The plan of the book
Introduction
Why this book?
The discipline of biblical theology reads Scripture with attention both to its unfolding plotline from Genesis to Revelation and its accent on Christ as the fulfilment of the antecedent hope of Israel. The study of themes therefore is a major part of the undertaking. For example, take the theme of the leadership of God’s people as in prophet, priest and king. Each category finds its apogee in Jesus Christ, as Calvin among others has seen. Any number of biblical theologies, as their tables of contents and indexes often show, trace the story of prophethood or priesthood or kingship as it canonically unfolds. But what of the incarnation? Here the treatment, if any, is sparse. Other great pivotal events in Christology, such as atonement or roles Christ assumed (e.g. servant of the Lord), can be successfully placed in a promise–fulfilment framework. Is incarnation an anomaly? Put another way, was incarnation part of the hope of Israel? This study attempts to address this question among others.
For years I have been intrigued by a quotation in one of Terence E. Fretheim’s books. In his book on the suffering of God, Fretheim quotes Old Testament scholar E. Jacob. In the quotation Jacob connected the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament and the incarnation of Christ. Eventually I was able to secure Jacob’s book for myself and found that his point was made even more richly than Fretheim’s brief quotation suggested. Jacob wrote:
The God of the Old Testament is a God who seeks to manifest his presence in order to be recognized as the sovereign Lord; that is why the fear of God is at the basis of all piety and all wisdom. But God also and especially seeks to manifest his presence in order to save man. A line not always straight, but nonetheless continuous, leads from the anthropomorphisms of the earliest pages of the Bible, to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
Could it be that Old Testament language about God’s eyes, ears, arms, hands, fingers and so forth prepare the way somehow for the incarnation of God the Word become flesh?
Kierkegaard famously said, ‘Life lived forwards but understood backwards.’ Perhaps something similar may be said of God’s providence: ‘Life is lived forwards but providence is understood backwards.’ Once the canon of Scripture was completed, God’s people could read it in such a way as to see how rich it is in intra-textual allusion and reference, and with it see the exhibition to divine providence that led to an incarnation. Thomas F. Torrance puts the point this way:
The background for Christ the Son of God can only be the background which the fact of the incarnation creates for itself out of the world…. [T]here is a long prehistory to Jesus, but theologically we must say that when the Son of God breaks into that historical development, he throws it all into critical reorientation. The prehistory is critically and creatively reinterpreted by the incarnate Word, and it is only in that light that we must look at the prehistory of the incarnation in Israel.
To use Hendrikus Berkhof ’s helpful phrase, God’s people can now do ‘Christology from behind’. (Torrance is one example.) That is to say that with reference to Jesus ‘we see him in the line of redemptive history, how he arises out of the Old Testament problematic, and gives and is the answer to it’. Again, Berkhof rightly contends, ‘the appearance of Jesus Christ is no isolated epiphany’. A surprising voice adds to the chorus. Rabbi Jacob Neusner writes:
On the basis of a large number of stories along these lines [with anthropomorphic descriptions of God], we might well contemplate composing the story of God on earth – a kind of gospel of God incarnate, walking among human beings, talking with them, teaching them, acting among them, just as, for the evangelists as the church received and venerated their writings, Jesus Christ, God incarnate, walked on earth, taught, and provided the example for humanity of the union of humanity and divinity. That is hardly to suggest that the Judaism of the dual Torah [the Hebrew Bible and those rabbinic works that reduced the oral Torah to writing] and the Christianity of Jesus Christ as God incarnate are to be matched. But they assuredly sustain comparison.
Neusner recognizes that very often the God presented in the Old Testament is presented as though incarnate.
In this present work my aim is to explore this idea of how the incarnation was prepared for. However, every exploration is shaped by certain assumptions. To these assumptions we next turn.
Assumptions
Assumptions play a role in every claim to knowledge. For example, if I claim to know X, I express that claim in some language. In so doing I am assuming that language can convey thought from one mind to another. That is to say, I am assuming that language is a vehicle for communicative action. Part of my job is not only to read books and articles but to help students to do so intelligently. More often than not, writers do not make their assumptions visible. Consequently students need some help in detecting a given writer’s assumptions. For example, if I read Scripture with materialist assumptions, then I need to explain – explain away? – any references to the supernatural. In this view Saul of Tarsus did not meet the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Rather he had an epileptic fit or some other aberrant neurological episode. The Christ he met was the Christ of a fevered imagination. So what assumptions underlie this work?
