In a book written in 2009, Peter Leithart defined two aims for Deep Exegesis: “First, this book advocates a hermeneutics of the letter. That is to say, reading Scripture has to do with attending to the specific contours of the text — the author’s word choices, structural organization, tropes and allusions, and intertextual quotations. . . . My second aim is to learn to read from Jesus and Paul. Almost without exception, most of the questions I attempt to answer in this book arose from my efforts to make sense of how the Bible works, and particularly how Jesus, Paul, and the other New Testament writers read the Old Testament.”[i]
The same two aims could serve as a preface for his essay, “The Triune Creator,” for here he shows us again a ‘hermeneutics of the letter,” detailed and thoughtful attention to “word choices, structural organization, tropes and allusions, and intertextual quotations.” The essay also shows that the “letter” does not kill, but, to quote him again, “We get at the riches of Scripture precisely by luxuriating in the letter, by squeezing everything we can from the text as written.”
Thus, Leithart suggests a reading for Genesis 1 that squeezes everything from the text through tools provided by Jesus, John, and Paul. As original as his reading may appear, he shows that he is following Augustine in particular, as well as Christian interpreters through the centuries.
Specifically, Leithart explains that from the beginning Elohim/Yahweh manifested a surplus of personhood. Though the story of creation depicts the plural “Elohim” as a singular “He,” the “He” is also an “Us” — an “Us” that converses.[ii] Whatever Moses might have thought about this, Paul tells us that the Gospel was a “mystery hidden for ages” — including the Triune foundations for the Gospel’s wonderful “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26-27).
As Leithart expounds, the creation of ha’adam in Genesis 1:27 is the result of divine conversation and consultation. Everett Fox translates Genesis 1:27, “So God created humankind in his image . . .”, as also, Gordan Wenham, “So God created man in his own image.” Though neither of these men hold to a Trinitarian view of verse 26, they seem to affirm, or allow, that the creation of man is the result of the mysterious “Let us.” Thus, correctly I believe, Carl F. H. Henry refers to the creation of man as “the execution of God’s resolution.”[iii]
But Leithart boldly suggests that the intra-trinitarian exchange began much earlier than verse 26, though the “us” are not directly introduced until then. The God who speaks with Himself appears from the beginning: “The one person of ‘elohim initiates each day’s work and, at the end of each day, commends his own performance. That is conceivable, but it more plausible that the ‘elohim who makes and the ‘elohim who evaluates are somehow distinct. We might say, for instance, that at the end of each day ‘elohim evaluates and commends the work of His own Spirit, who hovers over the waters.”
Reading backwards from John 1, validates and emphasizes this: “When we read Genesis 1 in the light of John 1, this suspicion becomes not only plausible but nearly inevitable. If the Word by which the Father creates is God-with-God, God-toward-God, then the judgments at the end of each day are the Father’s judgments of the Son’s work. Since the Son does all he does in the power of the Spirit, the Father commends both equally. Having established His throne in heaven, the Father issues decrees to be executed by the Son and Spirit, and passes judgment on the goodness of their work. Or, more tightly, the Son is the decree that the enthroned Creator utters by the breath of His Spirit.”
The order in Genesis 1 is Father, Spirit, Son, the same “odd” order that we see in Revelation 1:4-6. In his commentary on Revelation, Leithart describes this “odd” order as “the order of incarnation” and elaborates the outworking of order from Jesus’ conception, to His baptism and ministry, and His death and resurrection. “Throughout this history, the Father acts on and gives to the Son through the Spirit. Father, Spirit, Son.”[iv] Leithart notes that redemption follows the same pattern, which he summarizes as “Father, Spirit, sons.”[v]
Leithart adds this also: “This pattern is evident also in the OT. The Word that speaks the world into existence is the Word vocalized by the hovering Spirit. Adam is formed from the dust of the ground, and God breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and so the dust becomes the human son of God, God’s image and likeness. By the Spirit, adamah becomes adam. When Israel, God’s son, is a field of dry bones, the prophet prophesies to the bones, and the wind of God brings them to life. Yahweh, Spirit, Israel.”[vi]
Returning to Leithart’s account of the Trinitarian order in the creation, there may be one more point to append. Leithart points to the order: Father — ‘elohim of verse 1 — Spirit — hovering over the water in verse 2 — and Son — the Word of verse 3 “Let there be!”
Then “light” appears. What light? It is not the light of the sun, moon, and stars, for they do not appear until day 4.
James Jordan suggested that the “Light” is the glory of the Spirit of God: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light.’ The only source for that light is the Spirit Himself. When God appears later on in the Bible, He is surrounded by the glory, which is associated with the Spirit. Indeed, His glory hovers over Israel in the pillar of cloud & fire. Thus, the initial light came from the Spirit. Light is energy, fire; and so now fire is brought into the earth from heaven. This begins the transfiguration of the earth, from glory to glory.”[vii]
Just as Leithart pointed to Psalm 104, so did Jordan: “Confirmation of the idea that the Spirit is the light-bearer at this point comes from Psalm 104 — if confirmation is even needed. Psalm 104 is a reflective commentary on Genesis 1, and proceeds through the seven days in order. The first day is discussed in the first four lines (vv. 1-2a). There God is said to cover Himself with light as with a cloak. Thus, the Psalmist understood the light of the first day as a light from God.”[viii]
In other words, Genesis 1:3 is not speaking of the creation of light, but of the Father speaking the Word to the Spirit who shines His glory-light into and onto the earth.
If this is so, then in Genesis 1:1-3, we have Father, Spirit, Son, Spirit. The order suggests Trinitarian depths hinted at in the creation.
When Leithart points to the problem of a monad — what he calls “merely-mono theism” — he is addressing the problem of the One and the Many, though he does not use that language. Cornelius Van Til developed this aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity and pointed the way to a statement of the doctrine that addresses the most ancient philosophical problem — a problem addressed by Colin Gunton through consideration of the same Heraclitus and Parmenides that Van Til spoke of.[ix] In the Trinitarian God of the Bible, the One and the Three — the “many” in the Bible are defined clearly[x] — are equally ultimate. God is not One before He is Three, nor Three before He is One. In Van Til’s words: “Unity and plurality are equally ultimate in the Godhead. The persons of the Godhead are mutually exhaustive of one another, and therefore of the essence of the Godhead. God is a one-conscious being, and yet he is also a tri-conscious being.”[xi]
Both God’s threeness and His oneness ground the creation of the world. For, as Leithart points out there are deep problems with the idea of a monad creating. As I have stressed in another place, this is Islam’s deepest theological problem.[xii] Assuming that the One God is transcendent and wholly blessed in Himself with no needs outside of Himself to find blessing or completion, we must also assume that a unitarian god, a monad, would be a god who has never known an “other,” never had or desired fellowship with an “other,” never spoke a word to an “other” — indeed could not speak in so far as “words” are inescapably multiple and presumably contrary to the utter unity of the monad. The monad would be a god for whom “love” would be as foreign as otherness.
The question, then, is “why would such a god create, since the act of creation means bringing an “other” into being? For the monad to create, there would presumably be a motive, but for a wholly transcendent and self-blessed monad, no such motive is conceivable. However, let us suppose the inconceivable anyway! By virtue of a “big bang” sort of singularity, the monad did somehow bring the cosmos into existence! A new problem appears, or a new form of the same problem. How or why would the monad who is transcendent and totally blessed within its singular self seek to relate to the created “other?” For a monad, what would be the point of it?
In sum, only the trinitarian God of the Bible — for whom otherness is not only ontological reality, but even more, love, life, and joy[xiii] — only such a God could or would create. Leithart, through meticulous attention to the details — not by force, but by embrace — extracts juice from the text of Genesis 1, which is then fermented through John and Paul for our drinking pleasure!
Who is the Angel of Yahweh?
