messiah remained a real human being?

That question must be answered by first establishing what Scripture presents about God, then what it presents about man, and then how the Messiah fits those realities.

Theology: The One God and His Three Simultaneous Realities

Scripture begins with one God, not with multiple divine beings and not with a formless abstraction. Jesus says, “God is spirit” (John 4:24). That tells what kind of being God is. God is a spirit-being, a distinct type of being, invisible to ordinary human sight (1 Timothy 1:17), yet fully real, personal, living, willing, speaking, knowing, loving, and acting.

Once that type of being is established, the next question is how Scripture speaks about God’s own internal realities. This is where the discussion moves from what kind of being God is to the distinct, simultaneous aspects Scripture attributes to Him.

SOUL

Scripture also speaks of God’s Soul. God says, “my SOUL shall not abhor you” (Leviticus 26:11, 30) and “my SOUL hates” (Isaiah 1:14). These are not empty expressions. They identify the personal reality of God as the divine “I.” Scripture also shows the functions that belong to this personal aspect. God thinks and knows (Isaiah 55:8-9), wills and purposes (Isaiah 46:10; Ephesians 1:11), loves and delights (Isaiah 42:1), and can be grieved (Genesis 6:6). So when Scripture speaks of God’s Soul, it is not speaking of God as a type of being. God is not a soul-being (man). As just established, God is a spirit-being. The soul here is the personal reality, the who of God.

SPIRIT

Scripture also distinguishes God’s own Spirit through possessive language. Genesis 1:2 speaks of the Spirit of God. Paul gives the human parallel directly: “For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:11). The comparison is decisive. As the spirit of the man in him is the man’s own inner spirit, so the Spirit of God is God’s own inner Spirit, His inward divine life and aseity. The possessive matters. It teaches belonging, not separation. God’s Spirit is not another being beside Him, but God’s own Spirit. This must not be blurred.

FORM

Scripture also presents God as having Form, which means real structure. Numbers 12:8 says Moses beheld the form of Yahweh, and Jesus says, “you have neither heard his voice at any time nor seen his form” (John 5:37). A form is not formlessness. A shape is not nothing. Since God is spirit (John 4:24), His Form is spiritual, not physical, mortal, or limited like ours. God’s Form is His own eternal spiritual body, not a temporary manifestation and not a semi-independent agent. God is present through His own Form and acts by His own Spirit.

By “aspects,” Scripture is naming distinct, real, simultaneous, and inseparable internal realities of the one God. They are not separate persons, not separate beings, not detachable parts, and not temporary manifestations. God’s Soul, God’s Form, and God’s Spirit are therefore best understood as aspects of the one divine identity.

These three scriptural realities, Soul, Form, and Spirit, are not three beings, not three gods, not parts, and not temporary manifestations.

They are distinct, simultaneous, inseparable realities of the one God. Aspectival Monotheism is the theological framework that restores those biblical categories and affirms them as ASPECTS. It is restorative because it returns to the scriptural basis of reality itself: God as one spirit-being with His own Soul, Form, and Spirit, and man as Scripture defines him through biblical anthropology. It does not treat these realities as separate persons, detachable parts, or passing modes. It names and restores what the text itself presents.

Anthropology: What a Human Being Is

Once God has been established as a spirit-being, Scripture also defines man plainly as a different type of being. Genesis 2:7 says Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. That identifies man as a soul-being. Man is not a spirit-being like God, and man is not merely a physical being like the animals. Man is a soul-being brought forth through the union of the physical and spiritual elements.

That matters because the grammar itself teaches structure. There is a physical element, the dust-formed man. There is a spiritual element, the breath of life. And from the union of those two, the living human being emerges. That is why the text says BECAME. For example: Water is not hydrogen alone and not oxygen alone. When the two unite, there is H2O. In the same way, Genesis 2:7 presents the human being as the living reality that emerges from the union of the physical and the spiritual.

