Under
the broad umbrella of the Christian religion, there exists a great divide
between two fundamentally different ways of thinking about key aspects of the
Christian faith. Eugene Webb explores the sources of that divide, looking at
how the Eastern and Western Christian worlds drifted apart due both to the
different ways they interpreted their symbols and to the different roles
political power played in their histories. Previous studies have focused on
historical events or on the history of theological ideas. In Search of the
Triune God delves deeper by exploring how the Christian East and the
Christian West have conceived the relation between symbol and experience.
Chapter 1
Divine Sonship
in Israel
Very deep is the
well of the past. Should we not call
it bottomless? --Thomas Mann, Joseph
and His Brothers
Symbols
live in time. The images they are rooted in and the meanings that constitute
them evolve together in relation both to the times that surround them and to
the pull of transcendence that sometimes leads them toward what is beyond time.
The word God is itself a symbol whose meaning
has evolved over time; this is why one can find books with titles like A
History of God and God: A Biography.1 The transcendent
reality that Christians, Jews, and Muslims use the symbol “God” to point toward
may be beyond time and therefore beyond change, but the meaning of the symbol itself
has changed from the years when it was used to refer to what was still a tribal
deity more like the gods of Israel’s neighbors—“a great God, and a great king
above all gods” (Ps. 95:3)—than like the later, radically transcendent and
universal God that begins to emerge in the writings of the prophetic tradition.2
To call God a “god,” one might say, is to say that the absolutely transcendent
is analogous to one of those only relatively transcendent figuresthat
are called “gods.”
Christian
theologians of both East and West have been well aware of the metaphorical
character of all symbols used to refer to God. In his treatise on the names of
God, Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, discussed the relative adequacy and
inadequacy of a variety of such metaphoric designations for the radically
transcendent source of all that is—phrases such as ipsum esse (Being
Itself), Qui est (He Who Is), and also the word Deus (God)
itself. He concluded that although each of these can communicate something true
about God, none can be fully adequate. He finally suggested that perhaps the
least inadequate would be “the Tetragrammaton, imposed to signify the substance
of God itself, incommunicable and, if one may so speak, singular.”3 The
reason is that unlike the other symbols, the tetragrammaton, which consists of the
four Hebrew consonants Yod He Vau He (or in the Latin alphabet, YHVH) that in
the Hebrew Bible stand for the name of God that is never pronounced, is not an
analogy but an indicator that one has reached the ultimate limit of metaphors;
it points beyond metaphor as such into absolute mystery.4
Even
so, those who have professed the doctrines that eventually developed to
explicate the meaning of the Christian symbols have sometimes talked as though
the symbols themselves were missives from on high bearing a timeless meaning.
But before Christians ever came to use them, each of these symbols had a
history, and those histories sometimes led to forks in the road that have left
continuing ambiguities. The purpose of this chapter will be to explore the many
layers of meaning such symbols as “son of God,” “Father” as applied to God,
“Spirit of God,” “the anointed,” “servant of God,” and “king” brought with them
out of their past before the early Christians began to draw on them in order to
interpret the significance of the presence they encountered
in Jesus of Nazareth and in their own new lives in the aftermath and
continuation of that encounter.
“King”
and “servant” might at first seem out of place in that list. “Son,” “Spirit,”
and “Father” are obviously central to the doctrine of the Trinity, and
“anointed” is English for the word messiah (or mashiach, moshiach)
in Hebrew that was translated in Greek as christos, or Christ, which
came to be closely associated with the “son of God” image by early Christians.
The close connection between the images of “son of God” and “servant of God” will
become clear in a moment. “King,” however, besides being a key element in the
meaning of the word messiah, is a nodal point in the ambiguous history
of the symbol “son of God.” One of the principal dynamics of the Hebrew Bible
is the tension between two competing meanings for “son of God,” one of which
refers to Israel as a whole and the other only to the royal line descending
from David. The tension between these two possible meanings of the symbol
carried forward into the New Testament writings and the history of Christian
political institutions and played an important role in the later history of the
Trinitarian symbolism in the time of Charlemagne (whose courtiers called him
David), as we will see in Chapter 5.
Of
course more than only these two meanings for the image “son of God” can be
found in the Bible, since the first to appear—at least to one who reads the
books in the sequence we are accustomed to, beginning with Genesis—referred not
to any man but evidently to some kind of superhuman beings of the sort that
would later be called angels: Genesis 6:2 says, “The sons of God saw that the
daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose,”
who then gave birth to giants, “the mighty men that were of old.”5 This,
however, is an anomalous use of the image that seems to have slipped into an
early layer of the ancestral tales from pre-Israelite mythology and had no
continuing role to play in the Israelite imagination. There are also references
specifically to angels, including Satan, as “sons of God” in Job at 1:6, 2:1,
and 38:7. In each of these cases, the phrase is simply an identifier for a
special type of mythological entity. The symbolism of the “son of God” does not
appear in the specifically Israelite sense involving a filial relation constituted
by mutual love and loyalty until Exodus 4:22–23, when God tells Moses to go to
the pharaoh and announce, “Thus says the LORD, Israel is my first-born son, and
I say to you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me.’” Here there is a clear
reciprocal relation between the symbolisms of “son” and “servant,” with the
implication that to be God’s son, Israel must heed God’s word and serve God’s
intention.
