Introduction
\nWhy this book?
\nThe discipline of biblical theology reads Scripture with attention both to its unfolding plotline from Genesis to Revelation and its accent on Christ as the fulfilment of the antecedent hope of Israel. The study of themes therefore is a major part of the undertaking. For example, take the theme of the leadership of God\u2019s people as in prophet, priest and king. Each category finds its apogee in Jesus Christ, as Calvin among others has seen. Any number of biblical theologies, as their tables of contents and indexes often show, trace the story of prophethood or priesthood or kingship as it canonically unfolds. But what of the incarnation? Here the treatment, if any, is sparse. Other great pivotal events in Christology, such as atonement or roles Christ assumed (e.g. servant of the Lord), can be successfully placed in a promise-fulfilment framework. Is incarnation an anomaly? Put another way, was incarnation part of the hope of Israel? This study attempts to address this question among others.
\nFor years I have been intrigued by a quotation in one of Terence E. Fretheim\u2019s books. In his book on the suffering of God, Fretheim quotes Old Testament scholar E. Jacob. In the quotation Jacob connected the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament and the incarnation of Christ. Eventually I was able to secure Jacob\u2019s book for myself and found that his point was made even more richly than Fretheim\u2019s brief quotation suggested. Jacob wrote:
\nThe God of the Old Testament is a God who seeks to manifest his presence in order to be recognized as the sovereign Lord; that is why the fear of God is at the basis of all piety and all wisdom. But God also and especially seeks to manifest his presence in order to save man. A line not always straight, but nonetheless continuous, leads from the anthropomorphisms of the earliest pages of the Bible, to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
\nCould it be that Old Testament language about God\u2019s eyes, ears, arms, hands, fingers and so forth prepare the way somehow for the incarnation of God the Word become flesh?
\nKierkegaard famously said, \u2018Life lived forwards but understood backwards.\u2019 Perhaps something similar may be said of God\u2019s providence: \u2018Life is lived forwards but providence is understood backwards.\u2019 Once the canon of Scripture was completed, God\u2019s people could read it in such a way as to see how rich it is in intra-textual allusion and reference, and with it see the exhibition to divine providence that led to an incarnation. Thomas F. Torrance puts the point this way:
\nThe background for Christ the Son of God can only be the background which the fact of the incarnation creates for itself out of the world.\u2026 [T]here is a long prehistory to Jesus, but theologically we must say that when the Son of God breaks into that historical development, he throws it all into critical reorientation. The prehistory is critically and creatively reinterpreted by the incarnate Word, and it is only in that light that we must look at the prehistory of the incarnation in Israel.
\nTo use Hendrikus Berkhof\u2019s helpful phrase, God\u2019s people can now do \u2018Christology from behind\u2019. (Torrance is one example.) That is to say that with reference to Jesus \u2018we see him in the line of redemptive history, how he arises out of the Old Testament problematic, and gives and is the answer to it\u2019. Again, Berkhof rightly contends, \u2018the appearance of Jesus Christ is no isolated epiphany\u2019. A surprising voice adds to the chorus. Rabbi Jacob Neusner writes:
\nOn the basis of a large number of stories along these lines [with anthropomorphic descriptions of God], we might well contemplate composing the story of God on earth\u2014a kind of gospel of God incarnate, walking among human beings, talking with them, teaching them, acting among them, just as, for the evangelists as the church received and venerated their writings, Jesus Christ, God incarnate, walked on earth, taught, and provided the example for humanity of the union of humanity and divinity. That is hardly to suggest that the Judaism of the dual Torah [the Hebrew Bible and those rabbinic works that reduced the oral Torah to writing] and the Christianity of Jesus Christ as God incarnate are to be matched. But they assuredly sustain comparison.
\nNeusner recognizes that very often the God presented in the Old Testament is presented as though incarnate.
\nIn this present work my aim is to explore this idea of how the incarnation was prepared for. However, every exploration is shaped by certain assumptions. To these assumptions we next turn.
\nAssumptions
\nAssumptions play a role in every claim to knowledge. For example, if I claim to know X, I express that claim in some language. In so doing I am assuming that language can convey thought from one mind to another. That is to say, I am assuming that language is a vehicle for communicative action. Part of my job is not only to read books and articles but to help students to do so intelligently. More often than not, writers do not make their assumptions visible. Consequently students need some help in detecting a given writer\u2019s assumptions. For example, if I read Scripture with materialist assumptions, then I need to explain\u2014explain away?\u2014any references to the supernatural. In this view Saul of Tarsus did not meet the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Rather he had an epileptic fit or some other aberrant neurological episode. The Christ he met was the Christ of a fevered imagination. So what assumptions underlie this work?
\nA key assumption is that there is a living God who is a personal agent. Walter Brueggemann captures the essence of the biblical testimony to this living God in a fine way. He is writing of the God revealed in the Old Testament, but what he writes is true of both testaments: \u2018 \u201cGod\u201d as rendered in the Old Testament is a fully articulated personal agent, with all the particularities of personhood and with a full repertoire of traits and actions that belong to a fully formed and actualized person.\u2019 It is this God who providentially orders human affairs. Nature and history are thus open to divine action.
\nAccording to Huston Smith, both moderns and postmoderns would have problems with such openness. He offers this analogy by way of explanation:
\nIf we think of traditional peoples as looking out upon a world through the window of revelation (their received myths and texts), the window that they turned to look through in the modern period (science) turned out to be stunted. It cuts off at the level of the human nose, which (metaphysically speaking) means that when we look through it our gaze slants downward and we see only things that are inferior to us. As for the post modern window, it is boarded over and allows no inclusive view whatsoever.
\nIn contradistinction to the above, this work assumes that God has provided Holy Scripture so that his people are not left in an epistemological black hole from which no epistemic light can escape. In other words this work assumes that there is a revelation of the character, will and ways of God to be found in the church\u2019s inspired Book. Holy Scripture\u2014God\u2019s words in human words\u2014exhibits an amazing unity of storyline in its diversity of genres. There is a metanarrative. Or put another way, in the words of Augustine Scripture presents \u2018one discourse\u2019 (unus sermo) and from many mouths emanates \u2018one word\u2019 (unum verbum). That one discourse found in Scripture tells of the triune living God who speaks and acts, creates and recreates, saves and judges in a narrative that moves through creation, Fall, redemption and consummation as the story unfolds from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22.
\nPraeparatio evangelica
\nThe phrase praeparatio evangelica means \u2018preparation for the gospel\u2019. This concept featured early in Christian thought to explain how pagans got so much right about God. For example, Augustine wrote in his celebrated Confessions of the philosophers he had read:
\nAnd therein I read, not indeed in the same words, but to the selfsame effect, enforced by many and various reasons, that, \u2018In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made.\u2019 That which was made by Him is \u2018life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness; and the darkness comprehends it not.\u2019 And that the soul of man, though it \u2018bears witness of the light,\u2019 yet itself \u2018is not that light; but the Word of God, being God, is that true light that lights every man that comes into the world.\u2019 And that \u2018He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.\u2019 But that \u2018He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God even to them that believe in His name.\u2019 This I did not read there.
\nClearly Augustine thought that he found Johannine-like ideas in the writings of the philosophers (Platonists). Significantly, though, he also said he did not find the idea that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us in the pagan thought he knew. For early Christians ex hypothesi this preparatory work among the pagans was done by the Logos. This work paralleled that of the work of the logos asarkos (\u2018Word without flesh\u2019 or logos incarnandus) with Israel in Old Testament times in preparation for the incarnation, when logos asarkos became logos ensarkos (\u2018Word enfleshed\u2019, or logos carnatus).
\nThis work is in the tradition of praeparatio evangelica with its focus on how the revelatory work of providence in Old Testament times \u2018represents a foreshadowing of incarnation\u2019. In pursuit of this aim, as discussed above, typology plays its part as does analogical correspondence. Both are important conceptual tools. Another tool employed in this study is \u2018descriptor fittingness\u2019, for want of a better phrase. This phrase refers to how Old Testament language provides apt descriptors for understanding incarnation as the quintessential expression of divine presence in the midst of God\u2019s people. T. F. Torrance in his work The Mediation of Christ offers a helpful insight regarding such descriptors when he writes, \u2018They constitute the essential furniture of our knowledge of God even in and through Christ. If the Word of God had become incarnate among us apart from all that, it could not have been grasped\u2014Jesus himself would have remained a bewildering enigma.\u2019 In another work, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, Torrance points out that if you need to make something, you need tools. Likewise if you are to understand something, you need conceptual tools. God provided those conceptual tools in his revelatory and redemptive dealings with ancient Israel. There is a famous Bill Cosby skit in which the comedian plays Noah. God commands him to build an ark. Cosby ask what an ark is. Next God tells him to get wood to build the ark so many cubits in length, height and width. To which Cosby asks what a cubit is. The relevant point is that revelation is unintelligible without the requisite categories already being in place. So too the Christ event.
\nThe plan of the book
\nChapter 1 explores the purpose of creation in terms of God\u2019s creating and fashioning a palace-temple as his habitation for dwelling with the creature made in the divine image. In particular how God prepared the way for his ultimate incarnate concomitance by revealing himself in anthropomorphic, anthropopathic and anthropopraxic ways is canvassed. In this chapter these latter three crucial terms are defined. Also in this chapter I argue that a third category is needed in discussing God\u2019s relation to the world. The idea of concomitance (the God-with-us motif) needs to be added to the traditional categories of transcendence and immanence. In so doing I hope that the reader of Scripture may take away a more sophisticated set of categories by means of which to understand the portrayal of God in Scripture than the general categories of anthropomorphism simpliciter and transcendence or immanence to understand how God relates to creation with its culmination in the incarnation. An excursus is attached to the chapter that addresses a long-standing question that still attracts debate today: Would the incarnation have taken place if there had been no Fall?
\nIn the second chapter the biblical portrait of God is amplified as he acts in Israel\u2019s history to redeem a people of his own among whom he can dwell. Once more God\u2019s anthropomorphic, anthropopathic and anthropopraxic ways are reviewed as we follow the biblical plotline. In particular the theophanic language of the patriarchal, Mosaic, former and latter prophetic periods is examined. God is rendered as a person who speaks, acts and feels as though embodied. In two places at least the Lord is rendered in human terms as someone who eats and wrestles, and does so in history (e.g. Gen. 18 and 32 respectively). In other places the experience is visionary, more fragmentary and heavenly (e.g. Isa. 6). We follow James Barr in describing such phenomena as anthropomorphic theophanies. However, there is no incarnation of deity as such in view.
\nThe third chapter explores Israel\u2019s hope and the promise of the divine presence with his people in the midst of the created order. For B. B. Warfield\u2014as we shall see\u2014the keeping of the promise meant that the Messiah to come would be divine. R. C. Ortlund, Jr., argues similarly. This contention is examined. In chapter 3 particular attention is given to some key Old Testament texts (Pss 45:6; 110; Isa. 9:6; Dan. 7:13) that both Warfield and Ortlund, Jr., employ to argue for the deity of the Messiah. The question is whether these texts demand such a reading. Certainly the Old Testament expected human agents or even divine agents of the divine purpose to come to Israel\u2019s aid at some juncture in its future: a prophet like Moses, a Davidic king, the heavenly Son of Man, the child born bearing the names \u2018Immanuel\u2019 and \u2018mighty God\u2019. Moreover the Old Testament writers also expected God himself to come. But an incarnate, divine-human deliverer? That\u2019s the key question. The section on typology goes some of the way in addressing that question.
\nIn chapter 4 the preparatory gives way to the actual. The testimony of the New Testament now comes into full view as we continue to follow the biblical plotline. God stooped and entered the arena of human affairs in the most personal of ways. Concomitance is now enfleshed. Matthew\u2019s testimony to Jesus as both the truly human Davidic king of promise (Matt. 1) and as Emmanuel (\u2018God with us\u2019, Matt. 1:23), Mark\u2019s presentation of Jesus as the one in whom God comes to Zion (Mark 1\u20132) and the writer to the Hebrews\u2019 account of Jesus as both deity and humanity (Heb. 1\u20132) are considered along with the Johannine witness that Jesus is the Word become flesh who dwelt among us (John 1:14). The implicit incarnation theology of Matthew and Mark becomes more explicit in Hebrews and patent in John. What could be seen in retrospect after the coming of Christ and what could be seen in prospect are not to be confused, however. In Pauline terms the incarnation is a mystery that in Old Testament times was a hidden part of the divine plan. Also in this chapter, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff\u2019s theory of theories is drawn upon to provide an important conceptual tool to analyse how the anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms of the Old Testament together with other Old Testament testimonies might point to incarnation and contribute to the intelligibility of the idea. An excursus is attached that treats the question of whether the Christ per se was known by Old Testament saints to be active in their history.
\nChapter 5 addresses the question raised by Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages: Why did God become human? Unlike Anselm, however, we seek New Testament answers to the question, rather than speculative ones. The appeal is to Scripture, not to reason with the Bible shut. Happily there is an abundance of New Testament testimonies that address the question. Christ\u2019s revelatory, representative, substitutionary, defeating the devil and moral modelling roles are predicated on his assuming a truly human nature. An excursus is attached that treats the question of whether the divine Son assumed fallen or unfallen human nature in the incarnation.
\nChapter 6 considers the significance of the incarnation in two aspects: theological and existential. It explores the value of the incarnation for theological method, for the doctrine of God and change, for the affirmation of the created order, for the valuing of human life, for our understanding of mission, for the encounter between Christianity and other religions with special reference to Islam, for the question of theodicy and defence, given evils, and for matters of dogmatic rank. This chapter also explores the value of the incarnation at the personal or existential level. The incarnation matters with regard to our appreciation of the depths of the divine love and our cultivating a sense of wonder.
\nThe last chapter draws the threads of the argument together in summary form and is followed by an appendix that addresses the question of how biblical theology interfaces with systematic theology in the theological interpretation of Scripture.
\nMy hope is that by the time the reader closes this study he or she will have a deeper sense of the astonishing providence of God that subtly prepared the way for the mystery of the incarnation, a greater appreciation of the magnitude of the divine stooping that in the incarnation saw God weep human tears, and a profounder joy at the depth of the love of God that sent no surrogate as the final revelation but the beloved Son who became flesh.
\nChapter One
\nGod prepares the way from the beginning
\nOrigins are fascinating. At present I am doing some research on my Jewish grandfather on my mother\u2019s side of the family. He was known to the press as a flamboyant character who had emigrated from the Crimea after the First World War. He called himself a professor and ran a dance studio in Sydney, Australia, in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the dances he invented and put into print are in the National Library of Australia and are also listed in a Stanford University catalogue that begins with Domenico da Piacenza in 1425 and concludes with Elizabeth Gibbons in 2007. I learned that one of the dancing teachers he employed, Nellie Cameron, was a notorious character in the underworld of Sydney. He died when I was two so I have no memory of him, only a photo or two.
\nOrigins matter to individuals and indeed to an entire people. They mattered to Israel. Genesis as the name implies is about origins. The most basic of questions are addressed in the text: Where does humanity in general come from and where does Israel in particular come from? Why is the world so broken and we with it? Do we have a future?
\nIn this chapter we consider how from the beginning the Creator prepared a way to be present among his creatures. As Thomas F. Torrance rightly says, \u2018The incarnation of the Son of God has a prehistory, a background or hinterland of preparation and significance which we must not overlook.\u2019 In addition an excursus will address a venerable question: Would the incarnation have occurred irrespective of the Fall? But first, who is this God who prepares the way and who not only has his own glory but has humanity\u2019s best interests at heart?
\nGod and God\u2019s image
\nThe God who comes into majestic relief in Genesis 1:1\u20132:3 is the creator of all things who acts with purpose and not caprice. The language is simple, the thought profound. God is pictured in terms any Israelite would understand. He is the great worker who does six days on the job and then comes rest. The first three days see the creation of environments: day one, the heavens (Gen. 1:3\u20135); day two, the waters (Gen. 1:6\u20138); and day three, the earth (Gen. 1:9\u201313). Each day is pronounced as good and the presentation of each day\u2019s creative work has an evening-and-morning formula attached to it. If the first three days represent the forming of three different environments, the next three days articulate their filling with different kinds of creatures suitable for them. And so on the fourth day the heavens are populated with sun, moon and stars (Gen. 1:14\u201318). The fourth day is pronounced good and God applies the evening-and-morning formula. The fifth day sees the waters populated with all sorts of sea creatures and the air with winged creatures. Both the populating of the sea and earth are thematized. It too is good and once again the evening-and-morning phrase is in evidence (Gen. 1:20\u201323). On the sixth day God focuses on the earth and the creatures suitable for inhabiting it. It is on this day that a unique creature appears, humankind (more anon). The creation of various earth creatures is good, according to the text, but there is a qualitative leap in relation to the creature uniquely in the image of God. Now we read that the creation is very good (Gen. 1:24\u201331). And once more the evening-and-morning formula is in view. The seventh day moves the reader onto a different plane. Here is the climax of all the events that have gone before. The language of holiness is used in the Bible for the first time, as this time \u2018frame\u2019 itself is hallowed. Significantly the evening-and-morning phrase drops from view. There is something very different about this end point. Chaos has thus given way to cosmos. The process has been an orderly one.
\nThe nature of those days is controversial still. Richard Dawkins is not the first person to raise questions. Aquinas (1225\u201374) in his era was faced with multiple ways of understanding those days, as can be seen in Paul J. Glenn\u2019s paraphrase of part of the Summa Theologica:
\nThere are different interpretations of the term day as used in the scriptural account of creation. Some say the six days of active creation are not periods of time but a listing of the order in which creatures were made. Others think these days have time significance, but hardly in the sense of our twenty-four hour day, for that is measured by the sun, and the sun was not created until the fourth day. In any case the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest give an adequate account of the works of creation and their sanctification. St. Augustine makes the days of creation into one period in which God manifests worldly creatures to the angels in seven ways. It must be acknowledged that Scripture uses suitable words to express the works of creation, and to suggest or imply the operation of the three persons of the divine Trinity in these works.
\nSo what we have seen is how Aquinas explores the options: six days of revelation to the angels (Augustine), an orderly listing (others) and special days (still others). He concludes that, whichever it was, God created in an appropriate manner. Wise words.
\nOn the way to the Sabbath God created creatures to image his ways (Gen. 1:27):
\nSo God created mankind in his own image,
\nin the image of God he created them;
\nmale and female he created them.
\nThe divine intent is stated in the previous verse (Gen. 1:26): \u2018Then God said, \u201cLet us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.\u201d \u2019 God exercises dominion. They exercise dominion. He subdues. They subdue. The notion of humankind in the image of God (imago Dei) is also an essentially contested concept to this day. Are human beings images of God like the image of President Lincoln stamped on an American coin? Is the image ontological or substantival? Or are human beings images of God like the image we see of ourselves in a mirror? What we do, so the image does. So is the image functional? Or is it neither but rather a relational idea? Just as male and female are the image of God, so there is something relational about God on the inside (ad intra). Ultimately the doctrine of the Trinity lies behind our being the images of God in this view. C. John Collins wisely suggests, \u2018Scholars will advocate one of these three over the others, but we will note that they need not be mutually exclusive. Perhaps none is right, or some combination is right, or maybe we simply cannot come to a firm conclusion.\u2019 Following Aquinas here one could say whatever \u2018image\u2019 means, it is an appropriate way to describe who we are as creatures, vis-\u00e0-vis God. What is clear is that on this sixth day the creature is to act in Godlike ways in the created order. Furthermore Genesis 2 and 3 make plain that this creature can be God\u2019s speech partner. These three foundational chapters merit closer attention from this angle of vision. What portrayal of God is found in them? How is God rendered?
\nThe portrayal of God in the beginning
\nThe word to sum up the God of Genesis 1 is \u2018transcendent\u2019. This God has no rivals. He stands on the other side of the ontological ledger to creatures. He is beyond creatures. Creation is spoken into being by God. God\u2019s repeated speech acts are causative. As we observed previously, over the first three days various environments are formed: sky, next the waters and finally earth (Gen. 1:2\u201313). Over the remaining three they are filled: sun, moon and stars, next come the sea creatures and lastly the animals and humankind (Gen. 1:14\u201331). God is like a great emperor. His word works and is enough. Divine action is speech action. His words do things. And with that speech the Spirit also is at work. Indeed spirit or breath is the vehicle for the spoken word with us and with God.
\nIn Genesis 2 God not only speaks but he fashions. Like a potter with clay Adam is formed from the earth: \u2018Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being\u2019 (Gen. 2:7). God commands Adam regarding the task to control and care for the garden sanctuary: \u2018The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it\u2019 (Gen. 2:15). If Genesis 1 presents humankind in royal terms as rulers, Genesis 2 renders Adam as a priest who is to relate to the garden zone like the later Levites are to relate to the tabernacle and temple. Gordon J. Wenham comments:
\nSimilarly, [\u0161mr] \u2018to guard, to keep\u2019, has the simple profane sense of \u2018guard\u2019 (4:9; 30:31), but it is even more commonly used in legal texts of observing religious commands and duties (17:9; Lev 18:5) and particularly of the Levitical responsibility for guarding the tabernacle from intruders (Num 1:53; 3:7\u20138). It is striking that here and in the priestly law these two terms are juxtaposed (Num 3:7\u20138; 8:26; 18:5\u20136), another pointer to the interplay of tabernacle and Eden symbolism already noted (cf. Ber. Rab. 16:5).
\nSignificantly the garden sanctuary does not appear to constitute the geographical limits for the Adamic task. Following the logic of the narrative that begins in the previous chapter, humankind is to exercise dominion over the fish of the sea. This is hardly satisfied by a horticultural existence. In other words, the garden sanctuary is best seen as a staging post for the task of Edenizing the entire world. William J. Dumbrell makes the point well: \u2018As a paradigm of the end, Genesis 2 thus displays the harmony that humankind\u2019s dominion was to secure the world at large. Adam\u2019s role in Eden was to extend the contours of the garden to the whole world.\u2019
\nClearly in Genesis 2 God is portrayed as transcendent once more. What the human experience of being so commanded by God sounded or felt like is not explored. The text has little interest in human psychology per se. Moreover this chapter presents God as a farmer who planted the garden that became the Adamic responsibility: \u2018Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed\u2019 (Gen. 2:8).
\nAs literary scholar Leland Ryken suggests, the scriptural story is a comedy in literary terms. He writes regarding comedy that it is \u2018a work of literature in which the plot structure is U-shaped, with the action beginning in prosperity, descending into potentially tragic events, and ending happily\u2019. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery amplifies his point in relation to the Bible per se:
\nThe overall plot of the Bible is a U-shaped comic plot. The action begins with a perfect world inhabited by perfect people. It descends into the misery of fallen history and ends with a new world of total happiness and the conquest of evil. The book of Revelation is the story of the happy ending par excellence, as a conquering hero defeats evil, marries a bride and lives happily ever after in a palace glittering with jewels. From Genesis to Revelation we see the U-shaped structure working itself out: from the harmony of Genesis 1\u20132 through the disharmony of Genesis 3\u2013Revelation 20 to harmony again and albeit of a higher kind in Revelation 21\u201322.
\nThis is a refreshing way to view the biblical accounts. Clearly Scripture seen in these terms is no scientific monograph. Its interests lie elsewhere.
\nIn Genesis 3 the comedy takes its dark turn in what Augustine famously termed \u2018the Fall\u2019 and more recently Jacques Ellul \u2018the Rupture\u2019. Importantly for our purposes in this section the transcendent God of Genesis 1 and 2 is also now to be understood as concomitant as well. God comes alongside his creature made in his image, as Genesis 3:8 shows. This God walks in the garden: \u2018Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.\u2019
\nThe idea of divine concomitance adds an important nuance in understanding the divine relation to creatures. The traditional categories are transcendence and immanence. Transcendence has been thematized earlier in the discussion. Immanence refers to God\u2019s indwelling creation and working within it. Concomitance adds to these categories the notion of alongsideness or God with us. The notion of the divine alongsideness is important in both Old Testament and New. For example, Moses pleaded for the divine accompaniment in Exodus 33:15\u201316: \u2018Then Moses said to him, \u201cIf your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?\u201d \u2019 And Jesus promised it to the eleven disciples in Matthew 28:18\u201320 in the famous Great Commission passage:
\nThen Jesus came to them and said, \u2018All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.\u2019
\nIndeed Jesus arguably is entrusting to the disciples the Adamic task that Adam and Israel failed in, namely to be fruitful and multiply.
\nProcess theologian Norman Pittenger articulates these categories clearly when he writes:
\nThis God, who is the one and only God, is above and transcendent to the creation\u2014inexhaustible and beyond our human grasping. This God is active within the creation, enabling its response to the divine intention\u2014here is the divine immanence. This God is also alongside the creation too, disclosed by act in the affairs of the world; here is what I like to name the divine concomitance.
\nThe supreme instantiation of divine concomitance is the incarnation of the divine Son of God (John 1:14), as I shall argue in a later chapter. Importantly divine transcendence allows no room for pantheism. The Creator-creature distinction is the most basic metaphysical one in Scripture. The divine immanence and concomitance leave no room for deism as though the Creator has lost interest in creation.
\nAnother significant question arises from reviewing the early chapters of Genesis. How are we to understand the language of speaking and seeing of Genesis 1, of resting, planting and commanding in Genesis 2 and walking in Genesis 3? The traditional way of addressing the question is to view this language as anthropomorphic. An anthropomorphism (anthr\u014dpos, \u2018human\u2019; morph\u0113, \u2018shape\u2019) is a description of God in human terms. R. T. France makes an important observation in relation to biblical anthropomorphisms when he writes:
\nIt is one of the marks our departure from the biblical way of thinking about God, as the living God, that we are inclined to be ashamed of anthropomorphism.\u2026 We pass it off as a rather regrettable primitive phase in the evolution of thinking about God, just a step higher than sheer idolatry, a crude and unsophisticated language which our more advanced and respectable theology has translated into abstract concepts.
\nHerman Bavinck, for one, felt no such embarrassment. As he put it, \u2018If it is improper to speak about God in anthropomorphic language, the only logical alternative is not to speak about God at all.\u2019 For him biblical anthropomorphisms as a category covers the application to God of language about \u2018human organs, members, sensations, affections \u2026 human actions, a certain office, profession, or relation.\u2026 [and even] language derived from the organic and inorganic creation\u2019. Useful though this conventional approach is, I believe that more precision would be clarifying. But what would more precision look like? Terence E. Fretheim offers some clarifying distinctions regarding categories of anthropomorphic speech: \u2018(a) form, with its function (mouth, speaking, Num. 12:8); (b) emotional, volitional and mental states (rejoicing, Zeph. 3:17); (c) roles and activities, within the family (parent, Hos. 11:1) or the larger society (shepherd, Ps. 23:1)\u2019. With debts to Fretheim, I propose that when Scripture speaks of divine action in a way that is analogous to human action and roles such as \u2018speaking\u2019, \u2018seeing\u2019 and \u2018walking\u2019, the descriptor to employ is \u2018anthropopraxism\u2019. However, when Scripture uses terms of God that have their analogues in human emotion, then \u2018anthropopathism\u2019 is the more precise descriptor. Lastly, when Scripture ascribes human organs to God or facial features or limbs, then \u2018anthropomorphism\u2019 is the appropriate term. In fact this last category admits of further refinement. When the text speaks of an appearance of God in human form per se, then we are dealing with an anthropomorphic theophany. (In scholarly discourse, a theophany is an appearance of a god.) Genesis 6 is a case in point: \u2018The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled\u2019 (Gen. 6:5\u20136). The Lord sees human wickedness (anthropopraxism). He is grieved and has pain (anthropopathism). This pain fills God\u2019s heart (anthropomorphism).
\nSome early Christian commentary
\nEarly Christian commentators and preachers had to face the challenge of anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms. The depiction of God\u2019s walking in the garden in Genesis 3:8 provides a case in point. Ephrem the Syrian (born c. 306; fl. 363\u2013373) comments:
\nIt was not only by the patience he exhibited that God wished to help them [Adam and Eve]; He also wished to benefit them by the sound of his feet. God endowed his silent footsteps with sound so that Adam and Eve might be prepared, at that sound, to make supplication before him who made the sound.
\nThis early church poet seems to be working with some notion of divine accommodation to human need to account for the language.
\nJohn Chrysostom (344\/354\u2013407; fl. 386\u2013407), the famous early church leader and preacher, wrestles with the question \u2018Does God have feet?\u2019 There were some in his context who appeared to take Genesis 3:8 with a naive literalism. Chrysostom asks:
\nWhat are you saying\u2014God strolls? Are we assigning feet to him? Have we no exalted conception of him? No, God does not stroll\u2014perish the thought. How could he, present as he is everywhere and filling everything with his presence? Can he for whom heaven is his throne and earth a footstool be confined to the garden? What right minded person could say this?
\nHaving dismissed literalism, what positively can be said according to Chrysostom?
\nSo what is the meaning of this statement, \u2018They heard the sound of the Lord as he strolled in the garden in the evening?\u2019 He wanted to provide them with such an experience as would induce in them a state of anguish, which in fact happened: they had so striking an experience that they tried to hide from the presence of God.
\nSignificantly Chrysostom\u2019s doctrine of God trumps a literalist hermeneutic: \u2018Have we no exalted conception of him?\u2019 He seeks to protect the idea of the divine transcendence with his question. This insight will prove important, for, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, the biblical writers were very much aware that God belongs to a different order of being to ourselves.
\nGod prepares the way to what end?
\nMore than once in this chapter thus far the notion that God has prepared the way from the beginning has been thematized. The question now must be put as to the end in view. Hints have been given. The Adamic task is royal and priestly. Recent scholarship throws great light on the question, and for the purposes of this chapter I shall follow John H. Walton\u2019s discussion. In a nutshell God from the start has created with the end in view of living with the creature in his image. Put another way, the purpose of creation is divine habitation in a cosmic palace-temple. This is such a crucial point that elaboration is needed.