A key assumption is that there is a living God who is a personal agent. Walter Brueggemann captures the essence of the biblical testimony to this living God in a fine way. He is writing of the God revealed in the Old Testament, but what he writes is true of both testaments: ‘“God” as rendered in the Old Testament is a fully articulated personal agent, with all the particularities of personhood and with a full repertoire of traits and actions that belong to a fully formed and actualized person.’ It is this God who providentially orders human affairs. Nature and history are thus open to divine action.
According to Huston Smith, both moderns and postmoderns would have problems with such openness. He offers this analogy by way of explanation:
If we think of traditional peoples as looking out upon a world through the window of revelation (their received myths and texts), the window that they turned to look through in the modern period (science) turned out to be stunted. It cuts off at the level of the human nose, which (metaphysically speaking) means that when we look through it our gaze slants downward and we see only things that are inferior to us. As for the post modern window, it is boarded over and allows no inclusive view whatsoever.
In contradistinction to the above, this work assumes that God has provided Holy Scripture so that his people are not left in an epistemological black hole from which no epistemic light can escape. In other words this work assumes that there is a revelation of the character, will and ways of God to be found in the church’s inspired Book. Holy Scripture – God’s words in human words – exhibits an amazing unity of storyline in its diversity of genres. There is a metanarrative. Or put another way, in the words of Augustine Scripture presents ‘one discourse’ (unus sermo) and from many mouths emanates ‘one word’ (unum verbum). That one discourse found in Scripture tells of the triune living God who speaks and acts, creates and recreates, saves and judges in a narrative that moves through creation, Fall, redemption and consummation as the story unfolds from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22.
Praeparatio evangelica
The phrase praeparatio evangelica means ‘preparation for the gospel’. This concept featured early in Christian thought to explain how pagans got so much right about God. For example, Augustine wrote in his celebrated Confessions of the philosophers he had read:
And therein I read, not indeed in the same words, but to the selfsame effect, enforced by many and various reasons, that, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made.’ That which was made by Him is ‘life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness; and the darkness comprehends it not.’ And that the soul of man, though it ‘bears witness of the light,’ yet itself ‘is not that light; but the Word of God, being God, is that true light that lights every man that comes into the world.’ And that ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.’ But that ‘He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God even to them that believe in His name.’ This I did not read there.
Clearly Augustine thought that he found Johannine-like ideas in the writings of the philosophers (Platonists). Significantly, though, he also said he did not find the idea that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us in the pagan thought he knew. For early Christians ex hypothesi this preparatory work among the pagans was done by the Logos. This work paralleled that of the work of the logos asarkos (‘Word without flesh’ or logos incarnandus) with Israel in Old Testament times in preparation for the incarnation, when logos asarkos became logos ensarkos (‘Word enfleshed’, or logos carnatus).
This work is in the tradition of praeparatio evangelica with its focus on how the revelatory work of providence in Old Testament times ‘represents a foreshadowing of incarnation’. In pursuit of this aim, as discussed above, typology plays its part as does analogical correspondence. Both are important conceptual tools. Another tool employed in this study is ‘descriptor fittingness’, for want of a better phrase. This phrase refers to how Old Testament language provides apt descriptors for understanding incarnation as the quintessential expression of divine presence in the midst of God’s people. T. F. Torrance in his work The Mediation of Christ offers a helpful insight regarding such descriptors when he writes, ‘They constitute the essential furniture of our knowledge of God even in and through Christ. If the Word of God had become incarnate among us apart from all that, it could not have been grasped – Jesus himself would have remained a bewildering enigma.’ In another work, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, Torrance points out that if you need to make something, you need tools. Likewise if you are to understand something, you need conceptual tools. God provided those conceptual tools in his revelatory and redemptive dealings with ancient Israel. There is a famous Bill Cosby skit in which the comedian plays Noah. God commands him to build an ark. Cosby ask what an ark is. Next God tells him to get wood to build the ark so many cubits in length, height and width. To which Cosby asks what a cubit is. The relevant point is that revelation is unintelligible without the requisite categories already being in place. So too the Christ event.
The plan of the book
explores the purpose of creation in terms of God’s creating and fashioning a palace-temple as his habitation for dwelling with the creature made in the divine image. In particular how God prepared the way for his ultimate incarnate concomitance by revealing himself in anthropomorphic, anthropopathic and anthropopraxic ways is canvassed. In this chapter these latter three crucial terms are defined. Also in this chapter I argue that a third category is needed in discussing God’s relation to the world. The idea of concomitance (the God-with-us motif) needs to be added to the traditional categories of transcendence and immanence. In so doing I hope that the reader of Scripture may take away a more sophisticated set of categories by means of which to understand the portrayal of God in Scripture than the general categories of anthropomorphism simpliciter and transcendence or immanence to understand how God relates to creation with its culmination in the incarnation. An excursus is attached to the chapter that addresses a long-standing question that still attracts debate today: Would the incarnation have taken place if there had been no Fall?