Israel as Son of
God
Once
the image of divine sonship appears in that form with reference to Israel, the
people of God, as a whole, it takes on a life that then continues right through
Deuteronomy and the Prophets into Jewish apocryphal writings around the time of
Jesus.6 As the association with service to the “Father” indicates,
“son of God” is not simply descriptive of Israel’s actual condition, but refers
to its potentiality under God’s guidance. God’s identification of Israel as “my
first-born son” in Exodus represents a calling to sonship that Israel is
subsequently reproached over and over for failing to live up to. In Deuteronomy,
Moses describes God’s loving care as a father for his son, Israel, at the time
of the Exodus:
“When the Most High gave to the nations
their inheritance,
when he separated the sons of men,
he fixed the bounds of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of
God.
For the LORD’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.
He found him in a desert land,
and in the howling waste of the
wilderness;
he encircled him, he cared for him,
he kept him as the apple of his eye.
Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,
that flutters over its young,
spreading out its wings, catching them,
bearing them on its pinions,
the LORD alone did lead him,
and there was no foreign god with him.”
(Deut. 32:8–12)
But
this is stated in the context of a reproach:
“They have dealt corruptly with him,
they are no longer his children because
of their blemish;
they are a perverse and crooked
generation.
Do you thus requite the LORD,
you foolish and senseless people?
Is not he your father, who created you,
who made you and established you?”
(Deut. 32:5–6)
Similarly,
God’s voice, speaking through the prophet Hosea, reminds Israel of its calling
to sonship and its failure to live as a true son:
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Ba’als,
and burning incense to idols.
Yet it was I who taught E’phraim to
walk.
(Hos. 11:1–3)
There
is another passage in Hosea that refers pointedly back to the description of
Israel in Exodus 4 as God’s “first-born son,” but this time with the reproach
that those called to be the people of God are resisting being born into that
sonship: “The pangs of childbirth come for him, but he is an unwise son; for
now he does not present himself at the mouth of the womb” (Hos. 13:13).
Later,
especially in Jeremiah and Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah chapters 40–66), the
symbolisms of sonship and servanthood begin to merge into the special blend
that Christians would later use to interpret the role of Jesus. Jeremiah has
passages similar to those earlier references to Israel as a wayward but still
loved son, as in Jeremiah 3:19–22, “I thought you would call me, My Father, and
would not turn from following me. . . . Return, O faithless sons,” and 31:9,
“With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I
will make them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall
not stumble; for I am a father to Israel, and E’phraim is my first-born.” Even
more important for the Christian future of the symbol is the picture the book
presents of Jeremiah himself as the one truly filial Israelite left among a
faithless generation, God’s only true son, who is rejected and persecuted for
his fidelity. In the opening of the book Jeremiah speaks of how God called him
from beyond time into his service: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the
nations” (Jer. 1:5). Jeremiah describes his role as God’s persecuted servant in
words that Christians would later apply to Jesus: “But I was like a gentle lamb
led to the slaughter” (Jer. 11:19).7
It
seems likely that this image of Jeremiah as a loyal son who suffers in the
service of God contributed to the imagery of the suffering servant in Deutero-Isaiah,
where the image again refers to Israel as a people. Although the first Isaiah
opens with the image of Israel as failed sons and the book as a whole still
uses that image continuously,8 Deutero-Isaiah begins to shift from the imagery
of imperfect divine sonship to the image of Israel as God’s suffering servant,
who by his faithfulness under conditions of adversity will be a model of filial
loyalty for all mankind. This imagery of suffering clearly reflects Israel’s
experience under the conditions of the Babylonian captivity, but it seems
modeled at least in part on the memory of Jeremiah’s earlier sufferings in the
service of God when the Babylonian conquest was still on the horizon.
It
also brings with it a new dimension of universality, since now the suffering of
Israel is not simply or even primarily a chastisement for failure to live up to
the calling of sonship; rather it is itself the fulfillment of that calling, since
by the example of the faithful servant’s sacrificial fidelity “the nations” will
be led from darkness to light and brought together with Israel into a new, expanded
covenant with universal humanity:
Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him,
he will bring forth justice to the
nations. . . .
Thus says God, the LORD,
who created the heavens and stretched
them out,
who spread forth the earth and what
comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it
and spirit to those who walk in it:
“I am the LORD, I have called you in
righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept
you;
I have given you as a covenant to the
people,
a light to the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the
dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in
darkness.”
(Isa. 42:1, 5–7)
Both
Jeremiah’s sufferings and those of the Servant of Yahweh in Isaiah became
central symbolic elements in the Christian interpretation of Jesus. To the
early, still Jewish followers of Jesus who found themselves having to make
sense of the paradox of a crucified messiah, the parallels to Jesus in those
stories from six centuries earlier, especially in Isaiah 53 (“He was despised and
rejected by men; a man of sorrows. . . . he has borne our griefs and carried
our sorrows. . . . he was wounded for our transgressions . . . bruised for our
iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole”), must have
seemed the essential key to a solution to that paradox. But as people who could
still read the Hebrew scriptures with Jewish eyes, they would also have known
that in its original context, the Servant was not an individual but Israel
itself, so that the application of the image to Jesus involved interpreting Jesus,
like Jeremiah, as the true embodiment of Israel.
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