\nAccording to Walton, Genesis 1 is a temple text. The accent in the chapter is not on the material origins of the universe but on how God prepares a habitation for himself. In the ancient Near East such a habitation is a temple. He sums up his argument in the following way: \u2018In summary, we have suggested that the seven days are not given as the period of time over which the material cosmos came into existence, but the period of time devoted to the inauguration of the functions of the cosmic temple and \u2026 the entrance of the presence of God to take up his rest that creates the temple.\u2019
\nWalton\u2019s thesis needs amplification in that the early chapters of Genesis not only present the making of a temple but a palace-temple. Rikki E. Watts asks a crucial question:
\nBut is there any evidence of this notion in the Bible? The data is overwhelming.\u2026 In fact, the Hebrew Bible is awash with architectural imagery when describing creation. It speaks of the foundations of the earth (Ps 18:15; 82:5; 102:25; 104:5; Prov 8:29; Isa 51:13, 16; 2 Sam 22:8, 16; Zech 12:1; cf. 2 Sam 22:8), the pillars of the earth and of the heavens (1 Sam 2:8; Job 9:6; Ps 75:3; Job 26:11), the heavens\u2019 windows (Gen 7:11; 8:2; Isa 24:18; Mal 3:10; 2 Kgs 7:2; Ps 104:2), the stretching out of the heavens like a canopy\/tent (Isa 40:12, 22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 48:13; 51:13; Jer 10:12; 31:37; 32:17; 51:15; Amos 9:6; Zech 12:1; Job 9:8; Ps 102:25), and storehouses (Deut 28:12; Jer 10:13; 50:25; 51:16; cf. Ps 33:7; 135:7; Job 38:22).
\nHe asks a further question:
\nBut what kind of building is this? As Isaiah 66:1 makes clear, \u2018Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?\u2019 Where does one find a throne and a footstool if not in a palace, and what is the palace of Yahweh if not a temple? And note too the image of resting in his house (= Temple) in the light of Yahweh\u2019s resting in his completed abode on the seventh day of Genesis 1. In this sense, the whole of creation is seen as Yahweh\u2019s palace-temple, and hence the reason for his Jerusalem temple itself being a microcosm, a mini universe: it serves to remind Israel that the whole world is Yahweh\u2019s. Granted, Genesis 1 does not explicitly describe Yahweh as actually rolling up his sleeves and \u2018building\u2019 why should it when a truly Lordly Yahweh would merely have to give the word? But given the rather widespread Ancient Near Eastern notion linking creation, defeatof-chaos, and temple-building, and the thorough-going architectural imagery which characterizes the biblical conceptualizing of creation, it would be very odd if Genesis 1 were not to be understood along the lines of cosmic palace-temple building. As the Great King, Elohim, naturally creates realms for the lesser rulers (cf. Gen 1:16) as he forms his palace-temple out of the deep and gives order to and fills it. And as the Great King, having ordered his realm, he now rules over all in \u2018Sabbath\u2019 rest (see Exod 20), sitting in the great pavilion of his cosmos-palace-temple (cf. Ps 93).
\nThe idea of Emmanuel, \u2018God with us\u2019, is there in the biblical account from the very beginning.
\nGod prepares the way by promise
\nAs mentioned previously, in the divine comedy the harmonies of Genesis 1\u20132 with God and humankind at peace, humankind and the rest of creation at peace, humankind and the environment at peace give way in Genesis 3 to discord and fracture. As Thomas F. Torrance argues, \u2018It belongs to the nature of sin to divide, to create disorder, to disrupt, to destroy fellowship.\u2019 In Genesis 3:1\u20135 we learn that the catalyst comes from outside the garden sanctuary in the guise of the serpent armed with dark innuendo:
\nNow the snake was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, \u2018Did God really say, \u201cYou must not eat from any tree in the garden\u201d?\u2019
\nThe woman said to the snake, \u2018We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, \u201cYou must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.\u201d \u2019
\n\u2018You will not certainly die,\u2019 the snake said to the woman. \u2018For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.\u2019
\nThe character of God cannot be trusted. His word is not to be believed. Something good is being held back from the man and the woman. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not to be resisted but embraced. After all it is so alluring, a sensual delight (Gen. 3:6): \u2018When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.\u2019 The results of the disobedience are catastrophic. No longer is there the fellowship between God and his image. Fellowship gives way to fear and flight from the presence (Gen. 3:8): \u2018Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.\u2019 Meredith G. Kline offers an intriguing interpretation of this episode:
\nWe may then translate Genesis 3:8a: \u2018They heard the sound of Yahweh God traversing the garden as the Spirit of the day.\u2019 The frightening noise of the approaching Glory theophany told them that God was coming to enter into judgment with them. The sound of judgment day preceded the awesome sight of the parousia of their Judge. It was evidently heard from afar before the searching, exposing beams of the theophanic light pierced through the trees in the midst of the garden. Momentarily, then, it seemed to them possible to hide from the eyes of Glory among the shadows of the foliage. Thus, inadvertently, they positioned themselves at the place of judgment in the midst of the trees of the garden, at the site of the tree of judicial discernment between good and evil.
\nIn brief Adam and Eve meet with God\u2019s Spirit in judicial mode. Hence they hide. There is merit in his argument. The questioning is indeed confrontational in Genesis 3:9, 11 and 13. Furthermore in verse 24 the man and the woman are sent out of the garden and not simply led out. Even so, there is grace in the provision of a better and more permanent covering in Genesis 3:21 to address their nakedness.
\nThe cascading consequences of the primordial disobedience are manifold. The rupture is not simply an external one between God and humankind, but an internal one. There is shame at one\u2019s nakedness. Adam answers God, \u2018I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid\u2019 (Gen. 3:10). Consciousness of the other has become self-consciousness. The first pair has entered the dungeon of self-preoccupation. Furthermore there is not only the vertical relational rupture with God but a horizontal one between the sexes. The will to relate, exemplified in the one-flesh union of Genesis 2:24, becomes the will to blame (\u2018the woman you put here with me\u2019) and the will to dominate (\u2018he will rule over you\u2019). Lastly, the downward relation to the rest of creation is disrupted such that ultimately the environment triumphs over us and back to dust we go. The world of Genesis 1\u20132 is no longer accessible. The cherubim with the flaming swords exclude the possibility of a simple return to paradise (Gen. 3:23\u201324): \u2018So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life\u2019\u2014paradise lost, as Milton wrote. And yet there is evidence of mercy in the midst of judgment. The man and woman attempted to cover their nakedness with fig leaves (Gen. 3:7). The text does not elaborate but clearly they were no Versaces. And so God provides (Gen. 3:21): \u2018The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.\u2019 Indeed as I have written elsewhere, \u2018Even the banishment from the garden zone may have been a mercy, given the narrative logic of the account. Man and woman are prevented from eating of the tree of life and thus kept mercifully from being locked into their alienated state.\u2019
\nBy the end of Genesis 1\u20133 we see that the creation purpose to provide a dwelling place for God with humanity is challenged by both human and angelic sin. But there is light in this darkness: in the midst of judgment the text of the protoevangelium comes into view. God will remove the challenge but at a cost. He addresses the serpent as follows:
\nSo the Lord God said to the snake,
\n\u2018Because you have done this,
\n\u201cCursed are you above all livestock
\nand all wild animals!
\nYou will crawl on your belly
\nand you will eat dust
\nall the days of your life.
\nAnd I will put enmity
\nbetween you and the woman,
\nand between your offspring and hers;
\nhe will crush your head,
\nand you will strike his heel.\u201d \u2019
\n(Gen. 3:14\u201315, my emphasis)
\nThe blessing language of the creation account in Genesis 1 is now counterbalanced by the words of cursing in the Fall narrative of Genesis 3 (cf. Gen. 1:22, 28; 2:3, 14, 17). According to Gordon J. Wenham the reference to the serpent\u2019s eating dust is full of significance: \u2018 \u201cEat dust.\u201d The serpent will experience abject humiliation. Metaphorically eating dust is what happens to one\u2019s enemies (cf. Ps 72:9; Isa 49:23; Mic 7:17).\u2019 Furthermore, the \u2018enmity\u2019 in view suggests a long period of conflict rather than a short one (cf. Num. 35:21\u201322; Ezek. 25:15; 35:5).
\nC. John Collins, in a careful discussion of Genesis 3:15, captures the programmatic nature of the Genesis text:
\nHence, this is in fact a promise that God will act for the benefit of mankind by defeating the serpent (really the Dark Power that used the serpent as its mouthpiece) in combat and defeat him, thus bringing benefits to mankind. That is, he is a champion. We are further entitled to say that he will be a human (an offspring of the woman), but one with power extraordinary enough to win.\u2026 The rest of Genesis will unfold the idea of this offspring and lay the foundation for the developed messianic teaching of the prophets. We must remember that an author put this text here, and we suppose that he did so with his plan for this unfolding in mind; hence for us to ask whether this is messianic may mislead us: instead, we may say that Genesis fosters a messianic expectation, of which this verse is the headwaters.
\nThere is admirable caution here in not overstating the case. It is in the retrospective light of the canonical unfolding of the biblical story that the programmatic nature of the protoevangelium comes into view. Hence the coining of a term meaning \u2018first gospel\u2019, which presupposes the gospel that came much later.
\nGenesis 3 does not make clear in any deep way just how the serpent\u2019s fate will be sealed. What is clear is that a male descendant of the woman will be involved. Triumph will come through suffering and that suffering will involve both the male offspring and the serpent:
\nhe will crush your head,
\nand you will strike his heel.
\n(Gen. 3:15)
\nThe serpent will lose definitively, a crushed head, while the seed of the woman will sustain a struck heel. A subsequent book in the Torah underlines the nature of the challenge posed by the divine to human life in the new normal or abnormal (the post-Fall world). Leviticus reads strangely to modern Western ears: priests, sacrifices, blood and ritual. However, once the issue comes into view, namely of how a holy God can be present in the midst of an unholy people, then the logic of Leviticus becomes much less opaque. Ultimately atonement is needed, and at a cost.
\nConclusion
\nIn this chapter we have explored the idea of preparation from the beginning. That preparation is for the dwelling of God with humankind in a sacred space that is a palace-temple. The six-day process is best seen in architectural terms. God is building a habitation for himself. The divine largesse is shown in the way God creates a creature as his image with whom he can dwell. This is sheer grace in that there is no hint in the Genesis text that there was divine necessity to so create. Creation is an expression of divine freedom and generosity. However, discord entered the scene with devastating consequences for the habitation of God with humankind. Even so, the divine project is not abandoned. There is not only judgment but also the promise (the protoevangelium) of the world set right. The divine comedy will reach its harmony once more, the serpent will be defeated and a male descendant of the woman will be the key to the resolution of the conflict. The depiction of God in these early chapters is filled with anthropomorphism, anthropopathism and anthropopraxism. This depiction we shall continue to explore as we follow the biblical plotline.
\nExcursus: Would the incarnation have taken place irrespective of the Fall?
\nThe question is whether the incarnation would have taken place irrespective of the Fall of Genesis 3. In other words was an incarnation of deity always the divine intention? It is not a new question.
\nThe major figure in the early church period who turned his mind to the question was Maximus the Confessor (c. 580\u2013662). Maximus argued that the incarnation would have taken place irrespective of the Fall. The incarnation of the Logos was always the divine intention and the grand eschatological goal of creation. The question received more attention in the medieval period in the Western church. (According to Meyendorff it was never a major question of interest in the Byzantine church.) In the West, Honorius of Acun (fl. c. 1106\u201335) believed that the incarnation was always the divine intention, as did Rupert of Deutz (c. 1075\u20131129). Aquinas (c. 1225\u201374) was more cautious than Honorius and Rupert. Aquinas was well aware of differences of theological opinion on the question, but on balance thought that the incarnation was God\u2019s remedy for sin and presupposed the Fall. Aquinas argued:
\nSome say that the Son of God would have become incarnate, even if humanity had not sinned. Others assert the opposite, and it would seem that our assent ought to be given to this opinion. For those things that originate from God\u2019s will, lying beyond what is due to the creature, can only be known to us through being revealed in Holy Scripture, in which the divine will is made known to us. Therefore since the sin of the first human being is described as the cause of the incarnation throughout Holy Scripture, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of the incarnation was ordained as a remedy for sin, so that, if sin had not existed, the incarnation would never have taken place.
\nEven so, Aquinas had a healthy respect for the freedom of God: \u2018Yet the power of God is not limited in this way. Even if sin had not existed, God could still have become incarnate.\u2019
\nAmong those who believed that the incarnation would have taken place irrespective of the Fall, two main rationales for the divine purpose were suggested. Both Maximus the Confessor and Honorius of Acun saw deification as the key. The divine purpose was to make humanity divine through union with the divine-human Son. Rupert of Deutz suggested another reason: \u2018he [Christ] had no necessary cause for becoming man, other than that his love\u2019s \u201cdelights were to be with the children of men\u201d \u2019. For Rupert the incarnation was the climax of concomitance.
\nThe medieval debate may seem particularly esoteric to those whose high view of Scripture makes them cautious about going beyond what is written. However, it does raise the importance of having some concept of dogmatic rank. Dogmatic rank is the idea that not all doctrinal claims stand on the same level. As we saw above, Aquinas was sensitive to the fact that \u2018those things that originate from God\u2019s will, lying beyond what is due to the creature, can only be known to us through being revealed in Holy Scripture, in which the divine will is made known to us\u2019. The Christian past is indeed helpful here. In the Reformation era the early Lutherans and later Reformed divines posited three levels of theological claim. Fundamental articles are those doctrines \u2018without which Christianity cannot exist and the integrity of which is necessary to the preservation of the Faith\u2019 (e.g. the resurrection of Christ). Secondary fundamental articles are derived from the primary ones (e.g. how Christ is present in the Lord\u2019s Supper). The Lutherans argued that Calvinists were Christians because they held the primary fundamental articles but were clearly not Lutherans because of their view of the Lord\u2019s Supper. The Calvinists denied the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Non-fundamental articles were those theological claims that did not affect one\u2019s salvation and the maintenance of the faith (e.g. the exact identity of the Antichrist).
\nIn the light of the above I would assign the answer to the question of whether there would have been an incarnation irrespective of the Fall to the non-fundamental article category. The ever-present danger to the evangelical movement is to confuse these categories. The main thing is to make the main thing the main thing. This wisdom also applies to doctrine. Even so, if John H. Walton is correct, then Old Testament scholarship and ancient Near Eastern analogies throw fresh light on this old question. If Genesis 1:1\u20132:3 is a temple text, then the divine design was always to establish the divine presence on earth among God\u2019s creatures in a cosmic temple, which the Garden of Eden anticipates. This thesis, in my view, tips the speculative balance in favour of Maximus the Confessor, Honorius of Acun and Rupert of Deutz. The incarnation is no afterthought.
\nIn terms of dogmatic rank, both the question and my answer are speculative and to some presumptuous. Even so, Colin E. Gunton wisely argues, \u2018Would Christ have come even had there been no fall? Hypothetical questions are dangerous in theology, because it [theology] is concerned with what God has done, not what he might have done instead. But in this case the question enables us to bring out the point of what has happened.\u2019 He maintains\u2014following Edward Irving\u2014that sin and evil may have dictated the form of Christ\u2019s coming but not the fact that he would come.
\nChapter Two
\nGod prepares the way in his dealings with Abraham and Abraham\u2019s Old Testament children
\nIn this chapter we continue to follow the biblical plotline as we consider first God\u2019s dealings with the patriarchs and then Israel itself. The angle of vision remains the same. With special attention to anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms we are asking how God is portrayed in the relevant texts. Of particular interest will be those texts that present an encounter with Yahweh in human form on the one hand, and those texts on the other hand that suggest that in the divine revelatory encounters there is both a veiling and unveiling of the nature of God. We shall also see if there is merit in W. Eichrodt\u2019s view that in the Old Testament, God \u2018can temporarily incarnate himself\u2019, and in the even more provocative suggestion from Terence E. Fretheim that \u2018There is no such thing for Israel as a nonincarnate God.\u2019
\nThe patriarchal story and the \u2018embodied\u2019 God
\nThere is much continuity in the way God is rendered in the patriarchal texts with the ones we have already explored in Genesis 1\u20136. Abram\/Abraham serves as our example. Abram becomes God\u2019s speech partner (Gen. 12:1) just as Adam and Noah had been in pre-patriarchal times. And for the first time in the canonical story God is said to appear to, and not simply speak to, an individual (Gen. 12:7). A second new feature is that divine speaking now also takes place in vision (Gen. 15:1) and dream (Gen. 15:12\u201313). Esther J. Hamori usefully describes such textual evidence that presents a vision or a dream as \u2018envisioned anthropomorphism\u2019. Other anthropopraxisms, besides speech, include the Lord\u2019s taking Abram outside the tent (Gen. 15:5). This spatial idea is not elaborated in this text. Nor is the language of divine appearance filled out in Genesis 17:1: \u2018When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, \u201cI am God Almighty; walk before me faithfully and be blameless.\u201d \u2019 Here an empirical dimension is suggested implicitly (\u2018appearance\u2019) as well as divine speaking explicitly (\u2018He said\u2019).
\nTwo patriarchal stories are of particular interest, because for the first time in canonical unfolding we meet what Hamori describes as \u2018\u2019\u00ee\u0161\u2019 theophanies. She writes, \u2018There are two biblical texts in which God appears to a patriarch in person and is referred to by the narrator as a \u201cman,\u201d both times by the Hebrew word \u2019\u00ee\u0161. Both of these identifications of God as an \u2019\u00ee\u0161 [man] are accompanied by graphic human depiction.\u2019
\nAbraham and the three visitors
\nThe first of these stories involves Abraham and is found in Genesis 18. It has been said that Judaism is a four-thousand-year argument with God. In this view, Genesis 18 would describe the fountainhead. For in this chapter, Abraham famously argues with God about the fate of his nephew Lot in the face of the news that the Lord is about to overthrow the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:23\u201332). That disturbing news is prefaced by the good news that the aged Sarah will indeed have a son in a year\u2019s time (Gen. 18:10). This then is no minor encounter. God is keeping covenant. The account itself opens in a surprising way in Genesis 18:1\u20132: \u2018The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men [\u2019\u0103n\u0101\u0161\u00eem] standing nearby.\u2019
\nInterpreting the text is challenging because by the time one has read both Genesis 18 and 19 the visitors are described variously as \u2018the Lord\u2019 (Gen. 18:1, 13, 17, 20, 22, 26, 33), \u2018three men\u2019 (Gen. 18:2), \u2018my Lord\u2019 (\u2019\u0103d\u014dn\u0101y, Gen. 18:3), \u2018the men\u2019 (Gen. 18:16, 22; 19:10), \u2018two angels\u2019 (Gen. 19:1) and finally, \u2018two men\u2019 (Gen. 19:12). The following catena displays the diversity:
\nGenesis 18:1
\nThe Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day.
\nGenesis 18:2
\nAbraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby.
\nGenesis 18:3
\nHe said, \u2018If I have found favour in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by.\u2019
\nGenesis 18:13
\nThen the Lord said to Abraham, \u2018Why did Sarah laugh and say, \u201cWill I really have a child, now that I am old?\u201d \u2019
\nGenesis 18:16
\nWhen the men got up to leave, they looked down towards Sodom, and Abraham walked along with them to see them on their way.
\nGenesis 18:17
\nThen the Lord said, \u2018Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?\u2019
\nGenesis 18:20
\nThen the Lord said, \u2018The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous \u2026\u2019.
\nGenesis 18:22
\nThe men turned away and went towards Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord.
\nGenesis 18:26
\nThe Lord said, \u2018If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.\u2019
\nGenesis 18:33
\nWhen the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home.
\nGenesis 19:1
\nThe two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground.\u2026
\nGenesis 19:10
\nBut the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door.
\nGenesis 19:12
\nThe two men said to Lot, \u2018Do you have anyone else here\u2014sons-in-law, sons or daughters, or anyone else in the city who belongs to you? Get them out \u2026\u2019.
\nAt first Abraham does not recognize that he has encountered the Lord. True, he addresses one of them as \u2018Lord\u2019 when he offers hospitality (Gen. 18:3). But this seems simply to mean, as Gordon J. Wenham suggests, that he recognized one of them as the leader of the three, even though all three replied to him (Gen. 18:5). It is not until Genesis 18:13\u201314 that the proverbial penny drops. Abraham is speaking with Yahweh: \u2018Then the Lord said to Abraham, \u201cWhy did Sarah laugh and say, \u2018Will I really have a child, now that I am old?\u2019 Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son.\u201d \u2019 Sarah now knows in whose presence she stands. She is afraid (Gen. 18:15). It is intriguing that recognizing the presence of Yahweh himself took time, as Gordon J. Wenham notes. Was it the supernatural knowledge of Sarah\u2019s laughing to herself that betrayed the divine visitation? Or was it that Abraham finally recognized a voice he had heard in the past (Gen. 12:1; 15:1; 17:1)? Hamori is in no doubt: \u2018In the \u2019\u00ee\u0161 theophany, Yahweh appears as man, with such anthropomorphic realism that Abraham does not recognize him until Yahweh\u2019s verbal self-revelation.\u2019
\nIn this account we are dealing with anthropopraxisms. The Lord stands (Gen. 18:2), eats (Gen. 18:8), speaks (Gen. 18:13) and walks (Gen. 18:16). However, there is also anthropomorphism here in a startling way. We are dealing not with figurative references to the divine heart or arm or ears but with the form of a male human being. Early church fathers had no doubts as to who was in view in the story. Irenaeus is representative and his comments apply to the patriarchal story regarding Abraham we have been considering and the one to come involving Jacob: \u2018The Son of God is implanted everywhere throughout Moses\u2019 writings. At one time, indeed, He spoke with Abraham, when about to eat with him [Gen. 18].\u2026 At another time, He brought down judgment upon the Sodomites. And again, He became visible and directed Jacob on his journey [Gen. 32, more anon].\u2019 As David W. Bercot suggests, \u2018The early church taught that in all of the Old Testament theophanies, it was the pre-incarnate Son of God who appeared.\u2019
\nInterestingly Calvin largely follows early church interpretation but also allows the following:
\nThe reason why Moses introduces, at one time, three speakers, while, at another, he ascribes speech to one only, is, that the three together represent the person of one God. We must also remember what I have lately adduced, that the principal place is given to one; because Christ, who is the living image of the Father, often appeared to the fathers under the form of an angel, while, at the same time, he yet had angels, of whom he was the Head, for his attendants.
\nAccording to Calvin the three speakers are angels clothed in human form, one of whom is the pre-incarnate Christ, who is \u2018the chief of the embassy\u2019.
\nUnlike the early church fathers considered above, some modern interpreters have struggled to explain the portrayal of God in the story. John H. Sailhamer for instance:
\nThe explanation seems to be that the three men, as such, are to be understood as the physical \u2018appearance\u2019 of the Lord to Abraham. In other words, though God himself did not appear to Abraham in physical form, the three men are to be seen as representative of his presence. In much the same way the Burning Bush of Exodus 3:2\u20133 was a physical representation of God\u2019s presence but yet was not actually the physical presence of God. In such a way the actual presence of God among his covenant people was assured but without leaving the impression that God may have a physical form.
\nFor Sailhamer the three men represent the one God. Others, however, for example R. W. L. Moberly, see in the account that Yahweh appears \u2018in the form (apparently) of a normal human being\u2019 in one of the individuals. But is it a metaphor only? Moberly thinks yes. Hamori argues no and convincingly so in the light of thorough treatment of comparative ancient Near Eastern materials: \u2018The human form is no more metaphorical in the \u2019\u00ee\u0161 theophany of Genesis 18 than in the fire in the theophany of Exodus 3.\u2019
\nJacob and the wrestler
\nThe second \u2019\u00ee\u0161 theophany is found in another famous patriarchal narrative. Jacob, Abraham\u2019s grandson, is on his way to meet his estranged brother Esau and is aware that danger may well lie ahead. On the way Jacob meets a strange figure at the ford of the Jabbok. Martin Luther says of the story that \u2018Every man holds that this text is one of the most obscure in the Old Testament.\u2019 The account in Genesis 32:22\u201332 is so striking and so mysterious it needs quoting in full:
\nThat night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob\u2019s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, \u2018Let me go, for it is daybreak.\u2019
\nBut Jacob replied, \u2018I will not let you go unless you bless me.\u2019
\nThe man asked him, \u2018What is your name?\u2019
\n\u2018Jacob,\u2019 he answered.
\nThen the man said, \u2018Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.\u2019
\nJacob said, \u2018Please tell me your name.\u2019
\nBut he replied, \u2018Why do you ask my name?\u2019 Then he blessed him there.
\nSo Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, \u2018It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.\u2019
\nThe sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob\u2019s hip was touched near the tendon.
\nAs with the earlier \u2019\u00ee\u0161 theophany, this second one is no minor episode. After it Jacob will bear a name that remains with Abraham\u2019s progeny to this very day: \u2018Israel\u2019.
\nAccording to Hamori this narrative needs to be taken at face value as depicting an appearance of the divine in a human form. She argues:
\nAs in Genesis 18, God appears here in anthropomorphically realistic form. There is no indication that there is anything unusual about his physical form as a man. He is scarcely a match for Jacob, who is himself not drawn as a terrifically intimidating character. The man is thus implicitly not larger than human size nor beyond human strength. He is not stronger than Jacob even when the latter has a dislocated hip. He engages in very human activity, as in Genesis 18, and never acts outside the bounds of his human form.
\nBringing Genesis 32 and 18 into conversation she concludes, \u2018The most straightforward reading of each of these two texts is that God appears to the patriarch in theophany, just as we have seen in myriad other texts, and that in these two cases, the form of theophany is human.\u2019
\nHowever, it must be noted that on the surface Hosea 12 with its reference to Jacob appears to tell a different story to that of Hamori. What is straightforward in Genesis 32 becomes not so much so given Hosea 12:3\u20135:
\nIn the womb he grasped his brother\u2019s heel;
\nas a man he struggled with God.
\nHe struggled with the angel and overcame him;
\nhe wept and begged for his favour.
\nHe found him at Bethel
\nand talked with him there\u2014
\nthe Lord God Almighty,
\nthe Lord is his name!
\nUnsurprisingly then Jewish commentators have taken the Genesis 32 encounter to be one between Jacob and an angel. J. D. Levenson sums up the Jewish tradition of interpretation:
\n[Most] traditional Jewish commentators have taken him [Jacob\u2019s opponent] to be angelic. A well-known midrash [Gen. Rab. 77.3] sees him as the \u2018patron angel of Esau\u2019 and thus interprets this episode as a warning to all future enemies of the Jewish people: \u2018Your patron angel could not withstand him [i.e. Jacob\/Israel] and you seek to attack his descendants?\u2019
\nHow then is the challenge posed by Hosea 12:3\u20135 to be addressed? Hamori deals with the challenge by suggesting that the word for \u2018angel\u2019 in the text (mal\u2019\u0101\u1e25) is a gloss. W. Kaiser, Jr., takes a different tack:
\nHosea 12:4 describes the antagonist, then, as an \u2018angel.\u2019 But since Old Testament appearances of God, or theophanies, are routinely described as involving the \u2018angel of the Lord,\u2019 it should not surprise us that the Lord of glory took the guise or form of an angel. In fact, that is exactly what God would do later on in his enfleshment, or incarnation. He would take on flesh; in his coming as a babe to Bethlehem, however, he took on human flesh forever. But what really clinches the argument for this identification is the fact that in verse 3 of Hosea 12, the parallel clause equates this \u2018angel\u2019 with God himself. Jacob struggled with an \u2018angel,\u2019 yes, but he also \u2018struggled with God.\u2019
\nReconciling the Genesis account and Hosea\u2019s interpretation is not easy for the interpreter but Kaiser, Jr., offers the most promising way forward.
\nTurning to early church reflection upon Genesis 32 once more, we find a consistent reading of the text in Christological terms. Clement of Alexandria provides a serviceable example. He writes, \u2018Furthermore, Jacob is said to have wrestled with Him.\u2026 Jacob called the place, \u201cFace of God.\u201d \u2026 The \u201cface of God\u201d is the Word by whom God is manifested and made known. Then also was Jacob given the name Israel, because he saw God the Lord. It was God the Word.\u2019 Some modern commentators are not as sure, with suggestions that include the following: an angel, a river spirit, a river demon, a river guardian, spirit of a dead man and even Esau\u2019s alter ego or Esau\u2019s patron angel. However, as Paul R. House contends, \u2018He [Jacob] has not encountered a river demon in his opinion. He has encountered one who knows his past, present and future. Only God fits this description in the book of Genesis.\u2019
\nThe Mosaic story and the \u2018embodied\u2019 God
\nThere are a number of theophanic moments in the book of Exodus that are of interest. The burning bush in Exodus 3 is the most famous. God has remembered his covenant commitment to the children of Israel (Exod. 2:24). He meets Moses in the desert at Horeb, the mountain of God (Exod. 3:2\u20134):
\nThere the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, \u2018I will go over and see this strange sight\u2014why the bush does not burn up.\u2019
\nWhen the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, \u2018Moses! Moses!\u2019
\nAnd Moses said, \u2018Here I am.\u2019
\nAll the elements of a theophany are present: the language of appearance, visible phenomena and the divine voice. In Fretheim\u2019s categories this is a theophany of \u2018God as Bearer of the Word\u2019. What is not present is any suggestion that this was an anthropomorphic theophany.
\nOnce Israel is gathered at Sinai, however, anthropomorphic theophany comes into view. The description is curious. In Exodus 24:9\u201311 we read:
\nMoses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue as the sky. But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.
\nThe divine becomes visible. There is a reference to the sight of God, the feet of God and the hand of God. The reference to feet suggests a human form, whereas the reference to hand is more easily understood as metaphor.