In his essay, Leithart also mentioned the Angel of Yahweh. I wish to consider Him. The Angel of Yahweh[xiv], identical I believe with the Angel of Elohim in similar texts (Genesis 21:17; 31:11; Exodus 14:19; Judges 6:20; 13:6, 9), first appears surprisingly to an Egyptian maid who has run away from her mistress! Twice, the Angel of Yahweh (Genesis 16:7) or Elohim (Genesis 21:17) speaks to Hagar, both times by a spring or well. One cannot help but recall Jesus’ gracious approach to the Samaritan woman at the well, for Jesus sought her out, just as the Angel sought out Hagar in her trouble (Genesis 16:7), answering her cries (Genesis 21:17). Is not this Angel the pre-incarnate Jesus?
The Angel of Yahweh’s identity with Yahweh is evident throughout the stories in Genesis. Hilary offers the following comments.
“After God had spoken many times to Abraham, Sara was moved to anger against Agar, for she was jealous of her handmaid who had conceived, while she, her mistress, was sterile. When Agar had departed from her presence, the Scripture speaks of her in this manner: ‘The angel of the Lord said to Agar, “Return to your mistress and humble yourself under her hands.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “Multiplying I will multiply your posterity and it shall not be numbered because of the multitude.” And again: ‘She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “Thou, God, who hast seen me.” The angel of God speaks. (But ‘an angel of God’ has a twofold meaning: he himself who is, and he of whom he is.) And he speaks of matters that are not in keeping with the name of his office, for he says: ‘Multiplying I will multiply your posterity and it shall not be numbered because of the multitude.’ The power to increase the posterity exceeds the office of an angel. What, then, has Scripture testified about the one who, as an angel of God, spoke about matters that are proper to God alone. ‘She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “Thou, God, who hast seen me.”’ First, the angel of God; secondly, the Lord, for ‘she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her’; then, thirdly, God, ‘Thou, God, who hast seen me.’ The same one who is called the angel of God is the Lord and God. But, according to the Prophet, the Son of God is ‘the angel of the great council.’ In order that the distinction of persons should be complete, He was called the angel of God, for He who is God from God is also the angel of God. But, that due honor should be rendered to Him, He was also proclaimed as the Lord and God.”[xv]
In the story of Hagar, as in other stories of the Angel of Yahweh, we see clearly, as Hilary explains, that the Angel is Yahweh,[xvi] but as the Angel of Yahweh, He is the One who is “sent” by Yahweh — the very meaning of being an “angel” or “messenger.” So, the Angel of the Lord is identical to Yahweh, but also sent by Yahweh.
Furthermore, Yahweh and His Angel converse: “And when the angel stretched out His hand over Jerusalem to destroy it, Yahweh relented from the destruction, and said to the angel who was destroying the people, ‘It is enough; now restrain your hand.’ And the angel of Yahweh was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” (2 Samuel 24:16; cf. 1 Chronicles 21:15). Also, “Then the Angel of Yahweh answered and said, ‘O Yahweh of hosts, how long will You not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the cities of Judah, against which You were angry these seventy years?’” (Zechariah 1:12).
Note that the first conversation is Yahweh commanding the Angel, who of course, obeys. The second conversation is the Angel interceding for Jerusalem, a prayer which is answered.
Yahweh and His Angel, therefore, both appear in Scripture as God, but they are distinguished as the One who sends and the One who is sent. Without the light of the New Testament with the revelation in the incarnation and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, this must all appear to be mysterious indeed, as it seems to have been to ancient Jews.[xvii]
However, after the full revelation of the Three Persons given in the New Testament, when we read the Old Testament in the light of incarnation and Pentecost, I think we ought to say, Yahweh Father and the Angel of Yahweh, His Son. In the Exodus story, the Spirit may also present as the glory cloud.[xviii] He is associated with the Angel, but distinct: “And the Angel of Elohim, who went before the camp of Israel, moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud went from before them and stood behind them” (Exodus 14:19).
Christophany?
From the earliest church fathers, the consensus was that the Angel of Yahweh was Yahweh Himself, but especially the Second Person of the Trinity. In a detailed historical essay Günther Juncker wrote: “Unknown to many, the early church fathers often referred to Jesus as an Angel. And they gave him this appellation long before the (alleged) distortions of Constantine, the Controversies, the Councils, and the Creeds. Due to its antiquity, its longevity, and the unusual diversity of Greek and Latin theologians who use it, the word Angel has a prima facie claim to being a primitive, if not an apostolic, Christological title.”[xix] At some length, Juncker surveys four early church fathers: Justin Martyr, Theophilus Of Antioch, Irenaeus, and Tertullian.[xx] In his conclusion, he wrote:
“The OT theophanies were Christophanies.[xxi] But if this is the case, then the title Angel is an almost inevitable development, given the pre-Christian messianic status of Isa 9:6 and the prominence of the Angel of the Lord in the OT theophanies. The question is not, how could the Fathers have come up with such a title? But rather, how could they possibly have avoided it? And again, if this is the case, then the trinitarian formulations of Nicea are also an almost inevitable development. Prior to the advent of Arianism the Nicene formulations had been, so to speak, in solution. But they crystallized quickly with the addition of the necessary catalyst. For it was not the old ‘Angel-Christology and the [new] Trinitarian dogma of Nicaea’ which were ‘absolutely incompatible.’ It was instead the old Angel-Christology (i.e., the apostolic tradition) and the new Arianism which were absolutely incompatible. In a very real sense the old Angel Christology was the new Nicene orthodoxy: a fact which accounts for the continued popularity of the title Angel after Nicea among the orthodox Fathers.”[xxii]
If I understand him correctly,[xxiii] Robert Jenson approved this basic approach of the church fathers and offers a conclusion similar to the article cited.
First, Jenson writes: “The usual supposition is that the doctrine of Trinity, and the Chalcedonian Christology which follows from it, are not in the Bible, and certainly not in that bulk of the Bible we call the Old Testament. . . . The doctrine of Trinity and Chalcedonian — in fact Neo-Chalcedonian — Christology are, in the appropriate fashion, indeed in the Bible, and most especially in the Old Testament.”
The appropriate fashion that Jenson speaks of is narrative. To consider the narrative, he turns to Genesis 22 and says that the Akedah demands a trinitarian reading.
“We may start with an obvious question: Who is this ‘Angel of the Lord’? The persona who appears and speaks to Abraham is at his appearing described as mal’ak, messenger, of the Lord, and that structure of distinction between the Angel of the Lord and the Lord whose messenger he is constitutes his identity in this passage, as it does in every other passage where he appears. Accordingly, in his address to Abraham he initially refers to God in the third person. Yet then in the very same sentence and without missing a beat, he refers in the first person to himself as God.”
He continues: “We may note that the ‘Angel of the Lord’ title invariably serves to introduce the persona; it is as the Lord is introduced into what might until then have been taken as a story about created personae only, that he is identified as his own Angel. Once the Lord’s role in the story is established, the oneness of the Lord’s Angel with the Lord himself can rule the discourse.
Which is to say, the dialectics of the Angel’s identity over against the Lord are precisely those which the Nicene-Constantinopolitan doctrine of Trinity specifies for the Son or Logos. In Athanasius’ interpretation of the Nicene decision’s ‘homoousion with the Father,’ which had become the accepted meaning of the phrase by the time Nicea was reaffirmed at Constantinople, that the Son is ‘of one being with the Father’ means that the Son is the same God as the Father and that he is this precisely by his relation to the Father.”[xxiv]
Thus, Jenson identifies the Angel of Yahweh as a manifestation of the pre-incarnate Son, the Son who is “of one being with the Father,” but who is, nevertheless, distinct from the Father.
Whether or not Katherine Sonderegger would endorse that reading, she does say, “The Christian act of reading the Old Testament ‘Christologically’ — seeing, that is the presence of the Divine Son in the teachings, doings, and figures of ancient Israel, either in foreshadowing or in manifestation (a “theophany”) — is one of the oldest forms of Christian canonical exegesis.”Also, “Does the Tri-Personed God visit His people before the Missions of Son and Spirit, before Incarnation and Pentecost? This is a kind of Christian reflection on the divine economy that may stretch but does not appear to break the common, figural reading that has been understood to mark the Western literary canon.”[xxv] This suggests she might view the Angel of Yahweh who visited Hagar as the pre-incarnate Son.
