One mediator between God and man

In this post I'm going to comment on the difference between Christian and unitarian models of mediation. 

i) In the OT, there's a categorical difference between God and the world. Between the Creator and the creature. Time and space originate in God's creative fiat. So God is essentially transcendent.

In theory, this could lead to a deistic concept of divine action, where God acts in the world through intermediate creatures. In theory, God could be so holy, so other, so set apart, that he only speaks or acts through go-betweens. And to some extent, angels function as emissaries between heaven and earth.

However, in the OT, you also have theophanies. And you have an angel who is not a creature, like other angels, but God himself, assuming an angelic similitude. 

So, in the OT, angels don't take the place of God, as go-betweens. In the OT, God reserves the freedom to bypass angels and make "direct" contact with humans. 

ii) But in Second Temple Judaism, there's a shift. Because Second Temple literature isn't constrained by divine inspiration, it loses the balance, and sometimes becomes deistic. This is seen in the exaltation of Metatron. Because Yahweh is so sacrosanct, so unapproachable, Metatron becomes a cosmic viceregent or prime minister. The acting God. 

This illustrates the internal tensions of unitarianism. On the one hand, because God is so untouchable, he must delegate the administration of the universe to a second party. Someone must fill the gap. That exaggerates divine transcendence.

But, conversely, in order for a deputy to act in God's stead, he must be so exalted, so godlike, that this once again blurs the distinction between God and the world. The solution ends up intensifying the original tension. 

iii) We see a similar development in Islam and Medieval Judaism. Islam and Medieval Judaism aren't so much monotheistic as they are unitarian. That's because these are post-Christian developments. These exist in conscious, antagonistic reaction to Christianity. 

They accentuate the unicity and transcendence of God. But in so doing, they create a void. And they fill the void by the Neoplatonic tactic of introducing intermediaries which bridge the gap. Intermediaries which are higher than man, but just a tad than God. Not quite divine, not quite mundane. They occupy the space (as it were) between God and creation.

One obvious model for bridging a gap is to fill it in with something that occupies the interval and touches both ends. It fills the empty space in-between either side of the gap, like stepping stones.  

iv) In the NT, the Incarnate Son is a mediatorial figure, but it's a completely different paradigm. Assuming that Second Temple Judaism has any influence on this conception, the mediatorial role of Christ stands in studied contrast to the Second Temple paradigm. It's not an extension of the Second Temple paradigm, but an antithetical alternative–like green screening, where the background color exists for the sake of contrast. 

In the NT, Christ is not an intermediary between God and man in the sense of being in-between God and man, as something less than God but more than man, but as both. Not within the two sides of the gap, but on both sides of the gap. That's a radically different conception. That's not commensurable with the Second Temple model, or its counterpart in Medieval Judaism. 

A unitarian might object that this fails to solve the problem. However, the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments, never viewed the metaphysical distance between God and the world as a problem in the first place. There's nothing to solve in that regard. The real problem is the ethical distance between God and sinners. 

v) To take an illustration, and that's all it is, suppose you had two warring factions. Two belligerent ethnic and religious groups. Suppose the two factions were reconciled when one faction's king marries the other faction's queen, and they have a child. The child embodies both factions.