Throughout the creation account of Genesis, we find hints of a sort of divine multiplicity of some undefined and mysterious kind. There is, as Peter Leithart has observed in his opening essay, multiplicity seen in the presence of the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters. Multiplicity is seen in the mode of divine creation. Some mysterious sort of multiplicity might also be witnessed to by the plural term ‘elohim.
The richest readings of such texts, as Fred Sanders argues, are rereadings from the vantage point of New Testament revelation. Francis Watson, for instance, recognizes three differing modes of creative act in Genesis 1:
[T]he command/decision ‘Let there be lights’ differs from the command/decision ‘Let the earth bring forth.’ In the former case, the reference is to a coming into being ex nihilo, in the midst of a prior vacancy. In the latter case, the reference is to a coming into being out of the matrix of a prior plenitude, that is, to a mediated coming into being. God creates immediately by command and fabrication, but he also and simultaneously creates mediately in employing one of his creatures as the womb out of which others proceed [as God causes the earth to bring forth fruit].[1]
Watson argues that, from the vantage point of New Testament revelation, we can retrospectively perceive differing modes of God’s relationship to his creation: sovereign transcendence seen in the authoritative speaking of the world into existence from nothing, skilful and powerful fashioning of his creation as a master craftsman, and empowering indwelling. These modes of creative activity and the acts that correspond to them can be appropriated to the persons of the Trinity within the indivisibility of the divine creative work:
Thus every act of creation involves the word of command issuing from God’s mouth, the wisdom or skill (ḥokmāh) and the strength of God’s hands, and the dynamic indwelling of God’s breath.[2]
Of course, we have several instances of such rereadings in the New Testament itself. N.T. Wright, developing an argument from C.F. Burney, argues that Colossians 1:15-20 is such a rereading, making a case that the passage is a poem that unpacks the various possible meanings of the Hebrew term bereshith, fittingly the term with which the book of Genesis and the Scripture more generally begins. Wright outlines the elaboration of the bereshith theme within the poem as follows:
- (15a) He is the image [like Wisdom herself, and evoking Gen 1.26]
- (15c) He is the firstborn [like Wisdom herself: the first meaning of reshith]
- (17ab) He is supreme (προ πάντων) [the second meaning of reshith]
- (18a) He is the head [the third meaning of reshith]
- (18c) He is the beginning [the fourth, and climactic, meaning of reshith]
- (18d) He is the firstborn—this time from the dead [like Wisdom again, but now firmly as a human being]
The be of bereshith is also explored in each of its principal aspects—‘in him’, ‘through him’, ‘to him’ (verses 16, 19-20). In its unpacking of the term bereshith, its reference to the image of God, and in its expansive cosmic sweep, Colossians 1:15-20 evokes the creation account and situates the Son at the heart of its meaning.
Christ, the Son, is the firstborn and archetypal Image of God, the one who represents and symbolizes God’s rule in his world. He is the one in whom, through whom, and for whom all things were created. Whatever has been created—‘all things … in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities’—exists on account of him and for his sake. He is supreme, enjoying the pre-eminence and priority of the head, the source and the first principle of all things.
Implicit in this poem is a rereading of the opening chapters of Genesis. Veiled in the very language of Genesis 1, Paul discovers the incomparable majesty of the risen Christ, the one who has always been there, yet has only now in the fullness of time been disclosed. Within this triumphant poem, one of the most fundamental and familiar scriptural passages of all reveals a transfigured aspect, as from its words the light of the glory of Christ shines forth.
The prologue of John’s Gospel is generally—and justifiably—regarded as the most remarkable of these New Testament rereadings. The evangelist introduces his narrative with the uncreated Logos, before all creation, the one through whom all things without exception were created.