Fred Sanders, however, clearly rejects “the notion that before or apart from the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity was the subject of visible mission.”[xxvi] In this, he seems to be following Augustine, who was concerned about Arian misuse of theophanies. Some early fathers thought that the Father was too exalted to appear in the form of a creature, so that theophanies must be appearances of the Son, implying the Son’s inferiority to the Father. Augustine, Sanders explains, prefers to say that appearances of God before the incarnation and pentecost could have been any one Person or all Three. Theophanic revelation lacks the clarity to be specific, but more than that, for the pre-incarnate Son to be sent on visible missions seems to detract from the uniqueness of the incarnation.[xxvii]
In his work on Theophany,[xxviii] Very Poythress evaluated Andrew Malone’s similar rejection of Christophanies.[xxix] First, Poythress points out that Malone opposes the idea of Christophanies as if they are thought to be manifestations of the Son “alone.” However, Poythress notes, though the Son may be the Person manifest in an Old Testament theophany, He is never “alone.” The mutual indwelling of the Three Persons means that the Father and the Spirit are always with the Son, even in His unique manifestations and works.
Second, and this is also relevant to Sander’s rejection of Christophanies, how can there not be personal differentiation when there are two Persons in a story, both identified as God? The “Angel of Yahweh” is “sent” by Yahweh to fulfill some sort of mission or task. Even more, how can there not be personal differentiation when two who are named “God” hold a conversation?
The New Testament Paradigm
In the light of New Testament revelation, Augustine’s view seems to me incongruous. How, for example, could we imagine it possible for the Father to be sent? Sent by whom? Or, if the Angel is a manifestation of all Three Persons, who was the Sender? God sent God? I understand and sympathize with Augustine’s attempt to undercut Arianism, but in the light of the New Testament, this sort of ambiguity seems inadmissible, for there is a clearly revealed paradigm for God as Sender and God as Sent-One. If we read the Old Testament in the light of the New, how can we not apply that paradigm?
Also, we must say that even after the incarnation, whatever Jesus does, He does with, in, and by the Father and the Spirit, for the Three are always One. But that does not deny or reduce the reality that what the Second Person does belongs to Him in a special manner.
If we apply the New Testament revelation to the Old, it seems to me that we should think something like this: when the Father commands the Son, as Yahweh commanded the Angel of Yahweh, the Father must know Himself as distinct from the Son and the Son as an Other (John 15:10). When the Son delights to obey the Father, He must be conscious of Himself as distinct from the One He obeys (John 4:34). When the Son says that He does not seek His own honor, but the honor of the One who sent Him, He must be self-conscious of Himself and the Father as distinct Others who relate (John 7:18).
The Spirit does not speak from Himself, but what He hears, He will declare (John 16:13). Thus, the Spirit too is conscious of being a hearer who speaks words from Another. Also, since He will glorify the Son and not Himself, He must know the Son to be distinct from Himself (John 16:14; cf. 8:50, 54).
It seems to me that there is a New Testament paradigm that frames our reading of the Old Testament in such a way that we must see in the various theophanies persons in relation.
But what about the idea that Old Testament Christophanies derogate “in some way from the uniqueness of the incarnational sending.”[xxx]
Poythress does not see the idea of Old Testament Christophanies as detracting from the uniqueness of the mission of Christ in the incarnation but as anticipations of the incarnation of the future Christian hope to see His face.
“The theme of theophany—the theme of God appearing—is important for several reasons. First, as we just observed, the theme has at its center the person of Christ, who is the permanent theophany anticipated by the temporary theophanies in the Old Testament. Second, the theme finds its culmination in the final vision of God described in the book of Revelation: ‘They [the saints] will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads’ (Rev. 22:4). Thus, theophany is central to Christian hope. The final destiny of redeemed mankind is to experience the final theophany, when we ‘see his face.’”[xxxi]
In other words, revelation of the personal interactions of the Angel of Yahweh with Yahweh anticipate the fuller revelation of the wholly personal relationships of the Son to the Father and the Spirit that we see in the Gospels and that we find expounded in the epistles. Christophanies show us that the God revealed in the Gospels is the same God we have always known. In that sense, they enhance the incarnation. They suggest that God Himself was preparing and looking forward to truly becoming one with man. Like other Old Testament shadow revelation, they show what kind of God our God is and always has been.
Moreover and more importantly, Christophanies magnify the unique wonder of the incarnation by the overwhelming contrast between God temporarily assuming a human form to graciously reveal Himself, and God actually becoming man fully and forever. The incomparable greatness of the incarnation shines brighter by comparison, just as the reality of Christ transcends the shadows, but it also glorified by them.
Sander’s introduction to “prosoponic exegesis,” what Matthew Bates calls “prosopological exegesis,”[xxxii] offers profound resources for reading the Old Testament as Christian and Trinitarian. I find it especially interesting in approaching the Psalms. But it does not seem to apply to the Angel of the Lord. When the text of Scripture gives us a conversation between Yahweh and the Angel of Yahweh, or a conversation between some human person and the Angel of Yahweh, who is identified as Yahweh or God in the context, prosoponic exegesis would seem to be ruled out by Bates’ four criteria to define when prosopological exegesis is relevant, especially the second criterion.[xxxiii]
1) There must be a dialogue. This applies to Angel of the Lord passages because there is almost always a dialogue.
2) His second criteria is “non-triviality of person,” which he explains as “if there is no real or perceived ambiguity in the identity of the prosopon which can be presupposed, the exegesis is in accordance with the ‘plain sense’ of the pre-text and does not warrant special comment or the prosopological label.” When it comes to the Angel of the Lord, there is ambiguity in the sense that before the resurrection of Christ and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost no one could have understood the Angel as the pre-incarnate Christ Himself. But there is no ambiguity in the sense that everyone who was confronted by the Angel of Yahweh realized at some point that they had conversed with God Himself. No one leaves the encounter wondering who this great Angel must have been. After Pentecost, the identity of the One who was sent by Yahweh in the Old Testament era can be more specifically identified with the One who was sent by Yahweh at the incarnation.
3) There is a primacy of introductory formulas or markers. The appearances of the Angel of Yahweh are “marked” with introductory language.
4) His final criterion is “similar prosopological exegesis” in other texts. With respect to the Angel of the Lord, it seems to me the approach of most exegetes from ancient times would not be called “prosopological.”
Conclusion
In the case of the Angel of Yahweh, there seems to be little reason for Christians to hesitate to identify Him with the pre-incarnate Christ. There are other intimations of pre-incarnate visitations as well. Three men meet Abraham in Genesis 18, but one of them turns out to be Yahweh (Genesis 18:1-2, 10, 13-15, 17 ff.). In other words, in this story, Yahweh appeared in the form of a man, as the Angel of the Lord does on other occasions (Genesis 31:11-1332:24-32; Judges 13:3-23).
In the light of John 1:1-18, it seems reasonable to see every Old Testament reference to Yahweh or God appearing in angelic or human form as a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. Jesus was the “Word” from the beginning and it has always been the Word who reveals the Father. The work of the Word and Spirit in creation and redemption reveal their own inter-trinitarian relationships with each other and the Father.
What we learn from Old Testament theophanies is that the incarnation was the direction of God’s plan from the beginning. That the Trinitarian God of the Bible has always delighted to reveal Himself to us, eventually with the Son becoming one with us as the Last Adam and the Firstborn of a new race of man. The love of God manifest in the incarnation, death and resurrection was not asleep in the long years before the fullness of time, waiting for the manifestation of the Messiah. Jesus Christ — the same, yesterday, today, and forever — always rejoiced abundantly to show the Father to us in the form that He formed as His own image. Temporary manifestations of Yahweh in human form were unstated promises of Yahweh’s plan for the future, disclosures of His ultimate purpose to become one with His bride.
This comports wonderfully with the Spirit’s motherly hovering over the earth and the Father’s pronouncing over and over that the work of the Word and Spirit is “good.” The mutual delight of the Persons of the Trinity in their work of creation finds its climax in the creation of the “image and likeness” of God, with which the Son would become one through incarnation in the fullness of time. At the end of the sixth day, all is “very good” (Genesis 1:31) — which is also the way the whole Biblical story ends in the New Jerusalem.