This also shows that the emergent soul-being is not empty or mechanical. The soul-being is conscious, personal, willing, thinking, acting, and experiencing. That is why 1 Thessalonians 5:23 matters: “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul is not describing three beings. If “soul” there meant the whole being, then body and spirit would also have to be beings, and the person would be split into three persons. That is not the point. The text requires distinction within the one human being. The body is the physical aspect. The spirit is the spiritual infrastructure that contains the breath of life and enables life and spiritual relation. The soul is the personal aspect, the who of the person. It is more than personality. It is the person himself as an emergent reality, arising in parallel with the soul-being and not existing as a separate substrate on its own. So the soul-being names WHAT man is as a type of being, while the soul aspect names WHO the person is.

Scripture also shows that God set human multiplication into motion rather than repeatedly creating fresh humans from nothing. God rested from His works (Genesis 2:2-3) and then said, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Humanity reproduces according to its established kind as a soul-being race. The physical element comes through the parental line. The spiritual element, however, proceeds through the father-line in the logic of seed. That point must be stated plainly. The seed is not just a vague covenant symbol. The seed carries the life principle. That is why Scripture speaks in father-line begetting language, and that is why Peter can contrast the perishable seed and the imperishable seed (1 Peter 1:23). What proceeds through the father-line is the spiritual element, the spiritual infrastructure with the breath of life. That is why humanity inherits not only bodily continuity but generational spiritual continuity.

That is why Adam’s fall affects all who come from him. Sin and death pass through the human line (Romans 5:12-19). The problem is not that man lost all spiritual infrastructure and became a mere body. The problem is that the Adamic spiritual infrastructure is cut off from the life of God, so man is alienated from the life of God (Ephesians 4:18) and therefore spiritually dead even while biologically alive (Ephesians 2:1-3).What is passed on through Adam is Adamic spiritual infrastructure, and through it humanity becomes partaker of Adamic nature. That infrastructure is dead, not because it is absent, but because the life of God no longer flows in and through it.

This is also why Jesus’ emergence had to follow the real human pattern of emergence itself. If He were not brought forth according to the true human pattern of emergence, He would not be truly human. The difference is not that Jesus bypassed the human pattern. The difference is that where ordinary human emergence receives Adamic spiritual infrastructure through the fallen father-line, Jesus’ emergence followed the same human pattern, but with a different spiritual element. The physical element came from the woman (Mary), but the spiritual element was not Adamic. That is what makes His beginning unique while preserving His full humanity. And that is precisely why He did not have a human father. The virgin birth was not incidental. It was necessary.

Christology: John 1 and the “Logos”

With Biblical Theology and Anthrpology in place, John’s opening becomes much clearer. John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the ‘Logos,’ and the ‘Logos’ was with God, and the ‘Logos’ was God.” The question is not whether the “Logos” is divine. The question is what the term is naming.

A spoken word that becomes audible is not structureless. Audible speech requires a real basis for its production. Sound requires an underlying structure responsible for its production. That does not mean physical vocal cords must be projected back into God. It means that speech presupposes a real structure through which it is produced. Without such underlying structure, there is no actual speech, only shapeless nothingness. And once God’s own Form has already been established as His real spiritual structure (see Theology Paragraphg), the point becomes much clearer… The “Logos” is designator language pointing to God’s own Form, the structure through which God speaks, reveals, creates, and is known.

That also explains why John uses “Logos” rather than simply using a word that would only point to static shape. He is not describing a mute outline or a shadowy figure. He is describing God in His living, active, revelatory self-expression through His own Form. “Logos” fits because the point is not mere shape, but God’s own personal Form in revelatory action.

That is why the “Logos” is said to be with God and to be God (John 1:1). The relation is not creature to Creator and not second god to first god. “The Word was God” does not identify a second divine person beside God, but declares that what John calls the “Logos” belongs to God’s own divine reality, because it refers to God’s own Form and not to something created or external to Him. It is comparable, at the level of relation, to the inseparable relation of one’s own form to one’s own soul as a person. God is not separated from His Form. Nor is His Form another being beside Him. All things were made through the “Logos” (John 1:3), just as a man acts through his body. So God acts and creates through His Form.

Then John says, “the ‘Logos’ became flesh” (John 1:14). That word became must control the reading. John is not describing a timeless abstraction. He is describing a real historical coming-into-being. The text does not require the idea that a second divine person turned into a man. Nor does it say that God ceased to be God. The point is that God Himself, through His own Form, entered fleshly human existence. The designator points to the divine Form, and John says that this reality became flesh in the historical emergence of Jesus.

