Did Jesus Christ pre-exist in heaven together with God and the Holy Spirit before his biological birth in Earth through Mary?

Home - Quora Link

Pre-existence of Christ has a Wikipedia page, you should go read that if you haven’t.

When I read Wikipedia pages on specific Christian beliefs, my interest is always drawn to groups of people that don’t believe in that doctrine, and how those disagreements are organized.

Also in this case, you have non-trinitarian believers in this doctrine. This is an odd belief. Not believing in the Trinity means you don’t hold that Jesus is God. To not believe in the Trinity yet still believe in preexistence puts Jesus in a weird category of not merely man, but also not God either.

This sounded really weird to me until I saw that Jehovah’s witnesses believe that Jesus was actually Archangel Michael, which makes sense I guess. Christians have never been afraid of the middle ground between God and man. To me this makes Jehovah’s witnesses not actually Christian, but when you look at a lot of their other beliefs they do feel very Christian, so I guess we can’t hold non-trinitarianism against them too much.

The second interesting categorization is whether the nonbeliever in preexistence nevertheless also believes in the virgin birth. Those who disbelieve in the virgin birth as well are well on the road to psilantropism, the belief that Jesus was just a man, and not actually God. You can find a middle ground with adoptionism, which holds that Jesus didn’t become divine until his baptism.

This brings puts you in the broader categorization of subordinationism, which is a catch-all term indicating that you believe that God the Son was somehow less than God the Father.

If you’re asking me, then my mysticism has indicated that this ‘fabric’ of beliefs all results from misunderstanding of the nature of divinity. God is not limited to the conceptualizations we like to place Him in. Something can still be true without it being logical, by dint of humans not being able to understand the logic. The ability to understand the logic comes through mystic experience.

For example, God’s omniscience is widely misunderstood to create the dilemma of knowing that evil exists and choosing to do nothing about it. It does not create that dilemma, but it takes mysticism to really understand how. We have free will, God exists, he’s all-powerful, omni-benevolent and omniscient, and evil exists all at the same time and none of any of that makes any of the others impossible. The problem is in our limited understanding of morality and divinity.

So to answer the question, the distinctions are meaningless from a divine standpoint. To ask whether Jesus was man or God or preexisted is asking the exact point at which a blue-green gradient becomes one color or the other. Or a dog asking whether humans have a snout. It depends on your perspective. Spiritual distinction is far less important than spiritual essence.