No longer will there be anything accursed,
but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it,
and his servants will worship him.
They will see his face,
and his name will be on their foreheads.
And night will be no more.
They will need no light of lamp or sun,
for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. Revelation 22:3-5
Ralph Smith is pastor of Mitaka Evangelical Church.
[i] Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. vii-viii.
[ii] Matthew Bates discusses this at some length. The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 80 ff.
[iii] In context, Henry is discussing other views. Carl F. H. Henry, God Revelation and Authority: Vol. II: God Who Speaks and Shows: Fifteen Theses, Part 1 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976), p.139.
[iv] Peter Leithart, Revelation 1-11 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 85.
[v] Ibid., pp. 85-86.
[vi] Ibid., p. 86.
[vii] James Jordan, “The Sequence of Events in theCreation Week (I)” Biblical Chronology, vol 9, No. 10 October 1997.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Colin Gunton, The One the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity: The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). pp. 17-18, etc. Gunton’s approach to the matter is remarkably like Van Til’s but he shows no knowledge of Van Til. Perhaps he never knew of him or read him?
[x] On this, see Brant Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox: An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014). Bosserman argues that God could not be either less or more than Three Persons and presents each Person as the “context” in which the other two Persons relate and commune. Father and Son commune in the Spirit; Son and Spirit commune in the Father; Father and Spirit commune in the Son. Interpersonal Trinitarian relationships are thus wholly and exhaustively personal.
[xi] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971), p. 220.
[xii] Of course, Islamic philosophers and theologians ask questions and offer answers to basic theological issues. However, the fact of the existence of the world is an inescapable given, and the idea of creation is borrowed from the Bible. The problem is to understand and explain the reality that stands before all men. The philosophical and theological speculations that emerge are far to complex even to summarize. But an illuminating example might be in Oliver Leaman’s work: “God is identified as the necessary existent and is one and simple.This necessary existent or being does not produce other things as though intending them to come into existence, however, for then he would be acting for something lower than himself and would thereby introduce multiplicity into the divine essence. Rather, the first effect, a pure intelligence, necessarily proceeds from his self-reflection. . . . Avicenna had the problem of reconciling an eternally existing world and an eternally existing God without having the perfect simplicity and unity of God destroyed by contact with the multiplicity of material things. His strategy was to interpose many levels of spiritual substances, the intelligences, between God and the world of generation and corruption to insulate the divine unity from multiplicity.” An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 2004), pp. 50-51. Whether or not God knows particulars is a philosophical problem in Islam: “Avicenna has often been criticized for maintaining that God does not know particulars . . .” Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam edited by Jon McGinnis (Leiden: Brill, 2004) p. 142. The entire chapter on God’s knowledge of particulars shows the kind of problems a monad faces.
[xiii] “In himself and without any reference to a created world or the plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The boundless life that God lives in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is perfect. It is complete, inexhaustibly full, and infinitely blessed.” Fred Sanders, Deep Things of God (Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 2010), Kindle.
[xiv] This is not an exhaustive list, but many of the prominent passages are: Genesis 16:7, 9–11; 22:11, 15; Exodus 3:2; Numbers 22:22–27, 31–32, 34–35; Judges 2:1, 4; 5:23; 6:11–12, 21–22; 13:3, 13, 15–18, 20–21; 2 Samuel 24:16; 1 Kings 19:7; 2 Kings 1:3, 15; 19:35; 1 Chronicles 21:12, 15–16, 18, 30; Psalms 34:7; 35:5–6; Isaiah 37:36; Zecheriah 1:11–12; 3:1, 5–6; 12:8.
[xv] The Fathers of the Church, St. Hilary of Poitiers, The Trinity, translated by Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1954), pp. 111-12.
[xvi] Hilary’s exposition shows, I believe, that James McGrath’s approach to the Angel — though he does not address the Angel’s meeting with Hagar — simply will not hold up. For McGrath, the Angel of Yahweh was just one of many mediatorial representatives of Yahweh. “When God wanted to address his people, he sent a prophet or an angel. Agency was an important part of everyday life in the ancient world. Individuals such as the prophets and angels mentioned in the Jewish Scriptures were thought of as ‘agents’ of God. And the key idea regarding agency in the ancient world appears to be summarized in the phrase from rabbinic literature so often quoted in these contexts: ‘The one sent is like the one who sent him.’ The result is that the agent can not only carry out divine functions but also be depicted in divine language, sit on God’s throne or alongside God, and even bear the divine name.” James McGrath, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p.14.
[xvii] Camiilla Helena von Heijne concludes: “Finally, the conclusion must be drawn that there is no unambiguous or homogeneous interpretation of ‘the angel of the Lord’ and his identity in our sources. He is sometimes depicted as a divine emissary separate from God, while in other cases he appears to be seen as a manifestation or a hypostasis of God Himself. The ambivalence in the relationship between God and His angel remains in many of the interpretations of the texts, and in relation to ‘ordinary’ angels ‘the angel of the Lord’ is generally awarded a special, high status.” The Messenger of the Lord in Early Jewish Interpretations of Genesis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), p. 377.
[xviii] See: Meredith Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview (Overland Park, KS: Two Age Press, 2000), p. 16, 30, 77, etc. Poythress demurs. Theophany: A Biblical Theology of God’s Appearing (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), pp. 429 ff.
[xix] Günther Juncker, “Christ As Angel: The Reclamation Of A Primitive Title,” Trinity Journal 15:2 (Fall 1994).
[xx] This is not to endorse all that the fathers say about the Angel of the Lord, as John Behr points out, Justin Martyr in particular struggles to express his faith: “Justin is clearly trying to find a way to explain how it is that Jesus Christ is God, yet distinct from the God and Creator o f all, his Father. However, his manner o f explanation, in terms of the divinity of the ineffable Father being transcendent in a manner which prohibits him from being seen on earth, in fact undermines the very revelation of God in Christ. The divinity o f Jesus Christ, an ‘other God,’ is no longer that o f the Father himself, but is subordinate to it, a lesser divinity, and so it would no longer be true for the agent of such a theophany to claim, as Christ does, ‘he who has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9).” John Behr, The Formation of Christian Theology, Volume 1, The Way to Nicaea (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), p. 104.
[xxi] By “OT theophanies,” Juncker has in mind primarily “the Angel of Yahweh” or “the Angel of God” theophanies.
[xxii] Juncker, ibid., pp. 249-50.
[xxiii] In general, Jenson is utterly Augustinian. However, on the understanding of the Angel of Yahweh, he seems clearly to differ, unless I am not reading him accurately.
[xxiv] Robert Jenson, The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture ed. by Brad East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 241 ff. cf. also, Systematic Theology Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp 75-80, 86, cf. also, Systematic Theology Volume 2, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 287.
[xxv] Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2020), p. xxvi and p. 265.
[xxvi] Fred Sanders, The Triune God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), Kindle.
[xxvii] In addition to the section “No to Christophanies” in chapter 8, Sanders wrote in the Introduction: “The text of the Old Testament and the trajectory of its events do generate a host of unusual phenomena that need to be accounted for. They are best accounted for by Trinitarian theology as it throws a light backward from the New Testament to the Old. I commend the ancient practice of identifying divine speakers in the oracles of the old covenant (prosoponic exegesis), but consider and reject the tradition of identifying distinct Trinitarian presences in the Old Testament (christophanies).” Fred Sanders, The Triune God, Kindle
[xxviii] Vern Poythress, Theophany: A Biblical Theology of God’s Appearing (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), pp.417, ff.
[xxix] Andrew Malone, Knowing Jesus in the Old Testament? A Fresh Look at Christophanies (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity, 2015).
[xxx] Fred Sanders, The Triune God, Kindle.
[xxxi] Poythress, Op. Cit., p. 23.
[xxxii] Matthew Bates, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), pp. 183-221.
[xxxiii] Ibid., pp. 219-221.
