[A. E. Garvie]

There have been great teachers and leaders of the souls of men, but none of them claimed to do or did what Jesus has done. Through Moses came a law to be obeyed; Mohammed was the prophet of a truth about God; Guatama offered man the secret of a salvation which must be secured by their own efforts. Christ brings men to God and God to men in an immediacy of relation, in an intimacy of communion, in a sufficiency and an efficacy of divine grace through human faith which is a new creation of man in his inmost, highest life.

It is because of the sufficiency and efficacy both of His revelation of God, and His redemption of man, the transcendence of what He has done for man over all that other teachers and leaders of the soul have accomplished, the absolute quality of the relation of man to God through Him, that we must confess that this work is not of man, even at his very best; but this God and God alone can have wrought. This cannot, of course, be demonstrated by merely intellectual arguments to those who have not had the experience of what Christ has done; but for those who have that experience, there need be no other evidence. They have the witness in themselves that He is God.

We believe that Christ is God not because He mysteriously possessed a divine nature united to a human, but because as He is a man we find God in Him, and God finds us through Him. We behold the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father in the Word incarnate, and find Him full of grace and truth. God making Himself known and even giving Himself in love to us. This and nothing less is what believing in the divinity of Christ means.

—from The Christian Doctrine of the Godhead, chap. I, in The Book of Jesus, © Calvin Miller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)