The Old Testament and the Divine Plurality

The Church does not read the Old Testament as containing a stated doctrine of the Trinity, and does not need to. She reads it as the Lord himself taught his disciples to read it — from Christ backwards. This file sets out the texts the Fathers actually used, what they claimed from them and what they did not, and where the patristic reading and the reading of modern historical scholarship diverge, without pretending the divergence away.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Hermeneutical Rule Comes First

On the road to Emmaus the risen Lord “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). That verse, and not any argument from the plural verbs of Genesis, is the charter of the patristic reading of the Old Testament. The Fathers do not claim that Israel confessed the Trinity, or that a reader without the Gospel could extract it from the Law and the Prophets. They claim that the same God who spoke in the prophets became incarnate, that the Scriptures are therefore about him, and that once this is known the earlier texts are seen to have been shaped for it (see Christ the Key to the Scriptures).

This should be said plainly at the outset because it removes a whole class of bad argument. Orthodox apologetics has sometimes presented the Old Testament passages below as though they demonstrated the Trinity to a neutral reader. They do not, and the Fathers who used them did not think they did. What they do is show that the revelation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does not break with the God of Israel but discloses him.

The Unity Is Never Surrendered

The first and largest fact of the Old Testament witness is monotheism, stated absolutely: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4); “I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God” (Isaiah 44:6). Whatever the Church came to confess about the three, she confessed it as the same faith, and every Trinitarian heresy the councils condemned can be described as a failure to hold this together with the confession of Christ. Arius’ motive was the defence of this verse; so, in its way, was Sabellius’. The Nicene faith is not a qualification of Deuteronomy 6:4 but a claim about what it always meant.

“Let Us Make Man”

The best-known text is Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” — a plural cohortative followed immediately by a singular verb, “So God created man in his own image.” The Fathers read the plural as addressed by the Father to the Son and the Spirit. St. Basil argues the point at length in the Hexaemeron, noting that the words are addressed to someone, that no creature is a fit addressee for the making of the image, and that Scripture’s own idiom (“in his image”) forbids reading the plural as a plurality of gods (Basil, Hexaemeron 9.6; also On the Origin of Man 1; trans. NPNF II/8). St. Irenaeus reads the same verse through his image of the two hands: the Father makes man by the Son and the Spirit, “for with him were always the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, he made all things” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.20.1; trans. ANF 1; see The Apologists and the Two Hands).

Honesty requires noting that this is not how modern Old Testament scholarship reads the verse. The standard alternatives are a plural of deliberation or self-address, a plural of majesty, or — most commonly in current scholarship — an address to the divine council of heavenly beings, a motif attested elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (1 Kings 22:19–22; Job 1:6; Psalm 81:1 LXX = 82:1 MT). [Disputed: the patristic reading, from Irenaeus and Barnabas through Basil, takes the plural as intra-divine address (Irenaeus, *Against Heresies* IV.20.1; Basil, *Hexaemeron* 9.6); the dominant modern critical reading takes it as address to the divine council or as a plural of deliberation (see the discussion in Gordon J. Wenham, *Genesis 1–15*, Word Biblical Commentary 1, Waco: Word, 1987, on 1:26). The two readings answer different questions — the first asks what the text means in the canon of the Church, the second what it meant in its compositional setting — and the Church's reading does not depend on winning the second argument.] The point that survives either way is that the verse resists a flat unipersonalism, and that the Fathers who used it were not inventing its difficulty.

The Three at Mamre

Genesis 18 is the text with the deepest liturgical and iconographic consequences. Three men appear to Abraham at the oak of Mamre; he addresses them as one — “My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant” — and the narrative alternates between singular and plural throughout.

The patristic readings of this chapter differ, and the difference matters. One line, well represented, sees the Lord accompanied by two angels, since Genesis 19:1 has “two angels” arriving at Sodom; St. John Chrysostom reads it broadly this way. Another line sees a figure of the Trinity, and it is this reading that the Church’s iconography received: the Hospitality of Abraham became the received image of the Holy Trinity precisely because it depicts three who came as guests and not the divine nature (see The Liturgical and Iconographic Witness). The Church has not defined between the two exegeses, and both remain in use; what she has done is receive the scene as the one licit way of showing the Three.

Word, Wisdom, and Spirit

Three strands of Old Testament language did the heaviest lifting in the fourth century.