In a book written in 2009, Peter Leithart defined two aims for Deep Exegesis: “First, this book advocates a hermeneutics of the letter. That is to say, reading Scripture has to do with attending to the specific contours of the text — the author's word choices, structural organization, tropes and allusions, and intertextual quotations. . . . My second aim is to learn to read from Jesus and Paul. Almost without exception, most of the questions I attempt to answer in this book arose from my efforts to make sense of how the Bible works, and particularly how Jesus, Paul, and the other New Testament writers read the Old Testament.”[i]
The same two aims could serve as a preface for his essay, “The Triune Creator,” for here he shows us again a ‘hermeneutics of the letter,” detailed and thoughtful attention to “word choices, structural organization, tropes and allusions, and intertextual quotations.” The essay also shows that the “letter” does not kill, but, to quote him again, “We get at the riches of Scripture precisely by luxuriating in the letter, by squeezing everything we can from the text as written.”
Thus, Leithart suggests a reading for Genesis 1 that squeezes everything from the text through tools provided by Jesus, John, and Paul. As original as his reading may appear, he shows that he is following Augustine in particular, as well as Christian interpreters through the centuries.
Specifically, Leithart explains that from the beginning Elohim/Yahweh manifested a surplus of personhood. Though the story of creation depicts the plural “Elohim” as a singular “He,” the “He” is also an “Us” — an “Us” that converses.[ii] Whatever Moses might have thought about this, Paul tells us that the Gospel was a “mystery hidden for ages” — including the Triune foundations for the Gospel’s wonderful “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26-27).
As Leithart expounds, the creation of ha’adam in Genesis 1:27 is the result of divine conversation and consultation. Everett Fox translates Genesis 1:27, “So God created humankind in his image . . .”, as also, Gordan Wenham, “So God created man in his own image.” Though neither of these men hold to a Trinitarian view of verse 26, they seem to affirm, or allow, that the creation of man is the result of the mysterious “Let us.” Thus, correctly I believe, Carl F. H. Henry refers to the creation of man as “the execution of God’s resolution.”[iii]
But Leithart boldly suggests that the intra-trinitarian exchange began much earlier than verse 26, though the “us” are not directly introduced until then. The God who speaks with Himself appears from the beginning: “The one person of ‘elohim initiates each day’s work and, at the end of each day, commends his own performance. That is conceivable, but it more plausible that the ‘elohim who makes and the ‘elohim who evaluates are somehow distinct. We might say, for instance, that at the end of each day ‘elohim evaluates and commends the work of His own Spirit, who hovers over the waters.”
Reading backwards from John 1, validates and emphasizes this: “When we read Genesis 1 in the light of John 1, this suspicion becomes not only plausible but nearly inevitable. If the Word by which the Father creates is God-with-God, God-toward-God, then the judgments at the end of each day are the Father’s judgments of the Son’s work. Since the Son does all he does in the power of the Spirit, the Father commends both equally. Having established His throne in heaven, the Father issues decrees to be executed by the Son and Spirit, and passes judgment on the goodness of their work. Or, more tightly, the Son is the decree that the enthroned Creator utters by the breath of His Spirit.”
The order in Genesis 1 is Father, Spirit, Son, the same “odd” order that we see in Revelation 1:4-6. In his commentary on Revelation, Leithart describes this “odd” order as “the order of incarnation” and elaborates the outworking of order from Jesus’ conception, to His baptism and ministry, and His death and resurrection. “Throughout this history, the Father acts on and gives to the Son through the Spirit. Father, Spirit, Son.”[iv] Leithart notes that redemption follows the same pattern, which he summarizes as “Father, Spirit, sons.”[v]
Leithart adds this also: “This pattern is evident also in the OT. The Word that speaks the world into existence is the Word vocalized by the hovering Spirit. Adam is formed from the dust of the ground, and God breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and so the dust becomes the human son of God, God’s image and likeness. By the Spirit, adamah becomes adam. When Israel, God’s son, is a field of dry bones, the prophet prophesies to the bones, and the wind of God brings them to life. Yahweh, Spirit, Israel.”[vi]
Returning to Leithart’s account of the Trinitarian order in the creation, there may be one more point to append. Leithart points to the order: Father — ‘elohim of verse 1 — Spirit — hovering over the water in verse 2 — and Son — the Word of verse 3 “Let there be!”
Then “light” appears. What light? It is not the light of the sun, moon, and stars, for they do not appear until day 4.
James Jordan suggested that the “Light” is the glory of the Spirit of God: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light.’ The only source for that light is the Spirit Himself. When God appears later on in the Bible, He is surrounded by the glory, which is associated with the Spirit. Indeed, His glory hovers over Israel in the pillar of cloud & fire. Thus, the initial light came from the Spirit. Light is energy, fire; and so now fire is brought into the earth from heaven. This begins the transfiguration of the earth, from glory to glory.”[vii]
Just as Leithart pointed to Psalm 104, so did Jordan: “Confirmation of the idea that the Spirit is the light-bearer at this point comes from Psalm 104 — if confirmation is even needed. Psalm 104 is a reflective commentary on Genesis 1, and proceeds through the seven days in order. The first day is discussed in the first four lines (vv. 1-2a). There God is said to cover Himself with light as with a cloak. Thus, the Psalmist understood the light of the first day as a light from God.”[viii]
In other words, Genesis 1:3 is not speaking of the creation of light, but of the Father speaking the Word to the Spirit who shines His glory-light into and onto the earth.
If this is so, then in Genesis 1:1-3, we have Father, Spirit, Son, Spirit. The order suggests Trinitarian depths hinted at in the creation.
When Leithart points to the problem of a monad — what he calls “merely-mono theism” — he is addressing the problem of the One and the Many, though he does not use that language. Cornelius Van Til developed this aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity and pointed the way to a statement of the doctrine that addresses the most ancient philosophical problem — a problem addressed by Colin Gunton through consideration of the same Heraclitus and Parmenides that Van Til spoke of.[ix] In the Trinitarian God of the Bible, the One and the Three — the “many” in the Bible are defined clearly[x] — are equally ultimate. God is not One before He is Three, nor Three before He is One. In Van Til’s words: “Unity and plurality are equally ultimate in the Godhead. The persons of the Godhead are mutually exhaustive of one another, and therefore of the essence of the Godhead. God is a one-conscious being, and yet he is also a tri-conscious being.”[xi]
Both God’s threeness and His oneness ground the creation of the world. For, as Leithart points out there are deep problems with the idea of a monad creating. As I have stressed in another place, this is Islam’s deepest theological problem.[xii] Assuming that the One God is transcendent and wholly blessed in Himself with no needs outside of Himself to find blessing or completion, we must also assume that a unitarian god, a monad, would be a god who has never known an “other,” never had or desired fellowship with an “other,” never spoke a word to an “other” — indeed could not speak in so far as “words” are inescapably multiple and presumably contrary to the utter unity of the monad. The monad would be a god for whom “love” would be as foreign as otherness.
The question, then, is “why would such a god create, since the act of creation means bringing an “other” into being? For the monad to create, there would presumably be a motive, but for a wholly transcendent and self-blessed monad, no such motive is conceivable. However, let us suppose the inconceivable anyway! By virtue of a “big bang” sort of singularity, the monad did somehow bring the cosmos into existence! A new problem appears, or a new form of the same problem. How or why would the monad who is transcendent and totally blessed within its singular self seek to relate to the created “other?” For a monad, what would be the point of it?
In sum, only the trinitarian God of the Bible — for whom otherness is not only ontological reality, but even more, love, life, and joy[xiii] — only such a God could or would create. Leithart, through meticulous attention to the details — not by force, but by embrace — extracts juice from the text of Genesis 1, which is then fermented through John and Paul for our drinking pleasure!
Who is the Angel of Yahweh?