\nIsrael\u2019s failure at Sinai is a well-known story. While Moses receives the Ten Commandments on the mountain top, Israel below indulges in breaking them with the idolatry of the golden calf (cf. Exod. 31:18; 32:7\u20138). Moses as covenant mediator pleads with God not to abandon his people (Exod. 32:11\u201314). Judgment follows but is mitigated by Mosaic intercession (Exod. 32:33\u201335). Moses seeks further reassurance that the divine presence will be with God\u2019s people and asks to see the divine glory (Exod. 33:18). God accedes to his servant\u2019s request and the divine glory is displayed (Exod. 33:19\u201323):
\nAnd the Lord said, \u2018I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,\u2019 he said, \u2018you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.\u2019
\nThen the Lord said, \u2018There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.\u2019
\nThis too is an anthropomorphic theophany with its references to back, face and hand. However, this account introduces important qualifications. This is no surprise given the divine statement in Exodus 33:20 above: \u2018 \u201cBut,\u201d he said, \u201cyou cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.\u201d \u2019
\nWhat then did Moses see? Terence E. Fretheim perceptively comments regarding the reference to Moses\u2019 seeing the back of God: \u2018This suggests, not only that even Moses was granted less than a full sensorial view of God, but that what he was given had the lineaments of a human form.\u2019 Richard Elliot Friedman accurately describes this encounter between Yahweh and Moses on Sinai as \u2018the ultimate, exceptional experience of God by anyone in the Bible [by which he means the Hebrew Bible], Moses seeing the actual form of God on Mount Sinai (Exod. 34). It is arguably the culminating moment of human history since Adam and Eve in this narrative, and it is as mysterious as anything in the Bible.\u2019 Friedman\u2019s comment is accurate as long as only the Hebrew Bible is in view.
\nJeffrey S. Niehaus correctly observes that in the biblical presentation theophany involves both a veiling and an unveiling. It is as though outside Eden human ontology cannot bear the sight of the divine glory in its plenitude. A variety of commentators underline the point. For example, Jewish scholar Jeffrey H. Tigay comments, \u2018Although the Bible assumes that God has a physical (usually humanlike) form, many passages suggest that seeing him would be too awesome for humans to survive.\u2019 Evangelical Walter Kaiser, Jr., helpfully suggests, \u2018That this is a figure of speech [Exod. 33:23] is clear from the double effect of God passing by while simultaneously protecting Moses with the divine \u201chand.\u201d Only after his glory, or presence, had passed by would God remove his gracious, protecting \u201chand.\u201d Then Moses would view what God had permitted.\u2019 He then asks, \u2018But what was left for Moses to see? The translators say God\u2019s \u201cback.\u201d But since God is spirit (Is 31:3; Jn 4:24) and formless, what would this refer to?\u2019 Kaiser, Jr., answers his own questions: \u2018The word back can as easily be rendered the \u201cafter effects\u201d of the glory that had passed by. This would fit the context as well as the range of meanings for the Hebrew word used. Moses did not see the glory of God directly, but once it had gone past, God did allow him to view the results, the afterglow, that his presence had produced.\u2019
\nOne further account is of great interest in this part of the canonical unfolding. The setting is post-Sinai and Israel are on the march in the wilderness. Miriam and Aaron display a deep jealousy of their brother as God\u2019s chosen mouthpiece, and the Lord is displeased. We read in Numbers 12:4\u20138:
\nAt once the Lord said to Moses, Aaron and Miriam, \u2018Come out to the tent of meeting, all three of you.\u2019 So the three of them went out. Then the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud; he stood at the entrance to the tent and summoned Aaron and Miriam. When the two of them stepped forward, he said, \u2018Listen to my words:
\n\u2018When there is a prophet among you,
\nI, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions,
\nI speak to them in dreams.
\nBut this is not true of my servant Moses;
\nhe is faithful in all my house.
\nWith him I speak face to face,
\nclearly and not in riddles;
\nhe sees the form of the Lord.
\nWhy then were you not afraid
\nto speak against my servant Moses?\u2019
\nMoses is a privileged person as he sees the form of God. He is a prophet, yes, but more than that as he is God\u2019s conversation partner at an unrivalled depth (\u2018face to face\u2019). Jewish scholar Nili S. Fox rightly comments, \u2018God distinguishes Moses\u2019 prophetic privileges from those accorded any other prophet. Moses can speak to God directly, in live dialogue rather than in dreams or visions. God is at his most anthropomorphic in these verses.\u2019
\nThe picture of the \u2018embodied\u2019 God of anthropomorphic theophany is further complicated in the Mosaic materials by the witness of Deuteronomy. Moses preaches to Israel gathered on the plains of Moab just prior to their entry into the land of promise (Deut. 4:10\u201313):
\nRemember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, when he said to me, \u2018Assemble the people before me to hear my words so that they may learn to revere me as long as they live in the land and may teach them to their children.\u2019 You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while it blazed with fire to the very heavens, with black clouds and deep darkness. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice. He declared to you his covenant, the Ten Commandments, which he commanded you to follow and then wrote them on two stone tablets.
\nIsrael experience a theophany as a gathered people. They hear the divine voice. They witness theophanic phenomena: fire, clouds and deep darkness. However they see no form. Anthropopraxism is in evidence. Moses refers to God\u2019s speaking out of the fire and writing on the two stone tablets.
\nThese Mosaic stories reveal two lines of important evidence. On the one hand there is anthropomorphic theophany albeit with qualifications as discussed above. On the other hand there is theophany but no sighting of God in human form. As in the patriarchal accounts, anthropomorphic theophany appears to be for the few (Moses or Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel), and of the few for Moses even more so, and theophany for the many (gathered Israel). Importantly, however, theophany for Israel per se apparently comes to an end at Sinai. The experience was too much for them (Exod. 20:18\u201319): \u2018When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, \u201cSpeak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not let God speak to us or we will die.\u201d \u2019 As Friedman contends, Sinai represents the high point in God\u2019s manifest presence to a community: \u2018After this scene in the bible, Yahweh never again speaks directly to an entire community Himself.\u2019 He observes, \u2018Prophecy is mentioned in passing in the book of Genesis (20:7), but prophecy in this formal sense of divine messages mediated through individuals begins here in Exodus at Sinai.\u2019 It seems that God takes the plea of Israel seriously.
\nThe Judges story and the \u2018embodied\u2019 God
\nThe book of Judges does not make for pleasant reading. Abraham\u2019s children are in the land of promise but they are also caught up in a cyclical existence of periods of obedience, periods of disobedience, divine judgment in the form of consequent oppression from nations round about them, desperate cries to the Lord for deliverance, the divine provision of a judge as the bearer of Yahweh\u2019s rule and a subsequent period of \u0161\u0101l\u00f4m before the cycle starts up again.
\nThe Gideon narrative provides an interesting example. Judges 6 opens with the Israelites doing evil in the Lord\u2019s sight and the divine judgment being Midianite oppression. The situation is desperate (Judg. 6:2): \u2018Because the power of Midian was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds.\u2019 Israel calls upon the lord (Judg. 6:6): \u2018Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried out to the Lord for help.\u2019 God acts. The angel of the Lord visits Gideon. The divine message is brief and to the point (Judg. 6:14): \u2018The Lord turned to him and said, \u201cGo in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian\u2019s hand.\u201d \u2019 Gideon\u2019s diffidence is soon apparent (Judg. 6:15): \u2018 \u201cPardon me, my lord,\u201d Gideon replied, \u201cbut how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.\u201d \u2019 He seeks a sign and is given graciously more than one. After the first sign (the fire flaring from the rock and consuming the meat and bread), Gideon realizes that the stranger is no ordinary visitor (Judg. 6:22): \u2018When Gideon realized that it was the angel of the Lord [mal\u2019\u0101\u1e25 YHWH], he exclaimed, \u201cAlas, Sovereign Lord! I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face!\u201d \u2019 At this point, with the angel of the Lord absent, the Lord speaks (Judg. 6:23): \u2018But the Lord said to him, \u201cPeace! Do not be afraid. You are not going to die.\u201d \u2019
\nGideon\u2019s encounter with the mysterious angel of the Lord in Judges 6:1\u201340 brings an important set of questions into sharp relief. Who is this angel of the Lord? How is the angel of the Lord related to Yahweh? The angel of the Lord is introduced as such by the narrator in Judges 6:11. The language is anthropopraxic. The angel of the Lord comes and sits under the oak (Judg. 6:11). The angel speaks to Gideon (Judg. 6:12). However, the speaker becomes the Lord (Judg. 6:14, 16, 18) before the narrative returns briefly to the angel as Gideon\u2019s conversation partner and before the angel disappears (Judg. 6:20\u201321). There is no further reference to the angel of the Lord in the Gideon cycle, though there are references to the Lord as speaker (Judg. 6:23, 25; 7:4, 7).
\nCharles H. H. Scobie rightly maintains, \u2018In a number of passages it is not easy to distinguish the angel of the Lord from the Lord himself.\u2019 Judges 6:1\u201340 is a good example. Early in the account the angel of the Lord appears to be simply a divine messenger in human form (e.g. Judg. 6:11). Angels in the biblical narratives do indeed appear in human form, as we found in the story of Abraham\u2019s three visitors and in the Hagar and Ishmael story (e.g. Gen. 18:2). However, in Gideon\u2019s case there are puzzling turns. Walter Kaiser, Jr., states the puzzle well: \u2018If Gideon only saw an angel, why did he fear that he might die?\u2019 The angel of the Lord appears to transcend the mere angelic category. Because it is an encounter with the angel of the Lord he is then given divine assurance that he will not die (Judg. 6:23). In Judges 6:24 we find that Gideon is assured and builds an altar in response, which he calls \u2018The Lord Is Peace\u2019 (Hebr. \u0161\u0101l\u00f4m).
\nSome interpreters, for example Susan Niditch, see the angel of the Lord in the Judges passage as \u2018an intermediary messenger who appears at first to be a human being\u2019. So what does she do with the change of speaker in the text? She argues, \u2018having experienced the power of God through an intermediary, Gideon now receives messages directly from the Lord\u2019. Certainly angels do function as divine messengers in both Old Testament and New Testament. Scobie captures this idea well: \u2018The Hebrew mal\u2019\u0101kh, from the root l\u2019k = \u201csend,\u201d means one who is sent, a messenger. The lxx and NT Greek equivalent angelos provides the English word \u201cangel.\u201d \u2019 Gerald Bray concurs and points out the difference between patristic and contemporary exegetes on the matter of interpreting these sorts of biblical materials:
\nThe real point of difference between ancient and (most) modern commentators is to be found in the ways in which they generally assess the relationship between the Old Testament to the new. It was standard practice in ancient times to look for typological and prophetic foreshadowings of the coming of Christ in the Old Testament, and so we find that the Fathers saw nothing wrong in regarding epiphanies of angels, for example, as preincarnational appearances of the Son of God.
\nHe adds, \u2018This would not meet with general acceptance today.\u2019
\nBray is right to claim that most of today\u2019s exegetes would not see preincarnational appearances of Christ in the Old Testament. There are exceptions however that need to be noted. For example, Walter Kaiser, Jr., is emphatic:
\nIt is clear from this abundance of evidence that the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament was a preincarnate form of our Lord Jesus Christ, who would later permanently take on flesh when he came as a babe in Bethlehem. But mark it well: the one who came after John had already been before\u2014he was that angel of the Lord. His full deity was always observed and yet he presented the same mystery of the Trinity that would later be observed in \u2018I and the Father are one\u2019 (Jn 10:30) and \u2018my other witness is the Father, who sent me\u2019 (Jn 8:18). It is that word sent that ties together the angel, messenger or sent one into an Old Testament theology of christophanies, appearances of God in human form.
\nKaiser, Jr., is confident\u2014too confident?\u2014about the clarity of the Old Testament regarding Christophanies. However, whether the anthropomorphic theophanies of the Old Testament are in fact Christophanies is an important question to which we shall return at this chapter\u2019s end. The question is important because if these anthropomorphic theophanies are appearances of the pre-incarnate Christ, then there are indeed anticipations of the incarnation in the Old Testament.
\nThe former prophets and the \u2018embodied\u2019 God
\nIn the unfolding biblical plotline we are now with Israel settled in the land of promise. Once more, as we shall see, God is rendered as \u2018embodied\u2019. There are examples of anthropomorphism, anthropopathism and anthropopraxism. In contrast to the earlier biblical accounts, what we do not see are any \u2018\u2019\u00ee\u0161\u2019 theophanies. Two accounts from this period are particularly instructive for our purposes: those concerning Samuel and those involving Solomon.
\nSamuel
\nSamuel is an outstanding player in the drama of Scripture. He was a prophet, priest and judge. His threefold \u2018office\u2019 (munus triplex) in many ways anticipates that of the Christ to come. He first experienced a theophany of God the bearer of the Word as a child. His mother Hannah had dedicated him to God and he served at Shiloh under Eli the priest (1 Sam. 1:1\u20132:11). It was a period in Israel\u2019s history in which \u2018in those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions\u2019 (1 Sam. 3:1). Then God spoke to Samuel (1 Sam. 3:2\u201310):
\nOne night Eli, whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see, was lying down in his usual place. The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the house of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called Samuel.
\nSamuel answered, \u2018Here I am.\u2019 And he ran to Eli and said, \u2018Here I am; you called me.\u2019
\nBut Eli said, \u2018I did not call; go back and lie down.\u2019 So he went and lay down.
\nAgain the Lord called, \u2018Samuel!\u2019 And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, \u2018Here I am; you called me.\u2019
\n\u2018My son,\u2019 Eli said, \u2018I did not call; go back and lie down.\u2019
\nNow Samuel did not yet know the Lord: the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.
\nA third time the Lord called, \u2018Samuel!\u2019 And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, \u2018Here I am; you called me.\u2019
\nThen Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy. So Eli told Samuel, \u2018Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, \u201cSpeak, Lord, for your servant is listening.\u201d \u2019 So Samuel went and lay down in his place.
\nThe Lord came and stood there, calling as at the other times, \u2018Samuel! Samuel!\u2019
\nThen Samuel said, \u2018Speak, for your servant is listening.\u2019
\nThis theophany proved to be no isolated episode. The account goes on to assert in 1 Samuel 3:21, \u2018The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh, and there he revealed himself to Samuel through his word.\u2019 This claim is highly significant for Friedman. He observes this is \u2018The last time God is said to be \u201crevealed\u201d to a human: the prophet Samuel.\u2019 Moreover the text affirms that God appeared to Samuel. There is no fulsome elaboration however. We simply do not know what form the appearance assumed in any detail. Even so, there may be a clue in 1 Samuel 3:10: \u2018The Lord came and stood there.\u2019 James Barr sees here \u2018a trace of the common picture of theophany in erect human form\u2019. In other words here is another anthropomorphic theophany. One further observation is in order. There is now a clear nexus between revelation and word in 1 Samuel 3:21: \u2018there he revealed himself to Samuel through his word\u2019.
\nSolomon
\nKing Solomon is the last person in the Old Testament to whom God is said to have appeared. The first revelatory account concerns a dream (1 Kgs 3:5): \u2018At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon during the night in a dream, and God said, \u201cAsk for whatever you want me to give you.\u201d \u2019 Solomon famously asks for wisdom (1 Kgs 3:9): \u2018So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong.\u2019 Solomon\u2019s wisdom is soon demonstrated in the story of the two prostitutes and the baby boy (1 Kgs 3:16\u201328). His fame spreads. Even the queen of Sheba comes visiting to see that wisdom for herself and is suitably impressed. This is the high point of the undivided kingdom, as 1 Kings 10:23\u201325 shows:
\nKing Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth. The whole world sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart. Year after year, everyone who came brought a gift\u2014articles of silver and gold, robes, weapons and spices, and horses and mules.
\nHowever, ancient Near Eastern realpolitik sets in: foreign alliances made firm by marriage. In the very next chapter we read (1 Kgs 11:1\u20132), \u2018King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh\u2019s daughter\u2014Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, \u201cYou must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.\u201d \u2019 And turn his heart they did. The divine response is anger (1 Kgs 11:9): \u2018The Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.\u2019 Those two appearances are referred to first in 1 Kings 3:5, and then in 1 Kings 9:2 (which mentions \u2018a second time\u2019).
\nThe very fact that God had appeared to Solomon on two occasions and spoke to him makes Solomon\u2019s turning away from God to follow after idols all the more blameworthy. Indeed it appears an \u2018axiom\u2019 of biblical thought that knowledge brings responsibility, and the greater the knowledge the greater the responsibility and accountability (cf. Amos 3:2; Luke 12:47\u201348). Solomon had been privileged to experience theophanies of God as bearer of the Word. He had not merely received the divine word as in 1 Kings 6:11 but had seen something in a dream. As Fretheim comments, \u2018the appearance would have impressed the word upon Solomon in a way that just words would not have\u2019. But what did Solomon see on those two occasions? We are not told. An anthropomorphic theophany is a possibility. What is clear though is the anthropopraxism of a speaking God with whom one may converse in a dialogue (e.g. in 1 Kgs 3:5\u201315 there is dialogue, whereas in 1 Kgs 9:3\u20139 there is only monologue).
\nThe latter prophets and the \u2018embodied\u2019 God
\nIn the latter prophets there are no accounts of an earthly encounter with the \u2018embodied\u2019 God. There are no analogues to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre or to Jacob at the Jabbok. There are however accounts of sightings of God. These sightings take place in visionary experience. These are theophanies of God as bearer of the Word and can be best categorized as visionary anthropomorphic theophanies. Three prophets in particular will occupy our attention. First we shall consider Isaiah, then Amos and finally Hosea.
\nIsaiah\u2019s vision
\nIn the eighth century Isaiah has an extraordinary vision of God in the temple in Jerusalem. He not only has a vision of God but also of the divine retinue of seraphim. He also hears the divine voice commissioning him to take a message of judgment to Judah. We read in Isaiah 6:1\u20139:
\nIn the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: with two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:
\n\u2018Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
\nthe whole earth is full of his glory.\u2019
\nAt the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
\n\u2018Woe to me!\u2019 I cried. \u2018I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.\u2019
\nThen one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, \u2018See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.\u2019
\nThen I heard the voice of the Lord saying, \u2018Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?\u2019
\nAnd I said, \u2018Here am I. Send me!\u2019
\nHe said, \u2018Go and tell this people:
\n\u201cBe ever hearing, but never understanding;
\nbe ever seeing, but never perceiving.\u201d \u2019
\nThe Lord is rendered as an immense presence: \u2018the train of his robe filled the temple\u2019. The phenomena of theophany are in evidence: smoke, shaking and the human response of expressed unworthiness. The Lord sits in divine council and speaks. These are the traces of anthropomorphic theophany, albeit in visionary form.
\nAlso in Isaiah 6 we see the typical feature of the human response to theophany as one of fear and dread: \u2018Woe to me.\u2019 As Kuntz points out, \u2018In theophany, the God of Israel draws near as one whose ways are supremely holy and utterly mysterious. Man is overawed by the self-manifestation of the mysterium tremendum.\u2019 He elaborates:
\nBiblical man hides his face (so Moses in Ex. 3:6 and Elijah in 1 Kings 19:13), falls backwards toward the ground (so Abraham in Gen. 17:3 and Ezekiel in Ezek. 1:28), or utters a word of awful exposure (so Isaiah of Jerusalem in Isa. 6:6, \u2018Woe is me! For I am undone\u2019) or dismay (so Jacob in Gen. 28:17, \u2018How awesome is this place!\u2019).
\nSometimes one hears the statement \u2018If only God would show himself, then I would believe.\u2019 In the light of the human response to God in the biblical account of theophany, such a challenge is to ask for much more than is bargained for.
\nAmos\u2019s vision
\nAnother eighth-century prophet, Amos, also had a visionary experience (Amos 1:1): \u2018The words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tekoa\u2014the vision he saw [\u1e25\u0101z\u00e2 is typically used of prophecy] concerning Israel two years before the earthquake, when Uzziah was king of Judah and Jeroboam son of Jehoash was king of Israel.\u2019
\nTwo elements in the vision are of a particular interest. The first is in Amos 7:7\u20138:
\nThis is what he showed me: the Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plumb, with a plumb-line in his hand. And the Lord asked me, \u2018What do you see, Amos?\u2019
\n\u2018A plumb-line,\u2019 I replied.
\nThen the Lord said, \u2018Look, I am setting a plumb-line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.\u2019
\nThe vision presents the Lord as a standing figure holding a plumb line like a builder. The second element is in Amos 9:1:
\nI saw the Lord standing by the altar, and he said:
\n\u2018Strike the tops of the pillars
\nso that the thresholds shake.
\nBring them down on the heads of all the people;
\nthose who are left I will kill with the sword.
\nNot one will get away,
\nnone will escape.\u2019
\nIn this part of the prophecy God again is a standing figure and a speaking one. In both elements there are traces of anthropomorphic theophany in visionary expression. As Barr maintains in relation to Amos, \u2018There is little direct description of the theophanic appearance although an erect figure of human likeness seems clearly implied.\u2019
\nHosea\u2019s vision
\nThe eighth-century prophecy of Hosea stands as a witness against any Marcionite attempt to posit a wrathful, unfeeling God of the Old Testament against the loving one of the New Testament. In a remarkable passage in Hosea 11:8\u20139 we find that God\u2019s holiness becomes the grounds for divine compassion and not divine wrath. God saves his people because he is the holy God. He looks upon his broken people in Hosea 11 and, filled with compassion for their plight although undeserved, declares:
\nHow can I give you up, Ephraim?
\nHow can I hand you over, Israel?
\nHow can I treat you like Admah?
\nHow can I make you like Zeboyim?
\nMy heart is changed within me;
\nall my compassion is aroused.
\nI will not carry out my fierce anger,
\nnor will I devastate Ephraim again.
\nFor I am God, and not a man\u2014
\nthe Holy One among you.
\nI will not come against their cities.
\nJohn Day rightly observes, \u2018In vv. 8\u20139, one of the most moving passages in the OT, YHWH struggles with himself, and the anguish of his love dictates that he cannot totally destroy Israel.\u2019 Verse 8 speaks of God\u2019s heart and God\u2019s compassion. This passage in Hosea is the high point of Old Testament anthropopathism, a veritable \u2018window into the heart of God\u2019, as Leon J. Wood suggests. The God revealed in the Old Testament is a feeling God and not reducible to Mind, albeit with an upper case \u2018M\u2019. This is not a God like Aristotle\u2019s \u2018thought thinking itself\u2019.
\nThe theomorphic life of the prophet
\nTerrence E. Fretheim offers an interesting line of inquiry concerning theophany and the life of the Old Testament prophet. He argues that \u2018The prophet\u2019s life was reflective of the divine life.\u2019 Moses provides one of his examples. Twice in the book of Exodus Moses is described \u2018as God\u2019. In Exodus 4:16 Aaron is to speak for Moses and Moses is to be as God to him, and in Exodus 7:16 Moses will be as God to Pharaoh and Aaron shall be his prophet. This is God\u2019s doing. Fretheim concludes, \u2018Moses became a vehicle for divine immanence.\u2019 I would add \u2018and concomitance\u2019.
\nFretheim also draws attention to how Old Testament figures on occasion are said to be clothed with God\u2019s Spirit. He suggests, \u2018In these cases [e.g. Judg. 6:34; 1 Chr. 12:18; 2 Chr. 24:20; Mic. 3:8; Isa. 61:1], God becomes so active within the life of an individual that he can be said to be an embodiment of God.\u2019 In interpreting the ingesting of the Word of God by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 3:1\u20133, Fretheim quotes Samuel Terrien with approval, describing the prophet as a \u2018living incarnator of divinity\u2019. Passages which speak of the prophet\u2019s suffering in the light of the people\u2019s sins and parlous state and God\u2019s own attitudes are such that it is hard to distinguish the two, as in Jeremiah 8:18\u20139:1. Fretheim contends, \u2018At the least, Jeremiah\u2019s mourning [Jer. 8:18\u20139:1] is an embodiment of the anguish of God, showing forth to the people the genuine pain God feels over the hurt that his people are experiencing,\u2019 and, \u2018Yet, it seems best to understand the mourning of God and prophet as so symbiotic that in everything we hear the anguish of both.\u2019 In the light of this evidence Fretheim argues, \u2018The people thus not only hear the Word of God from the prophet, they see the Word enfleshed in their midst.\u2019 Fretheim\u2019s reading of these texts is highly suggestive. He contends, \u2018The prophet\u2019s life is \u2026 Theomorphic.\u2019
\nHowever, he is aware that he needs to be cautious lest he read too much anachronistically back into texts that predate Christ: \u2018Finally, we should note that the prophet\u2019s life as embodied Word of God is partial and broken. The OT does not finally come to the conclusion that God was incarnate in a human life in complete unbrokenness or in its entirety.\u2026 Yet, in the prophet we see decisive continuities with what occurs in the Christ-event.\u2019
\nConclusion
\nIn this chapter we have been exploring\u2014albeit briefly and selectively\u2014the theophanic language of the patriarchal, Mosaic, former and latter prophetic periods. God is rendered as a person who speaks, acts and feels. We have seen evidences in these texts of anthropomorphism, anthropopathism and anthropopraxism. In two places the Lord is rendered in human terms as someone who eats and wrestles, and does so in history (Gen. 18 and 32 respectively). In other places the experience is visionary, more fragmentary and heavenly. Such renderings are best described, following James Barr, as anthropomorphic theophanies. Traces of these anthropomorphic theophanies are found along the unfolding biblical plotline. However Deus revelatus (God revealed) needs the balance of Deus absconditus (God concealed or hidden). The divine appearance is not to be presumed on and cannot be controlled or manipulated by the creature. A surprising number of Jewish scholars I have referenced argue that the God of the Hebrew Bible is assumed by many of the biblical authors to be \u2018embodied\u2019. However, we have seen no incarnation of deity as such even though the life of a prophet might be accurately described as theomorphic in some instances. Next we shall consider whether an incarnation of \u2018the embodied\u2019 God was part of Israel\u2019s hope. However, before we do so, there is a question that has been tabled as to whether or not these Old Testament anthropomorphic theophanies were in fact Christophanies. To that question we shall turn in a subsequent chapter by way of an excursus.
\nChapter Three
\nGod prepares the way in Israel\u2019s hope
\nThe ancient people of Israel knew changes in their fortunes. Oppression under Pharaoh gave way to life under God in a land of promise (Exodus to Joshua). In that land and because of Israel\u2019s unfaithfulness, before long new cycles of oppression began. These cycles were broken only by God\u2019s oppressed people calling on the name of the Lord, and that Lord responded by raising up judges to deliver them (Judges). Then came Solomon\u2019s glorious kingdom, the high-water mark of Israel\u2019s national fortune. Even the queen of Sheba was impressed (1 Kgs 10). However, once more a people, starting with their king, descended into disobedience and fracture. The northern part of the subsequent split is overwhelmed by Assyria in 722 bc (2 Kgs 17) and then the southern definitively by the Babylonians in 586 bc (2 Kgs 25). But in that land of promise and even in exile in Babylon there were those who never ceased to wait on the Lord with expectation. Indeed in Old Testament terms to wait on the Lord is to hope in him, as in Isaiah 40:30\u201331:
\nEven youths grow tired and weary,
\nand young men stumble and fall;
\nbut those who hope [q\u0101w\u00e2, \u2018wait\u2019, as in the esv] in the Lord
\nwill renew their strength.
\nThey will soar on wings like eagles;
\nthey will run and not grow weary,
\nthey will walk and not be faint.
\nHowever, what exactly was the content of that hope?
\nOne way of summing up the hope of Israel as presented in the canon of the Old Testament is that it was the hope for a new (\u1e25\u0101d\u0101\u0161) state of affairs, whether a new song on the lips of God\u2019s people, as in Psalm 40:3, or a new covenant, as in Jeremiah 31:31, or a new spirit and a new heart within God\u2019s people, as in Ezekiel 36:26, or a new heavens and a new earth, as in Isaiah 65:17. Indeed there was hope that God himself would come to set the world right (Ps. 96). The God of the Bible is the God who can do a new thing. A new state of affairs is needful at personal, societal and environmental levels because of the corruption and disorder the primordial disobedience has introduced into the sphere of creation. Israel is very much aware\u2014to adapt the title of one of Cornelius Plantinga\u2019s books\u2014that things are not the way they\u2019re supposed to be. Charles H. H. Scobie captures the point admirably: \u2018Amid the chaos and darkness caused by Israel\u2019s rebellion and disobedience, and indeed the rebellion and disobedience of all human kind, again and again the OT sees the only hope as lying in some future action of God on behalf of his people and of his world.\u2019
\nThe question is, however, whether God\u2019s Old Testament people expected a divine-human incarnation as the way in which their hope would be realized? As stated above, they were looking for Yahweh to come himself. But to come in the flesh? In this chapter we shall consider recent treatments of Israel\u2019s hope that contend that no incarnation is in view in the Hebrew Bible. Next we shall turn our attention to B. B. Warfield\u2019s contrasting argument that the Old Testament in fact expected a divine Messiah to come to Israel\u2019s aid, and shall look at some contemporary support for it. Next we shall explore Israel\u2019s hope as found in certain key Old Testament texts and their import. We shall also briefly explore intertestamental expectations and a recent development in the typological reading of Scripture.
\nThe hope for a divine Messiah
\nWe begin on a negative note. First, some recent scholarship that says the Old Testament betrays no notion of a coming divine Messiah, is unclear on the question or at least says very little on the subject. Indeed, leaving aside the question of the expectation of a divine Messiah, some scholars see little in the Old Testament by way of messianic hope per se. We shall then turn to scholarship of a previous generation and some in our own that is far more positive.
\nAs mentioned above, for much recent scholarship there is no expectation whatever of a divine Messiah to be found in the Old Testament witness, nor is any clarity to be had there concerning the question. For example, J. Andrew Dearman acknowledges that patristic interpreters found references to the pre-incarnate logos in the Old Testament that prepared the way for the coming of Christ, but concludes his study of theophany, anthropomorphism and imago Dei in the Old Testament with the statement that \u2018There is no line of thought which leads inevitably from the OT to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation.\u2019 Even so, he contends:
\nAnd although no line of thought in the OT leads inevitably to the doctrine of the incarnation (because of the difference between anticipation and reality, seed-bed and flower), when interpreters work back to the OT from the claim that \u2018whoever has seen me has seen the Father\u2019 (John 14:9), they find themselves in mysteriously familiar territory.
