2. Intimations of the Old Testament.The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four heads:A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.[pg 318](a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simplepluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase“angel of Jehovah”is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John's doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.D. Descriptions of the Messiah.(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.[pg 322](a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ's coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”
2. Intimations of the Old Testament.The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four heads:A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.[pg 318](a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simplepluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase“angel of Jehovah”is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John's doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.D. Descriptions of the Messiah.(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.[pg 322](a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ's coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”
2. Intimations of the Old Testament.The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four heads:A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.[pg 318](a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simplepluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase“angel of Jehovah”is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John's doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.D. Descriptions of the Messiah.(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.[pg 322](a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ's coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”
2. Intimations of the Old Testament.The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four heads:A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.[pg 318](a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simplepluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase“angel of Jehovah”is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John's doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.D. Descriptions of the Messiah.(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.[pg 322](a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ's coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”
2. Intimations of the Old Testament.The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four heads:A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.[pg 318](a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simplepluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase“angel of Jehovah”is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John's doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.D. Descriptions of the Messiah.(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.[pg 322](a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ's coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”
2. Intimations of the Old Testament.The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four heads:A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.[pg 318](a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simplepluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase“angel of Jehovah”is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John's doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.D. Descriptions of the Messiah.(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.[pg 322](a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ's coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”
The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four heads:
A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.[pg 318](a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simplepluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.
(a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.
(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.
(a)Gen. 20:13—“God caused[plural]me to wander from my father's house”;35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el;because there God was revealed[plural]unto him.”(b)Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”;3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”;11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”;Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”(c)Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”;Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”;cf.2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d)Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”;Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”(e)Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”;Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath[spirit]of his mouth”;Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”;63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.”(f)Is. 6:3—the trisagion:“Holy, holy, holy”;Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”
It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term“Baalim,”and Elijah could say:“Call ye upon your Gods,”so“Elohim”may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural“Elohim”is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that“Baalim”is a collective term, while“Elohim”is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel,viz., the“Almighty”of the Patriarchs, the“Jehovah”of the Covenant, the“God of Hosts”of the Monarchy, the“Holy One”of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the“Our Lord”of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.
The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simplepluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.
Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.
Ps. 45:6;cf.Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.”Here it is God who calls Christ“God”or“Elohim.”The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. InGen. 41:41-44, he says:“I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.”But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called“my gods”or“my god,”indifferently. The word“master”is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf.Gen. 24:9, 51;39:19;40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)
This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a“quantitative plural,”signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where[pg 319]we should use the singular, as“heavens”instead of“heaven,”“waters”instead of“water.”We too speak of“news,”“wages,”and say“you”instead of“thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man's reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God's purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man's. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.
We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man....‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’(Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.”E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that“we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”
To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man's sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren:“The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander onPsalm 11:7;29:1;58:11.
B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah.(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase“angel of Jehovah”is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.
(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase“angel of Jehovah”is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.
(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.
(a)Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him[Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ...By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”;31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me[Jacob] ...I am the God of Beth-el.”(b)Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”;48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.”(c)Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”;Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”
The“angel of the Lord”appears to be a human messenger inHaggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah's messenger”; a created angel inMat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord[called Gabriel]appeared unto”Joseph; inActs 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him”(Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the“angel of Jehovah”is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of“the angel of Jehovah”seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as inGen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him[Abraham] ...And Jehovah said unto Abraham”;Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.”The N.T.“angel of the Lord”does not permit, the O.T.“angel of the Lord”requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”;cf.Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith,[pg 320]Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.
C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word.(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John's doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.
(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”
(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.
(a)Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?”Cf.Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”;Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”;11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”;Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”;cf.3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,”andHeb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.”(b)Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”;119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”;147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”
In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as“the brightness of the eternal light,”“the unspotted mirror of God's majesty,”and“the image of his goodness”—reminding us ofHeb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.”In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God's holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal:“Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”
It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John's doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.
Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.
Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo's doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God's multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God's unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.
We need not assign to John's gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo's Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John's gospel] appears to be derived directly from the PalestinianMemra, and not from the AlexandrianLogos.”Instead of Philo's doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had[pg 321]no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo's Logos is Reason, while John's is Word; Philo's is impersonal, while John's is personal; Philo's is not incarnate, while John's is incarnate; Philo's is not the Messiah, while John's is the Messiah.”
Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says:“The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.”He calls the Word the“chainband,”“pilot,”“steersman,”of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated‘Reason.’But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the‘Word’of Jehovah (Memra,Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself,‘The Word of God’had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.”George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John's use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”
Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans= the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo:‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’Philo's Logos is not only form but force—God's creative energy—the eldest-born of the‘I am,’which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest's robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo's belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.”See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer's History of the Jewish People, article on Philo:“Philo's doctrine grew out of God's distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”
The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled“the Word of life”(1 John 1:1).“The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead”(quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors' Bible, onJohn 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord's Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.
D. Descriptions of the Messiah.(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.[pg 322](a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ's coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”
(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.
(a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.
(a)Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”;Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.”(b)Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”;Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.”Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called“the Lord”or“the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.
It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ's coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.
Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.
That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”
That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson:“The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”