Dear Friends,
Welcome! Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent.
I want to go back for a moment to Peter Leithart’s Creator: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1. In this book he makes a truly dizzying—and compelling—case that Genesis 1 reveals to us the Triune God: Father, Son, and Spirit. Many Christian interpreters (e.g., Augustine) have suggested this in history, of course, but in the wake of the Enlightenment and historical-critical studies this view has fallen on hard times, to put it mildly.
But Leithart presses his case far more aggressively than just seeing “vestiges” or “hints” of a Trinitarian theology in Genesis. He wants to make an even bolder claim: that God’s revealed name, Yahweh—a word which he argues is “whispered” in various verbal forms all throughout Genesis 1, then suddenly appearing as a full proper noun in Genesis 2:4—is not a reference to undifferentiated divine “being,” but rather the name of the Second Person of the Trinity: the Son, the Word. He writes, after a great deal of argumentation:
YHWH is, in brief, the name of the Second Person of the Trinity. The New Testament confirms this repeatedly, by recording that Jesus, Word and Son, speaks egō eimi (“I Am”), the Greek equivalent of ehyeh. This name is especially prominent in John’s Gospel.
He goes through the familiar “I Am” statements of Jesus in John’s Gospel, and continues:
We reach the same conclusion by tracking kyrios (“Lord”) in the LXX and New Testament. Kyrios is the standard Greek translation of YHWH. YHWH ‘elohim in Genesis 2:8 becomes kyrios ho theos (“the LORD God”), the same phrase as Exodus 3:15. In the New Testament, kyrios is regularly used as a title for Jesus. Typically, the Father is ho theos, and Jesus is kyrios (e.g., 1 Cor. 8:6). The New Testament triune formula is God, the Lord, and the Spirit. Once again YHWH is taken as the name of the Second Person.
Jesus’ egō eimi sayings are typically taken as proof that Jesus is divine. Fair enough. But we can press and invert the point. If egō eimi is the Greek way of saying ‘ani hu, and that is a way of identifying God as YHWH, then Jesus is YHWH. YHWH is not a general name for the one God, but specifically a name for the Second Person. YHWH is the name of the God uttered by ‘elohim who brings heaven and earth into being. YHWH is the spoken God.
You can see why I said in one of our previous chats that this book is a workout. This is one of the more straightforward passages/arguments, although even here I would suggest a bit more caution with the language: “YHWH is the name of the God uttered by ‘elohim” makes it sound like there are multiple gods. Divine “person” would have been a better choice here.
But, anyway, the reference he makes to Exodus 3:15 particularly caught my eye. That is where God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush as “I Am that I Am.” It caught my eye because I had recently read Justin Martyr’s First Apology, a defense of Christianity written to the Roman Emperor circa A.D. 155). And what Peter Leithart is writing in A.D. 2023 as a refreshingly bold claim is something Justin Martyr thought completely obvious.
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