The point is that the “Logos” identifies the aspect of God’s own being that directly participates in the emergence of Jesus. And because that aspect is God’s own Form, not a separate person, not a detachable part, and not a temporary mode, the “Logos” identifies God Himself in that aspectual reality.

That language of became is not isolated. Paul’s controlling anthropology is Genesis 2:7. He is not reading man through Greek metaphysics, but through the scriptural pattern in which the human being comes into existence through emergence. That is why Paul says, “the first man Adam became a living soul” and “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). Galatians says God sent forth His Son, having “become” of a woman (Galatians 4:4). That language matters because it belongs to the same scriptural pattern of became. Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. The “Logos” became flesh. The Son became of a woman. The point is not mere arrival, but real coming-into-being in history according to the human pattern of emergence. Psalm 2:7 gives the begetting language directly: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” Luke 1:35 gives the concrete historical moment. There God comes upon Mary in covenant presence as the Holy Spirit, and the holy one brought forth is called the Son of God.

The Holy Spirit is God Himself in covenant presence as the set-apart Spirit. The term does not name a separate divine person, a second god, or an impersonal force. It identifies God personally present and active in holiness, revelation, power, and indwelling, while the Spirit of God names God’s own inner Spirit in possessive language.

This chain matters because it keeps the whole discussion inside the scriptural pattern of real coming-into-being. Jesus’ beginning is therefore not an exception to true humanity, but the decisive fulfillment of the human pattern of emergence. He did not bypass that pattern. He entered it fully. The uniqueness of His beginning lies not in the rejection of human emergence, but in the fact that the spiritual element given in that emergence was God’s own Form rather than Adamic spiritual infrastructure.

This is also where the human side must be stated clearly. What emerged in Jesus was not a generic human shell. A real human soul-being came into existence, and in parallel with that soul-being emerged a real, unique soul aspect, the personal WHO of Jesus. He is not merely a body animated by deity. He is the real man Jesus.

This is what the phrase ontological union identifies. In Genesis 2:7 terms, a human being comes into being through the union of the physical element and the spiritual element. In Jesus’ case, the physical element comes from Mary, and the spiritual element is God’s own Form given by the Father in His emergence. That is why the Messiah is fully human and yet uniquely divine in life-source.

How God Was in the Messiah

The answer is ontological union.

Ontological union is the real union of the physical element and the spiritual element through which a living person comes into being.

That is how God was in the Messiah.

As already established above, a human being comes into existence through the union of the physical and spiritual elements. In Jesus’ case, the Father gave His own Form as the spiritual element in His emergence. That is the answer to the question. It is not mere external empowerment, and it is not that the Father simply is Jesus. It is ontological union. That is why the fullness of deity could dwell in Him bodily (Colossians 2:9; 2 Corinthians 5:19).

That is why Jesus is born of a woman and truly belongs to the human race (Galatians 4:4; Hebrews 2:14-17). As to WHO He is personally, Jesus is the unique human soul aspect that emerged in parallel with His soul-being. He grows, learns, obeys, suffers, prays, and dies as a real human being (Luke 2:52; Hebrews 5:8). His human life is not an illusion and not a divine costume. He is a real emergent human soul-being with unique soul-aspect.

At the same time, His spirutual infrastracture and life-source is unique. God did not merely stand outside Him, authorize Him, and send Him on mission. Nor is Jesus a mere prophet carrying borrowed authority. The Father gave His own Form as the spiritual element in Jesus’ coming-into-being. Since that Form is God’s own personal Form, God’s presence in the Messiah is not impersonal divine machinery, but the true presence of God Himself. That is why God is truly present in Him from the beginning. That is why He can say and do what no mere prophet can say and do. That is why the text can say “God was in the Messiah” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

This also preserves the distinction between Jesus’s soul and God’s Soul. The point here is not a contrast between types of being, but between aspects. God’s Soul is the eternal personal aspect of God. Jesus’s soul aspect is the unique human personal aspect that emerged in history. That is why Jesus can pray to the Father, obey the Father, and speak to the Father, while the Father is truly in Him. What was given in Jesus’ emergence was not God’s Soul and not God’s own inner Spirit, but God’s Form. The distinction remains because the one who emerged in history is a real human soul-being, even though the spiritual element given in that emergence is God’s own Form.