Much of the theological potency of this identification is its discovery of the Logos in the fundamental and unitary act of creation and within the agency and being of the one God. It unambiguously places the Logos on the divine side of the Creator-creature divide. It identifies him, not merely in secondary creative acts, but in the one great Act of creation by which God is most markedly distinguished from all lesser powers. This Act of creation does not simply terminate at the end of six days (here some of the significance of John’s employment of the theologically and philosophically freighted term ‘Logos’ might come into play). Rather, as Hebrews 1:3 maintains—after making a similar claim about the Son as the one through whom all things were created—‘he upholds the universe by the word of his power.’
Discovering the Son in the fundamental and unitary Act of creation itself (rather than merely in the secondary sequence of creative acts of the six days), presses us towards a doctrine of Trinity that more prominently elevates the unity of God. Throughout the creation account, although we see elements of multiplicity hinted at, the most prominent and persistent note is that of the work of a single divine Creator. Even though the text may use the plural form ‘elohim, it consistently connects it with singular verbs and pronouns (as I will later elaborate, I believe that 1:26 refers to the Divine Council, not to God’s own Triune deliberations).
While John gestures towards Christophanic elements of his rereading of the Old Testament elsewhere in his gospel (e.g. John 1:51; 8:56-58; 12:41), he does not directly open his gospel with one of these. While those might aptly reveal a mysterious multiplicity relating to God, it is in the creation act of the one God that the mystery of the Trinity (which is not the truth of divine plurality as such, not least because it is no less the truth of divine oneness) is most powerfully presented in the New Testament.
By leaning into identifying the Logos with God revealed in the singularity of his act (and even declared prior to any act), John immediately chastens any visions of plurality that might give rise to a ‘social Trinity’, for instance, while still maintaining personal differentiation. One consequence of this is the theological load-bearing that prepositional differentiation start to perform from the outset: God’s works are from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit (this is also a notable feature of the Apostle Paul’s theological account of Christ’s deity). God’s works are not the collaborative work of a team of different unified agents, but the multiplicity proper to God is such that it is appropriate to represent him as a single purposeful Agent throughout the creation account, as elsewhere in the Scripture (Watson’s account of modal differentiation in the economic Trinity is an example of an attempt to read the broader creation account in this way).
Such a foregrounding of the creative Act and the accenting of prepositional differentiation in New Testament Trinitarian rereadings is also apparent in Paul’s reworking of the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6. Paul situates a Christian affirmation of God’s Triune plurality within Israel’s core confession of the oneness of God: ‘[F]or us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.’ And the statement that results is no less a dogmatic claim concerning God’s oneness.
Perhaps one of the surprising things is that, in their rereading of the creation account of Genesis in light of the Trinity, the New Testament writers so gravitate, not to intimations of plurality in God in the diversity of creative acts and the like, but to the very verse that might seem the least promising for such a case. Genesis 1:1 speaks, not of the diverse creative acts of the creation days, but of the unitary Act of creation, performed by a single Creator, thereby testifying to the oneness and the uniqueness of God and the indivisibility of his work.
It is difficult to see how any of the New Testament’s rereadings could be arrived at by a reader without a knowledge of New Testament revelation concerning the Trinity. While they are appropriate readings of Genesis 1, they only become possible after the revelation of God in Christ. From this vantage point, the other indications of divine multiplicity in the chapter take on a different aspect, as they are treated as inseparable from the oneness of God from the outset.
Ryan Hurd spoke of the dangers of motivated rereading in his response:
I worry at times a motivated rereading of the Old Testament can encode us with an idea of Trinity that has taken the edifice and ground it to powder. This can happen, also unintentionally, if we overplay our hand: the product is an overwrought portrait of Elohim and deflated idea of Trinity, instead of an inflated insight into Trinity, by way of support from Elohim.
We should observe that, although the rereadings of Genesis 1:1 offered by the New Testament are inaccessible apart from a New Testament vantage point, they accord the Old Testament text genuine weight in their articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. There is always a danger of ventriloquizing fully-fledged Trinitarian doctrine into speculative indicators of divine multiplicity in texts like Genesis 1, or of fancying that we are hearing a reference to the Trinity in every uncertain sound. While we should reread the Old Testament in the light of the New, we need to recognize the true source of the voices of such readings—what is a New Testament rereading of the Old and what is an Old Testament anticipation of the New. The New Testament invites us to reread Genesis 1 in terms of its Trinitarian teaching and such readings are both fitting and necessary readings of the text, yet, taken by itself, Genesis 1 would not give rise to them.
