Marketing in Confusion: A Response to Dale Tuggy, Part 3
The Necessity of Proper Categories
In the previous section, we discussed the fact that the biblical concept of “god”, “biblical” here referring to the biblical authors’ original context, was broad and not defined by a specific set of attributes. This means that the genus of “god” was populated by a number of species that were then defined by specific attributes that necessarily distinguished one kind of “god” from another.
This means that any theological endeavor to define what the biblical authors believed, taught, or want us to understand, must begin with them and not with us.
This is what brings us back to the argument that Tuggy wants us to consider an argument that he sees as anchored in “biblical theology”. The question is, from where is his theology beginning or being derived?
Does his theology begin with Scripture, as the sole and infallible rule of the faith, or does it begin with his precommitments to his unitarianism?
As we noted in the previous section, the first two premises of his argument are at least questionable, if not most certainly false, evidenced by the fact that, beginning in the Old Testament, which provides the Scriptural and epistemic foundation for the New Testament, by the distinguishing of two divine persons who are both identified as Yahweh, but are clearly distinguished from one another, yet are not seen as two different deities.
One might object that I have not proven the case based on the paucity of the evidence provided, just a few verses from the Psalms. I rebut this by an appeal to a number of passages wherein there are clearly two, or more, individuals who are either identified with or by the divine name yet are not treated separately. Passages such as Genesis 18:1-3, Genesis 19:24, and Exodus 34:5-6. Then there are paradoxical passages, where Yahweh speaks of another, or as if he is distinct from another, or is attempting to prove who he is. Passages like Isaiah 49:22-23, and Amos 4:11. These are some of the more explicit passages, however if one follows the thoughts laid out in the more explicit then the implicit passages will begin to reveal themselves.
While some may argue that there are multiple ways to interpret such passages, I appeal to the principle of interpretational simplicity: that such interpretations follow from the plain reading of the text (grammatical and contextual) and fall in line with the historical (ie pre-Christian) interpretation of such passages.
More importantly, the existence of this view of Yahweh in predating the New Testament, which serves as the realization of the Old Testament’s established categories and beliefs, explains not only the presentation of Jesus as not merely a divine messenger but as something else entirely.
Smuggling Assumptions
As has been demonstrated the name Yahweh is not merely “the proper name of the one God,” as Tuggy claims, rather it serves another purpose: to differentiate Yahweh--as a class of being--from the other gods of the nations. This is accomplished by the writers attaching Yahweh to two different, yet related, terms-- elohim (god) and adonai (lord)--terms that serve to distinguish, and yet relate, divine Persons. This is important because of what happens in the New Testament by the employment of a term to one of the Persons that term being the name “Father”.
This is relevant due to Tuggy’s second premise: “Yahweh just is the Father.” This premise is based upon two alleged evidences: a lack of New Testament use of the name “Yahweh” and alleged “name swapping”.
Regarding the first evidence, Tuggy gives two reasons that, by the time of the authorship of the New Testament, the name doesn’t appear: first, for reasons of religious propriety; and second, because the NT is written in Greek.
In giving his first reason, the issue of religious propriety, Tuggy is correct. By the time of Jesus, the direct use of the Tetragrammaton had ceased. This practice is testified to in the list of names from Ezra 2, where theophoric names are reduced in use, and in various scribal practices where the divine name is either replaced by the generic adonai (Lord) or otherwise obscured or notated for avoidance in pronunciation.[1] Moreover, in second temple literature, elohim, often translated as “god”, became the preferred means of referring to Yahweh.[2] By the time of the Septuagint, there are several instances where the translators attempted to bring the ancient Hebrew along with them, via either visual representation (יהוה/ΠΙΠΙ) or transliteration, however the primary means for conveying the divine name via substitution by the Greek word kyrios.[3]
Since the NT writings are written in the second temple period and are heavily dependent upon not only that background but also the Septuagint for much of their argumentation, then we should be careful how we approach understanding what the writers are saying when we approach the text.
Tuggy’s second premise, that “Yahweh just is the Father,” seems to be assuming what needs to be proven, as his justification for such seems to ignore the dependency on that second temple background, when he asserts that John is simply swapping terms of “God” and “Father” at passages like 6:46, 10:36, or 13:3 in his gospel for “stylistic reasons”.
Such and assertion is both overly simplistic and is immediately exposed as functionally false when placed into their greater context and studied with due exegetical scrutiny.