Jesus’s human conscious life is real. His human mind, human growth, human obedience, and human suffering are therefore not replaced by deity, but belong to the real human life of the Messiah. He matures in history. He learns obedience in lived experience. He is tempted without sin. He suffers unto death. He therefore has a real human will that obeys the Father, not because He is a second person alongside God, but because His human soul aspect is distinct from God’s Soul while remaining perfectly united to God in life-source. Yet none of that negates His divinity, because His divinity is not based on collapsing Him into the Father or inventing a second divine person beside the Father. It rests on the fact that God’s own Form is His spiritual infrastructure, given in His emergence. That is how the fullness of deity dwells in Him bodily: God, who is Soul, has His own inner Spirit dwelling in His own Form, and because that Form is bodily present in the Messiah, the fullness of deity dwells in Him bodily.

So the answer to the whole debate is neither Tuggy’s reduction nor Bird’s later creedal collapse. Scripture holds together both truths. Jesus is truly human because He really came into being as man. Jesus is truly divine because God was truly in Him from the beginning.

How This Reframes the Debate

Once that center is restored, the main debate looks very different.

Tuggy is right that Jesus is a real man, that the Father is Jesus’s God, and that later formulas often divide the subject they claim to explain. But Tuggy falls short because he does not account for the depth of God in the Messiah.

Bird is right that the apostolic witness forces the reader to say more than “only a man.” But Bird falls short because he forces the data through later categories that obscure both biblical anthropology and the scriptural account of God’s own Form.

The debate is not solved by choosing between bare humanity and later Trinitarian incarnation theory. It is solved by letting Scripture define God, define man, and then define the Messiah.

Reframing the Objections

1. The “Two Wills” Objection

“If Jesus is the presence of the one God, who was He praying to in the Garden?”

The usual trap is false from the start. One side says Jesus must be praying to a different divine Person. The other says He is only a separate human being praying to His Creator. Both miss the actual point.

As established in the anthropology section, Jesus is a real emergent soul-being. That means He has a real human soul aspect, a conscious personal “I,” distinct from the Father’s Soul. Jesus was not a divine person talking to Himself. He was the real human Messiah, whose life-source was God’s own Form, consciously relating to the Father. He learned obedience and submitted His real human will to the Father because He is the real human Messiah in ontological union, not a divine person pretending to be human and not a mere man standing outside divine life.

2. The “Polytheism” Objection

“If Jesus has God’s Form, doesn’t that make Him a second God?”

This objection only works if Form is treated as an independent agent. That is precisely what Scripture does not teach.

A form does not act apart from the one whose form it is. My form is not a second me. It is the way I am personally present and structured. In the same way, God’s Form is not another god standing beside God. It is God’s own Form, His own eternal spiritual body. Because the Father gave His own Form as the spiritual element in Jesus’ emergence, there is no second God. There is only the one God, now truly and bodily present in the Messiah through ontological union. Honoring the Messiah is therefore not honoring a rival deity, but honoring the one God uniquely present in Him.

3. The “Anthropomorphism” Objection

“Doesn’t saying God has a ‘Form’ or ‘spiritual body’ limit His infinity?”

The usual trap here is the assumption that spirit means shapeless nothingness. Scripture never says that.

Scripture says God is spirit (John 4:24), yet Scripture also speaks of the form of Yahweh (Numbers 12:8) and says that men had not seen His form (John 5:37). That means spirit cannot mean formless non-being. God’s Form is not a limitation imposed on Him. It is His own eternal spiritual reality, the basis of revelation. If God were truly formless, there would be no scriptural basis for revelation through His Form and no basis for ontological union in the Messiah. Recognizing God’s own Form does not limit God. It takes Scripture’s own language seriously and explains how the “Logos” could become flesh without God changing into a creature.

4. The “Form of God” Objection (Philippians 2:6)

“Doesn’t Philippians 2:6 prove Jesus existed as a person before His birth?”

The usual trap is to assume that “being in the form of God” requires a preexistent second divine Person who later chose to become man. That reading imports a later framework into the text.