By focusing on Genesis 1:1, however, the New Testament rereadings did not select the aspects of the text most apt to offer the echo of its own doctrinal voice in the creation account, but rather the verse most able to function as a constitute element of it, situating its confession to the divine Christ within the framework afforded by Genesis’s declaration of the unitary Act of the one Creator God, a powerful voice that is clearly the Old Testament’s own. An advantage of this, of course, is that the Son is enthroned in the very centre of the account in such a rereading.
Such an approach to the text of Genesis is also more ready to grant the Old Testament the integrity of its own voice, with all of its potential foreignness. If we are too eager in our quest for divine plurality in places like Genesis 1, we can easily neglect explanations that are much nearer to hand and, as Hurd warns, end up with a weakened doctrine of the Trinity into the bargain. For instance, the cohortative of verse 26 is similar to that which we encounter in 11:7, which itself seems to express a similar reality to 18:20-21, where God himself speaks of personally going down to inspect Sodom and Gomorrah and the Lord, as the Angel, is accompanied by two other angels. A similar alternation between a divine use of the singular and the plural can be seen in Isaiah 6:8: ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ There it seems reasonable to hear the Lord speaking both as the ruling King of kings in the midst of his council, but also for the council that surrounds him.
In Genesis, angels repeatedly briefly appear on the stage, even if they are generally hidden in the wings. In Genesis 3 we encounter the serpent, who seems to be some sort of heavenly being, and guarding cherubim. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, the angels are referred to as sons of God. As the concept of sonship is closely related to that of image-bearing and as the angels exercise the sort of dominion that image-bearing aspires to (functioning in priestly, kingly, and prophetic capacities), it seems far more likely to me that God creates humanity to image both himself and the divine council of his angelic ‘sons’ (to the full stature of which humanity will be raised in part through the ministry of the angels).[3] When the serpent tells Eve that they will be like ‘elohim if they eat of the tree, it is not God but the gods of the Divine Council to which he most likely refers. Likewise, the placing of the cherubim to guard the Garden occurs as the Lord God’s action in response to his statement in 3:22: ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.’ The ‘us’ here could reasonably be taken to refer to the members of the Divine Council, from whom the cherubim will descend to guard the Garden. The desire to find the Trinity in every possible reference to divine multiplicity has played no small part in obscuring the part played by things such as the Divine Council in the narrative of Scripture.
While the Lord genuinely reveals himself within it, there is a persistent danger of pursuing the mysterious multiplicity of the Trinity in a manner that would conceptually situate it in lower creaturely realm of diverse objects and persons, rather than in the oneness of the eternal God’s very self, compromising our doctrine of God in the process. When this occurs, we can fail to appreciate that God transcends unity and plurality as we humanly conceive them, and never undertake the discipline of chastening our creaturely categories for understanding God’s self-revelation. We cannot predicate things of God univocally, but must do so (and understand his revelation of himself) otherwise. Such approaches risk conceptually confining God to the heavens he created, demoting him to being merely a Zeus-like head of the Divine Council, rather than the ineffable eternal God who transcends heaven and earth, who exists beyond and prior to all time, and who exceeds the categories of all creaturely conceptual horizons.
Following the Scripture’s own patterns of rereading, which consistently presents its account of the Trinity principally in terms of the oneness of the transcendent Creator God, the integrity of the Old Testament’s voice will be better preserved and our doctrine of the Trinity will be at much less of a risk of reduction.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Francis Watson, Text, Church, and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 142.
[2] Watson, Text, Church, and World, 145
[3] In a similar manner, all human beings, like Seth (Genesis 5:1-3), image both God and Adam their father.
