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Chapter 1. Divine Sonship in Israel
- University of Missouri Press
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Chapter 1 Divine Sonship in Israel w Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless? —Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers Symbols live in time. the images they are rooted in and the meanings that constitute them evolve together in relation both to the times that surround them and to the pull of transcendence that sometimes leads them toward what is beyond time. the word God is itself a symbol whose meaning has evolved over time; this is why one can find books with titles like A History of God and God: A Biography.1 the transcendent reality that Christians, Jews, and Muslims use the symbol “God” to point toward may be beyond time and therefore beyond change, but the meaning of the symbol itself has changed from the years when it was used to refer to what was still a tribal deity more like the gods of Israel’s neighbors—“a great God, and a great king above all gods” (Ps. 95:3)—than like the later, radically transcendent and universal God that begins to emerge in the writings of the prophetic tradition.2 to call God a “god,” one might say, is to say that the absolutely transcendent is analogous to one of those only relatively transcendent figures that are called “gods.” Christian theologians of both East and West have been well aware of the metaphorical character of all symbols used to refer to God. in his treatise on the names of God, saint thomas aquinas, for example, discussed the relative 17 18 In Search of the Triune God adequacy and inadequacy of a variety of such metaphoric designations for the radically transcendent source of all that is—phrases such as ipsum esse (being itself), Qui est (He Who is), and also the word Deus (God) itself. He concluded that although each of these can communicate something true about God, none can be fully adequate. He finally suggested that perhaps the least inadequate would be “the tetragrammaton, imposed to signify the substance of God itself, incommunicable and, if one may so speak, singular.”3 the reason is that unlike the other symbols, the tetragrammaton, which consists of the four Hebrew consonants yod He vau He (or in the latin alphabet, yHvH) that in the Hebrew bible stand for the name of God that is never pronounced, is not an analogy but an indicator that one has reached the ultimate limit of metaphors; it points beyond metaphor as such into absolute mystery.4 Even so, those who have professed the doctrines that eventually developed to explicate the meaning of the Christian symbols have sometimes talked as though the symbols themselves were missives from on high bearing a timeless meaning. but before Christians ever came to use them, each of these symbols had a history, and those histories sometimes led to forks in the road that have left continuing ambiguities. the purpose of this chapter will be to explore the many layers of meaning such symbols as “son of God,” “father” as applied to God, “spirit of God,” “the anointed,” “servant of God,” and “king” brought with them out of their past before the early Christians began to draw on them in order to interpret the significance of the presence they encountered in Jesus of nazareth and in their own new lives in the aftermath and continuation of that encounter. “King” and “servant” might at first seem out of place in that list. “son,” “spirit,” and “father” are obviously central to the doctrine of the trinity, and “anointed” is English for the word messiah (or mashiach, moshiach) in Hebrew that was translated in Greek as christos, or Christ, which came to be closely associated with the “son of God” image by early Christians. the close connection between the images of “son of God” and “servant of God” will become clear in a moment. “King,” however, besides being a key element in the meaning of the word messiah, is a nodal point in the ambiguous history of the symbol “son of God.” one of the principal dynamics of the Hebrew bible is the tension between two competing meanings for “son of God,” one of which refers to israel as a whole and the other only to the royal line descending from David. the tension between these two possible meanings of the symbol carried forward into the new testament writings and the history of Christian political institutions and played an important role in the later history...