\nHe is not alone in this judgment. Alan F. Segal argues that there is in Judaism some background to ideas like resurrection and Trinity. But that unique relation of Spirit and matter, which the church has labelled \u2018incarnation\u2019, is much harder to find. He notes that the divine presence is presented in a variety of ways in the Old Testament (e.g. theophany per se, the angel of the Lord, the temple). However, he maintains concerning this variety, \u2018None of them precisely fits the Christian use of the term incarnation.\u2019 N. T. Wright sums up the common view of the academy\u2014a view he challenges\u2014in these terms: \u2018no first-century Jew could think of a human being, far less than himself, as the incarnation of God. Jewish monotheism prohibits it; and even if it didn\u2019t \u2026 There is no actual model for it within Judaism.\u2019
\nSome scholars of a previous generation would not be at all convinced by some recent scholarship. One of the doyens of the evangelical tradition, Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield, writing in the opening decades of the twentieth century, posed the matter in the following terms: \u2018The question whether the Old Testament has any testimony to give as to the Deity of our Lord, when strictly taken, resolves itself into the question whether the Old Testament holds out the promise of a Divine Messiah.\u2019 His answer to the question is entirely affirmative. He maintains that Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6 and Daniel 7:13 rightly understood show that the Old Testament expected a divine Messiah. Furthermore the Old Testament expectation that Yahweh himself was coming coalesces with the figures of the promised child of Isaiah 9:6 and the Son of Man of Daniel 7:13. The relevant texts read:
\nLet the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;
\nlet the sea resound, and all that is in it.
\nLet the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;
\nlet all the trees of the forest sing for joy.
\nLet all creation rejoice before the Lord, for he comes,
\nhe comes to judge the earth.
\nHe will judge the world in righteousness
\nand the peoples in his faithfulness.
\n(Ps. 96:11\u201313)
\nYour throne, O God, will last for ever and ever;
\na scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom.
\n(Ps. 45:6)
\nFor to us a child is born,
\nto us a son is given,
\nand the government will be on his shoulders.
\nAnd he will be called
\nWonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
\nEverlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
\n(Isa. 9:6)
\nIn my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. (Dan. 7:13)
\nFor Warfield Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6 and Daniel 7:13 viewed together with Psalm 96:11\u201313 bear witness to a hope for a figure that transcends the merely human. He concludes his discussion of the divine Messiah in the Old Testament with the words of another scholar, F. Godet:
\nThere was in the whole of the Old Testament from the patriarchal theophanies down to the latest prophetic visions, a constant current towards the incarnation as the goal of all these revelations. The appearance of the Messiah presents itself more clearly to the view of the prophets as the perfect theophany, the final coming of Jehovah.
\nRegarding the coming of God as Ruler and King, Warfield contends that the parallel between the coming of God in those roles and the expectation of a human who is the Saviour in those same roles is \u2018very complete\u2019. Warfield seeks to capture the coming of Yahweh motif and its parallel with the coming of a human Saviour in a quote he takes from a work by Ernst Sellin:
\nHe too is the ruler over the peoples (Gen. 49:10; Ps. 72:11), to the ends of the earth (Deut. 33:17; Mic. 5:3; Zech. 9:10 f.), the scepter-bearer over the nations (Num. 24:17\u201319; Ps. 45:17) to whose dominion there are no limits (Is. 9:6), etc.; he too bears sometimes but not often the title of \u2018King\u2019 (Ps. 45:2; 72:1; Zech. 9:9; Jer. 23:5), elsewhere those of \u2018Judge\u2019 (Mic. 5:1), \u2018Father\u2019 (Is. 9:5), \u2018Anointed\u2019 or \u2018Son of Jehovah\u2019 (Ps. 51:2, 7). Precisely as the activity of the one, so that of the other is three-fold: it is his to destroy the enemies (Num. 24:17b; Deut. 33:17; Ps. 51:9 [sic]; 45:6; 110:1, 2, 5); he has to judge (Is. 9:6b; 11:3; Jer. 23:5b; Ps. 72:6); and finally he has to \u2018save\u2019 (Zech. 10:6 [sic]; Jer. 23:6; Ps. 72:4, 12), above all by bringing social betterment, Paradise, and universal peace (Gen. 49:11, 12; Is. 7:15; 11:4, 6\u20139; Mic. 4:4a, 5b; Zech. 9:9b, 10 [sic]; Ps. 72:12, 16).\u2026 Moreover he is given a name. \u2018Emmanuel,\u2019 by which his appearance is notified as the fulfillment of Balaam\u2019s prophecy of the end of days, \u2018Jahve, his God is with him\u2019; and he is further designated as \u2018Star\u2019 (Num. 24:17), as \u2018God-Hero\u2019 (Is. 9:5), as \u2018God\u2019s Son\u2019 (Ps. 51:7); \u2026 [and] exegesis is continually bringing us back to the idea that Is. 7:14, Mic. 5:2 assume thoroughly a miraculous birth of a man; \u2026 [and] there is the promise to him when scarcely born, the dominion of the world (Gen. 49:10; Is. 9:5; Mic. 5:3).
\nFor Warfield what Sellin encapsulates is \u2018the correlation of the hope of the coming Savior, with the hope of what we have been accustomed to speak of as \u201cthe advent of Jehovah\u201d \u2019. What others of his day endeavoured to keep distinct\u2014the coming of a saviour and the coming of Yahweh\u2014Warfield wanted to synthesize. For him the ultimate synthesis was to be found in one person alone, namely Jesus who was yet to come.
\nAlmost a hundred years after Warfield wrote, Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr., who stands in the same tradition as Warfield, has revisited the question of whether the deity of the Christ is part of Old Testament faith. His careful discussion merits serious attention.
\nOrtlund, Jr., distinguishes three categories of texts. The first category he argues consists of texts that are inaccurately construed by some to reveal the deity of Christ. Psalm 2 centres on a personage who is the Lord\u2019s Anointed (v. 2), his king (v. 6), and his Son (vv. 7, 12). He contends that the interpretative crux is verse 7, as per the esv:
\nI will tell of the decree:
\nThe Lord said to me, \u2018You are my Son;
\ntoday I have begotten you.\u2019
\nDoes \u2018today\u2019 refer to a day that is always today, namely eternity as Augustine argued? Or is it referring to the coronation day of the Davidic king? With regard to this text he concludes, \u2018Psalm 2 says much about the Christ\u2014his unique role in God\u2019s plan for history, his inevitable judgment of the nations, all fulfilled in Jesus as the final son of David. But Psalm 2 does not reveal his deity.\u2019
\nThe second category of texts consists of those, according to Ortlund, Jr., that can accurately be construed as revealing the deity of the Christ. According to Ortlund, Jr., there are four Old Testament texts that can accurately be construed to reveal the deity of Christ. Three are ones that Warfield majored on (Ps. 45; Isa. 9; Dan. 7). The other is Psalm 110.
\nOrtlund, Jr., embraces translations of Psalm 45:6 that render the verse as addressed to God in terms of \u2018Your throne, O God\u2019 will be eternal or everlasting. He sees support for this rendering in the lxx, an Aramaic Targum, Jerome\u2019s Latin translation and Hebrews 1:8. The superscription attached to the psalm describes it as a wedding song intended for royal nuptials; but as the language is so extravagant, how can it apply to any ordinary Davidic king? He is convinced that Psalm 45:6 \u2018foresees a divine-human king\u2014divine because of \u201cO God\u201d in verse 6, human because of \u201cGod, your God\u201d in verse 7\u2019. He quotes Derek Kidner with approval that the verse is \u2018consistent with the incarnation, but mystifying in any other contexts\u2019. However, his own conclusion is stronger: \u2018Psalm 45, if allowed to speak for itself, demands recognition as a prophecy of a divine-human Messiah and the joy of his ultimate glories with his people.\u2019 Isaiah 9:6, Ortlund, Jr., maintains, is best understood as affirming the deity of the promised \u2018human child\u2019, the \u2018Mighty God\u2019 upon whose shoulders rests the government that never ends. He argues, \u2018And Hezekiah cannot be the king Isaiah is referring to, because the endless triumph of verse 7 goes far beyond the accomplishment of any historic son of David.\u2019 Daniel 7\u2019s vision of the one like the Son of Man\u2019 is best interpreted as rendering \u2018[a] human-like figure presented at the heavenly court \u2026 at a level fit for deity.\u2019 Ortlund, Jr., acknowledges that Psalm 110 poses exegetical difficulties. Even so, verse 1 is striking:
\nThe Lord says to my Lord:
\n\u2018Sit at my right hand
\nuntil I make your enemies
\na footstool for your feet.\u2019
\nOrtlund, Jr., contends that the figure of whom David writes in verse 1, who is the Lord seated at the right hand of the Lord, cannot be reduced to any ordinary king of Israel. This figure clearly goes beyond David himself. Moreover this figure has a unique priesthood, according to verse 4: \u2018in the order of Melchizedek\u2019. Ortlund, Jr., contends, \u2018Unlike the ancient kings of Israel, the Messiah is a king-priest\u2014and forever, after the analogy of Melchizedek.\u2019 For him Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6, Daniel 7:13 and Psalm 110:1 provide firm evidence that the Old Testament held out the promise of a divine-human Messiah.
\nThe third category includes Old Testament texts that are not clear enough to be certain one way or the other on the question of the deity of Christ. There are two such texts that some interpret as describing a divine-human Messiah, but Ortlund, Jr., is not so convinced. Regarding Isaiah 7:14 he maintains, \u2018But if Matthew saw in Isaiah 7:14 an indirect foreshadowing of Jesus, then the divine element in the name Immanuel does not necessarily identify the nature of the child.\u2019 In fact it could be argued that the promised child is the mah\u0113r \u0161\u0101l\u0101l \u1e25\u0101\u0161 baz (\u2018quick to plunder, swift to spoil\u2019, niv footnote) of Isaiah 8:1\u20134. He concludes that Isaiah 7:14 is consistent with an affirmation of the deity of the Messiah but that interpretation is not demanded. He views Micah 5:2 similarly, which speaks of a ruler coming out of Bethlehem as someone who is \u2018from ancient days\u2019 (esv). He believes that although, with its time reference, there is a case for the verse\u2019s referring to eternity, it is on balance more likely to be about \u2018the antiquity of the Messiah\u2019s Davidic roots\u2019.
\nThe discussion by Ortlund, Jr., raises a very important hermeneutical point. Is an interpretation demanded by the text in view, or is the interpretation under discussion simply consistent with that text of Scripture? The issue is not whether a New Testament writer or Jesus himself as presented in the Gospels interpreted the Old Testament text correctly when seeing it as messianic or prophetic. A robust doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture does not reduce the text merely to what the human authors intended. There is the divine author. The story of Scripture is a story of double agency. There can be a fuller meaning in canonical perspective that later events clarify.
\nInterestingly present-day Jewish scholars Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, writing in The Jewish Study Bible, lend some independent albeit guarded support to Warfield\u2019s reading of Psalm 45:6. They write that verse 7 (v. 6 in the niv) could be read as presenting the king as divine. However, although this would have ancient Near Eastern parallels, in the Hebrew Bible it would be the only occurrence. In the same volume Lawrence M. Wills argues that the author of Daniel 7:1\u201314 is \u2018most likely\u2019 presenting a \u2018celestial being\u2019.
\nWhat then was Israel hoping for according to the texts under discussion (Ps. 45:6, Isa. 9:6 and Dan. 7:13 viewed together with Ps. 96:11\u201313)?
\nIsrael\u2019s hope and the incarnation: key texts revisited
\nExpressing oneself in language can take a variety of forms. The British are famous for their understatement. Points are made subtly with an economy of words but a wealth of implication. There is a story of Oscar Wilde, the British playwright and wit, told at a party by someone he did not care for that this particular gentleman had driven by Wilde\u2019s house on a previous day but did not have the time to call in. Wilde\u2019s reply was just two words, \u2018Thank you!\u2019 At the other end there is hyperbole. Jesus famously said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:24). Funny but hardly subtle. The question is whether the language found in Psalm 45:6, Isaiah 9:6, Daniel 7:13 and Psalm 110:1 is similarly hyperbolic. We shall consider each of these texts in turn.
\nPsalm 45:6
\nPsalm 45 is a wedding song and a royal one at that. In the esv and nrsv translations the psalm addressed to the king becomes in verse 6 an address to God: \u2018Your throne, O God\u2019. As C. S. Rodd points out, the meaning of verse 6 is a matter of much debate. He references some of the other possibilities; for example, \u2018Your throne is everlasting like that of God\u2019, as in the nrsv margin. However, he rightly says that the most natural way to take the Hebrew is to render it as an address to God. Derek Kidner comments on verse 6, \u2018Throne and sceptre introduce the array of formal splendours and symbols of the king, for whose honour and retinue no rarity is too costly and no person too exalted.\u2019 He adds, as Ortlund, Jr., noted, \u2018This paradox [he is referring to the phrase \u2018God, your God\u2019] is consistent with the incarnation, but mystifying in any other context. It is an example of Old Testament language bursting its banks, to demand a more than human fulfilment (as did Ps. 110:1, according to our Lord).\u2019 Peter C. Craigie expands the picture:
\nPsalm 45 is a superb example of what C. S. Lewis has called \u2018second meanings in the Psalms\u2019 (Reflections on the Psalms, 101\u201315). The primary meaning of the psalm is clear; it is a wedding song, celebrating the marriage of a king to a princess. In its original sense and context, it is not in any sense a messianic psalm. And yet within the context of early Christianity (and in Judaism before that), it becomes a messianic psalm par excellence.
\nPsalm 45:6 provides an excellent example of how an Old Testament text takes on a valence that was unseen in its own time but with the unfolding of salvation history its depth of meaning becomes patent. Dots were being laid down in the Old Testament scriptures but lay unjoined.
\nIsaiah 9:6
\nSome scholars are very confident that Isaiah 9:6 speaks of a divine Messiah to come (e.g. as we saw in Warfield and in Ortlund, Jr.). The context is the fall of the northern kingdom, and the hope for both a future restoration and the overthrow of the enemies of God\u2019s people. In view is the birth of a Davidic king or perhaps the coronation of such. However, given that so many extravagant names (throne names) are predicated of this child\u2014\u2018Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace\u2019\u2014it is a puzzle how any merely human king could be so named. The name \u2018Mighty God\u2019 (\u2019\u0113l gibb\u00f4r) is of particular importance in this view. Geoffrey W. Grogan comments:
\nIf the child of Isaiah 7:14\u201316 \u2026 typifies the ultimate divine Christ, the child of these verses is that Christ. It is true that monarchs of the Near East often received exaggerated adulation from their subjects, especially at their enthronement and at subsequent kingdom renewal ceremonies. This is not Mesopotamia, however, but Judah, and Hebrew prophecy was founded on truth, not flattery \u2026 To speak to monarchs words that could not be taken at their face value was hardly consistent with their calling.
\nAlec Motyer argues similarly: \u2018Mighty God: the repetition of this title in 10:21, referring to the Lord himself, establishes its meaning here. Translations like \u201cGodlike Hero\u201d are linguistically improbable, sidestepping the implication that the Old Testament looked forward to a divine Messiah.\u2019 For Motyer \u2018Mighty God\u2019 refers to the person and power of the child.
\nOther scholars will have none of this. Benjamin D. Sommer in The Jewish Study Bible rejects any suggestion that Isaiah 9:5 (v. 6 in the niv) has a divine Messiah in view: \u2018These names do not describe that person who holds them but the god whom parents worship.\u2019 Indeed this translation renders the Hebrew of Isaiah 9:5 (v. 6 in the niv) as follows: \u2018He has been named \u201cThe Mighty God is planning grace; The Eternal Father, a peaceable ruler.\u2019 His argument is that these are throne names that need to be read in the light of how names were understood in ancient Israel. He gives examples: \u2018thus the name Isaiah in Hebrew means \u201cThe Lord saves\u201d; Hezekiah, \u201cThe Lord strengthens\u201d \u2019. Another Jewish scholar, James L. Kugel, renders the Hebrew in a slightly different way but again in complete sentences: \u2018He has been named \u201cMighty-God-counsels-wondrous-things,\u201d \u201cEternal-father-is-a-peaceful-ruler.\u201d \u2019 How then is the exalted language to be explained? Kugel argues:
\nIn the ancient world, it went without saying that a new golden age could be brought about only by a new golden ruler \u2026 life worked from the top down. Only a great new ruler could change things, but if such a ruler did arrive, he might indeed cause everything to be different: righteousness and justice and peace would all come about as a result of his rule.
\nTraditional Judaism interpreted Isaiah 9:6 as applying to Hezekiah. These early exegetes saw then no divine Messiah implications in \u2018Mighty God\u2019.
\nOn balance Isaiah 9:6 is consistent with the coming of a divine Messiah but does not demand that reading. R. Coggins provides a cautious but in my view sound comment: \u2018 \u201cMighty God\u201d may imply divine kingship, for which there is some evidence in ancient Israel (cf. Psalm 45:6), or \u201cGod\u201d here may be a kind of superlative.\u2019 Indeed if \u2018Mighty God\u2019 refers to the person and power of the child (so Motyer) then why not \u2018Everlasting Father\u2019? Of course if that were so, then the incarnation of the Father would be in view and not that of the Son. The way around this for Motyer is to distinguish between person and role. Motyer argues that \u2018Everlasting Father\u2019 refers to this King\u2019s relation to his subjects. In other words this throne name embodies the hope of kingly care. However, if so, why not argue that \u2018Mighty God\u2019 is the hope for a king mighty enough to defeat enemies in a Godlike way? I do not hold this view myself; I wish only to point out that the interpretation of the throne names of Isaiah 9:6 is not quite as straightforward as some think. Coggins\u2019s caution is warranted. Therefore I would move this text from Ortlund, Jr.\u2019s accurately construed to reveal the deity of Christ category but not to his not clear enough to be certain one way or the other category. Instead another category is needed, that of the \u2018Quite plausible\u2019.
\nDaniel 7:13
\nIn this apocalyptic work, Daniel 7:13 speaks of \u2018one like a son of man\u2019 (bar \u2019\u0115n\u0101\u0161 in Aramaic). However, to whom does the phrase refer? Rikki E. Watts captures the debate well: \u2018is the figure concrete or symbolic, celestial or human, individual or corporate\u2019 or some combination? Charles H. H. Scobie discusses only one option. The figure of the Son of Man in Daniel 7 refers to \u2018a collective figure symbolizing \u201cthe holy ones of the Most High,\u201d i.e., God\u2019s faithful people\u2019. He rejects the notion that the text is referring \u2018to an individual figure, whether the Davidic messiah, personified Wisdom, or an angel\u2019. Lawrence M. Wills, however, as a Jewish scholar is attracted to the proposition that an angelic figure such as Michael is in view. G. L. Archer, Jr., will have none of this. He contends:
\nThe personage who now appears before God in the form of a human being is of heavenly origin. He has come to this place of coronation accompanied by the clouds of heaven and is clearly no mere human being in essence. The expression \u2018like a son of man\u2019 (kebar enas) identifies the appearance of this final Ruler of the world not only as a man, in contrast to the beasts (the four world empires), but also as the heavenly Sovereign incarnate.
\nArcher, Jr., sees the incarnation per se in the text. This contention goes beyond the evidence and prematurely forecloses on the interpretative options.
\nIn the light of the above diversity of opinion Watts is right to describe the identification of the Son of Man in Daniel 7 as \u2018hotly contested\u2019. Indeed he argues that \u2018no resolution\u2019 is in sight. My point in parading this diversity of scholarly opinion is a simple one. Leaving to one side the way Jesus used the phrase of himself, the identity of the Son of Man in Daniel 7 when considered within the confines of the Old Testament canon is not transparent. Little wonder then, as Christopher J. H. Wright can write, \u2018Most scholars are agreed that the \u201cSon of Man\u201d was not a messianic title or figure in the inter-testamental Jewish writings. That is, the people of Jesus\u2019s day, whatever else they were hoping for in the way of a messiah, were not on the lookout for a \u201cSon of Man.\u201d \u2019 Therefore I would move this text from Ortlund, Jr.\u2019s accurately construed to reveal the deity of Christ category to his not clear enough to be certain one way or the other category.
\nPsalm 110:1
\nPsalm 110:1 is the most quoted or alluded to Old Testament text to be found in the New Testament. The text is intriguing:
\nThe Lord says to my lord:
\n\u2018Sit at my right hand
\nuntil I make your enemies
\na footstool for your feet.\u2019
\nHowever, is Ortlund, Jr., correct to see this royal psalm as revealing the deity of the Christ? On the one hand if David is the speaker, then the identity of the two lords is the crucial question. \u2018The right hand\u2019 (y\u0101m\u00een) is the place of greatest power or dignity next to that of the monarch. Normally this was where the second-in-command would sit. Interestingly Bathsheba was given that honour by Solomon (1 Kgs 2:19). Derek Kidner comments, \u2018What is unique is the royal speaker, addressing this more-than-royal person.\u2019 On this reading clearly a greater than David is in view. On the other hand if the speaker is a court prophet, then one of the lords is Yahweh and the other is the Israelite king. In fact, although pre-Christian Jewish interpretation on occasion understood the psalm as messianic, these interpreters did not regard the psalm as necessarily referring to a divine Messiah. Therefore yet again I would move this text from the accurately construed to reveal the deity of Christ category to the not clear enough to be certain one way or the other category. Remembering, of course, that at this stage we are moving within the horizon of Israel\u2019s ancient text, not that of the complete biblical canon.
\nThe reference above to the completed biblical canon raises an important consideration. At this point someone reading this analysis may be somewhat frustrated. After all, for example, does not Hebrews 1:12 employ Psalm 110:1\u2014and Psalm 45:6 for that matter\u2014as a key element in establishing the superiority of Jesus to angels? Indeed the New Testament writer does. However, the useful discussion of Ortlund, Jr., as to whether the deity of Christ is to be found revealed in the Old Testament appears to assume that the reader who may accurately or inaccurately construe the Old Testament text with regard to the question is the Christian who believes the Nicene Creed. Our concern is different if we are reading the Old Testament with our New Testament shut at this stage. We are endeavouring to understand what ancient Israel hoped for before the revelatory light of Christ became available. This, of course, does not preclude the fact that in the light of Christ such Old Testament texts take on a legitimate depth of significance that may not have been apparent to the original writer.
\nIntertestamental hopes
\nJewish intertestamental hopes took a variety of forms. Donald E. Gowan sums these expectations up in an admirable way. I quote in extenso:
\nHope for the ideal future could be expressed very nicely in post-OT Judaism without a Messiah. No such figure appears in the eschatology of Jubilees; 1 Enoch 1\u201336; 91\u2013104; Assumption of Moses; 2 Enoch; Sibylline Oracles IV; the War Scroll; Psalms Scroll, or Habakkuk Commentary of Qumran; or in any of the books of the Apocrypha except 2 Esdras. Messiah does appear in other documents from Qumran, but does not play a major role in them (1QSa II. 11\u201322; The Patriarchal Blessings; 1QS IX.11). A royal figure who might fairly be said to represent the messianic hope, although the word itself is not used, appears in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (T. Sim. 7:2; T. Jud. 24:1\u20136; Dan. 5:10\u201313; T. Jos. 19:8\u201311) in company with an eschatological priest. A white bull who presumably represents the Messiah appears in the dream-vision of Enoch (1 Enoch 90:37), but plays no significant role.
\nHe acknowledges that there is one, extensive, pre-Christian delineation of the Messiah to be found in Psalms of Solomon 17, which is a midfirst-century bc document. The figure portrayed is that of a Davidic king who defeats the enemies of God\u2019s people, regathers Israel and settles them in the land of promise under his judgeship. He will rule the nations. However, he \u2018is still a purely human figure\u2019.
\nGowan\u2019s picture of Second Temple expectations needs nuancing. As Darrell L. Bock points out, 1 Enoch 33\u201334, one of the texts Gowan refers to, presents a \u2018transcendent figure of divinely bestowed authority\u2019. Moreover Bock judiciously quotes Psalms of Solomon 17:4 to reveal how deeply Davidic its expectations are: \u2018Lord, you chose David to be king over Israel, and swore to him about his descendants forever, that his kingdom should not fall before you.\u2019 Even more apposite though is Psalms of Solomon 17:33\u201336:
\nAnd he shall purge Jerusalem, making it holy as of old:
\nSo that nations shall come from the ends of the earth to see his glory,
\nBringing as gifts her sons who had fainted,
\nAnd to see the glory of the Lord, wherewith God hath glorified her.
\nAnd he [shall be] a righteous king, taught of God over them.
\nAnd there shall be no unrighteousness in his days in their midst,
\nFor all shall be holy and their king the anointed [Messiah] of the Lord.
\nBock also reviews the Qumran materials. His conclusions are worth stating: \u2018So we see four major figures of the end time expected by Jews of one sort or the another; a regal David-like figure [Psalms of Solomon]; a transcendent figure described as one like a son of man [1 Enoch]; a priestly figure [1QS 9.11]; and a prophetic teacher [CD 6.11 and 4QFlor].\u2019
\nWhat is clear is that the intertestamental hopes for a deliverer of some kind were highly diverse. No synthesis is on offer, much like the Old Testament testimony itself. As Walther Eichrodt says of the Old Testament literature:
\nThus at the close of its career the form of the Old Testament hope cries out for a critique and a reconstruction which will be able to reach out and grasp the unchanging truth hidden under its bewildering diversity, and set this in the very center where it can dominate all else, while at the same time unifying its struggling contradictions, its resting in a timeless present and its tense waiting for a consummation at the end of history. Both needs are fully met in the NT confession of Jesus as the Messiah.
\nImportantly for our purposes no expectation of an incarnation is plainly in view in the pages of the Old Testament. But is that all that can be said? Recent work in the area of typology suggests no.
\nTypology and incarnation
\nThe human mind looks for patterns. This is part of the human endeavour to make sense of our environment. Ideally both reason and imagination are involved. Imagination posits a hidden likeness between things that are at first sight unalike. Reason assesses claims that a pattern has been discovered and not merely imposed. When only imagination is involved we get the bizarre\u2014such as the woman trying to sell a half-eaten piece of toast on eBay, while claiming that an image of the Virgin Mary is on it.
\nAny attempt at a typological reading of Scripture can invite the criticism that reason has been left behind and the religious imagination has triumphed. And yet the imagination is vital to human knowing, even theological knowing\u2014as Karl Barth maintained. He wrote, \u2018But human possibility of knowing is not exhausted by the ability to perceive and comprehend. Imagination, too, belongs no less legitimately in its way to the human possibility of knowing. A man without imagination is more of an invalid than one who lacks a leg.\u2019 Walter Brueggemann helpfully describes this use of the religious imagination as \u2018good-faith extrapolation\u2019. Caution is needed though because imagination may work in unconvincing ways. I recall a sermon that allegorized the colours of the curtains of the tabernacle. One colour stood for the deity of Christ and another for his humanity. This is not typology but allegory. What the preacher said was true but not true to the passage in view. What distinguishes typology from allegory? A. T. Hanson describes the difference well: \u2018If used excessively or indiscriminately, typology can pass over into allegory. Allegory means using any person or event, or object in the Old Testament arbitrarily to signify a corresponding event or thing in the New Testament.\u2019
\nCaution should not mean timidity. After all, there is precedent within special revelation for the typological reading of Scripture that starts with the Old Testament itself. Isaiah looks back to the exodus from Egypt and sees a pattern relevant to God\u2019s future dealings with Israel (cf. Exod. 1\u201315; Isa. 43:1\u201319; 51:9\u201311). So too in the New Testament Matthew\u2019s Gospel looks back to the Egyptian captivity of God\u2019s people and subsequent escape as interpreted by Hosea, and applies that pattern to Jesus (cf. Hos. 11:1; Matt. 1:14\u201315). A. T. Hanson captures the essence of a typological reading of Scripture: \u2018The practice in the New Testament and the early church whereby a person or a series of events occurring in the Old Testament is interpreted as a type or foreshadowing of some person (almost invariably Christ) or feature in the Christian dispensation.\u2019 Helpfully Hanson\u2019s phrase \u2018feature in the Christian dispensation\u2019 is broad enough to cover both an event (e.g. exodus) and an institution (e.g. priesthood).
\nThe attentive reader will have noticed that very little has been made of typology in the present study. This is not because I have an issue with a typological reading of Scripture. Far from it! The question is not whether there is a typological preparation in the providence of God for Christology in general. I would argue there most definitely is such a preparation in relation to Christ\u2019s prophethood (a greater than Moses), kingship (a greater than David and Solomon), priesthood (a greater than Levi) and sacrifice (a greater than any tabernacle-or temple-offered precursor) inter alia. But the incarnation? Recent work on typology may indeed answer that question, albeit in a finely finessed way that respects both reason and imagination.
\nIn his work Jesus the Son of God D. A. Carson writes of trajectories found in Old Testament texts that lead ultimately to Christ as the Son of God who is both human and divine. In particular the texts that speak of David and the hope connected with his house provide a case in point. A text such as 2 Samuel 7:14 in the first instance \u2018certainly\u2019 applies to Solomon. Another key text, Psalm 2:7, first \u2018probably\u2019 applies to David and his immediate successors, and a third one, Psalm 45:6\u20137, \u2018certainly applies, initially, to kings who had their heirs who replaced their fathers, not to Jesus\u2019. Even so, for Carson the significance of these texts cannot be left there: \u2018Yet in all three cases the context drops hints of a fulfillment that outstrips local petty monarchs.\u2019 He acknowledges that \u2018this Davidic trajectory is subtle\u2019. Subtle, yes, but also crucially important. He argues, \u2018If these trajectories are not identified and understood, however, we will be at a loss to understand how the Old Testament texts that are said to be fulfilled in Jesus actually \u201cwork.\u201d \u2019 By \u2018trajectory\u2019 he means, \u2018to use the more traditional terminology, this Davidic typology\u2019. In his view such Davidic texts are \u2018inherently forward looking\u2019. Because the writer to the Hebrews is aware of this Davidic trajectory in the Old Testament he can legitimately apply Psalms 2:7 and 45:6\u20137 to Jesus. Another example for Carson is provided by Ezekiel 34, which twenty-five times refers to Yahweh as coming to be the shepherd of his people in the face of the failure of their human shepherds (leaders), and yet the chapter ends with David as the shepherd. He concludes, \u2018The visitation of the Lord and the coming of his servant David become more than a little blended\u2019 (Ezek. 34:23\u201324).
