A related question demands brief treatment. To whom did the NT writers attribute the divine action described in the OT? To answer “the Lord God” (Yahweh Elohim=LXX kurios ho theos) is to beg the question, for the authors of the NT wrote of OT events in the light of their trinitarian understanding of God. A clear distinction must be drawn between what the OT meant to its authors and readers and how it was understood by the early Christians who lived after the advent of the Messiah and the coming of the Spirit. Certainly the person who projects the Trinitarian teaching of the NT back into the OT and reads the OT through the spectacles of the dynamic or Trinitarian monotheism of the NT is thinking anachronistically. On the other hand, it does not seem illegitimate to pose a question such as this: To whom was the author of Hebrews referring when he said (1:1), “At many times and in various ways God spoke in the past to our forefathers through the prophets”? That it was not the Holy Spirit in any ultimate sense is evident from the fact that in neither the OT nor the NT is the Spirit called “God” expressis verbis. And, in spite of the fact that the LXX equivalent of Yahweh, viz. kurios, is regularly applied to Jesus in the NT so that it becomes less a title than a proper name, it is not possible that ho theos in Heb 1:1 denotes Jesus Christ, for the same sentence (in Greek) contains “(the God who spoke…) in these last days has spoken to us in a Son (en huio).” Since the author is emphasizing the continuity of the two phrases of divine speech (ho theos lalesas…elelesen), this reference to a Son shows that ho theos was understood to be “God the Father.” Similarly, the differentiation made between ‘ho theos as the one who speaks in both eras and hios as his final means of speaking shows that in the author’s mind it was not the Triune God of Christian theology who spoke to the forefathers by the prophets. That is to say, for the author of Hebrews (as for all NT writers, one may suggest), “the God of our fathers,” Yahweh, was no other than “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (compare Acts 2:30 and 2:33; 3:13 and 3:18; 3:25 and 3:26; not also 5:30). It would be inappropriate for Elohim or Yahweh ever to refer to the Trinity in the OT when in the NT theos regularly refers to the Father alone and apparently never to the Trinity.
M. J. Harris, Jesus as God (Baker 1992), 47n112.
Harris is a fine NT scholar, and his monograph remains the standard in the field. However, this footnote is deeply confused. One problem is that he’s trying to cover too much ground in too little space.
i) On the one hand he admits that Yahweh/Elohim doesn’t single out God the Father with respect what OT writers intended.
ii) On the other hand he also admits that NT writers apply the Greek equivalent of “Yahweh” to Jesus.
But in that event they are including Jesus as the referent when the OT attributes actions or sayings to Yahweh.
iii) He sets up a false dichotomy: either Yahweh/Elohim designates God the Father or else it designates the Trinity. But that overlooks another option: the designation is neutral or indefinite. It refers to “God” without further specification.
iv) In the very same chapter that Harris cites, the author of Hebrews assigns an OT statement about God to Jesus (Heb 1:10-12/Ps 102:25-27). Therefore, the author doesn’t single out God the Father as the exclusive referent of OT ascriptions.
v) The author of Hebrews also attributes divine speech to the Holy Spirit in OT discourse (Heb 3:7-11/Ps 95:7-11; Heb 9:1-8/Exod 25-26; Heb 10:15-17/Jer 31:33-34). Therefore, the author doesn’t restrict the divine speaker to God the Father in OT discourse.
In both (iv-v), the author includes Jesus and the Holy Spirit within the semantic domain of OT ascriptions to God.
vi) It’s true that in Heb 1 you have an interplay between the Father and the Son, where “God” is generally a synonym for God the Father–although 1:8 is a conspicuous exception.
At the same time he oversimplifies the contrast. It’s not just a contrast between to different persons or periods. Rather, there is also a contrast, in Heb 1-2, between God discarnate (i.e. Yahweh/Elohim in OT times) and God incarnate (i.e. the Son in NT times).
vii) Harris fails to distinguish between “God” as a common noun and “God” as a proper noun.
viii) His appeal to Acts suffers from three basic problems:
a) These are popular evangelistic homilies. They are not designed to explicate the Trinity in any detail.
b) There’s a polemical thrust to these speeches. Appeal is made to the God of patriarchal history to indict the religious establishment as covenant-breakers. That accounts for the emphasis on God as the “God of the fathers.” By spurning the Messiah, the religious establishment broke faith with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s the point.
c) In these very same speeches, Yahwist passages are assigned to Jesus (Acts 2:21,34,36/Ps 110:1; Joel 2:32).