In his essay, Leithart also mentioned the Angel of Yahweh. I wish to consider Him. The Angel of Yahweh[xiv], identical I believe with the Angel of Elohim in similar texts (Genesis 21:17; 31:11; Exodus 14:19; Judges 6:20; 13:6, 9), first appears surprisingly to an Egyptian maid who has run away from her mistress! Twice, the Angel of Yahweh (Genesis 16:7) or Elohim (Genesis 21:17) speaks to Hagar, both times by a spring or well. One cannot help but recall Jesus’ gracious approach to the Samaritan woman at the well, for Jesus sought her out, just as the Angel sought out Hagar in her trouble (Genesis 16:7), answering her cries (Genesis 21:17). Is not this Angel the pre-incarnate Jesus?
The Angel of Yahweh’s identity with Yahweh is evident throughout the stories in Genesis. Hilary offers the following comments.
“After God had spoken many times to Abraham, Sara was moved to anger against Agar, for she was jealous of her handmaid who had conceived, while she, her mistress, was sterile. When Agar had departed from her presence, the Scripture speaks of her in this manner: ‘The angel of the Lord said to Agar, “Return to your mistress and humble yourself under her hands.” The angel of the Lord said to her, “Multiplying I will multiply your posterity and it shall not be numbered because of the multitude.” And again: ‘She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “Thou, God, who hast seen me.” The angel of God speaks. (But ‘an angel of God’ has a twofold meaning: he himself who is, and he of whom he is.) And he speaks of matters that are not in keeping with the name of his office, for he says: ‘Multiplying I will multiply your posterity and it shall not be numbered because of the multitude.’ The power to increase the posterity exceeds the office of an angel. What, then, has Scripture testified about the one who, as an angel of God, spoke about matters that are proper to God alone. ‘She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “Thou, God, who hast seen me.”’ First, the angel of God; secondly, the Lord, for ‘she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her’; then, thirdly, God, ‘Thou, God, who hast seen me.’ The same one who is called the angel of God is the Lord and God. But, according to the Prophet, the Son of God is ‘the angel of the great council.’ In order that the distinction of persons should be complete, He was called the angel of God, for He who is God from God is also the angel of God. But, that due honor should be rendered to Him, He was also proclaimed as the Lord and God.”[xv]
In the story of Hagar, as in other stories of the Angel of Yahweh, we see clearly, as Hilary explains, that the Angel is Yahweh,[xvi] but as the Angel of Yahweh, He is the One who is “sent” by Yahweh — the very meaning of being an “angel” or “messenger.” So, the Angel of the Lord is identical to Yahweh, but also sent by Yahweh.
Furthermore, Yahweh and His Angel converse: “And when the angel stretched out His hand over Jerusalem to destroy it, Yahweh relented from the destruction, and said to the angel who was destroying the people, ‘It is enough; now restrain your hand.’ And the angel of Yahweh was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.” (2 Samuel 24:16; cf. 1 Chronicles 21:15). Also, “Then the Angel of Yahweh answered and said, ‘O Yahweh of hosts, how long will You not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the cities of Judah, against which You were angry these seventy years?’” (Zechariah 1:12).
Note that the first conversation is Yahweh commanding the Angel, who of course, obeys. The second conversation is the Angel interceding for Jerusalem, a prayer which is answered.
Yahweh and His Angel, therefore, both appear in Scripture as God, but they are distinguished as the One who sends and the One who is sent. Without the light of the New Testament with the revelation in the incarnation and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, this must all appear to be mysterious indeed, as it seems to have been to ancient Jews.[xvii]
However, after the full revelation of the Three Persons given in the New Testament, when we read the Old Testament in the light of incarnation and Pentecost, I think we ought to say, Yahweh Father and the Angel of Yahweh, His Son. In the Exodus story, the Spirit may also present as the glory cloud.[xviii] He is associated with the Angel, but distinct: “And the Angel of Elohim, who went before the camp of Israel, moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud went from before them and stood behind them” (Exodus 14:19).
Christophany?
From the earliest church fathers, the consensus was that the Angel of Yahweh was Yahweh Himself, but especially the Second Person of the Trinity. In a detailed historical essay Günther Juncker wrote: “Unknown to many, the early church fathers often referred to Jesus as an Angel. And they gave him this appellation long before the (alleged) distortions of Constantine, the Controversies, the Councils, and the Creeds. Due to its antiquity, its longevity, and the unusual diversity of Greek and Latin theologians who use it, the word Angel has a prima facie claim to being a primitive, if not an apostolic, Christological title.”[xix] At some length, Juncker surveys four early church fathers: Justin Martyr, Theophilus Of Antioch, Irenaeus, and Tertullian.[xx] In his conclusion, he wrote:
“The OT theophanies were Christophanies.[xxi] But if this is the case, then the title Angel is an almost inevitable development, given the pre-Christian messianic status of Isa 9:6 and the prominence of the Angel of the Lord in the OT theophanies. The question is not, how could the Fathers have come up with such a title? But rather, how could they possibly have avoided it? And again, if this is the case, then the trinitarian formulations of Nicea are also an almost inevitable development. Prior to the advent of Arianism the Nicene formulations had been, so to speak, in solution. But they crystallized quickly with the addition of the necessary catalyst. For it was not the old ‘Angel-Christology and the [new] Trinitarian dogma of Nicaea’ which were ‘absolutely incompatible.’ It was instead the old Angel-Christology (i.e., the apostolic tradition) and the new Arianism which were absolutely incompatible. In a very real sense the old Angel Christology was the new Nicene orthodoxy: a fact which accounts for the continued popularity of the title Angel after Nicea among the orthodox Fathers.”[xxii]
If I understand him correctly,[xxiii] Robert Jenson approved this basic approach of the church fathers and offers a conclusion similar to the article cited.
First, Jenson writes: “The usual supposition is that the doctrine of Trinity, and the Chalcedonian Christology which follows from it, are not in the Bible, and certainly not in that bulk of the Bible we call the Old Testament. . . . The doctrine of Trinity and Chalcedonian — in fact Neo-Chalcedonian — Christology are, in the appropriate fashion, indeed in the Bible, and most especially in the Old Testament.”
The appropriate fashion that Jenson speaks of is narrative. To consider the narrative, he turns to Genesis 22 and says that the Akedah demands a trinitarian reading.
“We may start with an obvious question: Who is this ‘Angel of the Lord’? The persona who appears and speaks to Abraham is at his appearing described as mal’ak, messenger, of the Lord, and that structure of distinction between the Angel of the Lord and the Lord whose messenger he is constitutes his identity in this passage, as it does in every other passage where he appears. Accordingly, in his address to Abraham he initially refers to God in the third person. Yet then in the very same sentence and without missing a beat, he refers in the first person to himself as God.”
He continues: “We may note that the ‘Angel of the Lord’ title invariably serves to introduce the persona; it is as the Lord is introduced into what might until then have been taken as a story about created personae only, that he is identified as his own Angel. Once the Lord’s role in the story is established, the oneness of the Lord’s Angel with the Lord himself can rule the discourse.
Which is to say, the dialectics of the Angel’s identity over against the Lord are precisely those which the Nicene-Constantinopolitan doctrine of Trinity specifies for the Son or Logos. In Athanasius’ interpretation of the Nicene decision’s ‘homoousion with the Father,’ which had become the accepted meaning of the phrase by the time Nicea was reaffirmed at Constantinople, that the Son is ‘of one being with the Father’ means that the Son is the same God as the Father and that he is this precisely by his relation to the Father.”[xxiv]
Thus, Jenson identifies the Angel of Yahweh as a manifestation of the pre-incarnate Son, the Son who is “of one being with the Father,” but who is, nevertheless, distinct from the Father.
Whether or not Katherine Sonderegger would endorse that reading, she does say, “The Christian act of reading the Old Testament ‘Christologically’ — seeing, that is the presence of the Divine Son in the teachings, doings, and figures of ancient Israel, either in foreshadowing or in manifestation (a “theophany”) — is one of the oldest forms of Christian canonical exegesis.”Also, “Does the Tri-Personed God visit His people before the Missions of Son and Spirit, before Incarnation and Pentecost? This is a kind of Christian reflection on the divine economy that may stretch but does not appear to break the common, figural reading that has been understood to mark the Western literary canon.”[xxv] This suggests she might view the Angel of Yahweh who visited Hagar as the pre-incarnate Son.
