The Trinity or One God? (part 12 and 13)

(Continuing my review of the essay by Mark D. Roberts)
Rev. Roberts sent me this email in reference to my last posting:

I appreciate the effort you're making. It's a good one. Yet for me to
comment adequately would take more time than I really have. For
example, your ideas about Wisdom deserve a careful reply. There are
many reasons why it's not right to think of Wisdom as an angel. My
advice is that you keep on working on these things, but especially that
you get some good input from folks whose learning is larger than my
own. Is there a seminary near where you live where you could take some
classes?

Honestly, I'm not even dealing with the issue of the Trinity, though
that seems to be important to you. I'm only trying to assess what the
early Christians thought about Jesus and whether he was in some sense
God. I think the answer is clearly "yes." The doctrine of the Trinity
was a later attempt to make theological sense of this.

I appreciate his input and understand that he doesn’t really have the time to spend on my behalf. I will continue approaching this exercise considering what he has said.

First, he says that it isn’t correct to think of Wisdom as an Angel. I’ll have to find some more information on these concepts, but that will take time, and have to be a new topic which may invalidate my entire thought process on this. I imagine that is true in the sense of the idea of wisdom as a concept, instead of just a descriptive name. I wonder if the Jewish word for “wisdom” has been used as a common name? As for the issue of the Trinity, he is right that this concept is important to me, because of the reasons I stated in the beginning. He may not be directly dealing with that issue in this essay, but before the details of the Trinity as a later doctrine can be considered, this concept that Jesus and God are one and the same must be addressed.

* * * * * * * * *

Part 12

It one sense, it appears that Jesus is being linked directly to Wisdom. This may have been due to Jesus being the incarnation of one of God’s heavenly host, or of God, Himself, or it may have been an attempt by John to link Jesus to earlier Biblical writings (very likely), or a combination of these ideas. The section then begins to meld Wisdom with The Word, and then both with Jesus, but at this point there isn’t anything to really suggest Jesus as God. I expect that this eventually leads to “Jesus is the Word” and “The Word is God”, thus, “Jesus is God”.


Part 13

Obviously, monotheistic Jews would not have looked at Wisdom as having been a “goddess” alongside God. But their writings suggest an entity created by God, and I imagine can suggest an angel who is close to God, is divine and yet not God. Perhaps the writers did not use as much poetic license as some might think.

I can see where he is going with the idea that Wisdom pitched her tent in Jacob. But he says that pitching the tent was physically the Tabernacle, or Temple, “in which God was present on earth”. I think this is once again putting human limitations and expectations on God. I thought, though I will have to look into this more, that Jews did not believe God lived in the Temple in the way that, for instance, the Greeks believed their gods did. Or, at least, the tradition did not start that way. In any event, I thought Jesus brought us the word that the Temple was in each of us, that the building itself wasn’t really important? I don’t think that God had changed the rules when Jesus came.

John makes a very poignant remark with “It is God the only Son,” that does strongly imply that Jesus and God are one and the same, but I don’t find this convincing by itself. For one, I wonder if there are any issues with translation here. Also, in the passages he posted (John 1:1, 3-4, 10-12, 14, 17), it is another appeal to gentiles, telling them that acceptance of Jesus allows them to come to God, rather than God being simply for the Jews. So this makes me wonder about his motivations for linking Jesus as God.