In the the biblical portrait of God is amplified as he acts in Israel’s history to redeem a people of his own among whom he can dwell. Once more God’s anthropomorphic, anthropopathic and anthropopraxic ways are reviewed as we follow the biblical plotline. In particular the theophanic language of the patriarchal, Mosaic, former and latter prophetic periods is examined. God is rendered as a person who speaks, acts and feels as though embodied. In two places at least the Lord is rendered in human terms as someone who eats and wrestles, and does so in history (e.g. Gen. 18 and 32 respectively). In other places the experience is visionary, more fragmentary and heavenly (e.g. Isa. 6). We follow James Barr in describing such phenomena as anthropomorphic theophanies. However, there is no incarnation of deity as such in view.
The explores Israel’s hope and the promise of the divine presence with his people in the midst of the created order. For B. B. Warfield – as we shall see – the keeping of the promise meant that the Messiah to come would be divine. R. C. Ortlund, Jr., argues similarly. This contention is examined. In particular attention is given to some key Old Testament texts (Pss 45:6; 110; Isa. 9:6; Dan. 7:13) that both Warfield and Ortlund, Jr., employ to argue for the deity of the Messiah. The question is whether these texts demand such a reading. Certainly the Old Testament expected human agents or even divine agents of the divine purpose to come to Israel’s aid at some juncture in its future: a prophet like Moses, a Davidic king, the heavenly Son of Man, the child born bearing the names ‘Immanuel’ and ‘mighty God’. Moreover the Old Testament writers also expected God himself to come. But an incarnate, divine-human deliverer? That’s the key question. The section on typology goes some of the way in addressing that question.
In the preparatory gives way to the actual. The testimony of the New Testament now comes into full view as we continue to follow the biblical plotline. God stooped and entered the arena of human affairs in the most personal of ways. Concomitance is now enfleshed. Matthew’s testimony to Jesus as both the truly human Davidic king of promise (Matt. 1) and as Emmanuel (‘God with us’, Matt. 1:23), Mark’s presentation of Jesus as the one in whom God comes to Zion (Mark 1 – 2) and the writer to the Hebrews’ account of Jesus as both deity and humanity (Heb. 1 – 2) are considered along with the Johannine witness that Jesus is the Word become flesh who dwelt among us (John 1:14). The implicit incarnation theology of Matthew and Mark becomes more explicit in Hebrews and patent in John. What could be seen in retrospect after the coming of Christ and what could be seen in prospect are not to be confused, however. In Pauline terms the incarnation is a mystery that in Old Testament times was a hidden part of the divine plan. Also in this chapter, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s theory of theories is drawn upon to provide an important conceptual tool to analyse how the anthropomorphisms, anthropopathisms and anthropopraxisms of the Old Testament together with other Old Testament testimonies might point to incarnation and contribute to the intelligibility of the idea. An excursus is attached that treats the question of whether the Christ per se was known by Old Testament saints to be active in their history.
addresses the question raised by Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages: Why did God become human? Unlike Anselm, however, we seek New Testament answers to the question, rather than speculative ones. The appeal is to Scripture, not to reason with the Bible shut. Happily there is an abundance of New Testament testimonies that address the question. Christ’s revelatory, representative, substitutionary, defeating the devil and moral modelling roles are predicated on his assuming a truly human nature. An excursus is attached that treats the question of whether the divine Son assumed fallen or unfallen human nature in the incarnation.
considers the significance of the incarnation in two aspects: theological and existential. It explores the value of the incarnation for theological method, for the doctrine of God and change, for the affirmation of the created order, for the valuing of human life, for our understanding of mission, for the encounter between Christianity and other religions with special reference to Islam, for the question of theodicy and defence, given evils, and for matters of dogmatic rank. This chapter also explores the value of the incarnation at the personal or existential level. The incarnation matters with regard to our appreciation of the depths of the divine love and our cultivating a sense of wonder.
The last chapter draws the threads of the argument together in summary form and is followed by an appendix that addresses the question of how biblical theology interfaces with systematic theology in the theological interpretation of Scripture.
My hope is that by the time the reader closes this study he or she will have a deeper sense of the astonishing providence of God that subtly prepared the way for the mystery of the incarnation, a greater appreciation of the magnitude of the divine stooping that in the incarnation saw God weep human tears, and a profounder joy at the depth of the love of God that sent no surrogate as the final revelation but the beloved Son who became flesh.