\nGiven this approach one can see how the Old Testament provides anticipatory texts whose deeper significance in the light of the incarnation event can be both seen and drawn out in a way that is neither fanciful not arbitrary. Again Hebrews 1 is the case in point. Carson is aware of what such subtlety means:
\nIt takes some hard work to uncover how these trajectories, these typologies, actually work. But when we take the time and effort to examine them, we are hushed in awe at the wisdom of God in weaving together intricate patterns that are simultaneously so well hidden in their development [in the Old Testament] and so magnificently obvious in their fulfillment [in the New Testament].
\nThe emphasized words are important because, as we shall see in the next chapter, Christ\u2019s appearing in the flesh is described as a mystery in the Pauline sense of something hidden in the plan of God but now revealed. This subtle typological argument does not undermine that Pauline claim, although an argument that the Old Testament explicitly expects an incarnation would subvert it. To that discussion we now turn.
\nConclusion
\nWhen arguing whether or not the idea of the Trinity was to be found in the Old Testament, B. B. Warfield asserted that the Old Testament was like a dimly lit room:
\nThis is not an illegitimate reading of New Testament ideas [trinitarian ideas] back into the text of the Old Testament; it is only reading the text of the Old Testament under the illumination of the New Testament revelation. The Old Testament may be likened to a chamber richly furnished but dimly lit; the introduction of light brings into it nothing which was not in it before; but it brings out into clearer view much of what was in it but was only dimly or even not at all perceived before.
\nPoint taken! However, in contrast Warfield had no such reticence in relation to what he believed was a clear expectation in the Old Testament that a divine Messiah would come. I am unable to follow either Warfield or Ortlund, Jr., all the way in this. There are Old Testament texts that prima facie when read together are consistent with that idea but do not demand it (e.g. Ps. 45:6; Isa. 9:6; Dan. 7:13). There are other readings of these texts that are also defensible. Significantly, though, when other texts that are relevant to Israel\u2019s messianic hope are considered, the picture becomes much more problematical for the Warfield and Ortlund, Jr., thesis. For example, on any reckoning 2 Samuel 7:14a is salient for Israel\u2019s messianic hopes: \u2018I will be his father, and he will be my son.\u2019 However, the next part of the verse, 14b, shows that the figure in view is all too human: \u2018When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands.\u2019 And as for Psalm 45:6, the psalm goes on to describe the king\u2019s queen (Ps. 45:9\u201317).
\nThe results yielded in this chapter then may appear limited. The Old Testament expected human agents or even divine agents of the divine purpose to come to Israel\u2019s aid at some juncture in its future: a prophet like Moses, a Davidic king, the Son of Man, the child born bearing the name \u2018Mighty God\u2019, and the Old Testament writers also expected God himself to come. But an incarnate divine-human deliverer? On the surface of it there seem then to have been two distinct but unsynthesized lines of expectation\u2014one concerning God and another concerning a human agent\u2014that constituted the mainsprings of Israel\u2019s hope. How then can this chapter be dealing with the preparation for the incarnation in Israel\u2019s hope? Recent developments in the typological reading of Scripture help us address that question. And that question will be further addressed in the next chapter when I shall draw on Nicholas Wolterstorff\u2019s fertile idea of data-background beliefs as we consider the New Testament testimony to the Word who became flesh.
\nChapter Four
\nThe great mystery
\nIn this chapter we begin our discussion of the epicentre of the divine project to restore to its rights the created order. To do so, first we explore how Jesus, as delineated in the Gospels, saw himself in the light of the testimony of the Old Testament, and then examine how the New Testament writers in retrospect saw in Jesus the fulfilment of Old Testament promise and prediction. With regard to the latter we shall examine some key claims in Matthew, Mark, Paul, Hebrews and John. Even so, I shall contend the Old Testament Scriptures per se did not offer the prospect of an incarnation as part of the hope of Israel. It was a mystery in the sense of \u2018revelation that is in some sense \u201cthere\u201d in the [Old Testament] Scriptures but hidden until the time of God-appointed disclosure\u2019. No surprise then that 1 Timothy 3:16 can state, \u2018Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: He appeared in the flesh.\u2019 (This text will play a pivotal role in this chapter.) Importantly there is another way that the Old Testament may have prepared the way for the incarnation. Drawing on Nicholas Wolterstorff\u2019s theory of theories, a suggestion of how this is so will be offered. Regarding this back story preparation, the anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms of the Old Testament take on particular relevance.
\nIn retrospect
\nThere is nothing like looking in retrospect to see connections, implications and entailments that otherwise would be hard to discern. The Monday-morning quarterback can see it all: the play that should have been made or completed, the tactic that should have been employed, the tackle that turned the game. The New Testament writers had a source of epistemological aid that no Monday-morning quarterback can know. The Holy Spirit has come. In the upper room before the crucifixion Jesus said, \u2018But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you [the apostles] into all the truth\u2019 (John 16:13). I shall canvas only five examples of what was discerned when the time had fully come (hote de \u0113lthen to pl\u0113r\u014dma tou chronou), to borrow the Pauline phrase from Galatians 4:4.
\nAccording to Jesus
\nIn dialogue and debate with others Jesus often grounded his self-understanding on the testimony of the Old Testament Scriptures. Craig L. Blomberg sums up the New Testament witness in an admirable way:
\nWhen it comes to the inspiration, truthfulness, authority and relevance of the Bible of his world, Jesus could scarcely have held to higher views. The central theological and moral truths of Scripture\u2014monotheism, the double love-commandment, the frequent rebellion of humanity (including God\u2019s own people), the promises of eschatological judgment and blessing beginning with a Messianic age of God\u2019s beneficent reign on earth through that Messiah\u2014all proved central to Jesus\u2019 own thinking as well. He acknowledged Scripture\u2019s divine origin as God\u2019s word and words. He quoted from the Bible extensively and intensively. He affirmed the inviolability of its contents down to the smallest details. To whatever degree the contents of the Hebrew canon had solidified by his day, Jesus affirmed their unity but also their tripartite division. He interpreted the historical narratives in ways that suggest he believed that at least most (and probably all) of the events narrated really happened. He saw the collection of scriptural writings as open-ended, however, pointing forward to a time when God would fulfill his complete salvation-historical purposes for the ages. He believed that such an era had been inaugurated with his ministry. As a result, he mined the Scriptures for predictions and patterns that so closely paralleled events in and surrounding his life that the faithful Jew should have been able to see God\u2019s providential hand of guidance in them, fulfilling or filling full his word of old.
\nBlomberg rightly sees that Jesus is presented in the Gospels as the supreme hermeneutist or interpreter of the sacred writings.
\nLuke\u2019s Gospel in particular gives insight into Jesus as the hermeneutist. Luke 24 is especially instructive. In Luke 24:25\u201327 the risen Christ appears on the road to Emmaus teaching Cleopas and one other disciple that the Old Testament\u2019s leitmotiv (main idea) was Jesus himself. First he chides them, \u2018He said to them, \u201cHow foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?\u201d \u2019 Then he instructs them, \u2018And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained [dierm\u0113neuein, \u2018to translate\u2019, \u2018to interpret\u2019, \u2018to explain\u2019] to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself\u2019 (Luke 24:27). Later in the same chapter the scene shifts to Jerusalem. Cleopas and the other disciple bring the news of their encounter with Jesus to the Eleven (Luke 24:33). Jesus appears once more and the disciples are frightened (Luke 24:37). He reassures them in Luke 24:44, \u2018This is what I told you while I was still with you: everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.\u2019 Being so informed is necessary but not sufficient. Next we read, \u2018Then he opened [dianoichein, \u2018to open\u2019] their minds so they could understand the Scriptures\u2019 (v. 45). In systematic categories this is a classic instance of the revelatory word and the illuminated mind.
\nLuke 24 has further significance for our purposes. According to David W. Pao and Eckhardt J. Schnabel with reference to Luke 24:25, \u2018Later Christians understood Jesus\u2019 statement as a model for the \u201cglobal reading of the OT as praeparatio evangelica\u201d [preparation for the gospel].\u2019 As C. J. H. Wright explains, \u2018But for those with eyes and ears and memories, the Hebrew scriptures had already provided the patterns and models by which he [Jesus] could be understood, and by which he could understand and explain himself and his goals to others.\u2019 In that light we now turn our attention to examples of such readings of the Old Testament from Matthew, Mark, Hebrews and John that appear to have the incarnation in view.
\nAccording to Matthew
\nIt is unsurprising that the early church made Matthew\u2019s Gospel the beginning of the New Testament canon. As Craig L. Blomberg argues, \u2018Why then was Matthew put first when the canonical sequence of the four Gospels, and eventually of the entire New Testament, was crystallized? Doubtless one answer is because of Matthew\u2019s clearest and most frequent links to the Old Testament.\u2019 Those clear links begin in Mathew\u2019s first chapter. In that chapter as we shall see, not only is its Jewishness patent, but the genealogy that begins it explicitly takes the reader back in the history of God\u2019s dealings to Abraham, the father of the faithful.
\nThe Matthean genealogy provides a natural bridge to the Old Testament testimony. According to Matthew 1:1, \u2018This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham.\u2019 The three names in reverse order\u2014Abraham, David and Jesus\u2014become the structural key to what follows. In a highly stylized and selective way in three series of fourteen names each Matthew covers salvation history from Abraham to Jesus. The first series canvasses Abraham to David (Matt. 1:2\u20136a), the second one David to the Babylonian exile (Matt. 1:6b\u201311), and the last one from the exile to the birth of Jesus (Matt. 1:12\u201316). Matthew 1:17 sums it up: \u2018Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.\u2019 At this juncture in the Matthean account there is no hint that Jesus is God incarnate. The Christology in view is from below.
\nWhat follows next in the account (Matt. 1:18\u201323) adds another dimension to this picture.
\nThis is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: his mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
\nBut after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, \u2018Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.\u2019
\nAll this took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet: \u2018The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel\u2019 (which means \u2018God with us\u2019).
\nThis is no ordinary birth. The Holy Spirit is involved in a way without precedent in the canonical presentation. The surprising reference to the four women in the genealogy anticipates this to a degree. Tamar (v. 3), Rahab (v. 5), Ruth (v. 5) and Bathsheba (v. 5) were not Israelites and their pregnancies were atypical, each in their own way. (Theologically these women also point to the fact that the Abrahamic promise is for the Gentiles and not just the Jews, as the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18\u201320 with its reference to \u2018all nations\u2019 underlines.) Mary\u2019s pregnancy was likewise atypical but in an even more extraordinary fashion.
\nIn fact, according to Matthew this child fulfils Old Testament Scripture (v. 22). Isaiah 7:14 has come to pass. For some the prediction of Isaiah 7:14, quoted in Matthew 1:23, is now realized: \u2018God with us.\u2019 For others Matthew has misunderstood the Old Testament text, which most probably in its original context referred to the birth of Isaiah\u2019s own son Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz (cf. Isa. 7:14; 8:8, 10). Craig L. Blomberg illuminatingly suggests that a double fulfilment is quite possible. The birth of Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz did not exhaust the fulfilment. In the light of descriptors that come after in Isaiah, \u2018Almighty God\u2019, \u2018Eternal Father\u2019 and \u2018Prince of Peace\u2019, Blomberg argues that these are \u2018prophecies that scarcely could have been fulfilled in a mere earthly king\u2019. The worship of this child by the Magi in the very next chapter (Matt. 2:8, 11) and the quotation from Micah 5:2 (Matt. 2:5\u20136) reinforce the view that here is king who transcends the merely human.
\nMatthew\u2019s Gospel does not say in so many words that this Jesus is God incarnate\u2014unlike John\u2019s Gospel, which is quite explicit on the matter, as we shall soon see\u2014but that idea appears to be implicit in the account.
\nAccording to Mark
\nCompared to Matthew\u2019s Gospel Mark\u2019s account of Jesus makes fewer explicit references to the Old Testament Scriptures, but where it does it orients the entire narrative and does so from the start.
\nMark\u2019s Gospel begins on a new exodus note. According to Thorsten Moritz, and he acknowledges the seminal work of Rikki E. Watts here, Mark 1:1\u20133 is an important hermeneutical key to understanding the Marcan narrative. The text reads as follows:
\nThe beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
\n\u2018I will send my messenger ahead of you,
\nwho will prepare your way\u2019\u2014
\n\u2018a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
\n\u201cPrepare the way for the Lord,
\nmake straight paths for him.\u201d \u2019
\nMark creatively brings Isaiah 40:3, Malachi 3:1 and Exodus 23:20 together to make at least three points. God is coming to Zion to restore his people (Isa. 40). The Lord\u2019s coming to his temple will mean judgment (Mal. 3). God will ensure that the way is prepared (Exod. 23:20).
\nJohn the Baptist is the promised Elijah, and Jesus is\u2014as Rikki E. Watts suggests\u2014\u2018identified not merely as Yahweh\u2019s agent, but in some mysterious way with Yahweh\u2019s very presence\u2019. Mortiz is more explicit: \u2018Mark consciously sets the appearance and ministry of Jesus in the context of the NE [New Exodus]. For him, this is the story of the beginning of the renewal of God\u2019s people, and Jesus is revealed not just as a protagonist in the NE story, but as Israel\u2019s returning God.\u2019
\nThe next chapter in Mark provides a story that illustrates Moritz\u2019s claim (Mark 2:1\u201312). The setting is Capernaum. Jesus is teaching in a home. Teachers of the law are present. Four friends carrying a paralysed friend cannot access the home because of the crowd. Famously they make an opening in the roof and lower their friend down. Jesus, impressed with their faith, in verse 5 pronounces to the paralysed man, \u2018Son, your sins are forgiven.\u2019 The teachers of the law are alarmed (vv. 6\u20137): \u2018Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, \u201cWhy does this fellow talk like that? He\u2019s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?\u201d \u2019 They rightly understand that forgiving sins is not a human prerogative. It belongs to God alone. To them Jesus appears to have slandered the God of Israel and usurped his place. Jesus, however, is unfazed at their thinking (Mark 2:8\u201311):
\nImmediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, \u2018Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to this paralysed man, \u201cYour sins are forgiven,\u201d or to say, \u201cGet up, take your mat and walk\u201d? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.\u2019 So he said to the man, \u2018I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.\u2019
\nThe formerly paralysed man did just that and those there were amazed (v. 12). God is on his way to Zion in Mark\u2019s account and yet this Jesus is clearly human. The self-referencing title \u2018the Son of Man\u2019 has enough ambiguity to cover both the human and the divine.
\nMortiz is right to speak of Mark\u2019s \u2018implied Jesus incarnational theology\u2019. As in Matthew\u2019s account, incarnational theology is present but not explicit. There is no attempt in either Gospel to prove in some sense that this Jesus is both God and human, and that the Old Testament predicted as much. The interests of both Gospels lie elsewhere.
\nAccording to Hebrews
\nIn Hebrews the implied incarnational theology of Matthew and Mark gives way to an explicit one. In fact, by the time the reader has completed the reading or hearing of Hebrews 1:5\u20132:18 he or she has learnt that this Jesus is truly God and truly human. Further, the reader learns that with regard to his humanity the Son became human. It was not always the case. An event has taken place that has made it so. The Old Testament testimonies and the fact of the Christ\u2019s coming are creatively brought together in a way that no Old Testament writer appears to have imagined. Harold W. Attridge rightly describes Hebrews as \u2018a masterpiece of early Christian homiletics, weaving creative scriptural exegesis with effective exhortation\u2019. To these opening chapters we now turn.
\nHebrews opens on a revelatory note in Hebrews 1:1\u20132: \u2018In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.\u2019 The nature of this Son is next thematized in verse 3: \u2018The Son is the radiance of God\u2019s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.\u2019 This Son is divine. What follows surprises (v. 4): \u2018After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. So he became as much superior [kreitt\u014dn, \u2018better\u2019 or \u2018higher ranked\u2019] to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.\u2019 Creation (v. 3) and redemption (v. 4) have been conjoined in the person of this Son whose superiority has been made patent.
\nNo angel can match this Son, as the catena (\u1e25\u0101r\u00fbz, \u2018string of pearls\u2019) of Old Testament quotations makes plain: Psalm 2:7 (v. 5); 2 Samuel 7:14 (v. 5); Deuteronomy 32:43 (v. 6); Psalm 104:4 (v. 7); Psalm 45:6\u20137 (vv. 8\u20139); Psalm 102:25\u201327 (vv. 10\u201312); Psalm 110:1 (v. 13). Angels are divine beings but are not God. This Son is both a divine being and God. Angels worship the Son (v. 6). The Son does not worship angels.
\nThe very next chapter of Hebrews makes it clear that this Son is also truly human. He fulfils the divine expectations of humanity as Psalm 8:6\u20138 portrays it (Heb. 2:6\u20138). But who is this remarkable person to whom the world to come is subject (v. 5)? Hebrews 2:9 gives his human name: \u2018Jesus\u2019. There is purpose at work here (Heb. 2:9\u201310):
\nBut we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
\nIn bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered.
\nOnce more \u2018salvation\u2019 (s\u014dt\u0113ria) is the key term (cf. Heb. 1:14; 2:3; 2:10).
\nJesus the Son is the agent of this salvation. He provided purification for sins (Heb. 1:3) and tasted death for everyone (Heb. 2:9). But there is even more to the story and the more is incarnation (Heb. 2:14\u201318):
\nSince the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in [kekoin\u014dn\u0113ken, \u2018shared\u2019, \u2018partook of\u2019] their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death\u2014that is, the devil\u2014and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham\u2019s descendants. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
\nThis passage makes explicit what was implicit in Hebrews 1:3. Jesus the Son has assumed a role\u2014\u2018a merciful and faithful high priest\u2019\u2014that presupposes a genuine human nature and he carried out that role definitively as the reference in Hebrews 1:3 to sitting down (ekathisen) at the right hand of God suggests.
\nBy the time the first-century hearer or reader of this exhortation (tou logou t\u0113s parakl\u0113se\u014ds, \u2018the word of exhortation\u2019) had been exposed to the first two chapters, the idea of both the deity and humanity of Jesus the Son would have been encountered in the context of concerned pastoral exhortation (Heb. 2:1, \u2018so that we do not drift away\u2019). The idea of incarnation is firmly grounded in such New Testament testimonies.
\nAccording to John
\nRichard Elliot Friedman makes this general statement concerning the presentation of Christ in the Christian Gospels:
\nAgainst the backdrop of the Hebrew Bible, one reads in the first four books of the New Testament\u2014Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four Gospels\u2014a narrative in which, after centuries of hiddenness, the deity once again manifests His presence visibly in human form. There had been nothing like this since the Genesis accounts of Eden and Jacob\u2019s struggle with god. Over a millennium had passed since, according to the Hebrew Bible, the creator told Moses, \u2018I shall hide My face from them,\u2019 and then in one moment, there is the most immediate expression of the divine presence on earth since Sinai.
\nAlthough Friedman\u2019s academic discipline is in Hebrew and comparative literature, he is aware that
\n[t]here is scholarly controversy over when the doctrine that Jesus was an incarnation of God took hold. Whatever doubt there is of incarnation in Matthew, Mark, and Luke\u2014known as the Synoptic Gospels\u2014it appears to be explicit in the Gospel of John, both in the passages that identify Jesus as \u2018Lord and \u201cGod\u201d \u2019 (John 20:18, 28) and in the famous opening of the book \u2026
\nTo that opening we now give attention.
\nThe Prologue to John\u2019s Gospel is magisterial (John 1:1\u201318). Indeed David Brown and Ann Loades claim, \u2018it is arguable that this is John\u2019s most revolutionary contribution to Christian theology. The Word has ceased to be the medium that keeps God and the world apart; instead, it has become that which binds world and God together.\u2019 The Prologue appears to work recursively. If you read the rest of the Fourth Gospel in its light you get oriented to its themes (e.g. light versus darkness, life versus death). Then upon rereading the Prologue more of its depth can be seen and so even more may be gained by rereading the rest of the narrative. John 1:1 begins in eternity with the Word, and climaxes with this Word\u2019s becoming flesh (sarx egeneto) in time in verse 14. The opening verse runs, \u2018In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.\u2019 Identity and yet distinction. Here is a puzzle to which a trinitarian theology brings light. This Word is the agent through whom creation happened (v. 3). In this Word is found life and light for humanity (v. 4). John the Baptist bore witness to this light (vv. 6\u20139). However, in words that are programmatic for the main narrative (vv. 10\u201313):
\nHe was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. [Broadly speaking, chs. 1\u201312.] Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God\u2014children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband\u2019s will, but born of God. [Broadly speaking, chs. 13\u201320.]
\nJohn 1:14 adds a further descriptor to this picture. The Word become flesh is the Father\u2019s unique Son in whom the great covenant values (Hebr. \u1e25esed, \u2018grace\u2019, \u2018loving kindness\u2019, and \u2019\u0115met, \u2018truth\u2019) announced in the revealing of the divine name at Sinai (Exod. 34:6\u20137) have their embodiment: \u2018The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only [monogenous, \u2018unique\u2019] Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.\u2019 As Andreas J. K\u00f6stenberger comments, \u2018The reference in 1:14 to Jesus taking up residence among God\u2019s people resulting in the revelation of God\u2019s glory (the first occurrence of doxa in this Gospel) also harks back to OT references to the manifestation of the presence and glory (k\u0101b\u00f4d) of God, be it in theophanies, the tabernacle, or the temple.\u2019 James D. G. Dunn adds to the picture when he contends that the Fourth Gospel makes an epochal claim in verse 14 concerning this manifestation of the divine presence: \u2018something quite new is being claimed here. Not simply a dwelling among, an appearance to, a temporary visitation, but \u201cbecame\u201d\u2014incarnation\u2019. The Prologue does not stop there though. We read in John 1:17 that the Word who is the Son has a human name that anchors him securely in human history. The Word become flesh is Jesus Christ. As such he stands in contrast to Moses in this respect: \u2018For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.\u2019 Thus by John 1:17 we have learned that the abstract Logos now bears a personal name. The implication is staggering and well articulated by R. T. France: \u2018Now Jesus, as the Word made flesh, is a thoroughly concrete embodiment of the very nature of God. He is a living anthropomorphism, God expressed in human form.\u2019
\nAn incident related in the next chapter of John\u2019s Gospel throws more light on the nature of the divine presence now enfleshed. Jesus clears the temple\u2014the place where the divine presence is supposed to be found\u2014of those selling animals and birds for sacrifice as well as the money changers (John 2:13\u201322). When challenged, he replies in verse 19, \u2018Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.\u2019 His hearers are astonished (v. 20): \u2018It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?\u2019 In retrospect the evangelist knows the true import of Jesus\u2019 words (vv. 21\u201322): \u2018But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.\u2019
\nThis is no Jesus \u2018meek and mild\u2019. Understandably he is challenged by the vested interests. The Jews demand a sign. By what authority is Jesus permitted to behave so outrageously? In the light of the resurrection the disciples could fathom what Jesus was saying so puzzlingly on this dramatic occasion. K\u00f6stenberger sums up John\u2019s thesis\u2014and the temple cleansing is some of the evidence for it\u2014in the following illuminating way:
\nIn essence, the thrust of John\u2019s presentation of Jesus as the new temple is the conviction that instead of the old sanctuary, it is now Jesus who has become the proper place of worship for God\u2019s people. This marks all previous places of worship, and all manifestations of God\u2019s presence and glory with his people, as preliminary anticipations of his final and definitive revelation in the Lord Jesus Christ. Just as Jesus, as the new Israel, is the vine and his followers the branches, he is to be the center of all God\u2019s activity and of all worship directed to God. It is readily apparent, then, that John presents Jesus as divine, for worship is to be rendered to no one but God alone.
\nJesus is the temple presence of the God of Israel. John 1:14, which speaks of the Word\u2019s having tented or tabernacled (esk\u0113n\u014dsen) among us, with all its resonances of the tabernacle as the place of the divine presence in the wilderness, is now amplified in John 2 in concrete action within the precincts of the Jerusalem temple. G. K. Beale draws John 1:14 and John 2 together and rightly concludes, \u2018The special revelatory presence of God, formerly contained in the holy of holies of the tabernacle and temple, has now burst forth into the world in the form of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ.\u2019
\nThe unfolding Johannine narrative also makes plain the real humanity of this Word incarnate. A journey makes him weary by the time he reaches Jacob\u2019s well at Sychar in Samaria (John 4:6). At Bethany in Judea the death of his friend Lazarus makes him weep, and moves and troubles him (John 11:33\u201335). In the Johannine account this Jesus is no phantom but the God who wept human tears.
\nBut incarnation?
\nNothing reviewed thus far suggests that the New Testament believed that their Old Testament forebears were expecting an incarnation. Even John\u2019s Gospel, which has the most explicit incarnational theology, has no suggestion of such an expectation. With reference to the testimony of the Fourth Gospel Richard Bauckham rightly says, \u2018Thus God\u2019s gracious love, central to the identity of the God of Israel, now takes the radically new form of a human life in which the divine self-giving happens. This could not have been expected, but nor was it uncharacteristic. It is novel but appropriate to the identity of the God of Israel.\u2019 There is a very good reason for this. The incarnation was a mystery, as noted in the opening paragraph of this chapter. Speaking generally, David Hill captures the relevant sense of New Testament mystery well: \u2018In the New Testament, therefore, myst\u0113rion signifies a divine secret that is being (or has been) revealed in God\u2019s good time, an open secret in some sense.\u2019 H. H. D. Williams III amplifies the content of the mystery: \u2018In the New Testament a revealed mystery involves Jesus Christ and his place within God\u2019s plan of salvation.\u2019
\nThe key text for exploring the mystery for our purposes is found in 1 Timothy 3:14\u201316. However, it is not the only text in 1 Timothy that thematizes \u2018mystery\u2019. In 1 Timothy 3:9 we read in the esv, \u2018They must hold the mystery [myst\u0113rion] of the faith with a clear conscience.\u2019 The niv is more an interpretation at this point but a defensible one: \u2018They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience.\u2019 \u2018Mystery\u2019 has been rendered \u2018the deep truths of the faith\u2019. P. T. O\u2019Brien concurs when he comments, \u2018it is best to understand the phrase as referring to the corpus of Christian teaching\u2019. Our key text needs to be read with the earlier reference in mind.
\nAccording to Philip H. Towner, the term \u2018mystery\u2019 in these verses (which are hymnic in form) \u2018denotes the appearance of Christ in history as the hidden salvation plan of God\u2019. Paul writes to Timothy (1 Tim. 3:14\u201316):
\nAlthough I hope to come to you soon, I am writing you these instructions so that, if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God\u2019s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth. Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great:
\nHe appeared [ephaner\u014dth\u0113, \u2018was manifested\u2019] in the flesh,
\nwas vindicated by the Spirit,
\nwas seen by angels,
\nwas preached among the nations,
\nwas believed on in the world,
\nwas taken up in glory.
\nAs far as the structure of the hymn is concerned, there are three main views among scholars.
\nSignificantly for our purpose, whichever view is embraced, the first line of the hymn is seen to refer to the incarnation and that the incarnation is a part of the divine mystery. As I. H. Marshall argues, \u2018Although no subject is expressed \u2026 The language is based on that used elsewhere to describe how the Son of God was incarnate. The thought is of an epiphany in human form, and that a divine or heavenly subject is intended. The reference is certainly to the earthly life of Jesus and not his resurrection appearances.\u2019 In other words the incarnation is a datum of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) that hither to had not been made known. Vladimir Lossky captures the sense of mystery well: \u2018The work of Christ is a \u201cdispensation of the mystery which from all ages has been hidden in God\u201d, as St. Paul said, an \u201ceternal purpose which was realized in Jesus Christ\u201d. However, there is no necessity of nature in the incarnation.\u2026 It is the work of the will, the mystery of divine love.\u2019
\nGiven the mystery referred to in 1 Timothy 3:16 it is no surprise then that the Old Testament contains no explicit presentation of an incarnation as part of the hope of Israel. A returning Elijah? Yes! A coming Son of Man? Yes! A coming Davidic messiah? Yes! A God-man? No! If this is so, how could the Old Testament text and story have prepared the way, as this study is arguing? Is the incarnation one theme that arises de novo once the New Testament era has arrived? Thus a biblical theology of incarnation can start only with the New Testament text, unlike other themes such as convent, election and sacrifice, to name just a few. To answer these questions, help can be found in a surprising place, namely in a theory about theory.
\nNicholas Wolterstorff, the eminent Christian philosopher, offers a fascinating account of the nature of theorizing. In every theory some pattern is present. To determine whether the pattern is truly present, theories need to be weighed. Weighing theories requires beliefs. Some beliefs have to do with the data. He writes, \u2018At the center of all weighing of theory with respect to the presence or absence of the pattern claimed is a decision to take certain of one\u2019s beliefs about the entities within the theory\u2019s scope as data for one\u2019s weighing of the theory.\u2019 However, what is acceptable data is in turn contingent upon other beliefs that Wolterstorff calls \u2018data-background beliefs\u2019. He gives an example. He takes as a datum that the desk is brown because he believes that his sense of sight is working properly and that the light in the room is not distorting the colour. Importantly data-background beliefs are \u2018a condition of one\u2019s accepting as data that which one does\u2019.
\nHow is Wolterstorff\u2019s theory about theorizing relevant to the question of incarnation? In my view, without the Old Testament accounts of theophany\u2014especially the \u2019\u00ee\u0161 ones\u2014and depictions of God in anthropomorphic (e.g. depicted with ears, eyes, arms, hands, fingers), anthropopathic (depicted as angry, afflicted, grieving) and anthropopraxic ways (depicted as standing, sitting, ruling, fighting, walking) there would not have been the possibility of data-background beliefs that were crucial for the intelligibility of an actual incarnation\u2014for example, the belief that God was coming to Zion and the belief that a Davidic king, who by definition was human, was also coming. And the idea that implicit in certain key Davidic texts the figure in view resists being reduced to the merely human adds to the picture. Without these data-background beliefs who would have been able to combine the biblical ideas of God and humanity into the notion of God incarnate? Or again data-background beliefs about the Logos, the tabernacling presence of God, and creaturely flesh make the claim that \u2018The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us\u2019 plausible in a first-century setting.