Fred Sanders, however, clearly rejects “the notion that before or apart from the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity was the subject of visible mission.”[xxvi] In this, he seems to be following Augustine, who was concerned about Arian misuse of theophanies. Some early fathers thought that the Father was too exalted to appear in the form of a creature, so that theophanies must be appearances of the Son, implying the Son’s inferiority to the Father. Augustine, Sanders explains, prefers to say that appearances of God before the incarnation and pentecost could have been any one Person or all Three. Theophanic revelation lacks the clarity to be specific, but more than that, for the pre-incarnate Son to be sent on visible missions seems to detract from the uniqueness of the incarnation.[xxvii]
In his work on Theophany,[xxviii] Very Poythress evaluated Andrew Malone’s similar rejection of Christophanies.[xxix] First, Poythress points out that Malone opposes the idea of Christophanies as if they are thought to be manifestations of the Son “alone.” However, Poythress notes, though the Son may be the Person manifest in an Old Testament theophany, He is never “alone.” The mutual indwelling of the Three Persons means that the Father and the Spirit are always with the Son, even in His unique manifestations and works.
Second, and this is also relevant to Sander’s rejection of Christophanies, how can there not be personal differentiation when there are two Persons in a story, both identified as God? The “Angel of Yahweh” is “sent” by Yahweh to fulfill some sort of mission or task. Even more, how can there not be personal differentiation when two who are named “God” hold a conversation?
The New Testament Paradigm
In the light of New Testament revelation, Augustine’s view seems to me incongruous. How, for example, could we imagine it possible for the Father to be sent? Sent by whom? Or, if the Angel is a manifestation of all Three Persons, who was the Sender? God sent God? I understand and sympathize with Augustine’s attempt to undercut Arianism, but in the light of the New Testament, this sort of ambiguity seems inadmissible, for there is a clearly revealed paradigm for God as Sender and God as Sent-One. If we read the Old Testament in the light of the New, how can we not apply that paradigm?
Also, we must say that even after the incarnation, whatever Jesus does, He does with, in, and by the Father and the Spirit, for the Three are always One. But that does not deny or reduce the reality that what the Second Person does belongs to Him in a special manner.
If we apply the New Testament revelation to the Old, it seems to me that we should think something like this: when the Father commands the Son, as Yahweh commanded the Angel of Yahweh, the Father must know Himself as distinct from the Son and the Son as an Other (John 15:10). When the Son delights to obey the Father, He must be conscious of Himself as distinct from the One He obeys (John 4:34). When the Son says that He does not seek His own honor, but the honor of the One who sent Him, He must be self-conscious of Himself and the Father as distinct Others who relate (John 7:18).
The Spirit does not speak from Himself, but what He hears, He will declare (John 16:13). Thus, the Spirit too is conscious of being a hearer who speaks words from Another. Also, since He will glorify the Son and not Himself, He must know the Son to be distinct from Himself (John 16:14; cf. 8:50, 54).
It seems to me that there is a New Testament paradigm that frames our reading of the Old Testament in such a way that we must see in the various theophanies persons in relation.
But what about the idea that Old Testament Christophanies derogate “in some way from the uniqueness of the incarnational sending.”[xxx]
Poythress does not see the idea of Old Testament Christophanies as detracting from the uniqueness of the mission of Christ in the incarnation but as anticipations of the incarnation of the future Christian hope to see His face.
“The theme of theophany—the theme of God appearing—is important for several reasons. First, as we just observed, the theme has at its center the person of Christ, who is the permanent theophany anticipated by the temporary theophanies in the Old Testament. Second, the theme finds its culmination in the final vision of God described in the book of Revelation: ‘They [the saints] will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads’ (Rev. 22:4). Thus, theophany is central to Christian hope. The final destiny of redeemed mankind is to experience the final theophany, when we ‘see his face.’”[xxxi]
In other words, revelation of the personal interactions of the Angel of Yahweh with Yahweh anticipate the fuller revelation of the wholly personal relationships of the Son to the Father and the Spirit that we see in the Gospels and that we find expounded in the epistles. Christophanies show us that the God revealed in the Gospels is the same God we have always known. In that sense, they enhance the incarnation. They suggest that God Himself was preparing and looking forward to truly becoming one with man. Like other Old Testament shadow revelation, they show what kind of God our God is and always has been.
Moreover and more importantly, Christophanies magnify the unique wonder of the incarnation by the overwhelming contrast between God temporarily assuming a human form to graciously reveal Himself, and God actually becoming man fully and forever. The incomparable greatness of the incarnation shines brighter by comparison, just as the reality of Christ transcends the shadows, but it also glorified by them.
Sander’s introduction to “prosoponic exegesis,” what Matthew Bates calls “prosopological exegesis,”[xxxii] offers profound resources for reading the Old Testament as Christian and Trinitarian. I find it especially interesting in approaching the Psalms. But it does not seem to apply to the Angel of the Lord. When the text of Scripture gives us a conversation between Yahweh and the Angel of Yahweh, or a conversation between some human person and the Angel of Yahweh, who is identified as Yahweh or God in the context, prosoponic exegesis would seem to be ruled out by Bates’ four criteria to define when prosopological exegesis is relevant, especially the second criterion.[xxxiii]
1) There must be a dialogue. This applies to Angel of the Lord passages because there is almost always a dialogue.
2) His second criteria is “non-triviality of person,” which he explains as “if there is no real or perceived ambiguity in the identity of the prosopon which can be presupposed, the exegesis is in accordance with the ‘plain sense’ of the pre-text and does not warrant special comment or the prosopological label.” When it comes to the Angel of the Lord, there is ambiguity in the sense that before the resurrection of Christ and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost no one could have understood the Angel as the pre-incarnate Christ Himself. But there is no ambiguity in the sense that everyone who was confronted by the Angel of Yahweh realized at some point that they had conversed with God Himself. No one leaves the encounter wondering who this great Angel must have been. After Pentecost, the identity of the One who was sent by Yahweh in the Old Testament era can be more specifically identified with the One who was sent by Yahweh at the incarnation.
3) There is a primacy of introductory formulas or markers. The appearances of the Angel of Yahweh are “marked” with introductory language.
4) His final criterion is “similar prosopological exegesis” in other texts. With respect to the Angel of the Lord, it seems to me the approach of most exegetes from ancient times would not be called “prosopological.”
Conclusion
In the case of the Angel of Yahweh, there seems to be little reason for Christians to hesitate to identify Him with the pre-incarnate Christ. There are other intimations of pre-incarnate visitations as well. Three men meet Abraham in Genesis 18, but one of them turns out to be Yahweh (Genesis 18:1-2, 10, 13-15, 17 ff.). In other words, in this story, Yahweh appeared in the form of a man, as the Angel of the Lord does on other occasions (Genesis 31:11-1332:24-32; Judges 13:3-23).
In the light of John 1:1-18, it seems reasonable to see every Old Testament reference to Yahweh or God appearing in angelic or human form as a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. Jesus was the “Word” from the beginning and it has always been the Word who reveals the Father. The work of the Word and Spirit in creation and redemption reveal their own inter-trinitarian relationships with each other and the Father.
What we learn from Old Testament theophanies is that the incarnation was the direction of God’s plan from the beginning. That the Trinitarian God of the Bible has always delighted to reveal Himself to us, eventually with the Son becoming one with us as the Last Adam and the Firstborn of a new race of man. The love of God manifest in the incarnation, death and resurrection was not asleep in the long years before the fullness of time, waiting for the manifestation of the Messiah. Jesus Christ — the same, yesterday, today, and forever — always rejoiced abundantly to show the Father to us in the form that He formed as His own image. Temporary manifestations of Yahweh in human form were unstated promises of Yahweh’s plan for the future, disclosures of His ultimate purpose to become one with His bride.
This comports wonderfully with the Spirit’s motherly hovering over the earth and the Father’s pronouncing over and over that the work of the Word and Spirit is “good.” The mutual delight of the Persons of the Trinity in their work of creation finds its climax in the creation of the “image and likeness” of God, with which the Son would become one through incarnation in the fullness of time. At the end of the sixth day, all is “very good” (Genesis 1:31) — which is also the way the whole Biblical story ends in the New Jerusalem.