In John 6:46, for example, we do not have a “swapping of terms”, as Tuggy alleges, where one can draw an equal sign. While it is outside of the scope of this response, what needs to be noticed is that the sentence in question is a parenthetical statement, wherein Jesus identifies himself as “the Bread of Life.” While most translations, if they employ red-lettering to highlight the words of Jesus, mark this as Jesus speaking, for exegetical reasons I think that the verse is a narrative intrusion that shouldn’t be included, namely on the basis of the third person reference.[4] Speaking of exegetical reasons, that “swapping” should be excluded is in the use of the proposition para, often translated as “from” though sometimes as “with”, generally referring to personal presence in a geographical location. That is, in 6:46 the phrase “from God”, should be understood as a place.
His second example, John 10:36, suffers from a similar exegetical issue since “God” appears as part of a title and not in a nominative form. Lastly, John 13:3, demonstrates that the prepositional phrase “from God” is a geographical location by the use of the verbs translated (ESV) as “had come” and “was going back”, but also by the use of the preposition apo, which is used to refer to geographical locations.
However, there are those times when Jesus is identified as Yahweh, such as in John 12:41, where the apostolic witness appeals to Isaiah’s temple vision as evidence of his identity. Or, where the Holy Spirit is identified as Yahweh, as in 2 Corinthians 3:17-18. While these are singular examples, reading the New Testament holistically, there is a clear and comfortable co-identification of Persons as Yahweh, not in the sense that they are parts but that there is no way to separate them from that identity without damaging the deity.
Tuggy wants his readers to read the text with blinders and preconceived notions already in place so that they can ignore how words are used and what they are clearly referring to, namely either in regard to physical locations or titular use. Thus, contrary to his claim that “… ‘God’ and ‘Father’ are normally understood as co-referring terms,” we should not make such preemptive assumptions but rather allow the text to inform us of how the term should be understood in its context.
Bad Data + Bad Assumptions = Erroneous Conclusions
Tuggy delivers his initial conclusion that will inform the rest of his argument as “God just is the Father”. He reaches this based on the assumption that “numerical identity is transitive”. That is if “a=b and b=c then a=c”.
We’ve already noted that his first premise is false because it ignores Old Testament theological categories, as well as the fact that I noted that its formulation is linguistically problematic, in that it has already determined what the conclusion is and therefore formulates his premises to arrive there.
The first biblical premise of the argument should be, The God of the Old Testament is Yahweh. This formulation of the premise avoids the unnecessary exclusiveness of Tuggy’s premise of “God just is Yahweh” as well as allows for the OT’s use of divine plurality in its presentation of Yahweh as multi-personal, distinguished by Yahweh Elohim (LORD God) and Adonai Yahweh (Lord GOD).[5]
Moving to the New Testament, the second biblical premise is that the Father is identified as Yahweh. This refined premise maintains the distinction of divine persons as well as supports the fact that Jesus is not proclaiming a new God (thus avoiding Gnostic contentions) while recognizing that the New Testament maintains ontological unity between the Father and Son (thus avoiding Arian contentions) while distinguishing between the Persons. It is in this ontological unity that the numerical identity is not only established but maintained.[6]
Keeping in mind the Gnostic concern, we can then form our biblical conclusion that therefore, the Father is Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. This conclusion follows from
all of the NT data but does not necessarily exclude such data that also identifies the Son and the Spirit as Yahweh, by the principle of interpretational simplicity. Moreover, the truth of numerical identity is maintained by not confusing ontological numerical identity with personal numerical identity, which is the foundational error of modalism.
The key to understanding the doctrine of the Trinity, as it is derived from the self-revelation of God in Scripture, is that it positively responds to all theological errors, whether it seeks to deny the humanity of Christ (Docetism), the identity of God (Gnosticism), the Persons of God (Modalism), the ontology of God (Arianism), or the deity of Christ (Sabellianism), by maintaining both the unity and distinction of the Persons that Scripture clearly enunciates but is careful to not confuse.
There is still more to come in this series.
Notes
1. Martin A. Shields and Ralph K. Hawkins. “YHWH”. The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Lexham Press. 2016.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. D.A. Carson in his commentary The Gospel According to John (Eerdmans, 1991) notes this.
5. It needs to be noted that these are not the only terms by which the Second Yahweh is distinguished from the First. Other terms include Malak Yahweh (the Angel of the LORD), Tsar shabbat Yahweh (commander/captain of the LORD’s host/armies), Shem Yahweh (the Name of the LORD), and Dabar Yahweh (the word of the LORD), among others. For a thorough discussion see Matt Foreman and Douglas Van Dorn’s book The Angel of the LORD: a Biblical, Historical, and Theological Study (Waters of Creation, 2020).
6. Louis Berkhof. Systematic Theology. GLH Publishing. 2017. p. 63
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