\nAn older writer, H. P. Liddon, captures something of the significance of such data-background belief preparation in the following way. Of course, Wolterstorff\u2019s language was unavailable to him at his time of writing in the nineteenth century:
\nWhether in them [Old Testament theophanies] the Word or Son actually appeared, or whether God made a created angel the absolutely perfect exponent of His Thought and Will, do they not point in either case to a purpose in the Divine Mind which could only be realized when man had been admitted to a nearer and more palpable contact with God than was possible under the Patriarchal or Jewish dispensations? Do they not suggest, as their natural climax and explanation, some Personal Self-unveiling of God before the eyes of His creatures? Would not God appear to have been training His people, by this long and mysterious series of communications, at length to recognize and to worship Him when hidden under, and indissolubly one with a created nature? Apart from the specific circumstances which may seem to explain each Theophany at the time of its taking place, and considering them as a series of phenomena, is there any other account of them so much in harmony with the general scope of Holy Scripture, as that they were successive lessons addressed to the eye and to the ear of ancient piety, in anticipation of a coming Incarnation of God?
\nHe describes the role of theophanies as \u2018This preparatory service\u2019. My argument is that anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms similarly prepare the way for what Friedman describes as the \u2018ultimate anthropomorphism \u2026 God in the form of a man, yet still the one and only God. Cosmic yet personal. The logos yet flesh. People could walk and talk with an incarnation of an infinite being beyond the universe.\u2019
\nConclusion
\nBiblical theology as a discipline traces the great themes of Scripture from their first appearance in the canon to the last, whether the key term (or terms) appears or the idea does. Key ideas such as covenant, election, sacrifice, kingdom, the land, inheritance and presence, among many others, become the lens through which the unfolding biblical story is viewed. Old Testament believers would have found foregoing terms in Hebrew (or Aramaic) and the ideas instantiated by them familiar. \u2018Covenant\u2019 (b\u0115r\u00eet) and the idea of it, for example, would have been familiar to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and the psalmist, but incarnation? Not even the notion of the divine presence, whether resident in tabernacle or temple, would necessarily have implied incarnation. It is true that the trajectory of key texts relating to David and his house were suggestive of a more than merely human figure in view. But that trajectory was subtle, not easily perceived before the actual coming of Christ.
\nWith the incarnation comes a newness in God\u2019s dealings with humankind that early church fathers appreciated. Anthony Tyrell Hanson captures the newness well:
\nThe newness came through the incarnation, not through the revelation of the Son as such. What was new was not grace, or faith, or rejection, or love, or Son, or Word, but God the Word incarnate, God the Son incarnate.\u2026 It was the taking of flesh as such, the act, the event in history, culminating of course in death and resurrection, that was unique, supreme, new.
\nPaul made the same point: \u2018Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: He appeared in the flesh\u2019 (1 Tim. 3:16). And for Paul the one who appeared in the flesh is he in whom the fullness of deity dwells, as his letter to the Colossians makes plain: \u2018For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity [theot\u0113s, \u2018deity\u2019] lives in bodily form\u2019 (Col. 2:9).
\nBut why incarnation per se and not some other way? What was the rationale for the incarnation? To that question we shall soon turn but next is an excursus dealing with a contemporary debate.
\nExcursus: the pre-incarnate Christ, theophany and the Old Testament debate
\nAs we saw in previous chapters, the early church fathers (e.g. Clement of Alexandria) and some modern commentators (e.g. Walter Kaiser, Jr.) see in the Old Testament anthropomorphic theophanies appearances of the pre-incarnate Logos or Son. A robust trinitarian faith would make the suggestion all the more plausible. For the trinitarian Christian, following Augustine, omnia opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (the works of the Trinity outward are undivided), the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are in every divine action but not necessarily in exactly the same way. And therefore any anthropomorphic theophany in the OT ex hypothesi involved the second Person of the triune Godhead. Furthermore, if there is merit in Fretheim\u2019s distinction between \u2018Theophanies of God as Warrior\u2019 and \u2018Theophanies of God as Bearer of the Word\u2019\u2014and I believe there is\u2014then the idea that it is the Word who is the actor in these Old Testament anthropomorphic theophanies is strengthened. This proposition is further buttressed if the doctrine of appropriation is brought into play. This doctrine assigned a particular work especially to one of the triune Godhead: creation to the Father, revelation and redemption to the Son, and sanctification to the Holy Spirit, although the Trinity is involved in every divine action in some way.
\nI have argued that once Christ came, in retrospect the New Testament writers and early church fathers could see in the Old Testament connections, implications and entailments hither to hidden from view. However, recently a different view has been championed. In this view those who experienced such anthropomorphic theophanies in Old Testament times knew they were seeing Christ. Controversially Paul Blackham argues so. According to Blackham not only are there Christophanies in the Old Testament, but that testament also teaches the doctrine of the Trinity. He rejects conservative scholarship that has notions of progressive revelation that deny that Old Testament saints such as Abraham explicitly put their trust in Christ. He also rejects critical scholarship that attempts to see some kind of Christian development of the Hebrew understanding of God. Margaret Barker illustrates his point:
\nThe Trinitarian faith of the Church had grown from the older Hebrew belief in a pluriform deity, and so the earliest Christian exegetes had not been innovators when they understood the Lord of the Hebrew Scriptures as the second God, the Son of El Elyon. The One whom they recognized in Jesus had been the Lord, and so they declared \u2018Jesus is Lord\u2019.
\nBlackham draws attention to that Old Testament strand of evidence that affirms that God cannot be seen, and yet some do see God (e.g. cf. Exod. 24:9\u201311; 33:18\u201323 inter alia). Next he examines the use of such scriptural evidence by second-century fathers. In particular he explores how Justin Martyr and Irenaeus drew a trinitarian understanding of God from Old Testament evidence, with the Father as the hidden One and the Son as the appearing One, especially in the guise of the angel of the Lord. He maintains that, theologically speaking, God is not known without a mediator and that mediator is the Son. He further argues, following Colin E. Gunton, it was Augustine who decisively broke from this tradition of the theological interpretation of Old Testament Scripture. In other treatments of Christophany he appeals to some of the luminaries in the Christian past such as Luther, Calvin, John Owen and Jonathan Edwards.
\nThere is little doubt that New Testament characters and writers saw Christ at work in the Old Testament. In John\u2019s Gospel we find these words on the lips of Jesus himself:
\nYour father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.
\n\u2018You are not yet fifty years old,\u2019 they said to him, \u2018and you have seen Abraham!\u2019 (John 8:56\u201357)
\nEven after Jesus had performed so many signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him. This was to fulfil the word of Isaiah the prophet:
\n\u2018Lord, who has believed our message
\nand to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?\u2019
\nFor this reason they could not believe, because, as Isaiah says elsewhere:
\n\u2018He has blinded their eyes
\nand hardened their hearts,
\nso they can neither see with their eyes,
\nnor understand with their hearts,
\nnor turn\u2014and I would heal them.\u2019
\n(John 12:37\u201340)
\nIsaiah said this because he saw Jesus\u2019 glory and spoke about him. Likewise Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 10:1\u20134 that Christ was active in the time of Moses:
\nFor I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.
\nPeter adds to the Pauline picture by referring to the prophets. 1 Peter 1:10\u201312 states:
\nConcerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.
\nHowever, the question is not whether Christ was at work in the Old Testament but whether Old Testament saints consciously believed in him. On this latter issue Blackham is less convincing. It is one thing to say that the Old Testament saints were saved by Christ. It is quite another to say that they knew Christ was their saviour.
\nAs Graeme Goldsworthy contends, Blackham appears to be interpreting the New Testament primarily through the lens of the Old Testament, whereas primarily the Old Testament should be interpreted through the lens of the New. Justice needs to be done to the incarnation as \u2018the final revelation of God\u2019. Or, put another way, there is more merit in a more traditional understanding of progressive revelation than Blackham allows. Moreover Blackham does not appear to feel the weight of opposing arguments and alternative exegeses. This attitude Goldsworthy labels \u2018exegetical authoritarianism\u2019, and not without some justification.
\nDespite the arguments above, a caveat is in order. I have argued that the idea that these Old Testament anthropomorphic theophanies are appearances of the pre-incarnate Christ needs to be weighed carefully. Calvin has wisdom to offer on this point:
\nI willingly accept what the old writers teach, that when Christ appeared in those early times in the form of a man, it was a prelude of the mystery which was revealed when God manifested in the flesh. But we must beware of imaging, that Christ then was incarnate; for we do not read that Christ was incarnate; for we do not read that God sent his Son in the flesh before the fullness of time.
\nThe suggestion that the anthropomorphic theophanies were actually appearances of the pre-incarnate Son of God is plausible and the idea is defensible. However, it must be observed that even though this proposition is consistent with the biblical testimony it is not demanded by it.
\nWhat an extraordinary person Jesus was to have caused such a searching for Old Testament language, personages, events and institutions in the attempt to construe his identity and significance. His own reading of the Old Testament as the back story to his own identity and mission led the way to reading those Scriptures in a way that may have eluded\u2014and in the case of the incarnation I have contended did\u2014even the Old Testament writers and readers. Some contemporary proposals for Jesus\u2019 identity hardly begin to explain this phenomenon of so reading the ancient Scriptures, whether that of Jesus as the cynic sage or as the wandering Jewish charismatic healer, to name just two. These proposals concerning Jesus are just too small. There is an explanation large enough, however, and it is the classic one articulated at Chalcedon in ad 451. This Jesus is one Person who is truly God and truly human. The Word became incarnate. The secret is out. Now it is an open secret or a \u2018mystery\u2019, in the Pauline sense of the term.
\nChapter Five
\nCur Deus homo
\nS\u00f8ren Kierkegaard (1813\u201355) was a Christian genius, albeit an eccentric one. He is widely regarded as \u2018the father of existentialism\u2019. This nineteenth-century Danish thinker saw his role as one of reintroducing Christ to Christendom. He believed, for example, that the clergy in Denmark were \u2018little more than a branch of the civil service\u2019. He knew how to write in a way that would startle his readers. For him the incarnation represented an absolute paradox that posited the Eternal\u2019s entering time. He famously and provocatively wrote of the incarnation in the following way:
\nIf the contemporary generation had left nothing behind them but these words: \u2018We have believed that in such and such a year the God appeared among us in the humble figure of a servant, that he lived and taught in our community, and finally died,\u2019 it would be more than enough. The contemporary generation would have done all that was necessary; for this little advertisement, this nota bene on a page of universal history, would be sufficient to afford an occasion for a successor [future believers], and the most voluminous account can in all eternity do nothing.
\nKierkegaard captures the wonder of an incarnation in these words but such minimalism leaves the believer in an epistemological vacuum. \u2018More than enough\u2019? Hardly! Happily the New Testament writers did not think so. So then why, according to the New Testament writers, did God become human, or, to use the famous title of Anselm\u2019s classic work, cur Deus homo?
\nNew Testament answers
\nIn general terms the incarnation qualified Jesus to be what Adam failed to be and what Israel failed to be: the true image of God walking the earth and exercising dominion. He proved to be the faithful son in contrast to Adam and Israel. Thomas Oden finely sums up the rationale of the incarnation as found in the biblical testimony. He offers five biblically defensible reasons for the incarnation:
\nTo reveal God to humanity (John 1:18; 14:7\u201311)
\nTo provide a high priest interceding for us able to sympathize with human weaknesses (Heb. 4:14\u201316)
\nTo offer a pattern of the fullness of human life (1 Pet. 2:21; 1 John 2:6)
\nTo provide a substitutionary sacrifice for the sins of all humanity (Heb. 10:1\u201310)
\nTo bind up the demonic powers (1 John 3:8)
\nI would add a sixth: to redeem those under law (Gal. 4:4). Let\u2019s now examine these, although not necessarily in Oden\u2019s order.
\nTo reveal the Father to us
\nThe revelatory importance of the incarnation is in view in John\u2019s Gospel to a degree that no other New Testament document can rival. From the Prologue (John 1:18) we learn that the Word who became flesh without ceasing to be the Word is the exegete of the invisible Father: \u2018No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father\u2019s side [kolpos, lit. \u2018bosom\u2019, \u2018breast\u2019, \u2018chest\u2019], he has made him known [ex\u0113g\u0113sato]\u2019 (esv). Ren\u00e9 Kieffer comments insightfully, \u2018The prologue now makes it explicit that the Word is identical with Jesus, the Messiah, v. 18, in contrast to Moses who could not see God without dying (Ex 33:20), Jesus is said to be in the Father\u2019s bosom and is himself \u201cGod\u201d (probably the original reading, attested already in P66 and P75).\u2019 Kieffer points out, \u2018The \u201cbosom\u201d expresses the intimacy Jesus shares with his Father (see 13:25 on the beloved disciple), in his pre-existence, his mission on earth, and his return to the Father (cf. 17:5). He is therefore the proper revealer of God.\u2019 John 1:18 appears to follow the ancient epistemological principle of connaturality (like knows like).
\nThe encounter between Jesus and Nathaniel at the end of the first chapter of John throws further light on the revelation Jesus brings. Nathaniel is astonished at Jesus\u2019 knowledge of him, as related in John 1:47\u201348:
\nWhen Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, \u2018Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.\u2019
\n\u2018How do you know me?\u2019 Nathanael asked.
\nJesus answered, \u2018I saw you while you were still under the fig-tree before Philip called you.\u2019
\nThis revelation elicits a confession of faith from Nathanael in verse 49: \u2018Then Nathanael declared, \u201cRabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel.\u201d \u2019 Jesus\u2019 response is profound (John 1:50\u201351): \u2018Jesus said, \u201cYou believe because I told you I saw you under the fig-tree. You will see greater things than that.\u201d He then added, \u201cVery truly I tell you, you will see \u2018heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on\u2019 the Son of Man.\u201d \u2019 Hans Urs von Balthasar rightly draws out the significance of this claim: \u2018In the Son, therefore, heaven is open to the world. He has opened the way from the one to the other and made exchange between the two possible, first and foremost through his Incarnation (Jn 1:51).\u2019 The temporary stairway between earth and heaven that Jacob witnessed in Old Testament times (Gen. 28:12) has given way to the permanence of the Word enfleshed as the link between the human and the divine. There is a bridge between heaven and earth that was not there before. In Pauline language the mediator (mesit\u0113s) has come (1 Tim. 2:5).
\nA. M. Ramsey maintained, \u2018God is Christlike and in him there is no unChristlikeness at all.\u2019 The famous scene set in the upper room in John\u2019s Gospel in which Jesus prepares his disciples for his return to the Father provides evidence for Jesus\u2019 contention (John 14:1\u20139). Jesus detects their alarm at the thought of his departure and in the light of their anxiety promises them a future with him (John 14:1\u20134):
\nDo not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father\u2019s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.
\nThomas is puzzled: \u2018Lord, we don\u2019t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?\u2019 (v. 5). Jesus responds with another one of the famous emphatic \u2018I am\u2019 statements found in this Gospel: \u2018I am [eg\u014d eimi ] the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him\u2019 (vv. 6\u20137). This time it is Philip asking the questions: \u2018Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us\u2019 (v. 8). Jesus\u2019 answer is striking. To see him at work is to see the Father at work: \u2018Don\u2019t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, \u201cShow us the Father\u201d?\u2019 (v. 9). Indeed shortly after this, in the narrative flow of the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is presented in prayer to the Father in a garden setting. In that prayer he sums up his mission in revelatory terms (John 17:6 esv): \u2018I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world.\u2019 According to Andreas J. K\u00f6stenberger, \u2018The notion that Jesus reveals the Father in his whole Person, both works and words, is foundational to John\u2019s Gospel (e.g., 1:18; 8:19, 27; 10:38; 12:45; 14:9\u201311).\u2019 Put another way, Jesus has made the divine nature known. D. A. Carson rightly suggests:
\nDo you want to know what the character of God is like? Study Jesus. Do you want to know what the holiness of God is like? Study Jesus. Do you want to know what the wrath of God is like? Study Jesus. Do you want to know what the forgiveness of God is like? Study Jesus. Do you want to know what the glory of God is like? Study Jesus all the way to that wretched cross. Study Jesus.
\nJesus has truly exegeted the Father by word and deed.
\nTo redeem us
\nPaul\u2019s letter to the Galatians contains deep Christology. In it Paul skilfully places his Christology in an eschatological framework of how the promises to Abraham are realized in Jesus Christ: \u2018If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham\u2019s seed, and heirs according to the promise\u2019 (Gal. 3:29). He explains further by drawing attention to the problematic in Galatians 4:1\u20133, \u2018What I am saying is that as long as an heir is under age, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were under age, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world.\u2019 However, there is a divine timetable. According to that timetable, \u2018when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law [hina tous hypo nomon exagoras\u0113 ], that we might receive adoption to sonship\u2019 (Gal. 4:5, my emphasis). The idea of \u2018redemption\u2019 in this context may have a double background: Yahweh\u2019s redemption of his \u2018firstborn son\u2019 Israel in the Old Testament and the Greco-Roman slave market where slaves were purchased. Both ideas would have resonated with Galatian congregations that would have had a mixture of Jewish and Gentile believers in their membership. John Stott comments:
\nWhat is emphasized in these verses is that the one whom God sent to accomplish our redemption was perfectly qualified to do so. He was God\u2019s Son. He was also born of a human mother, so that He was human as well as divine, the one and only God-man. And He was born \u2018under the law\u2019, that is, of a Jewish mother, into the Jewish nation, subject to the Jewish law. Throughout His life He submitted to all the requirements of the law. He succeeded where all others before and since have failed: He perfectly fulfilled the righteousness of the law.
\nStott then draws out the theological implications of the Pauline text:
\nSo the divinity of Christ, the humanity of Christ and the righteousness of Christ uniquely qualified Him to be man\u2019s redeemer. If He had not been man, He could not have redeemed men. If He had not been a righteous man, He could not have redeemed unrighteous men. And if He had not been God\u2019s Son, He could not have redeemed men for God or made them the sons of God.
\nThe divine largesse does not stop with the sending of the Son. The Spirit is also sent. Paul argues (Gal. 4:6\u20137), \u2018Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, \u201cAbba, Father.\u201d So you are no longer a slave, but God\u2019s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.\u2019 The sending of the Son secures our status of sonship. The sending of the Spirit of the Son secures our Jesus-like experience of sonship. We too pray \u2018abba Father like he did\u2019.
\nTo represent us as great high priest
\nThe priest in Israel played a mediatorial role in representing the worshipper to God and God to the worshipper. None was more important in this role than Israel\u2019s high priest. The letter to the Hebrews with its Jewish orientation makes much of this role in presenting Jesus Christ as the High Priest. The letter contends in Hebrews 2:16\u201318:
\nFor surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham\u2019s descendants. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
\nThis text contains the first explicit reference in Hebrews of Jesus in the high priestly office, which is to play such an important role in subsequent chapters, especially 7\u201310.
\nJesus in this role is the intercessor par excellence according to Hebrews 4:14\u201315: \u2018Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to feel sympathy for our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are\u2014yet he did not sin.\u2019 The reason why Jesus is able to so sympathize is because he is truly human. Thus the writer can confidently exhort the readership, \u2018Let us then approach God\u2019s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need\u2019 (Heb. 4:16). His priesthood is not subject to the limitations death brings, where priest after priest is removed by it: \u2018Now there have been many of those priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; but because Jesus lives for ever, he has a permanent priesthood. Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them\u2019 (Heb. 7:23\u201325). His priesthood is Melchizedekian (Heb. 7:11\u201319). Moreover in this high priestly role he is credentialled to offer the definitive sacrifice for sins. Unlike the Levitical priesthood he is without sin, and therefore as both offerer and offering he has a purity the old order could never provide (Heb. 10:1\u201314). A point we shall return to shortly.
\nJesus\u2019 humanity is a necessary condition for his carrying out not only his high priestly role as intercessor in Hebrews 2:16\u201318, as we have seen, but also for his being the liturgical leader, as in Hebrews 8:1\u20132: \u2018Now the main point of what we are saying is this: we do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle [t\u014dn hagi\u014dn leitourgos kai t\u0113s sk\u0113n\u0113s, lit. \u2018of the holy things servant and of the tent\/tabernacle\u2019] set up by the Lord, not by a mere human being.\u2019 If there had been no incarnation, there would have been no one qualified to so serve humankind. As Leon Morris says, \u2018The nature of the work Jesus came to accomplish [as high priest] demanded the Incarnation.\u2019
\nTo substitute sacrificially for us
\nBoth the letter to the Hebrews and the Pauline letters make clear the importance of Christ\u2019s righteous humanity as a prerequisite for his saving work. He could not have stood in our place as our substitute without it. Moreover without his righteousness we could not stand before a holy God as righteous unless in union with him. His righteousness becomes our own.
\nWe begin with Hebrews and return to the theme of Jesus as our high priest. Hebrews 7:26\u201328 is of special relevance as it summarizes so much of Hebrews\u2019 presentation of Jesus\u2019 high priestly ministry:
\nSuch a high priest truly meets our need [eprepen, \u2018fitting\u2019]\u2014one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself. For the law appoints as high priests men in all their weakness; but the oath, which came after the law, appointed the Son, who has been made perfect for ever.
\nAs our high priest he perfectly represents us before God. Unlike the old Levitical order he does not have to offer a sacrifice for his own sins\u2014he had none: \u2018one who is holy [hosios], blameless [akakos], pure [amiantos], set apart from sinners\u2019. William L. Lane comments, \u2018The three terms are not descriptive of static moral qualities but of dispositions demonstrated by the incarnate Son in spite of his complete involvement in the life of common humanity.\u2019 This high priest now exalted to the heavens is \u2018the high priest appropriate to the Christian community \u2026 qualified by spiritual and moral perfection\u2019. And as the sacrifice itself he provides a perfection no bull or goat could give. Hebrews 9:14 draws out the latter point in a classic a fortiori argument: \u2018How much more [in comparison to bulls and goats], then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!\u2019 (my emphasis).
\nThe accent of the superiority of Christ\u2019s sacrifice to those under the old order reaches its apogee in Hebrews 10:1\u201318. That superiority is articulated in three ways. Under the old order animal sacrifices were offered; under the new order Christ\u2019s own body was the offering. Under the old order an earthly setting was the location for sacrifice. Under the new it is the heavens. Under the old order sacrifices were daily affairs. Under the new only one affair\u2014that of Christ offered once for all time. What is of striking interest is the writer\u2019s use of Psalm 40:6\u20138a in Hebrews 10:5\u20137:
\nTherefore, when Christ came into the world, he said:
\n\u2018Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,
\nbut a body you prepared for me;
\nwith burnt offerings and sin offerings
\nyou were not pleased.
\nThen I said, \u201cHere I am\u2014it is written about me in the scroll\u2014
\nI have come to do your will, my God.\u201d \u2019
\nAs Guthrie rightly argues, \u2018The use of kosmos (\u201cworld\u201d), along with the context, suggests here that the incarnation is in mind.\u2019 The writer of Hebrews then draws out the theological implications of Christ\u2019s coming into the created order. Christ came into the world to do away with the old order and to bring in a new one. A new covenant has come (Heb. 10:15\u201316). It took the sacrifice of himself to do so and what he did was definitive and final (v. 12, eis to di\u0113nekes, \u2018for ever\u2019, \u2018uninterrupted\u2019). Hence, having offered himself, \u2018he sat down at the right hand of God\u2019 (v. 12) and as per verse 13 fulfilled Psalm 110:1: \u2018waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet\u2019 (esv).
\nPaul too draws attention to the substitutionary nature of Christ\u2019s saving work. Two texts for 2 Corinthians are of special importance here. We shall treat them in reverse order to their appearance in the letter and bring them into conversation with one another. The first is 2 Corinthians 8:9, \u2018For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.\u2019 This wonderful Christology is posited by Paul for a very practical reason. He wants to motivate the Corinthians to give to the Jerusalem project: a collection from the Pauline churches to be taken to Jerusalem. The Macedonians have given generously to provide for the needs of the Jerusalem saints, but what of the Corinthians? Will they be generous too? If they act with Christlike generosity, they will be indeed.
\nIn 2 Corinthians 8:9 Paul presents the great stooping as an \u2018incarnational event\u2019. Colin G. Kruse captures it well: \u2018It is most likely that what Paul had in mind was the whole drama of redemption, especially the incarnation.\u2019 Grace does what it does not have to do: give up the riches of heaven for our sakes. This is the nature of the divine largesse. But grace does not end the story there. The coming and cross of Christ\u2014both incarnation and atonement are in view most probably\u2014enrich us. This is one of the purposes of Christ\u2019s incarnation. What are these riches? To quote an earlier phrase from St Paul, they are \u2018an eternal weight of glory\u2019 (2 Cor. 4:17 esv).
\nIf both Jesus\u2019 coming and the cross are in view in 2 Corinthians 8:9, then Paul\u2019s powerful claim in 2 Corinthians 5:21, our second text, provides a lens through which to view just how \u2018poor\u2019 Christ was willing to become for our sakes: \u2018God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.\u2019 According to A. M. Hunter, in 2 Corinthians 5:21 \u2018Paul declares that the crucified Christ, on our behalf, took the whole reality of sin upon himself, like the scapegoat: \u201cFor our sake [hyper h\u0113m\u014dn, \u2018on behalf of us\u2019] he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.\u2019 \u201d Our sin was exchanged for his righteousness. Hunter goes on to say, \u2018We are not fond nowadays of calling Christ\u2019s suffering \u201cpenal\u201d or of styling him our \u201csubstitute\u201d; but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Paul\u2019s view of the atonement?\u2019
\nTo defeat the evil one
\nAs we saw in an earlier chapter, in the biblical story of origins evil enters the human sphere through the serpent later identified in the canon of Scripture as the devil, the evil one (cf. Gen. 3:1 and Rev. 20:2). We also read of a promise made that the serpent will be overcome by the male seed of a woman:
\nAnd I will put enmity
\nbetween you and the woman,
\nand between your offspring and hers;
\nhe will crush your head,
\nand you will strike his heel.
\n(Gen. 3:15)
\nHowever, for many Westerners to speak of the evil one is to enter the realm of fantasy. Modern materialism has banished the world of spirits. So much for the biblical view of what is real. Surprisingly spirits are fine for entertainment. Horror films and supernaturalistic television series have large followings. Significantly many Christians in the West are not immune from this Zeitgeist. Notional belief in the devil and his demons remains, but for all practical purposes life is lived as though there are only two realms of persons: God and us. One important contribution of the Pentecostal movement is to take the kingdom of darkness and spiritual warfare seriously. Here is an area where Western Christians can learn from other believers in the majority world.
\nChristian anthropologist and missiologist Paul Hiebert especially drew attention to the need for the West to learn from other parts of the world. He describes his own experience in India in these terms:
\nThe reason for my uneasiness with the biblical and Indian worldviews should be clear: I had excluded the middle level of supernatural this-worldly beings and forces from my own worldview. As a scientist I had been trained to deal with the empirical world in naturalistic terms. As a theologian I was taught to answer ultimate questions in theistic terms. For me the middle zone did not really exist. Unlike Indian villagers, I had given little thought to spirits of this world, to local ancestors and ghosts, or to the souls of animals. For me these belonged to the realm of fairies, trolls, and other mythical beings.
\nHiebert describes the truncated universe that many a Western Christian lives in as \u2018the flaw of the excluded middle\u2019. The middle level of unseen spirits has been excluded.
\nJesus did not embrace the flaw of the excluded middle. He had no difficulty in recognizing that evil cannot be reduced to the bad behavior of humankind. There is an enemy of God and humanity. In the parable of the weeds in Matthew 13:24\u201330 he speaks of an enemy who sows weeds among the wheat, and in his explanation in verses 36\u201343 identifies the enemy as \u2018the evil one\u2019, \u2018the devil\u2019 (esp. Matt. 13:38\u201339). In Mark\u2019s Gospel in response to a criticism that his power came from the dark side Jesus argued in classic reductio ad absurdum terms (Mark 3:23\u201327):
\nSo Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: \u2018How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. In fact, no one can enter a strong man\u2019s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man\u2019s house.\u2019
\nThus he compared the devil to a strong man. Before a strong man can be despoiled he needs to be bound. Jesus saw his work in exorcism in those terms. He was despoiling the strong man by liberating those possessed from Satan\u2019s grip.
\nThe question though is whether any of the New Testament writers saw this combat against the devil as a rationale for the incarnation. Two important passages from two different New Testament writers come into view in answer to the question. The first is found in Hebrews 2:14\u201315: \u2018Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that [with this purpose in mind: hina of purpose] by his death he might break the power [katarge\u014d, \u2018to render inoperative or ineffective\u2019] of him who holds the power of death\u2014that is, the devil\u2014and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.\u2019 The devil\u2019s power lies in the very human fear of death. But to quote the title of John Owen\u2019s famous Puritan work, the cross represents \u2018The Death of Death in the Death of Christ\u2019. How the devil exercises his power is not explained but simply stated. What is clear though is that in sharing our humanity Christ enters the sphere of the devil\u2019s rule and through his own death deprives the devil of his power. George H. Guthrie comments, \u2018Since death was the prescription for victory in this case, the only way the Son could accomplish the needed task was to die, and the only way to die was to become human. This is, for our author, the logic of the Incarnation.\u2019 Jesus thus comes before the reader in Hebrews 2:14\u201315 as humanity\u2019s champion who does battle on our behalf.
\nThe second text is found in the Johannine literature. There were those in the orbit of the first readers who were denying that a real incarnation had taken place. John would have none of it. In 1 John 3:7\u20138 we read, \u2018Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil\u2019s work.\u2019 Stephen S. Smalley has it right when he comments:
\nThe aorist passive ephaner\u014dth\u0113 (literally, \u2018he was manifested\u2019) indicates that \u2026 John is referring here to the Incarnation of Jesus in time and space. It was a real appearing, in history, with a specific and salvific purpose in mind (in saying this, John is perhaps mindful of those heretics who were ready to claim that the Incarnation was merely an illusion).
