Eugene Webb is Professor Emeritus of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and is the author of numerous books, including Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development (University of Missouri Press).

In Search of the Triune God

The Christian Paths of East and West

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

Contents

Divine Sonship in Israel

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Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not callit bottomless?

—Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers

Symbols live in time. The images they are rooted in and the meaningsthat constitute them evolve together in relation both to the times thatsurround them and to the pull of transcendence that sometimes leadsthem toward what is beyond time. The word God is itself a symbol whosemeaning has evolved over time; this is why one can find books with titleslike A History of God and God: A Biography. The transcendent reality thatChristians, Jews, and Muslims use the symbol "God" to point toward maybe beyond time and therefore beyond change, but the meaning of the symbolitself has changed from the years when it was used to refer to what was stilla tribal deity more like the gods of Israel's neighbors—"a great God, and agreat king above all gods" (Ps. 95:3)—than like the later, radically transcendentand universal God that begins to emerge in the writings of the prophetictradition. To call God a "god," one might say, is to say that the absolutelytranscendent 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 themetaphorical character of all symbols used to refer to God. In his treatise onthe names of God, Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, discussed the relativeadequacy and inadequacy of a variety of such metaphoric designations forthe 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. Heconcluded that although each of these can communicate something true aboutGod, none can be fully adequate. He finally suggested that perhaps the leastinadequate would be "the Tetragrammaton, imposed to signify the substanceof God itself, incommunicable and, if one may so speak, singular." The reasonis that unlike the other symbols, the tetragrammaton, which consists ofthe 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 ofmetaphors; it points beyond metaphor as such into absolute mystery.

Even so, those who have professed the doctrines that eventually developedto explicate the meaning of the Christian symbols have sometimes talked asthough the symbols themselves were missives from on high bearing a timelessmeaning. But before Christians ever came to use them, each of thesesymbols had a history, and those histories sometimes led to forks in the roadthat have left continuing ambiguities. The purpose of this chapter will be toexplore 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 beganto draw on them in order to interpret the significance of the presence theyencountered in Jesus of Nazareth and in their own new lives in the aftermathand 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) inHebrew that was translated in Greek as christos, or Christ, which came tobe closely associated with the "son of God" image by early Christians. Theclose connection between the images of "son of God" and "servant of God"will become clear in a moment. "King," however, besides being a key elementin the meaning of the word messiah, is a nodal point in the ambiguoushistory of the symbol "son of God." One of the principal dynamics of theHebrew Bible is the tension between two competing meanings for "son ofGod," one of which refers to Israel as a whole and the other only to the royalline descending from David. The tension between these two possible meaningsof the symbol carried forward into the New Testament writings and thehistory of Christian political institutions and played an important role in thelater history of the Trinitarian symbolism in the time of Charlemagne (whosecourtiers 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 readsthe books in the sequence we are accustomed to, beginning with Genesis—referrednot to any man but evidently to some kind of superhuman beings ofthe sort that would later be called angels: Genesis 6:2 says, "The sons of Godsaw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of themas they chose," who then gave birth to giants, "the mighty men that were ofold." This, however, is an anomalous use of the image that seems to haveslipped into an early layer of the ancestral tales from pre-Israelite mythologyand had no continuing role to play in the Israelite imagination. There are alsoreferences specifically to angels, including Satan, as "sons of God" in Job at1:6, 2:1, and 38:7. In each of these cases, the phrase is simply an identifierfor a special type of mythological entity. The symbolism of the "son of God"does not appear in the specifically Israelite sense involving a filial relationconstituted by mutual love and loyalty until Exodus 4:22–23, when God tellsMoses to go to the pharaoh and announce, "Thus says the LORD, Israel ismy 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'sword and serve God's intention.

Israel as Son of God

Once the image of divine sonship appears in that form with reference toIsrael, the people of God, as a whole, it takes on a life that then continuesright through Deuteronomy and the Prophets into Jewish apocryphal writingsaround the time of Jesus. 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 ofIsrael as "my first-born son" in Exodus represents a calling to sonship thatIsrael is subsequently reproached over and over for failing to live up to. InDeuteronomy, 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 Israelof 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 descriptionof Israel in Exodus 4 as God's "first-born son," but this time withthe reproach that those called to be the people of God are resisting beingborn into that sonship: "The pangs of childbirth come for him, but he is anunwise 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 specialblend that Christians would later use to interpret the role of Jesus. Jeremiahhas passages similar to those earlier references to Israel as a wayward butstill loved son, as in Jeremiah 3:19–22, "I thought you would call me, MyFather, and would not turn from following me.... Return, O faithless sons,"and 31:9, "With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will leadthem back, I will make them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path inwhich they shall not stumble; for I am a father to Israel, and E'phraim is myfirst-born." Even more important for the Christian future of the symbol is thepicture the book presents of Jeremiah himself as the one truly filial Israeliteleft among a faithless generation, God's only true son, who is rejected andpersecuted for his fidelity. In the opening of the book Jeremiah speaks of howGod called him from beyond time into his service: "Before I formed you inthe womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointedyou a prophet to the nations" (Jer. 1:5). Jeremiah describes his role asGod'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).