Throughout the creation account of Genesis, we find hints of a sort of divine multiplicity of some undefined and mysterious kind. There is, as Peter Leithart has observed in his opening essay, multiplicity seen in the presence of the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters. Multiplicity is seen in the mode of divine creation. Some mysterious sort of multiplicity might also be witnessed to by the plural term ‘elohim.
The richest readings of such texts, as Fred Sanders argues, are rereadings from the vantage point of New Testament revelation. Francis Watson, for instance, recognizes three differing modes of creative act in Genesis 1:
[T]he command/decision ‘Let there be lights’ differs from the command/decision ‘Let the earth bring forth.’ In the former case, the reference is to a coming into being ex nihilo, in the midst of a prior vacancy. In the latter case, the reference is to a coming into being out of the matrix of a prior plenitude, that is, to a mediated coming into being. God creates immediately by command and fabrication, but he also and simultaneously creates mediately in employing one of his creatures as the womb out of which others proceed [as God causes the earth to bring forth fruit].[1]
Watson argues that, from the vantage point of New Testament revelation, we can retrospectively perceive differing modes of God’s relationship to his creation: sovereign transcendence seen in the authoritative speaking of the world into existence from nothing, skilful and powerful fashioning of his creation as a master craftsman, and empowering indwelling. These modes of creative activity and the acts that correspond to them can be appropriated to the persons of the Trinity within the indivisibility of the divine creative work:
Thus every act of creation involves the word of command issuing from God’s mouth, the wisdom or skill (ḥokmāh) and the strength of God’s hands, and the dynamic indwelling of God’s breath.[2]
Of course, we have several instances of such rereadings in the New Testament itself. N.T. Wright, developing an argument from C.F. Burney, argues that Colossians 1:15-20 is such a rereading, making a case that the passage is a poem that unpacks the various possible meanings of the Hebrew term bereshith, fittingly the term with which the book of Genesis and the Scripture more generally begins. Wright outlines the elaboration of the bereshith theme within the poem as follows:
- (15a) He is the image [like Wisdom herself, and evoking Gen 1.26]
- (15c) He is the firstborn [like Wisdom herself: the first meaning of reshith]
- (17ab) He is supreme (προ πάντων) [the second meaning of reshith]
- (18a) He is the head [the third meaning of reshith]
- (18c) He is the beginning [the fourth, and climactic, meaning of reshith]
- (18d) He is the firstborn—this time from the dead [like Wisdom again, but now firmly as a human being]
The be of bereshith is also explored in each of its principal aspects—‘in him’, ‘through him’, ‘to him’ (verses 16, 19-20). In its unpacking of the term bereshith, its reference to the image of God, and in its expansive cosmic sweep, Colossians 1:15-20 evokes the creation account and situates the Son at the heart of its meaning.
Christ, the Son, is the firstborn and archetypal Image of God, the one who represents and symbolizes God’s rule in his world. He is the one in whom, through whom, and for whom all things were created. Whatever has been created—‘all things … in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities’—exists on account of him and for his sake. He is supreme, enjoying the pre-eminence and priority of the head, the source and the first principle of all things.
Implicit in this poem is a rereading of the opening chapters of Genesis. Veiled in the very language of Genesis 1, Paul discovers the incomparable majesty of the risen Christ, the one who has always been there, yet has only now in the fullness of time been disclosed. Within this triumphant poem, one of the most fundamental and familiar scriptural passages of all reveals a transfigured aspect, as from its words the light of the glory of Christ shines forth.
The prologue of John’s Gospel is generally—and justifiably—regarded as the most remarkable of these New Testament rereadings. The evangelist introduces his narrative with the uncreated Logos, before all creation, the one through whom all things without exception were created.