\nAs for purpose, again Smalley\u2019s comments are helpful: \u2018John is thus saying here that the coming of Jesus, in flesh and blood, was concerned with unpicking the net of evil in which the devil has always attempted to trap human beings.\u2019
\nGiven the testimonies of Hebrews 2:14\u201315 and 1 John 3:7\u20138 Calvin rightly sums up the nexus between the incarnation, the atonement and the Christus Victor theme in his famous Institutes:
\nIn short, since neither as God alone could he feel death, nor as man alone could he overcome it, he coupled human nature with divine that to atone for sin he might submit the weakness of the one to death; and that, wrestling with death by the power of the other nature, he might win victory for us.\u2026 But we should especially espouse what I have just explained: our common nature with Christ is the pledge of our fellowship with the Son of God; and clothed with our flesh he vanquished death and sin together that the victory and triumph might be ours.
\nNo incarnation, no atonement; but also no atonement, no victory over the evil one.
\nTo model true humanity
\nIn the New Testament the Old Testament concept of walking in the ways of Yahweh becomes walking in the ways of the Christ. As 1 John 2:6 says, \u2018Whoever claims to live in him must live as [opheilei kath\u014ds ekeinos periepat\u0113sen, \u2018ought to walk as that one\u2019] Jesus did.\u2019 In other words the imitatio Dei of the older revelation becomes overwhelmingly the imitatio Christi of the new one. Not that the imitatio Dei is missing from the New Testament, but generally the accent falls elsewhere. For example, 1 Peter has both ideas. In 1 Peter 1:15\u201316 the readers are exhorted to be holy as God is holy (cf. Lev. 19:2). Even so, when Peter addresses the matter of Christian slaves abused by their masters he appeals to the model Christ provided. Indeed in 1 Peter 2:21 the idea of walking in Christ\u2019s footsteps is made quite explicit: \u2018To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.\u2019
\nThe question though is not whether the New Testament writers exhort readers to be like Christ. They do. The issue is whether the New Testament explicitly states that a rationale for the incarnation was to provide an ethical model. Thomas Oden certainly thinks so in arguing that one of the purposes of the incarnation was \u2018To offer a pattern of the fullness of human life.\u2019 He brackets 1 Peter 2:21 and 1 John 2:6 as proof texts for his contention. Perhaps it would be more accurate to argue that both 1 Peter and 1 John draw a moral application out of the facts of the incarnate Son\u2019s life.
\nThere is, however, a famous Pauline text that brings the incarnation to the fore and applies it to Christian behaviour. In Philippians 2:5\u201311 we find one of the richest Christological passages in all the New Testament and worth quoting in full:
\nIn your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
\nWho, being in very nature God,
\ndid not consider equality with God something
\nto be used to his own advantage;
\nrather, he made himself nothing [eken\u014dsen, lit. \u2018emptied\u2019],
\nby taking the very nature of a servant [doulos, lit. \u2018slave\u2019],
\nbeing made in human likeness.
\nAnd being found in appearance as a man,
\nhe humbled himself
\nby becoming obedient to death\u2014
\neven death on a cross!
\nTherefore God exalted him to the highest place
\nand gave him the name that is above every name,
\nthat at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
\nin heaven and on earth and under the earth,
\nand every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
\nto the glory of God the Father.
\nIn this magnificent hymnic passage (vv. 6\u201311) Paul articulates the journey of Christ on our behalf from eternity into time and back to eternity. In classic terms here are the two states of Christ: the state of humiliation (vv. 6\u20138, esp. the descent) and the state of glory (vv. 9\u201311, esp. the ascent).
\nPaul\u2019s point is a pastoral one. There are problems at Philippi: \u2018Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind\u2019 (Phil. 2:1\u20132). Unity is needed. Perhaps Philippians 4:2\u20133 illustrates the problem: \u2018I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.\u2019 Understandably then Paul seeks a change in the Philippians\u2019 attitudes: \u2018Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others\u2019 (Phil. 2:3\u20134). Informed by Christ\u2019s great stooping, both in incarnation and atonement, the believer is to be like-minded: that is to say, humble and other-person centred (Phil. 2:5). Paul illustrates what he means by way of a reference to his associate in ministry, Timothy. In Philippians 2:20\u201321 he refers to his co-worker Timothy, who exhibits the very Christlike mindset and practice that he is commending to the Philippians. He writes of Timothy, \u2018I have no one else like him, who will show genuine concern for your welfare. For everyone looks out for their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ.\u2019 Paul contrasts Timothy as someone \u2018who will genuinely care for the things concerning you [ta peri hym\u014dn]\u2019 with those who \u2018seek the things of themselves\u2019 [ta heaut\u014dn]\u2019 (my tr.). Paul appears to be picking up the language of verse 4. Timothy is a true servant shaped by the example of Christ.
\nThe timing of the incarnation: insight from Thomas Aquinas
\nFor some Protestants the very mention of Thomas Aquinas creates anxiety. However, this medieval theologian beloved by so many Roman Catholic thinkers is one of the pre-eminent minds of the Christian tradition along with Augustine, Calvin and Barth. To say this is not to say that our critical faculties are to be suspended at the mere mention of the name. Rather it is to be open to learn as well as to critique. As the saying goes, \u2018Have many teachers [Aquinas would be one, Calvin another] but only one master [Christ].\u2019
\nAquinas turned his considerable intelligence to the matter of the timing of the incarnation. Paul A. Glenn accurately captures Aquinas\u2019s reasoning in this paraphrase:
\nThe time of the Incarnation was most suitable. Had God become man to redeem us immediately after the first sin was committed, human pride would not have been humbled in consequence of that sin; man would not have realized, through an impressive stretch of time, the greatness of the treasure he had lost. And it was good for man to prepare, by prayerful longing, for the redemption; thus he would gain a keen awareness of the value of redemption; and of his need for it, so that, when it came, he would ardently take advantage of it. On the other hand, it would not do to have the Incarnation delayed, lest human longing turn to hopelessness and despairing disappointment. Therefore at exactly the right time, in the \u2018fullness of time,\u2019 as St. Paul says (Gal. 4:4), God became man.
\nAquinas\u2019s three reasons are clearly in view in this part of the Summa Theologica. If the incarnation had taken place too soon, then human pride would not have been challenged sufficiently. We would not have appreciated what was lost by the Fall. Additionally, to use Augustine\u2019s famous words, \u2018You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You\u2019. Without the elapse of time would our hearts have grown sufficiently restless? Would we have appreciated redemption\u2019s cost and therefore its worth? On the other hand, however, if the incarnation were too long in coming, then despair would have triumphed. The divine timing then was exquisite.
\nAnother question needed addressing in Aquinas\u2019s time: Why not delay the incarnation until the end of human history? Aquinas had an answer to that question too:
\nThe perfection of glory to which human nature will finally be raised by the Word Incarnate will appear when souls and bodies are united again at the end of the world in the time of the general judgment. Yet it could not be fitting to have the Incarnation deferred to that moment. For man needed a remedy for sin, knowledge of God, reverence, good morals. And the Incarnation gave man these needed things: first, by hope and anticipation in those who lovingly awaited it, and then, by faith and devotion in those who actually experienced it in fact and in its fruits. None of these things would have come to man had the Incarnation been delayed to the end of the world. Hope and longing would have disappeared; the hearts of men would have grown cold.
\nOnce more the divine timing of the incarnation was just right, or, to use a term favoured by Aquinas, \u2018fitting\u2019. Belief in a sovereign God would expect no less.
\nConclusion
\nAs I write this conclusion the USA is in the grip of the presidential race. All over the country there are surrogates for the incumbent president and for the rival speaking on behalf of their respective leaders. Surrogates abound as do television ads. Some of the surrogates are former or presently serving politicians, some are business successes, some are entertainers. None by definition is the leader. The wonderful news of the gospel is that God did not send a mere revelatory spirit nor a mere prophetic surrogate but the Son himself (Mark 12:1\u201312). No other could reveal the Father as the Son could. No other could redeem alienated humanity as the Son could. No other could both represent and substitute for us as the Son could. No other could defeat the evil one as the Son could. No other could model all that Adam and Israel should have been as the sinless, ever obedient, ever trusting Son could. And he did!
\nExcursus: Did the divine Son assume fallen or unfallen human nature?
\nIn classic Chalcedonian terms Jesus Christ is one Person who is truly God and truly human. With reference to Christ\u2019s humanity, Chalcedon affirms that he is \u2018of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin\u2019. But what sort of humanity did he assume in this post-Fall world? Did he assume a fallen human nature as Karl Barth maintained or did he assume an unfallen human nature as Oliver Crisp argues? And what is the dogmatic rank of the answer?
\nCrisp usefully distinguishes two kinds of temptation and two possible subjects of temptation when it comes to men and women. One kind of temptation is external. The serpent comes from outside Eden. The other kind is internal. This temptation comes from the appetites of fallen flesh. One kind of subject of temptation is an innocent human being (e.g. Adam in Gen. 2). Another kind of subject is a sinful human being (e.g. the wretched person of Rom. 7).
\nWhat then of Christ? Certainly Jesus experienced external temptation. In Matthew 4:1 we read, \u2018Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.\u2019 The tempter clearly comes from the outside in an attempt to tempt Jesus into deviating from the Father\u2019s will. However, there is no evidence in the Gospels that Jesus faced internal temptation. Internal turmoil, yes! The agony in Gethsemane makes that plain. In Luke 22:44 we find, \u2018And being in anguish [ag\u014dnia, lit. \u2018agony\u2019], he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.\u2019 Even so, internal turmoil is not necessarily the product of temptation, as the Gethsemane account shows. Paul does ascribe to Christ \u2018the likeness of sinful flesh\u2019 (Rom. 8:3). Does this Pauline phrase suggest that Christ possessed a fallen human nature? N. T. Wright argues that such a question is beside the point:
\nTo debate whether Jesus\u2019 humanity was therefore \u2018sinful humanity\u2019 or \u2018sinless humanity,\u2019 whether \u2018fallen\u2019 or \u2018unfallen,\u2019 seems to me beside the point. What matters is that it was genuine humanity, not a sham (cf. Phil 2:7), where \u2026 [en homoi\u014dmati anthr\u014dp\u014dn, \u2018in the likeness of humans\u2019] does not mean \u2018like a human being, but not actually one,\u2019 but rather \u2018a true human being, bearing the true likeness.\u2019 Jesus could and did suffer and die, truly and really; he was in principle capable of sinning, but unlike all other humans did not. It was God\u2019s design that, in his truly human death, sentence would be meted out on sin once for all.
\nJ. D. G. Dunn adds, \u2018Hence whatever the precise force of the homoi\u014dmati [likeness] it must include the thought of Jesus\u2019 complete identification with \u201csinful flesh\u201d (cf. njb: \u201cthe same human nature as any sinner\u201d).\u2019 Calvin understands the phrase differently: \u2018But he says, that he came in the likeness of the flesh of sin; for though the flesh of Christ was polluted by no stains, yet it seemed apparently to be sinful, inasmuch as it sustained the punishment due to our sins, and doubtless death exercised all its power over it as though it was subject to itself.\u2019 Calvin seems in no doubt that Christ\u2019s human flesh was unfallen. In no doubt also is W. J. Dumbrell who comments, \u2018Greek homoi\u014dma (likeness) is chosen to further understand that, though Jesus shared fully with humanity, he did not share sinful humanity.\u2019 Dumbrell makes the important point that \u2018 \u201cFlesh\u201d here is not a physical term but the this-worldly orientation shared by all as a result of the Fall, hence its character as a force.\u2019 If so, then Wright is correct to maintain that to argue from this verse (Rom. 8:3) whether Christ\u2019s human nature was fallen or unfallen is beside the point. A different approach is needed that takes into account wider considerations.
\nGiven the way Paul in his letter to the Romans appeals to Adam as a type of the one to come and Christ as the antitype that corresponds to Adam, it is important to reflect theologically on the features of the correspondence between them. Regarding human nature, both came to be in this world without a human father. In T. V. Morris\u2019s categories Adam and Christ are essentially human but not commonly human. Commonly human beings are the result of a union of a male and female. Both Adam and Christ are in their own ways the first of a race of creatures. Adam comes before us as the head of the old creation of humankind. Christ in contrast is the head of the new creation of humankind. Furthermore, both Adam and Christ were innocent when facing the tempter. (Adam fell. Christ did not.) Christ was therefore tempted not internally but externally like Adam. Given these correspondences it seems more likely that Christ assumed unfallen human nature. In other words, as Crisp rightly contends Christ was impeccable (not liable to sin) and not merely sinless. Even so, Barth is right to maintain, \u2018True, the Word assumes our human existence, assumes flesh, i.e., He exists in the state and position, amid the conditions, under the curse and punishment of sinful man.\u2019 Christ did not become incarnate in some unreal unfallen creation, but in this actual fallen one. Even so, it does not follow that the human nature he assumed was a fallen one.
\nWhat I argued in an earlier excursus, on the question whether Christ would have come if there had been no Fall, applies here as well. In terms of dogmatic rank both the question and my answer are speculative. However, Gunton is worth quoting once more, \u2018Hypothetical questions are dangerous in theology, because it [theology] is concerned with what God has done, not what he might have done instead. But in this case the question enables us to bring out the point of what has happened.\u2019
\nChapter Six
\nThe significance of the incarnation
\nThis study thus far has yielded conclusions that are classically patristic. In terms of the Nicene Creed of ad 325, the Son of God came down from heaven to save us. In terms of the ancient hymn the Te Deum (fourth century ad), in so doing the Son of God overcame the sting of death and opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. In terms of the famous Chalcedonian definition of ad 451, Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God is one Person in two natures, truly God and truly human. The task now is to consider the question \u2018So what?\u2019 Or, put another way, what is the significance of the incarnation? Theologically considered, just how important is the incarnation? As we shall see, that significance is manifold but for the purposes of this discussion I shall divide significance into two kinds: theological and existential. I make no pretence to being exhaustive in so doing.
\nTheological significance
\nThe theological significance of the incarnation will be explored in terms of its methodological implications for the doing of theology, its import for the question of God and change, for its affirmation of the value of creation, for the valuing of human life, for our understanding of mission, for its importance in the Christian\u2019s encounter with other religions in the world, for theodicy and defence in the face of evil, and for matters of the dogmatic ranking of doctrines.
\nFor theological method
\nPaul G. Hiebert maintains that there are three types of theology. Systematic theology examines \u2018the fundamental categories of and structures implicit in Scripture\u2019 in a synchronic way. Biblical theology reads Scripture diachronically with sensitivity to its storyline as it unfolds in space and time. Narrative is to the fore. He then suggests a third kind of theology, which he calls \u2018missiological theology\u2019. This form of theology asks, \u2018What does God\u2019s Word say to humans in this particular situation?\u2019 Others might call this \u2018applied theology\u2019. Whether the theology in view is systematic theology or biblical theology or missiological theology so called, theology cannot be done as though we do not live on a visited planet. In other words we ought not to do Christian theology as though Christ had never come.
\nKarl Barth draws out the methodological implications of Christ\u2019s coming for theological thought in the following terms:
\nWe must realize that the Christian message does not at its heart express a concept or an idea, nor does it recount an anonymous history to be taken as truth and reality only in concepts and ideas. Certainly the history is inclusive, i.e. it is the one which includes in itself the whole event of \u2018God with us\u2019 and to that extent the history of all those to whom \u2018God with us\u2019 applies. But it recounts this history and speaks of its inclusive power and significance in such a way that it declares a name, binding the history indissolubly to this name and presenting it as the story of this name. This means that all the concepts and ideas used in this report (God, man, world, eternity, time, even salvation, grace, transgression, atonement and any others) can derive their significance only from the bearer of this name and from His history, and not the reverse. They cannot have any independent importance or role based on a quite different prior interpretation. They cannot say what has to be said with some meaning of their own or in some context of their own abstracted from this name. They can only serve to describe this name\u2014the name of Jesus Christ.
\nBarth is stating an important principle in the theological methodological realm that St Peter expressed in the soteriological one. Peter preached, \u2018And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men [anthr\u014dpoi includes both males and females] by which we must [dei, \u2018of necessity\u2019] be saved\u2019 (Acts 4:12 esv). In both cases there is in a pluralistic culture an unavoidable scandal in attaching so much methodologically, soteriologically and, I would add, epistemologically to that Name with its sufficiency, supremacy and finality. The scandal of particularity remains.
\nIn a nutshell, as Barth realized, we cannot do theology as though Christ has not come in the flesh.
\nFor the doctrine of God and change
\nIf we indeed live on a visited planet, then did that event change God, and if so in what ways? After all, John 1:14 claims that the Word (logos) became (egeneto) something other than the Word, namely flesh (sarx).
\nThere are several logical possibilities here. One is that the incarnation changed the very being of God. This seems to be an implication of kenoticist Christologies that argue that either the Son of God divested himself of his omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence in becoming incarnate (e.g. Gottfried Thomasius) or put them into abeyance. For the most radical kenoticist of them all, Thomas J. J. Altizer, in becoming incarnate God ceased to be God and thus the death on the cross was the death of God. He writes, \u2018The radical Christian proclaims that God has actually died in Christ, that this death is both a historical and a cosmic event, and, as such, it is a final and irrevocable event, which cannot be reversed by a subsequent religious or cosmic movement.\u2019 If that were so, it is utterly mystifying why a New Testament was ever written predicated as it is on the assumption of a living God. Taking another tack, perhaps God\u2019s being per se was not changed by the incarnation. Rather God\u2019s character has been changed by a matter of degree. God is now more loving and more compassionate because of the experience of incarnation. However, the fact that the divine love and compassion are more in view in the incarnate Son of God may be better understood as an epistemological claim, not an ontological one. Is there a better answer?
\nThe better answer is the classical one. As in the Athanasian Creed (sixth century) the incarnation is claiming \u2018not the conversion of Godhead into flesh, but the assumption of manhood into God\u2019 (Lat. non conversione divinitatis in carnem, sed assumptione humanitatis in Deum). That is to say, the Trinity now relates to itself qua Trinity in a new way through the humanity of Christ. As Bruce Milne rightly argues, we are not talking about the triune Godhead and minus regarding the incarnation. As he states it, \u2018At a theological level kenosis appears to move in the wrong direction. Its basic equation is: incarnation = God minus. The biblical equation is rather: incarnation = God plus.\u2019 The plus is the new way the Father, Son and Holy Spirit relate through the assumed humanity of the Son. Rather we are speaking of the Trinity and plus. The change is relational and permanent.
\nFor the affirmation of the created order
\nArchbishop of Canterbury William Temple famously said that Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions. Clearly he wasn\u2019t suggesting that here is a faith interested only in materialistic pursuits. Rather his point was that Christianity affirms the material order. The Creator created matter. Indeed the world to come of Scripture and the classic creeds does not leave matter behind.
\nAs Jason Byassee argues, \u2018Grace does not destroy nature, nor does it leave it alone, but transfigures it.\u2019 Romans 8:19\u201322 is eloquent testimony to this prospect. Creation has a future:
\nFor the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
\nWe know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
\nPaul personifies creation under the figure of a pregnant woman about to give birth. Creation\u2019s destiny is intertwined with that of God\u2019s children. The Christian hope is not for the individual alone but has cosmic implications. As for the individual, our material bodies likewise have a future, according to Paul in verses 23\u201324: \u2018Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.\u2019 Paul adds to the picture in his Philippians letter. He sees the incarnate Son of God\u2019s own glorified body as the paradigmatic prospect for the believer: \u2018But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body\u2019 (Phil. 3:20\u201321).
\nHowever, some in the early church period had difficulty embracing the affirmation of flesh, as 1 John 4:1\u20133 shows:
\nDear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
\nJohn is opposing a Christology that finds a real incarnation difficult to entertain. Jesus Christ may not have been rejected but the idea of his enfleshment, as in John 1:14, is rejected.
\nThe erroneous view that John is contesting seems to be a precursor to the full-blown Docetist ones of the next century that are associated with Gnosticism. John Macquarrie writes of the challenge that a robust doctrine of creation and incarnation posed to some of the religious thinkers in the early church period. He states the threat in these terms:
\nThus very early in Christian history the Church was threatened by the rise of various Gnostic and docetic sects. Sometimes these denied that the creation is the work of God and assigned it to demons; or in the case of Marcion, it was even claimed that the god of the Hebrew Scriptures is himself a demonic power. Likewise, the doctrine of the incarnation was explained away as mere appearance.
\nWhat provoked such responses to Christian claims? Mark A. Noll captures the conceptual challenge of incarnation to the Docetist in particular in these arresting words:
\n[I]t is obvious that early Christian writers were making unusually bold claims about the person and work of Jesus Christ. He appears on earth and appears to be human, but he is also said to possess\u2014and to bestow\u2014the glory of the one true God. Mysteries, conundrums, paradoxes and apparent contradictions abound \u2026 How could an apparently ordinary human born to an apparently ordinary Galilean woman be said to partake of what the one true God enjoyed as his sole prerogative? If Jesus somehow did embody the divine glory, why was it recorded that he seemed to lack the prerogatives of deity\u2014that he needed to eat and drink, that he became weary, that he professed not to know everything, and (most counterintuitively) that he could die? But maybe, if testimonies about the glory of God in Christ were true, then the reports of human limitations were deceptive and Jesus never really experienced human weaknesses he only seemed to experience.
\nNoll\u2019s last sentence captures the essence of ancient Docetism. Jesus only seemed (dokein, \u2018to appear\u2019) human.
\nHow does the incarnation then affirm the material order? The Word really did become flesh. As Michael Williams states:
\nJohn 1:14 does not say that the Word became nous [mind]. It says that the Word became sarx [flesh]\u2014the bodily stuff of God\u2019s good creation. The Word became flesh not in some abstract realm of truth where only minds exist, but in history.\u2026 Dwelling among us, he was seen by flesh and blood, a particular human being. Pretty material stuff. Pretty historical. Glorious.
\nJohn in his letter adds his own testimony (1 John 1:1): \u2018That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched\u2014this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.\u2019 And the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, remains flesh albeit now glorified post-resurrection. Matter and spirit are not antithetical. A biblically informed Christianity is not Platonism in religious guise. The body is not a body-tomb (s\u014dma-s\u0113ma) from which the soul must escape to some ethereal realm.
\nFor the valuing of human life
\nIn 1969 Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood summarized years of his own thinking about human life and its value in these ominous words:
\nA quarter of a century ago a few of us began to say that faith in the possibility of a cut-flower civilization is a faith which is bound to fail. What we meant was that it is impossible to sustain certain elements of human dignity, once these have been severed from their cultural roots. The sorrowful fact is that, while the cut flowers seem to go on living and may even exhibit some brightness for a while, they cannot do so permanently, for they will wither and be discarded. The historical truth is that the chief sources of the concepts of the dignity of the individual and equality before the law are found in the biblical heritage. Apart from the fundamental convictions of that heritage, symbolized by the idea that every man is made in the image of God, there is no adequate reason for accepting the concepts mentioned.
\nIn his startling statement Trueblood did not exhaust the range of relevant \u2018fundamental convictions\u2019 made available through the biblical heritage.
\nThe very fact that God became truly human underlines the value of human life. The Creator did not become a lion (apologies to C. S. Lewis) or a dolphin or a parrot. He became one of us. True, medieval divine and of nominalist fame William of Ockham, with his idea of the absolute sovereignty of God (potestas absoluta, \u2018absolute authority\u2019 or \u2018absolute power\u2019), did argue that God could have become incarnate as a stone or an ass or a wooden object. But his view has been judged rightly as absurd (e.g. John Macquarrie). As another philosopher, this time the eminent twentieth-century Roman Catholic Jacques Maritain, argued often, \u2018the sanctity of human life ultimately rests in the fact that Christ became incarnate as a human creature, not some other sort of creature\u2019. Protestant theologian Karl Barth adds to the chorus: \u2018The respect for human life which becomes a command in the recognition of the union of God with humanity has an incomparable power and width.\u2019 It is no surprise then to find in the Gospels that Jesus operated with a scale of creaturely value. Human life is more valuable (diapher\u014d, lit. \u2018carry through\u2019, tr. \u2018are of more value than\u2019 in the context) than that of a sparrow, even a flock of them (Matt. 10:29\u201331). Human life is more valuable (diapher\u014d) than that of a sheep (Matt. 12:11\u201312). This valuing of human life over that of other creatures is criticized by some as \u2018speciesism\u2019 but is fundamental to a sound theological anthropology that factors in the reality of an incarnation.
\nThe fact of the incarnation has profound implications for Christian ethical thinking and moral practice whether in view are the issues surrounding the beginnings of life (e.g. abortion) or the endings of human life (e.g. euthanasia). Regarding the beginnings of human life, J\u00fcrgen Moltmann points out:
\nIf the Son of God became wholly and entirely human, and if he assumed full humanity, then this does not merely take in human personhood; it includes human nature as well. It does not embrace adult humanity alone; it comprehends humanity diachronically, in all its phases of development\u2014that is, it includes the being of the child, the being of the foetus [sic] and the embryo. The whole of humanity in all its natural forms is assumed by God in order that it may be healed. So it is \u2018human\u2019 and \u2018holy\u2019 in all its natural forms, and is prenatally by no means merely \u2018human material\u2019, or just the preliminary stage of humanity.
\nIndeed if Christ were not incarnate at conception, then Christology becomes adoptionist, with an already fertilized human ovum becoming divinely endorsed, or even Nestorian, with an already fertilized human ovum becoming a vehicle for divine presence, resulting in both a human presence and a divine one.
\nFor our understanding of mission
\nIt is popular these days to make much of the incarnation as the model for Christian mission in the world\u2014a balanced mission of word and deed. The second Lausanne Conference held in Manila in 1989 states in its manifesto, \u2018True mission is incarnational. It necessitates entering humbly into other people\u2019s worlds, identifying with their social reality, their sorrow and suffering, and their struggles for justice against oppressive powers.\u2019 At the earlier Lausanne Conference held in 1974 the eminent John Stott in his addresses argued that the Johannine text below (John 20:19\u201323) is the \u2018crucial form\u2019 of the Great Commission:
\nOn the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, \u2018Peace be with you!\u2019 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
\nAgain Jesus said, \u2018Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.\u2019 And with that he breathed on them and said, \u2018Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone\u2019s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.\u2019
\nThis passage is widely appealed to in order to justify an incarnational model of mission to embrace, and not just by John Stott. The argument runs in general along the following lines. Just as Christ identified with us in becoming human, we too need to identify with those whom we are trying to reach with the love of God. James Davison Hunter expresses the point in this way as he teases out the implications of the incarnation: \u2018For the Christian, if there is a possibility for human flourishing in a world such as ours, it begins when God\u2019s word of love becomes flesh in us, is embodied in us, is enacted through us.\u2019 We are to be a faithful presence in a broken world as a kind of incarnatus prolongus (the incarnation prolonged) in concert with the quintessential faithful presence of the Word who became flesh. However, the accent in Jesus\u2019 words is not on identification but on the reception of the Holy Spirit and the promise of forgiveness. As Andreas K\u00f6stenberger rightly comments, \u2018The fact that Jesus shows to his disciples his pierced hands and his side (cf. 20:19), as well as his commission to forgive or retain sins, ties the disciples\u2019 mission to Jesus\u2019 death (cf. chaps 18\u201320; cf. also 17:4 and 19:30).\u2019 J. Todd Billings adds to the point by drawing attention to the reference to the Holy Spirit in the Johannine passage. He explores the implication of Jesus\u2019 saying \u2018Receive the Holy Spirit\u2019 as follows: \u2018It is not our own \u201cincarnation,\u201d then, but the Holy Spirit who makes Christ present in us and beyond us.\u2019 In his view the New Testament model for mission is not an incarnational one but \u2018the much richer theology of servant-witness and cross-cultural ministry \u2026 in union with Christ by the Spirit\u2019. Furthermore he contends that the popular slogan in some circles of \u2018live the Good News rather than preach the Good News\u2019 fails in the light of the biblical witness. He is right.
\nThat Christ in the incarnation identified with humankind is a truth to affirm and prize. Who can deny that identifying with those one hopes to reach has no better exemplar than Christ? He came to the lost sheep of Israel as a Jew of the house of David. However, the question is where the emphasis falls in the New Testament literature in so far as mission is concerned. It is instructive that neither the Matthean version of the Great Commission nor the Lucan one thematize the incarnation. The accent in Matthew falls on disciple-making, baptizing, teaching and obedience (Matt. 28:18\u201320). In Luke\u2019s account we read, \u2018The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things\u2019 (Luke 24:46\u201348). These disciples were not witnesses of the Bethlehem manger but of Christ\u2019s death and resurrection. And, as in John 20:19\u201322, the forgiveness of sins is to the fore.
\nBetter then to speak of the Christological model for mission where the incarnation is an important facet yet not the centre of gravity but the presupposition for that centre\u2019s cruciform shape.
\nFor the encounter with other religions
\nI have lived in three countries. Most of my life I lived in Australia. Twice I lived in England and now for a number of years in the USA. The religious scene in the three countries is plural. Judaism, Christianity of various sorts, Islam, Buddhism and a host of others look for their place in the sun. Theology of religions is increasingly popular as a subject for publication. Yet for those Christians with a high view of scriptural authority encountering other religions cannot be done with integrity as though Christ had never come in the flesh. But the nature of that claim and its particularity is becoming increasingly problematical for many in a multifaith world. Our discussion at this point needs to be selective, so for our purposes only one other religion will be our focus: Islam.
