I’ve been thinking more lately on the Trinity, the Hypostatic Union, and the relationship of the Son to the Father. In traditional Orthodox theology, there is God the Father, God the Son who is Eternally Begotten of the Father, and God the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father (the western inclusion of “and the Son” in the Nicene Creed is a later addition which began with Spanish bishops and worked its way throughout the entire western Catholic Church by the tenth century or so; it wasn’t a part of the original Creed documented at the Second Great Ecumenical Council). These three are one Being in three Hypostases. The thing about the Orthodox Doctrine of the Trinity is that, while it is developed from the Scriptural accounts, this description and formula are nowhere to be found in either the Old or New Testaments. Rather, they were developed to uphold the New Testament understanding of Jesus Christ as being fully God and fully human, as well as the understanding that Jesus Christ is “I Am,” the God of Israel, while maintaining the distinction between His Father and Himself, and keeping to the declarations in Scripture that “Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one” and there are no other gods next to Him. The problem comes in however that, as much as the doctrine of the Trinity attempted to clarify things, it actually managed, and continues to manage to this day, to cause more confusion on the subject.
Our main problem stems from identifying the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three separate personalities prior to the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It seems very clear in the Old Testament that Yahweh is presented as a single personality; an omnipresent, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, and transcendent Being who is nonetheless immediately immanent, and who is always identified with being the Creator and originator of the skies, the land, the seas, everything in them, and the cosmos in general. On occasion, we see Him taking a bodily form of some sort in the Old Testament, particularly in Genesis. In the New Testament, John, using the philosophical language of the day, refers to this avatar of Yahweh as the “Logos,” a concept which his immediate Greek readers would have understood very well. In Genesis 3, He is heard walking in the Garden. In Genesis 18, He and two angels are received and entertained by Abraham and then they go for a walk together. In Genesis 32, Jacob wrestles with Him all night and sees Him face to face and lives. In Exodus 3, Yahweh speaks to Moses out of a thorn bush which appears to be on fire, but not burning. In Exodus 24, Moses and the leaders of Israel see the God of Israel, Yahweh, standing in a humanoid form as if all of space and time are bending around His shape, and then they feast in his presence. In Judges 13, Samson’s parents recognize the Angel of the Lord as the Lord Himself and make sacrifices to Him which He accepts. And of course, Daniel has a vision of the “Ancient of Days” sitting on His throne in a humanoid form lit up like the sun. In every case here, there is no distinction revealed in personalities between the unseen and transcendent Yahweh (what we would call “God the Father”), and the bodily avatar of Yahweh with whom people walked, talked, and interacted (what we would call “God the Son”). They are taken as the same person by the Biblical authors. We do not see this avatar being referred to as the Son of Yahweh, but Yahweh Himself.
In the New Testament, we see something very different. We see Jesus regularly distinguishing Himself as a separate personality from His Father. We see this in the voice from Heaven which calls Jesus His beloved Son at least twice. We see this in Jesus’ regular prayer to His Father. We see this in Jesus regularly referring to the Father as a distinct personality from Himself in the third person, even as He also refers to Himself several times in the Gospel of John especially as “I Am.” We know that Jesus is a human being. He was born from human flesh and blood regardless of the unusual nature of His conception. He ate, he drank, he slept, presumably he used the toilet, he sweated, he wept, he got tired, and every other indication of total humanity. And, according to Scripture, Jesus Himself had a definite point of origination. He had a beginning. There was a time when Jesus Christ did not exist because He had not been born, He had not been given a distinct name, He hadn’t been conceived.
It is my belief, that prior to the incarnation, there was no separate personality between the invisible, transcendent Yahweh and His physical manifestation. While He had no need for an avatar subject to space and time to know and understand us, human beings had a need for an avatar of Him to interact with directly. He and His avatar had been one and the same personality.
This changed when Jesus was conceived. By joining His avatar to human flesh and blood which grew around it and intertwined with it, and which flesh and blood would develop its own personality as it experienced its environment, that avatar would forever be a separate personality bound to the memories and experiences which programmed the brain of that flesh and blood human being. Yahweh grown together in a womb with human flesh, bone, blood, and DNA all contributed by the mother. Yahweh relinquishing His own identity as Yahweh to adopt the unique identity of a human being, who then in turn would later do the same, submitting as a separate and unique personality in thought, word, and action to Yahweh with whom His psyche was intertwined from conception. There then, at the moment of Jesus’ conception, becomes a distinction between the personalities of God the Father and God the Son precisely because there now exists a Son of God in space and time where there had not before.
We fall into false teaching when we overemphasize either Jesus’ humanity or His divinity. It is equally wrong to claim that Jesus is only God as it is to claim that He was only a human being. It is equally wrong to claim that Jesus existed from eternity as it is to claim that He was an ordinary man. Yahweh, both transcendent and bodily avatar, existed from eternity without beginning and end, but Jesus, as a human being, had a beginning.
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