As established in the theology section, God has His own Form, His eternal spiritual body. Philippians 2:6 therefore does not force a second divine Person beside the Father. It points to God’s own Form as the life-source present in the Messiah. And the humbling in the passage must be read carefully. The one who humbled Himself is God, because He Himself was in the form of God. The point is not that a second god traveled through space and changed costumes. The point is that the Father gave His own Form as the spiritual element in the emergence of the Messiah, so that the man Jesus appeared in the form of a servant and lived the path of humility, obedience, and death. The passage does not reveal a second divine person. It reveals God’s own Form present in the Messiah’s historical life of self-humbling.

5. The “Sending/Descending” Objection (John 6:38)

“How can Jesus say He ‘came down from heaven’ if He only began to exist at birth?”

The usual trap is to assume that the speaking “I” must have been a separately conscious person in heaven before the world began.

But in ontological union, the Messiah speaks from the reality of the life-source given in His emergence. Because the life-source of the Messiah is God’s own eternal Form, He can truly speak of coming from above. When the “Logos” became flesh (John 1:14), it was not a separate person moving from one location to another. It was the Father giving His own Form as the spiritual element in Jesus’ emergence (Luke 1:35). So the preexistence belongs to the Form, while the emergence belongs to the man. Because they are one in ontological union, the Messiah can speak with the authority of the eternal divine reality present in Him.

A Clear Comparison

Feature	Dale Tuggy	Mike Bird	Aspectival Monotheism
Jesus’ origin	A uniquely empowered man	An eternal divine person who became incarnate	A real human soul-being who came into being in history through the Father giving His own Form as the spiritual element in emergence
Union	Functional authorization	Hypostatic union of two natures	Ontological union in the Genesis 2:7 pattern
God’s presence in Jesus	External empowerment	Personal incarnation of a divine person	God truly in the Messiah through His own Form
Jesus’ identity	More than prophet, but still only man	God the Son	The real human Messiah in whom the one God is truly present
Main weakness	Reduces Jesus’s divine uniqueness	Imports later creedal categories	Holds together the human and divine data by Scripture’s own categories

Final Assessment

Tuggy’s strength is that he exposes contradictions in later Christological systems and rightly insists that Jesus is a real man. His weakness is that he reduces Jesus’s divine uniqueness to empowered humanity.

Bird’s strength is that he sees Scripture presents Jesus as more than a bare human envoy. His weakness is that he resolves that truth through later Trinitarian categories that do not arise from Scripture’s own account of God and man.

The better way is neither reduction nor collapse.

• The Father alone is God as the ultimate personal source (John 17:3; 1 Corinthians 8:6).
• God is spirit, which means God is a spirit-being, not a formless abstraction (John 4:24).
• God has His own Soul, His own Form, and His own Spirit as real, simultaneous, inseparable aspects of the one divine identity (Leviticus 26:11, 30; Numbers 12:8; 1 Corinthians 2:11).
• Man became a living soul through the union of the physical and spiritual elements (Genesis 2:7).
• Jesus came into being in history as a real human being, following the true human pattern of emergence (Luke 1:35; Galatians 4:4).
• God was truly in the Messiah because the Father gave His own Form as the spiritual element in Jesus’ emergence (Luke 1:35; 2 Corinthians 5:19; Colossians 2:9).
• Therefore Jesus is fully human and truly divine, without being the Father and without requiring a second divine person beside the Father.

Conclusion

The Tuggy-Bird debate is valuable, but it still leaves the reader choosing between two inadequate options.

One side says Jesus cannot be God because He is truly man.

The other side says Jesus must be God in a later Trinitarian sense because Scripture gives Him divine honor.

Scripture gives a better answer.

Jesus is the real human Messiah in whom the one God was truly present. God did not send a mere outsider. Nor did a second divine person merely put on flesh. The Father gave His own Form as the spiritual element in Jesus’ coming into being, so that God was in the Messiah from the beginning (Luke 1:35; 2 Corinthians 5:19).

That is why Jesus is not just a man.

That is also why He does not need to be collapsed into the Father or into a later three-person framework.

The debate is not solved by choosing between unitarian reduction and Trinitarian collapse.

It is solved by returning to Scripture’s own categories and letting them speak.