No longer will there be anything accursed,
but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it,
and his servants will worship him.
They will see his face,
and his name will be on their foreheads.
And night will be no more.
They will need no light of lamp or sun,
for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. Revelation 22:3-5
Ralph Smith is pastor of Mitaka Evangelical Church.
[i] Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. vii-viii.
[ii] Matthew Bates discusses this at some length. The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 80 ff.
[iii] In context, Henry is discussing other views. Carl F. H. Henry, God Revelation and Authority: Vol. II: God Who Speaks and Shows: Fifteen Theses, Part 1 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976), p.139.
[iv] Peter Leithart, Revelation 1-11 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 85.
[v] Ibid., pp. 85-86.
[vi] Ibid., p. 86.
[vii] James Jordan, “The Sequence of Events in theCreation Week (I)” Biblical Chronology, vol 9, No. 10 October 1997.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Colin Gunton, The One the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity: The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). pp. 17-18, etc. Gunton’s approach to the matter is remarkably like Van Til’s but he shows no knowledge of Van Til. Perhaps he never knew of him or read him?
[x] On this, see Brant Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox: An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014). Bosserman argues that God could not be either less or more than Three Persons and presents each Person as the “context” in which the other two Persons relate and commune. Father and Son commune in the Spirit; Son and Spirit commune in the Father; Father and Spirit commune in the Son. Interpersonal Trinitarian relationships are thus wholly and exhaustively personal.
[xi] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971), p. 220.
[xii] Of course, Islamic philosophers and theologians ask questions and offer answers to basic theological issues. However, the fact of the existence of the world is an inescapable given, and the idea of creation is borrowed from the Bible. The problem is to understand and explain the reality that stands before all men. The philosophical and theological speculations that emerge are far to complex even to summarize. But an illuminating example might be in Oliver Leaman’s work: “God is identified as the necessary existent and is one and simple.This necessary existent or being does not produce other things as though intending them to come into existence, however, for then he would be acting for something lower than himself and would thereby introduce multiplicity into the divine essence. Rather, the first effect, a pure intelligence, necessarily proceeds from his self-reflection. . . . Avicenna had the problem of reconciling an eternally existing world and an eternally existing God without having the perfect simplicity and unity of God destroyed by contact with the multiplicity of material things. His strategy was to interpose many levels of spiritual substances, the intelligences, between God and the world of generation and corruption to insulate the divine unity from multiplicity.” An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 2004), pp. 50-51. Whether or not God knows particulars is a philosophical problem in Islam: “Avicenna has often been criticized for maintaining that God does not know particulars . . .” Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam edited by Jon McGinnis (Leiden: Brill, 2004) p. 142. The entire chapter on God’s knowledge of particulars shows the kind of problems a monad faces.
[xiii] “In himself and without any reference to a created world or the plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The boundless life that God lives in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is perfect. It is complete, inexhaustibly full, and infinitely blessed.” Fred Sanders, Deep Things of God (Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 2010), Kindle.
[xiv] This is not an exhaustive list, but many of the prominent passages are: Genesis 16:7, 9–11; 22:11, 15; Exodus 3:2; Numbers 22:22–27, 31–32, 34–35; Judges 2:1, 4; 5:23; 6:11–12, 21–22; 13:3, 13, 15–18, 20–21; 2 Samuel 24:16; 1 Kings 19:7; 2 Kings 1:3, 15; 19:35; 1 Chronicles 21:12, 15–16, 18, 30; Psalms 34:7; 35:5–6; Isaiah 37:36; Zecheriah 1:11–12; 3:1, 5–6; 12:8.
[xv] The Fathers of the Church, St. Hilary of Poitiers, The Trinity, translated by Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1954), pp. 111-12.
[xvi] Hilary’s exposition shows, I believe, that James McGrath’s approach to the Angel — though he does not address the Angel’s meeting with Hagar — simply will not hold up. For McGrath, the Angel of Yahweh was just one of many mediatorial representatives of Yahweh. “When God wanted to address his people, he sent a prophet or an angel. Agency was an important part of everyday life in the ancient world. Individuals such as the prophets and angels mentioned in the Jewish Scriptures were thought of as ‘agents’ of God. And the key idea regarding agency in the ancient world appears to be summarized in the phrase from rabbinic literature so often quoted in these contexts: ‘The one sent is like the one who sent him.’ The result is that the agent can not only carry out divine functions but also be depicted in divine language, sit on God’s throne or alongside God, and even bear the divine name.” James McGrath, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p.14.
[xvii] Camiilla Helena von Heijne concludes: “Finally, the conclusion must be drawn that there is no unambiguous or homogeneous interpretation of ‘the angel of the Lord’ and his identity in our sources. He is sometimes depicted as a divine emissary separate from God, while in other cases he appears to be seen as a manifestation or a hypostasis of God Himself. The ambivalence in the relationship between God and His angel remains in many of the interpretations of the texts, and in relation to ‘ordinary’ angels ‘the angel of the Lord’ is generally awarded a special, high status.” The Messenger of the Lord in Early Jewish Interpretations of Genesis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), p. 377.
[xviii] See: Meredith Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview (Overland Park, KS: Two Age Press, 2000), p. 16, 30, 77, etc. Poythress demurs. Theophany: A Biblical Theology of God’s Appearing (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), pp. 429 ff.
[xix] Günther Juncker, “Christ As Angel: The Reclamation Of A Primitive Title,” Trinity Journal 15:2 (Fall 1994).
[xx] This is not to endorse all that the fathers say about the Angel of the Lord, as John Behr points out, Justin Martyr in particular struggles to express his faith: “Justin is clearly trying to find a way to explain how it is that Jesus Christ is God, yet distinct from the God and Creator o f all, his Father. However, his manner o f explanation, in terms of the divinity of the ineffable Father being transcendent in a manner which prohibits him from being seen on earth, in fact undermines the very revelation of God in Christ. The divinity o f Jesus Christ, an ‘other God,’ is no longer that o f the Father himself, but is subordinate to it, a lesser divinity, and so it would no longer be true for the agent of such a theophany to claim, as Christ does, ‘he who has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9).” John Behr, The Formation of Christian Theology, Volume 1, The Way to Nicaea (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), p. 104.
[xxi] By “OT theophanies,” Juncker has in mind primarily “the Angel of Yahweh” or “the Angel of God” theophanies.
[xxii] Juncker, ibid., pp. 249-50.
[xxiii] In general, Jenson is utterly Augustinian. However, on the understanding of the Angel of Yahweh, he seems clearly to differ, unless I am not reading him accurately.
[xxiv] Robert Jenson, The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture ed. by Brad East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 241 ff. cf. also, Systematic Theology Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp 75-80, 86, cf. also, Systematic Theology Volume 2, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 287.
[xxv] Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2020), p. xxvi and p. 265.
[xxvi] Fred Sanders, The Triune God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), Kindle.
[xxvii] In addition to the section “No to Christophanies” in chapter 8, Sanders wrote in the Introduction: “The text of the Old Testament and the trajectory of its events do generate a host of unusual phenomena that need to be accounted for. They are best accounted for by Trinitarian theology as it throws a light backward from the New Testament to the Old. I commend the ancient practice of identifying divine speakers in the oracles of the old covenant (prosoponic exegesis), but consider and reject the tradition of identifying distinct Trinitarian presences in the Old Testament (christophanies).” Fred Sanders, The Triune God, Kindle
[xxviii] Vern Poythress, Theophany: A Biblical Theology of God’s Appearing (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), pp.417, ff.
[xxix] Andrew Malone, Knowing Jesus in the Old Testament? A Fresh Look at Christophanies (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity, 2015).
[xxx] Fred Sanders, The Triune God, Kindle.
[xxxi] Poythress, Op. Cit., p. 23.
[xxxii] Matthew Bates, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), pp. 183-221.
[xxxiii] Ibid., pp. 219-221.
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