\nTo a Muslim the very idea of a God who could become incarnate and weep human tears is nonsensical. How can the transcendent Allah weep, let alone weep human tears? I made this point a few years ago in a conference and the question was raised about one of the names of Allah in the Qur\u2019\u0101n, namely al-Rahim (The Merciful). Indeed the Qur\u2019\u0101n opens with \u2018In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful [al-ra\u1e25im]\u2019. However, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058\u20131111) argues in discussing this name:
\nMercy is not without a painful empathy which affects the merciful, and moves him to satisfy the needs of the one receiving mercy. Yet the Lord\u2014praise be to him most high\u2014transcends that, so you may think that this diminishes the meaning of mercy. But you should know that this is a perfection and does not diminish the perfection of mercy inasmuch as the mercy depends on the perfection of its fruits. So long as the needs of those in need are perfectly fulfilled, the one who receives mercy has no need of suffering or distress in the merciful one; rather the suffering of the merciful only stems from a weakness and effect in himself.
\nDivine perfection and transcendence exclude suffering in this view. Furthermore the Christian claim that Jesus the Christ is God incarnate presupposes that God is Trinity and that God can become a human being. In fact to describe Jesus as the Son of God to a Muslim\u2019s ear implies sexual intercourse between God and Mary. All these claims are problematical in the extreme for Muslims. In Islam, Allah is the only God there is and Allah\u2019s transcendence is such that having a son is unthinkable: \u2018Verily, God is only one God; too exalted (subhanahu) is He that He should have a son (walad).\u2019 Islam has a Christology but it is a low one that sees Jesus as a human creature only\u2014albeit the second greatest prophet. Only Muhammad is greater. In fact ascribing deity to Christ is to commit the sin of shirk (regarding someone as the partner of another). That is to say, another, namely Jesus, is being associated with Allah. This is idolatry and for Muslim thinker Shabbir Akhtar \u2018blasphemous mythology\u2019 and \u2018only fantasy\u2019.
\nBy way of contrast, the classic Christian view of Jesus as expressed in the Chalcedonian definition of ad 451 is a high Christology. This definition affirms that Christ is one Person in two natures. He is truly human and truly God. Richard Bauckham makes this illuminating point about the early Christian creeds and definitions: \u2018The Trinitarian definitions of the faith at Nicea and Constantinople and the Christological definition at Chalcedon are not, of course, in any sense substitutes for the apostolic witness to Christ in the New Testament. They are formulated essentially as guides to reading the Gospel story of Jesus.\u2019 Of these definitions the Chalcedonian one that Bauckham cites is of particular importance for what it both said and left unsaid. It affirms that Jesus Christ is one Person in two natures, truly God and truly human. It did so in categories not found in any Bible concordance (e.g. homoousios, \u2018of the same being\u2019). However, as B. B. Warfield argued in relation to the Trinity\u2014and it applies to Christology as well\u2014sometimes other than Bible words are needed to preserve the sense of Scripture. He argues:
\nA doctrine [of the Trinity] so defined can be spoken of as a Biblical doctrine only on the principle that the sense of Scripture is Scripture. And the definition of a Biblical doctrine in such un-Biblical [better, \u2018non-biblical\u2019] language can be justified only on the principle that it is better to preserve the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture.
\nThe use of non-biblical terminology becomes all the more non-biblical when deviant versions of Christology come quoting Scripture (e.g. the ancient Arians). What Chalcedon left unsaid was any theory of how metaphysically speaking Jesus Christ can be one Person in two natures, truly God and truly human. This is one of its strengths in my view. Its great affirmations make it clear that to deny that Jesus Christ is one Person, as popular Nestorianism did, it seems, is to fall off a doctrinal cliff. To deny that he is truly God is likewise to go over the edge. This is the problem with Islam\u2019s low Christology and many a liberal theology. To deny that Jesus Christ is truly human is to go into free fall likewise. One thinks here of Gnostics like the second-century Basileides. The mystery of Jesus Christ as the theoanthr\u014dpos (the God-man) is not to be dissolved by a reductionism of his divine aspect: he was only human as in Islam. Nor is it to be dissolved by a reductionism of his human aspect: he was divine only. The Chalcedonian fathers read their Scriptures aright. Crucially this classic answer withstands biblical scrutiny.
\nIncidentally the story of the incarnation shows us why all religious stories cannot be equally true. Islam affirms that Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin but is not the incarnate Son of God. Classic Christianity affirms both claims. Someone has clearly got the story wrong. If I may update an observation of the philosopher E. S. Brightman: a universe in which both Christianity and Islam were true would be a madhouse. The principle of non-contradiction needs to be observed. \u2018A\u2019 cannot be non-\u2018A\u2019 at both the same time and in the same respect. A typewriter cannot be blue all over and red all over at the same time and in the same respect. For, make no mistake, both Christianity and Islam claim that their foundational stories are not merely useful fictions, or, to use Plato\u2019s expression, \u2018a noble lie\u2019. Rather both religions assert that they are making truth claims.
\nFor theodicy and defence
\nAs I write, the war in Afghanistan continues and there is further violence in Iraq. Syria is in a particularly bloody period, and a friend has just been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. A few years ago one of my close friends died on Christmas Day. We went through theological college together. Every Christmas now reminds of that fact. Death, disease, destructive behaviour stalk humankind. In a world of so much manifest suffering what can the historic Christian faith say? John 11:35 tells us that \u2018Jesus wept\u2019. In other words, God incarnate wept. But what more might be said?
\nFollowing a helpful distinction found in the work of Alvin Plantinga, let me suggest that in the face of evil all that may be offered is a defence rather than a theodicy. A theodicy gives the reason God allows or does X, whereas a defence offers a more moderate proposal. A theodicy might argue that the reason is that God so prizes human free will that it was worth a creation that might have evils in it. The Creator desired a creature that could love its maker freely. In contrast, a strong defence would give reasons for trusting in God\u2019s moral integrity (e.g. the love of God expressed through the cross) and also offer a theory of how that integrity is not compromised by the presence of evils in creation. A moderate defence would likewise give reasons for trusting in God\u2019s moral integrity, but unlike the strong defence offer no account of how the existence of evil comports with that integrity. I would contend that because of the limitations in scope of special revelation\u2014not all has been revealed (Deut. 29:29)\u2014only some kind of defence is possible. Integral to any such defence would be the fact that God incarnate wept human tears. Outside Eden God in Christ knows human pain and grief from the inside of the human condition. More than that, God in Christ has acted to defeat evil through Christ\u2019s coming and cross, as Hebrews 2:14\u201315 makes plain: \u2018Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death\u2014that is, the devil\u2014and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.\u2019
\nOn the one hand Dietrich Bonhoeffer was right to argue that \u2018Only the suffering God can help.\u2019 Historic Christianity of the Bible and the creeds says he has indeed helped. On the other hand Baron von H\u00fcgel was right to argue we need help, and not just a fellow sufferer. God in Christ instantiated both desiderata. As Kevin J. Vanhoozer argues, \u2018God is not Whitehead\u2019s \u201cfellow sufferer who understands\u201d but the \u201csovereign sufferer who withstands.\u201d \u2019
\nFor dogmatic rank
\nThe sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther was many things: a transformative leader, an engaging preacher, a pioneering Bible translator into the vernacular, a hymn writer and a still influential theological writer, among other contributions. He was also astute in judging his times. He argued:
\nIf I profess, with the loudest voice and clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battle field beside is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.
\nChurch history illustrates Luther\u2019s contention. Some examples are in order. In the first century the emphasis was on grace, not works of the law, contra the Judaizers. In the second century it was the reality of Christ\u2019s humanity contra Gnosticism. In the third century it was the reality of the three eternal persons of the one God contra Sabellianism. In the fourth century it was the essential Trinity contra the Arians. In the fifth century it was the two natures of Christ, truly God and truly human, contra the Eutychians. And so forth. These days, as we have seen above, it is both Trinity and Christology contra Islam.
\nA good way to ascertain the dogmatic rank of a theological proposition is to ask what would be lost if the claim were untrue. In the case of the incarnate Son of God\u2019s humanity a whole host of other key claims fall to the ground. If the Son of God had not become truly human, then he could not have served as the prophet like Moses of Deuteronomy 18:15\u201318, nor as the messianic Davidic king of Psalm 2, nor as the servant of the Lord of Isaiah 53, nor as the cursed substitute of Galatians 3:13, nor as our representative great high priest of Hebrews 4:14\u201316, nor as the role model of 1 Peter 2:18\u201325. In other words he could not have been the mediator of whom Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 2:5\u20136, where Paul accents Christ\u2019s humanity: \u2018For there is one God and one mediator [mesit\u0113s] between God and mankind [anthr\u014dp\u014dn, pl.; includes males and females], the man [anthr\u014dpos, sg.] Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people.\u2019 Clearly the incarnation is no minor doctrinal claim. Both its relevance and importance remain acute. Even so, it is significant that the two ordinances Jesus left with his disciples\u2014baptism and the Lord\u2019s Supper\u2014focus on his death, resurrection and return, not his coming into the world in the first place. The latter is important, yes! All important, no!
\nExistential significance
\nBy \u2018existential significance\u2019 I mean the significance of the incarnation for the individual living in the broken creation that longs itself to be remade. Two aspects of the significance will be explored: appreciating the depths of the divine love as seen in the incarnation, and cultivating a sense of wonder. Again this discussion is not exhaustive.
\nAppreciating the depths of divine love
\nThis is not an easy world in which to believe in a God of love. Death stalks us all. Disease is humanity\u2019s constant companion. And we destroy one another in war and crime. So to claim that God is not only there but is also good raises the questions \u2018How do you know this? Where is the evidence?\u2019 The New Testament tells us where to look.
\nThe evidence provided by 1 John 4:9\u201310 is crucial for answering the questions posed above. John writes, \u2018This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.\u2019 The Christian is to look to the coming and cross of Christ to know that God is indeed love. The genius of Scripture is to offer narratival definitions of key terms. If we want to know what biblical forgiveness looks like, we go back to the story of how Joseph forgave his brothers who sold him into slavery (Gen. 50:15\u201321). If we want to know what repentance is, we think of the story Jesus told of the return of the prodigal son to his father (Luke 15:11\u201332). And if we want to know what divine love is in our sort of world and the evidence for it, we tell the story of the incarnation and the atonement: Christmas and Easter. Philosopher Roger Scruton captures in some measure the divine goodness in his Gifford Lectures when he writes:
\nGod revealed himself on that occasion as we do\u2014by coming to the threshold of himself. He came before Moses as a point of view, a first person perspective, the transcendental \u2018I am\u2019 that cannot be known as an object but only as a subject. This perspective can become a real presence among us only if it can be revealed in the world of objects, as the human subject in the human face. But how can this be?\u2026 Christianity\u2019s answer to that question and that answer is the incarnation. God, in the person of Christ, is present among us. It is from the life of Christ that we can understand the true nature of God\u2019s goodness.
\nSimilarly Hans Urs von Balthasar argues, \u2018But this love is no mere diffused, all-pervading medium, dissolving everything in vague sentiment; on the contrary, it becomes present in the exact features of one particular, historical Person.\u2026 It attains visibility in his very precise words, actions, sufferings and miracles.\u2019 Without the incarnation the human story becomes a very dark one indeed. In Shakespearean terms, as Macbeth states it, humanity\u2019s story becomes
\na tale
\nTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
\nSignifying nothing.
\nHowever, in Johannine terms the good news is that light\u2014the light of life\u2014has come into the world (John 1:4\u20139).
\nCultivating a sense of wonder
\nFamously Aristotle maintained that philosophy begins in wonder. If that is true of philosophy, how much more so the Christian life? Wonder at what Paul described in Ephesians 1:7\u20138 as \u2018the riches of God\u2019s grace that he lavished on us\u2019. Lavished on us in Christ is Paul\u2019s argument.
\nIn this section we look at the wonder that quite properly stems from looking back to what God in Christ has done and then the wonder that flows from looking forward to what God in Christ will do.
\nWonder in retrospect
\nTo state the obvious, Christianity, unlike say Scientology, is not a new religion on the human scene. Generally speaking, for us as moderns the new has an attraction the old has not. C. S. Lewis even coined a phrase for it: \u2018chronological snobbery\u2019. For the chronological snob the new is always to be preferred over the old. As a consequence, for many in the West the Christian story is a very old hat and worthy only of satire, as in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian. In the film Jesus\u2019 words \u2018Blessed are the peacemakers\u2019 gets misheard as \u2018Blessed are the cheese makers.\u2019 Brian and a host of others ultimately are crucified and happily sing on their crosses, \u2018Look on the bright side of life.\u2019 A hideously cruel form of punishment becomes a vehicle for comedy.
\nSomeone who was aware of the loss of wonder at the stupendous nature of the Christian story was Christian essayist, playwright and lay theologian Dorothy Sayers. She had a deep appreciation of the nature of drama. Sayers expresses her wonder with a great deal of verve as she looks back to the coming of Christ into the world and to his cross:
\nSo that is the outline of the official story\u2014the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull\u2014this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero \u2026 If this is dull, what, in Heaven\u2019s name, is worthy to be called exciting?
\nIn her conclusion she reinforces her point:
\nNow, we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.
\nSayers felt the wonder of it. And she rightly sees the drama is not reducible to the Christmas story. Easter is crucial as well. Significantly the drama has not ended. There is the world to come.
\nWonder at the prospect
\nOne of the great milestones in Christian history was the call and conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road as narrated in the book of Acts. He encountered the risen Christ and it transformed his life. However, in what form did he meet Jesus on that day? Was Jesus embodied in some post-resurrection sense or was he a disembodied spirit? Paul\u2019s letters make it clear that Jesus was embodied in some way. He informed the Corinthians in his magnificent cumulative argument for the resurrection that he had seen the Lord, as had other apostles (1 Cor. 15:7\u20138): \u2018Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.\u2019 \u2018As one abnormally born\u2019 clearly has the Damascus road in view. In fact the very term \u2018resurrection\u2019 entails \u2018embodiment\u2019. Moreover he encourages the Philippians by reminding them of their citizenship in heaven and of the great prospect ahead of them (Phil. 3:20\u201321): \u2018But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.\u2019 The prospect of seeing the glorified incarnate Christ ought to fill the believer with longing, according to the apostle in 2 Timothy 4:8, \u2018Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day\u2014and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for [\u0113gap\u0113kosi, \u2018have loved\u2019] his appearing.\u2019
\nPaul was not the only apostle who lived sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). John in his first letter (1 John 3:1\u20133) spells out the prospect in an intimate way:
\nSee what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
\nFor John the end-time prospect is the transformation of the children of God. The visio Dei in this text is actually the visio Christi. There is an ancient epistemic principle that only like can know like. In the end, to see Christ there needs to be ontological transformation. Paul in his letters calls it \u2018glorification\u2019 (e.g. Rom. 8:30).
\nGod-with-us (concomitance) will find its apogee in the consummation represented by the new heavens and the new earth of Revelation 21\u201322. In Revelation 21:1\u20134 (esv) the seer reports:
\nThen I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, \u2018Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.\u2019
\nThe great covenant goal of God-with-us is now met. In the words of my biblical theology teacher Graeme Goldsworthy, which I heard in class so many times, \u2018God\u2019s people are in God\u2019s place under God\u2019s rule.\u2019
\nAll is now sacred space. J\u00fcrgen Moltmann sums up the end-time picture in these colourful terms: \u2018With this the whole creation becomes the house of God, the temple in which God can dwell, the home country in which God can rest.\u2019 Spatially speaking, the New Jerusalem like the Holy of Holies of Old Testament times is a cube (Rev. 21:16). Again, as Moltmann observes, \u2018In this respect the city resembles no earthly city, and no earthly temple either. But it does correspond to the Holy of Holies in Israel\u2019s temple, the inner sanctuary (1 Kgs 6:17\u201320).\u2019 Any distinction between the sacred and the profane no longer applies. For this city is filled with priest-kings. As priests they worship God and the Lamb (Rev. 22:3), and as kings they reign with the Lamb on the throne (Rev. 22:5). As Augustine wrote in his classic work The City of God with reference to the world to come, \u2018There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise.\u2019
\nConclusion
\nBernard Ramm reminds us that \u2018The great theologian differs from the ordinary in the former\u2019s ability to draw out these larger implications of the text. It was in men like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Barth that the genius of theological exegesis came into its own.\u2019 In this chapter I have endeavoured to draw out some of the larger implications of the texts dealing with the incarnation\u2014texts we have explored in previous chapters. The incarnation has theological implications for theological method, the question of whether God can change in some way, for the value of the created order, for the valuing of human life, for our understanding of mission, for the Christian encounter with other religions, especially Islam with its low Christology, for theodicy and defence, and for the weighting of doctrines in some kind of dogmatic rank. Christian theology cannot be properly done as though Christ had never come. The incarnation also has implications for the individual. The love of God as displayed in the entry of the Son of God into the world is, in the words of James Davison Hunter, \u2018the most breathtaking demonstration in history of God\u2019s love for his creation and his intention to make all things new\u2019. What God has done is astonishing. John Murray states it well:
\nThe infinite became finite, the eternal and supratemporal entered time and became subject to its conditions, the immutable became mutable, the invisible became visible, the Creator became the created, the sustainer of all became dependent, the Almighty infirm. All is summed up in the proposition, God became man.
\nDoxology is the appropriate response and also the cultivation of a sense of wonder at what God has done in the past and will do in the world to come.
\nChapter Seven
\nConclusion
\nScripture presents a living God who is transcendent and immanent. The transcendent God is not confined by creation. He is not limited by time or space. As immanent, this same God is at work within the created order, sustaining its existence. As Thomas Chalmers suggested, \u2018the uniformity of nature is but another name for the faithfulness of God\u2019. Yet these two broad categories do not exhaust the reality of the living God\u2019s relation to us. God is also concomitant\u2014he comes alongside, dwells with and travels with his people. Divine concomitance finds its quintessential expression in the incarnation of the Son who pitched his tent among us in real space and real time. As John Murray says, \u2018The thought of incarnation is stupendous, for it means the conjunction in one person of all that belongs to godhead and all that belongs to manhood.\u2019 This is a staggering claim. No surrogate came. Concerning God the Son, Irenaeus the second-century church father writes of \u2018the only true and steadfast Teacher, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself\u2019. If this is not a reason for doxology, what can be?
\nChapter 1 explored the purpose of creation in terms of God\u2019s creating and fashioning a palace-temple as his habitation for dwelling with the creature made in the divine image. In addition how God prepared the way for his ultimate incarnate concomitance from the very beginning by revealing himself in anthropomorphic, anthropopathic and anthropopraxic ways was canvassed. In this chapter these latter three terms were defined. From the start, in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, we found that the God of the Bible is often spoken of as though embodied. Herman Bavinck is even more bold: \u2018It follows that Scripture does not merely contain a few anthropomorphisms; on the contrary, all Scripture is anthropomorphic.\u2019 Moreover the chapter argued that a third category needs to be added to the two traditional ones of transcendence and immanence to discuss God\u2019s relation to creation. The third category is concomitance. An excursus examined a venerable question: Would the incarnation have taken place irrespective of the Fall? Speculatively I argued yes.
\nIn the second chapter the portrait of God was amplified as we considered the divine deeds in Israel\u2019s history with its fountainhead in the call of Abram. God was at work to redeem a people of his own among whom he could dwell. Once more God\u2019s anthropomorphic, anthropopathic and anthropopraxic ways were reviewed as we followed the biblical plotline. In this chapter the mysterious figure of the angel of the Lord was also considered, as was the phenomenon of anthropomorphic theophany.
\nThe third chapter explored Israel\u2019s hope and the promise of the divine presence with his people in the midst of the created order. Key texts were examined, including Psalms 45:6, 110:1, Isaiah 9:6 and Daniel 7:13. Some argue that the Old Testament expected a divine Messiah and that the deity of Christ was taught in the Old Testament. Others disagree. I argued that the idea that the Christ is God is consistent with the Old Testament testimony but not demanded by it. We also considered how the Old Testament held out the promise of Yahweh himself coming to rescue his people. These ideas are left unsynthesized by Old Testament writers. We also saw that recent approaches to the typological reading of Scripture help us to understand how the incarnation was prepared for in a subtle way in the descriptors and promises relating to David and his house.
\nIn chapter 4, as we continued to follow the biblical plotline, we saw how the preparatory gave way to the actual as the testimony of the New Testament came into full view. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). God stooped. Concomitance was now enfleshed as Immanuel (\u2018God with us\u2019, Matt. 1:23). In the Old Testament in Genesis 6:6 God grieved over wayward humankind. In the New Testament we saw how Christ wept human tears at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35). He is the window into the heart of God. To hear Jesus is to hear the Word of God; to see Jesus is to see the character of God; to watch Jesus in action is to see God in action. R. T. France makes the point strikingly: \u2018God no longer simply told His people about Himself, or even showed them by His actions. He came Himself, and walked among them, and men saw the invisible, God in a human body, the ultimate anthropomorphism.\u2019 John\u2019s testimony was joined to that of Matthew, for whom Jesus was the Immanuel of Isaianic hope, and to that of Mark, for whom God in Jesus comes to Zion, and to that of Hebrews, which affirmed both the deity and humanity of the incarnate Son. In retrospect these New Testament writers could ground their belief in the deity and humanity of Christ in the Old Testament Scriptures. This chapter also argued that the incarnation was of the one to whom the Old Testament anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms pointed. Nicholas Wolterstorff\u2019s theory of theories gave conceptual tools for understanding how the Old Testament prepared the way for an incarnation, although the incarnation in prospect was never explicitly in view in the Old Testament. The Pauline notion of mystery underlined the latter point and reinforced the argument that the Old Testament believers were not expecting an actual incarnation of the God of Israel. An excursus dealt with the debate over whether Old Testament saints knowingly encountered the pre-incarnate Christ. I remained unconvinced by those who argued that they did.
\nChapter 5 addressed the question raised by Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages: Why did God become human? Unlike Anselm, however, New Testament answers rather than speculative ones were sought to the question. The appeal was to Scripture, not to reason with the Bible intentionally shut. A plethora of New Testament testimonies were canvassed that address the question of the rationale of the incarnation. I argued that Christ\u2019s revelatory, representative, substitutionary, devil-defeating and moral-modelling roles are predicated on his assuming a truly human nature. An excursus was attached that tackled the question of whether the divine Son assumed fallen or unfallen human nature in the incarnation. I sided with the traditional view that Christ assumed an unfallen human nature.
\nIn chapter 6 we considered the value of the incarnation in two aspects: theological and existential. We saw the value of the incarnation for theological method, for epistemology, for the doctrine of God and change, for affirming the created order, for valuing human life, for our understanding of mission, for the encounter between Christianity and other religions, with special reference to Islam, for the question of theodicy and defence, given evils, and for matters of dogmatic rank. We also explored the value of the incarnation at the personal or existential level. The incarnation matters with regard to our appreciation of the depths of the divine love and our sense of wonder at what the Lord has done on the plane of human history in this age and what he will do in the age to come.
\nThe canonical story ends on a note of hope, a hope in which concomitance (God-with-us) is consummated in the world to come. In the end all is sacred space. The divine habitation is definitively built. The New Jerusalem has no need of a temple. God dwells in the midst of his people. The palace-temple has both rulers and priests. Creation has been reclaimed and transfigured. Order has been restored. Significantly the Lamb on the throne remains the incarnate one. The end point is no ethereal Platonic-style heavenly existence but a robust new heavens and a new earth. Christianity is not Gnosticism. The biblical testimony calls for discipleship, doxology and great expectation as we live as God\u2019s people in between the comings of the great king. We are to set our minds on things above, as Paul expressed to the Colossians (Col. 3:1). In this life we walk by faith, in the world to come, by sight. Thus there is a day coming when the veiling will no longer pertain. All will be revealed. Hence the longing that ends the canonical presentation (Rev. 22:20): \u2018Come, Lord Jesus.\u2019
\nAbove all, the incarnation of the Son of God ought to fill us with humble wonder. A loving Father did not send a mere prophetic or priestly or royal surrogate, but the Son who both instantiates the perfection of all three and yet transcends them. This is what divine love looks like, as John makes plain: \u2018This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him\u2019 (1 John 4:9).
\nAppendix
\nThe theological interpretation of Scripture
\nMy wife is a fashion designer and college teacher of fashion. To be a good designer, she tells me, you need to listen to the fabric. You need to engage the fabric on its terms. You can\u2019t stitch leather the way you stitch knits. A different needle is needed. An ordinary needle would break. Biblical theology likewise is a discipline that seeks to listen to its fabric. The fabric is the Word of God written. In practice this means placing a biblical text or passage in its context in its literary unit or argument in its book in the canon within the flow of revealed redemptive history. Presuppositions are always at work, of course, as I endeavoured to make clear in the introductory chapter of this study. By way of reminder, evangelical biblical theology presupposes the living God who speaks and acts, the unity of Scripture, inspiration and the canon. Scripture then is not reducible to an anthology of ancient Near Eastern and early church texts but is the inspired\u2014in the strong Pauline theopneustos sense\u2014Word of God, albeit in human words (concursus). Put another way, we try to be good phenomenologists of the text. I like the way the Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel summed up phenomenology: knowing what you see rather than seeing what you know. I once worked with a Bible teacher who found the same meaning in every text, whether in Genesis, Isaiah or Mark: read your Bible, say your prayers, share your faith, have fellowship with other Christians, and give to the work. He saw what he knew rather knew what he saw. Happily what he knew had good biblical warrant, but not in the texts he was expounding, I would argue. So, as much as lies within us, we seek to see what is actually there in the text before us.
\nEvangelical systematic theology also appeals to what is there but goes further than the descriptive. It is a normative or prescriptive discipline. Systematic theology wants to find out what we ought to believe (our head), what we ought to value (our heart) and how we ought to live (our hands and feet) as the sacred text is brought to bear on the broken world in which we live and are to serve. However, to do so responsibly systematic theology needs to know how to listen to the fabric. This is where the discipline of biblical theology is vital to the discipline of systematic theology. The traditional way to do systematic theology is to make a claim and supply proof texts (dicta probantia) to back it up. For example, take the claim that Christ is God incarnate. The classic proof text is John 1:14, \u2018The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.\u2019 It might appear like this: \u2018Christ is God incarnate\u2019 (John 1:14). I am sure many a reader has had the experience of looking up the string of proof texts in a standard systematic theology text and being mystified as to the relevance of some of them to the claim. Now proof texts are needed. You can\u2019t say everything at once. I remember a student in England who had been warned off systematic theology by his pastor, who valued only biblical theology. The student was having problems of a practical kind. If he was asked after church about an issue, people simply didn\u2019t have the time to take the tour with him from Genesis to Revelation to find out what all the relevant texts had to say. Some kind of synthesis, some kind of theological shorthand, was needed. Systematic theology supplies that shorthand.
\nSystematic theology\u2019s proof texts, however, need to be derived from the application of a sound biblical theology method. Let us return to John 1:14. If I am challenged on appealing to that text as a systematic theologian I would seek to show that it is part of an argument beginning at John 1:1, in eternity as it were, and ending in time, with John 1:14\u201318. In other words our text is integral to the Prologue of John and is the climax of the story of how God seeks to dwell in the midst of his people. This story started in the garden (Eden), continued with Israel (esp. tabernacle and temple) and climaxed in Jesus Christ. Incarnation is the zenith of divine presence. To use Brian Rosner\u2019s way of expressing it\u2014I am appealing to John 1:14 in the light of the Bible\u2019s \u2018overarching narrative and Christocentric focus\u2019. In other words a text needs not only to be seen in its context but also seen in its literary unit, in its book in the canon and with the flow of redemptive history firmly in mind.
\nBiblical theology serves systematic theology in another way. Here my example is that great gospel benefit of the forgiveness of our sins. Read your standard systematic theology texts and you would not know how important as a biblical motif the forgiveness of our sins is, but Luke-Acts, which constitutes about a third of the New Testament, is clear. The risen Christ thematizes the forgiveness of sins as the great gospel benefit in Luke 24:47 (the Great Commission Lucan style), and in Acts we see it held out both to Jews (Acts 2:38\u2014Pentecost) and Gentiles (Acts 10:43\u2014Cornelius). In the light of the overarching narrative of Scripture, which identifies the God to whom we pray, we can see why this benefit is so important. God is not only love (1 John 4:8), but is also light (1 John 1:5). How can a holy God dwell with an unholy people? Sin needs to be addressed. The Word become flesh is the linchpin to that address: his coming, his cross and his coming to life again. In other words biblical theology helps systematic theology get the proportions right in its accents. This is an exceedingly important contribution. In my opinion there is a crying need for a systematic theology text to be written that does just that.
\nA final question to consider\u2014what has all the above to do with the increasingly influential notion of the theological interpretation of Scripture? Are biblical theology and the theological interpretation of Scripture synonymous? I like to distinguish the two tasks. Other theologians appear to treat them more as synonymous (e.g. Brian S. Rosner). I am aware that I am being stipulative in arguing this. Biblical theology on the one hand helps me to know what I see, whereas the theological interpretation of Scripture helps me to know how to serve the church with what I see as I endeavour to bring the text and the present together in a meaningful fashion. For example, John 1:14 viewed through the theological interpretation of Scripture\u2019s lens cannot be merely described as the climax of a biblical theology of presence, true though that is. The theological interpretation of Scripture also wants to say that John 1:14 tells of a God who so loved the world that he came himself and tabernacled among us. We do not live in a divinely abandoned landscape, adrift in space as cosmic flotsam and jetsam. Put another way the theological interpretation of Scripture draws out the larger implication of the text of Scripture, or of several texts of Scripture that have been placed in a conversation with each other with an eye on the flow of redemptive history. Bernard Ramm\u2019s wise words on the subject are worth quoting once more: \u2018The great theologian differs from the ordinary in the former\u2019s ability to draw out these larger implications of the text. It was in men like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Barth that the genius of theological exegesis [or what I prefer to call the theological interpretation of Scripture] came into its own.\u2019 The disciplines of biblical theology and the theological interpretation of Scripture are thus in my view complementary. Both disciplines are indispensible. Put yet another way, when systematic theology uses biblical theology to connect text and present in a normative fashion, we are engaged in the theological interpretation of Scripture.
\nBibliography<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Introduction Why this book? The discipline of biblical theology reads Scripture with attention both to its unfolding plotline from Genesis to Revelation and its accent on Christ as the fulfilment of the antecedent hope of Israel. The study of themes therefore is a major part of the undertaking. For example, take the theme of the … <\/p>\n