The Word. “By the word of the Lord were the heavens established, and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth” (Psalm 32:6 LXX = 33:6 MT). This verse is quoted constantly by the Fathers as a single sentence naming all three — the Lord, his Word, and the Spirit of his mouth — and it stands behind the Nicene “by whom all things were made” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 16.38; trans. NPNF II/8). Alongside it stand the passages where the Word of the Lord comes to a prophet as an agent rather than a message, and the developed Johannine reading of Genesis 1:3.

Wisdom. The Wisdom literature personifies Wisdom as present with God at creation and as his agent (Proverbs 8:22–31; Wisdom of Solomon 7:22–8:1). The pre-Nicene Fathers used this freely of the Son. It then became the single most dangerous text in the controversy, because the Septuagint of Proverbs 8:22 reads “The Lord created me (ekstisen me) the beginning of his ways for his works,” and Arius made it his chief proof (see Arius and What He Actually Taught). St. Athanasius devoted the whole of Orations against the Arians II.18–82 to it, arguing that the verse speaks of the Wisdom that took flesh — of the Son “created” in the economy, in his human nature, as the beginning of God’s new works — and not of his eternal generation (Athanasius, Orations against the Arians II.44–52; trans. NPNF II/4). That an entire book of a Father’s principal work is given to one Septuagint verse is a measure of how much the Old Testament witness was contested and how little of it was self-evident.

The Spirit. The Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2), comes upon judges and kings and prophets, is not to be taken away (Psalm 50:13 LXX = 51:11), is grieved and rebelled against — that is, is treated as one who can be offended (Isaiah 63:10). The Pneumatomachian controversy of the 370s turned in large part on whether such language required a divine person or merely a divine influence (see The Pneumatomachoi and the Creed).

The Angel of the Lord and the Theophanies

A recurring figure in the Pentateuch and Judges is the “angel of the Lord” who speaks as the Lord in the first person and receives worship (Genesis 16:7–13; Exodus 3:2–6; Judges 6:11–24; Judges 13). The early Christian reading, standard from St. Justin Martyr onward, identifies this figure with the pre-incarnate Word: it was the Son who spoke to Moses from the bush and who wrestled with Jacob, since the Father is invisible and unapproachable (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 56–60, 126–128; trans. ANF 1). This exegesis has a real theological function — it secures that the God of Israel and the God of the Gospel are the same, and that the Son was active before the Incarnation — and it was pressed hard in the Arian controversy from both directions, since the Arians could take the same texts to show a subordinate divine agent. St. Augustine’s decision to break with the identification and read the theophanies as angelic mediations is one of the notable divergences between the Greek and Latin traditions of the period (Augustine, On the Trinity II–III; see St. Augustine: De Trinitate).

The Thrice-Holy

Isaiah’s vision of the seraphim crying “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts” (Isaiah 6:3) is read by the Church as a Trinitarian doxology, and this reading is embedded in her worship rather than argued in her polemics: the Sanctus of the anaphora and the Trisagion of the Liturgy both derive from it, and both are addressed to the Trinity. The threefold blessing of Numbers 6:24–26 is read the same way. This is the most characteristic form of the Old Testament witness in Orthodox use — not a proof but a prayer, received and continued.

What the Section Claims

Set together, the Old Testament materials support a modest and precise claim, and the Church makes no larger one. They show that the God of Israel is not a bare unit; that he acts by his Word and his Spirit, spoken of in ways that strain against being mere metaphors for his own activity; that he appears and is seen while remaining invisible; and that the language which the apostolic preaching would use of the Son and the Spirit was already lying to hand and already stretched. They do not establish the doctrine. The doctrine was established by the coming of the one of whom they spoke, and by his command to baptize into a threefold name — which is the subject of the next file.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Orations against the Arians II. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4.
Basil the Great. Hexaemeron 9; On the Holy Spirit 16. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies IV.20; V.6.1. Trans. ANF, vol. 1.
Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho 56–62, 126–128. Trans. ANF, vol. 1.
Augustine of Hippo. On the Trinity II–III. Trans. NPNF, First Series, vol. 3.
Wenham, Gordon J. Genesis 1–15. Word Biblical Commentary 1. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987.
Behr, John. The Way to Nicaea. Formation of Christian Theology 1. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001.