The Trinity in the OT

There are different views regarding the revelation of the Trinity in the OT:

1. At one extreme are Catholics and unitarians who don't think the Trinity is in the OT because they don't think the Trinity is NT. If it's not even in the NT, it can hardly be in the OT! Rather, they think the Nicene Fathers and Nicene/post-Nicene councils invented the Trinity.

2. At the other end of the spectrum are Christians who suppose you can directly prooftext the Trinity from passages like Gen 1:26 and Isa 6:3. I think traditional prooftexts like that should be retired. On the other hand, some traditional prooftexts are strong, as far as they go. 

3. Retiring a few traditional prooftexts doesn't mean we have less to work with. A problem with bad prooftexts is how they get in the way of developing better exegetical arguments. Some Christians just park on those prooftexts. That's where they stop.

Retiring a few traditional prooftexts frees up room to bring in neglected lines of evidence. The traditional methodology appealed to pinpoint prooftexts. While some individual texts are strong, modern evangelical scholars often take a diachronic approach where they trace messianic motifs as they unfold through a series of OT books. 

Other important developments involve the two-Yahweh doctrine in Second Temple Judaism and the phenomenon  of illeism in the OT and its NT counterparts. 

4. There's also some ambiguity in what it means to say we can find the Trinity in the OT. Does that mean we can find individual texts where it's all put together? Or does that mean the OT has the parts without the instruction sheet, and the NT provides the instructions on how to assemble the parts?

5. To take another example, some Christians think the Angel of the Lord is a theophany while others think that's a Christophany. Those aren't mutually exclusive interpretations: it could be a theophanic Christophany. The point, though, is that the Christophanic identification is more specific than the merely theophanic identification. 

5. Another issue is whether it's illicit to interpret OT statements in light of NT revelation. Here's another way to frame the issue? Is the Trinity recognizable in the OT if that's all you have to go by? Or does the NT create the shock of recognition? 

6. Apropos (5), let's take a comparison: 

i) In many stories (plays, novels, movies, TV dramas), some characters are related to each other while others are not. In some of these stories, the related characters are explicitly identified, viz. mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters. 

ii) In real life, there are certain clues that people are related, even if the relationship isn't explicitly identified. That includes visual clues. The most obvious is family resemblance in the case of close blood relatives. Or there can be subtler clues, like having the same idiosyncratic accent. 

Or, when you see two people together, there's a particular dynamic if they're related. That's not something you could discern in isolation.

iii) But in plays, movies, and TV dramas, actors who play blood relatives are usually unrelated in real life. Yet the audience is expected to suspend disbelief. It's a necessary convention. 

iv) In some cases the relationships are explicitly stated. It is, however, possible to have a story in which their identity is left unstated. Where it's up to the reader or audience to tease that out.

And that's more dramatically interesting. You start out knowing nothing about the characters. But as the story unfolds, especially in extended narratives like novels and TV dramas, the attentive viewer or reader will pick up on certain suggestive clues that particular characters are relatives, even if they're never explicitly identified as such. They behave around each other in ways typical of family members. They take certain liberties with each other, freely entering one another's personal space. 

That may be inconclusive, but there's a sorting process where it dawns on the audience that the characters interact with each other in ways that make a lot of sense if they belong to the same family, but make less sense if they're unrelated. 

And if, as the story progresses, the relationships are made explicit, that confirms what the audience suspected. The characters were recognizably related to each other, and when the relationships are named, everything falls into place. The story began as a riddle in that regard, but a telltale pattern emerges as the narration continues.