Much of the theological potency of this identification is its discovery of the Logos in the fundamental and unitary act of creation and within the agency and being of the one God. It unambiguously places the Logos on the divine side of the Creator-creature divide. It identifies him, not merely in secondary creative acts, but in the one great Act of creation by which God is most markedly distinguished from all lesser powers. This Act of creation does not simply terminate at the end of six days (here some of the significance of John’s employment of the theologically and philosophically freighted term ‘Logos’ might come into play). Rather, as Hebrews 1:3 maintains—after making a similar claim about the Son as the one through whom all things were created—‘he upholds the universe by the word of his power.’
Discovering the Son in the fundamental and unitary Act of creation itself (rather than merely in the secondary sequence of creative acts of the six days), presses us towards a doctrine of Trinity that more prominently elevates the unity of God. Throughout the creation account, although we see elements of multiplicity hinted at, the most prominent and persistent note is that of the work of a single divine Creator. Even though the text may use the plural form ‘elohim, it consistently connects it with singular verbs and pronouns (as I will later elaborate, I believe that 1:26 refers to the Divine Council, not to God’s own Triune deliberations).
While John gestures towards Christophanic elements of his rereading of the Old Testament elsewhere in his gospel (e.g. John 1:51; 8:56-58; 12:41), he does not directly open his gospel with one of these. While those might aptly reveal a mysterious multiplicity relating to God, it is in the creation act of the one God that the mystery of the Trinity (which is not the truth of divine plurality as such, not least because it is no less the truth of divine oneness) is most powerfully presented in the New Testament.
By leaning into identifying the Logos with God revealed in the singularity of his act (and even declared prior to any act), John immediately chastens any visions of plurality that might give rise to a ‘social Trinity’, for instance, while still maintaining personal differentiation. One consequence of this is the theological load-bearing that prepositional differentiation start to perform from the outset: God’s works are from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit (this is also a notable feature of the Apostle Paul’s theological account of Christ’s deity). God’s works are not the collaborative work of a team of different unified agents, but the multiplicity proper to God is such that it is appropriate to represent him as a single purposeful Agent throughout the creation account, as elsewhere in the Scripture (Watson’s account of modal differentiation in the economic Trinity is an example of an attempt to read the broader creation account in this way).
Such a foregrounding of the creative Act and the accenting of prepositional differentiation in New Testament Trinitarian rereadings is also apparent in Paul’s reworking of the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6. Paul situates a Christian affirmation of God’s Triune plurality within Israel’s core confession of the oneness of God: ‘[F]or us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.’ And the statement that results is no less a dogmatic claim concerning God’s oneness.
Perhaps one of the surprising things is that, in their rereading of the creation account of Genesis in light of the Trinity, the New Testament writers so gravitate, not to intimations of plurality in God in the diversity of creative acts and the like, but to the very verse that might seem the least promising for such a case. Genesis 1:1 speaks, not of the diverse creative acts of the creation days, but of the unitary Act of creation, performed by a single Creator, thereby testifying to the oneness and the uniqueness of God and the indivisibility of his work.
It is difficult to see how any of the New Testament’s rereadings could be arrived at by a reader without a knowledge of New Testament revelation concerning the Trinity. While they are appropriate readings of Genesis 1, they only become possible after the revelation of God in Christ. From this vantage point, the other indications of divine multiplicity in the chapter take on a different aspect, as they are treated as inseparable from the oneness of God from the outset.
Ryan Hurd spoke of the dangers of motivated rereading in his response:
I worry at times a motivated rereading of the Old Testament can encode us with an idea of Trinity that has taken the edifice and ground it to powder. This can happen, also unintentionally, if we overplay our hand: the product is an overwrought portrait of Elohim and deflated idea of Trinity, instead of an inflated insight into Trinity, by way of support from Elohim.
We should observe that, although the rereadings of Genesis 1:1 offered by the New Testament are inaccessible apart from a New Testament vantage point, they accord the Old Testament text genuine weight in their articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. There is always a danger of ventriloquizing fully-fledged Trinitarian doctrine into speculative indicators of divine multiplicity in texts like Genesis 1, or of fancying that we are hearing a reference to the Trinity in every uncertain sound. While we should reread the Old Testament in the light of the New, we need to recognize the true source of the voices of such readings—what is a New Testament rereading of the Old and what is an Old Testament anticipation of the New. The New Testament invites us to reread Genesis 1 in terms of its Trinitarian teaching and such readings are both fitting and necessary readings of the text, yet, taken by itself, Genesis 1 would not give rise to them.