It seems likely that this image of Jeremiah as a loyal son who suffers inthe service of God contributed to the imagery of the suffering servant inDeutero-Isaiah, where the image again refers to Israel as a people. Althoughthe first Isaiah opens with the image of Israel as failed sons and the book asa whole still uses that image continuously, Deutero-Isaiah begins to shiftfrom the imagery of imperfect divine sonship to the image of Israel as God'ssuffering servant, who by his faithfulness under conditions of adversity willbe a model of filial loyalty for all mankind. This imagery of suffering clearlyreflects Israel's experience under the conditions of the Babylonian captivity,but it seems modeled at least in part on the memory of Jeremiah's earliersufferings in the service of God when the Babylonian conquest was still onthe horizon.

It also brings with it a new dimension of universality, since now the sufferingof Israel is not simply or even primarily a chastisement for failure to liveup 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 Isaiahbecame central symbolic elements in the Christian interpretation of Jesus.To the early, still Jewish followers of Jesus who found themselves having tomake sense of the paradox of a crucified messiah, the parallels to Jesus inthose stories from six centuries earlier, especially in Isaiah 53 ("He was despisedand rejected by men; a man of sorrows.... he has borne our griefs andcarried our sorrows.... he was wounded for our transgressions ... bruisedfor our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole"), musthave seemed the essential key to a solution to that paradox. But as peoplewho could still read the Hebrew scriptures with Jewish eyes, they would alsohave known that in its original context, the Servant was not an individual butIsrael itself, so that the application of the image to Jesus involved interpretingJesus, like Jeremiah, as the true embodiment of Israel.

Sonship and the Spirit of God

It is also worth remembering that the Spirit, the divine breath that animatessonship, is God's gift to his Servant-Son, as in Isaiah 42:1 ("I have put mySpirit upon him") and 63:11–13:

Where is he who brought up out of the sea
the shepherds of his flock?
Where is he who put in the midst of them
his holy Spirit,
who caused his glorious arm
to go at the right hand of Moses,
who divided the waters before them
to make for himself an everlasting name,
who led them through the depths?

There is a clear parallel between "Behold my servant, whom I uphold, mychosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him" (Isa. 42:1)and Mark 1:10–11: "And when he came up out of the water, immediately hesaw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; anda voice came from heaven, 'Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am wellpleased.'" In the former case, the Spirit of God is given to Israel to enable it tofill its universally redemptive role as "a light to the nations." In the latter case,with the development of the specifically Christian symbolism that will be thefocus of the next chapter, the imagery of divine sonship and the gift of theSpirit became associated with Jesus as an individual, but the meaning of thatassociation can be understood adequately only when one remembers what itwould have meant to the first–century Jewish-Christian authors of the Gospelswho used that imagery to interpret Jesus: that the reduction of Israel to onefaithful individual, which had been sketched in the image of the persecutedJeremiah, now took on a new, more pregnant meaning in the Jesus whom theybelieved to fulfill that role to perfection. Jesus, that is, was True Israel, the onewho had finally and definitively fulfilled God's calling of Israel to sonship.

If we bear in mind, as they did, the full biblical context of the images of"son" and "spirit," it will help to clarify some important but often neglectedissues regarding the interpretation of the way the two images and ideas relateto one another. One of these is the question of who, precisely, can be said to"have," "receive," "be indwelt by" the Spirit of God. Another is how many"spirits" is one talking about when one speaks of a spirit that God confers.Or to put the question more pointedly, when one speaks of different figuresas having received "spirit" from God, with some of those figures exemplifyinga superior, more eminent, or more privileged relation to God, do thosegifts of spirit involve differences in the kind of spirit or rather in the degree?These are probably not questions that will sound familiar to readersof standard theological commentaries, but they are questions that do ariseinsistently from the biblical texts themselves if one reads them closely andwithout preconceptions.

It will be worthwhile, therefore, to consider again some of the passages wehave just seen with these questions in mind and in doing so, to be somewhatcautious about the possibly occluding effects of the preconceptions that arebuilt into virtually all modern translations of both the Hebrew and the Greekscriptures. One basic consideration that should be noted from the start, forexample, is that translations almost always capitalize some instances of thewords son and spirit and leave others in lowercase, as though the originaltexts were distinguishing between different spirits and different kinds of son.I remember once observing a class on the New Testament taught by a colleaguewho was discussing the possibility that Son of Man as a term referringto Jesus was not necessarily in all instances a theological title but possiblya common first-century locution meaning simply a man; a student burst outindignantly, "Then why is it capitalized in the text?"