"These are popular evangelistic homilies. They are not designed to explicate the Trinity in any detail."
ReplyDeleteThis comment would only make sense if you could point to the places in the Bible where the Trinity is indeed explicated in detail.
The Trinity is a theological construct which has a wide variety of passages feeding into it.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, there are passages that do focus on the intra-Trinitarian life of the Godhead, in contrast passages that focus on God's relation to the world.
Yes, it is "a theological construct," but that is quite different from saying that it is scripturally explicated.
ReplyDeleteUh, Steve didn't say it's merely a "theological construct."
ReplyDeleteNo single verse is going to explicate the Trinity, any more than no single verse is going to explicate Biblical eschatology.
ReplyDeleteHowever, some passages go into more detail than others, and some genres are more overly didactic than others.
As Steve says, "The Trinity is a theological construct ..."
ReplyDeleteAs I understand it, the trinitarian conception of the god-head was formally accepted at the conference of Nicea. Would that be right?
The biggest problem with the concept of trinity is that it obscures the light of Christ.
ReplyDeleteHe who is called the "second" person of the Trinity is taught by the New Testament as coming to have "first place in everything." (Col 1:18)
I'm not going to make a positive case for the Trinity just for your benefit. I don't have to reinvent the wheel in this respect. There's extensive scholarship that lays out the exegetical case for the Trinity in minute detail.
ReplyDeleteIf you love Christ our Lord, I beg you not to leave His light under the bushel of the trinity concept.
ReplyDeleteIn no case would I ask you to lay out a positive case for me. Rather, I'm appealing to you - for Jesus' sake and for your sake - to reexamine the case for yourself in light of scriptural admonitions (e.g. 2 Cor 11:3; Eph 1:10; and 2 John 1:9) to make Christ the focal point of our pursuit of God.
Thank you for listening to me, and you owe me no further response on this point.
If you love Christ our Lord, I beg you not to leave His light under the bushel of the nonchurchgoer's concept (among other things).
ReplyDeleteIn no case would I ask you to lay out a positive case for me. Rather, I'm appealing to you - for Jesus' sake and for your sake - to reexamine the case for yourself in light of scriptural admonitions (e.g. 2 Cor 11:3; Eph 1:10; and 2 John 1:9) to make Christ and his church the focal point of our pursuit of God.
Thank you for listening to me, and you owe me no further response on this point.
Patrick,
ReplyDeleteYour retort would have been clever, except for three major facts you have managed to overlook:
1. Your application of the bushel metaphor is exactly backward. It is the churchgoing bushel you are using to cover the light of Christ. To dispense with churchgoing is to let that light shine.
2. Unlike Steve and his unwillingness to lay out a positive case for the trinity, I fully lay out a positive case for the supremacy of Christ and the inadequacy of church attendance in my blog, and I answer all questioners.
3. You left my scriptural admonitions as they were, which, if you were to insert into them the church or the trinity, it would alter their meaning...and violently so. Our salvation is in Christ - Christ plus nothing.
I assume you can now recognize these facts, given that I am presenting them to you in triune fashion.
blogforthelordjesus,
ReplyDeleteYour retort would have been clever, except for three major facts you have managed to overlook:
1. Your application of the application of the bushel metaphor is exactly backward. It is the nonchurchgoing bushel you are using to cover the light of Christ. To dispense with nonchurchgoing is to let that light shine.
2. Unlike your mistaken claim that Steve is unwilling to lay out a positive case for the Trinity, he noted there's no reason for him to reinvent the wheel when there's extensive scholarship that lays out the exegetical case for the Trinity in minute detail.
3. You left my scriptural admonitions as they were, which, if you were to insert them into your claims about nonchurchgoing, it would alter their meaning...and violently so. Our salvation is in Christ - Christ plus nothing.
I assume you can now recognize these facts, given that I am presenting them to you in nonchurch context.
blogforthelordjesus is obscuring the light of Christ by interposing himself between Christ and the reader. He should get out of the way and let people see Jesus for themselves by going directly to the Bible. But he has to stand between the reader and the light of Christ, like a shadow.
ReplyDeleteA point upon which we can apparently agree is that none of us should interpose himself between a reader and the Bible. May Christ shine and may all shadows be dispersed.
ReplyDelete