By focusing on Genesis 1:1, however, the New Testament rereadings did not select the aspects of the text most apt to offer the echo of its own doctrinal voice in the creation account, but rather the verse most able to function as a constitute element of it, situating its confession to the divine Christ within the framework afforded by Genesis’s declaration of the unitary Act of the one Creator God, a powerful voice that is clearly the Old Testament’s own. An advantage of this, of course, is that the Son is enthroned in the very centre of the account in such a rereading.
Such an approach to the text of Genesis is also more ready to grant the Old Testament the integrity of its own voice, with all of its potential foreignness. If we are too eager in our quest for divine plurality in places like Genesis 1, we can easily neglect explanations that are much nearer to hand and, as Hurd warns, end up with a weakened doctrine of the Trinity into the bargain. For instance, the cohortative of verse 26 is similar to that which we encounter in 11:7, which itself seems to express a similar reality to 18:20-21, where God himself speaks of personally going down to inspect Sodom and Gomorrah and the Lord, as the Angel, is accompanied by two other angels. A similar alternation between a divine use of the singular and the plural can be seen in Isaiah 6:8: ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ There it seems reasonable to hear the Lord speaking both as the ruling King of kings in the midst of his council, but also for the council that surrounds him.
In Genesis, angels repeatedly briefly appear on the stage, even if they are generally hidden in the wings. In Genesis 3 we encounter the serpent, who seems to be some sort of heavenly being, and guarding cherubim. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, the angels are referred to as sons of God. As the concept of sonship is closely related to that of image-bearing and as the angels exercise the sort of dominion that image-bearing aspires to (functioning in priestly, kingly, and prophetic capacities), it seems far more likely to me that God creates humanity to image both himself and the divine council of his angelic ‘sons’ (to the full stature of which humanity will be raised in part through the ministry of the angels).[3] When the serpent tells Eve that they will be like ‘elohim if they eat of the tree, it is not God but the gods of the Divine Council to which he most likely refers. Likewise, the placing of the cherubim to guard the Garden occurs as the Lord God’s action in response to his statement in 3:22: ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.’ The ‘us’ here could reasonably be taken to refer to the members of the Divine Council, from whom the cherubim will descend to guard the Garden. The desire to find the Trinity in every possible reference to divine multiplicity has played no small part in obscuring the part played by things such as the Divine Council in the narrative of Scripture.
While the Lord genuinely reveals himself within it, there is a persistent danger of pursuing the mysterious multiplicity of the Trinity in a manner that would conceptually situate it in lower creaturely realm of diverse objects and persons, rather than in the oneness of the eternal God’s very self, compromising our doctrine of God in the process. When this occurs, we can fail to appreciate that God transcends unity and plurality as we humanly conceive them, and never undertake the discipline of chastening our creaturely categories for understanding God’s self-revelation. We cannot predicate things of God univocally, but must do so (and understand his revelation of himself) otherwise. Such approaches risk conceptually confining God to the heavens he created, demoting him to being merely a Zeus-like head of the Divine Council, rather than the ineffable eternal God who transcends heaven and earth, who exists beyond and prior to all time, and who exceeds the categories of all creaturely conceptual horizons.
Following the Scripture’s own patterns of rereading, which consistently presents its account of the Trinity principally in terms of the oneness of the transcendent Creator God, the integrity of the Old Testament’s voice will be better preserved and our doctrine of the Trinity will be at much less of a risk of reduction.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Francis Watson, Text, Church, and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 142.
[2] Watson, Text, Church, and World, 145
[3] In a similar manner, all human beings, like Seth (Genesis 5:1-3), image both God and Adam their father.
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