Is Jesus Yahweh? God of the political-religious order to come

The first passage which James White considers in his debate with Dale Tuggy is Hebrews 1:10-12, in which the writer directly applies Psalm 102:25-27 to the Son. You can find my treatment of the second passage, which I did first, here.

The lines from the psalm are a statement about the transcendent character of YHWH, who laid the foundations of the earth and made the heavens, who is “immutable and eternal.” So whereas the angels are created beings (Heb. 1:7), the Son is called “God” (Heb. 1:8) and is described in language that should belong uniquely to YHWH. White says: “in a text clearly discussing the Father and the Son, these divine attributes are purposefully ascribed to the Son as the Son.”

I’m inclined to agree with White that the text re-envisions Jesus as theos—as “god” or “God”—but the identification needs to be qualified in a couple of important respects. First, it is the Son as Israel’s king and future ruler of the nations who is redescribed in this way. Secondly, it is not an absolute identification of Jesus with theos but is qualified eschatologically.

1. The Son, in the first place, has acquired a new status on ascension to the right hand of God: he has been “appointed heir of all things,” he has become much greater than the angels, and he has “inherited a name more excellent” than the names of the angels (Heb. 1:2, 4*). There is no thought of a personal heavenly pre-existence here or elsewhere in the passage.

2. The Son is “a radiance (apaugasma) of the glory” of God and “an impression (charaktēr) of his substance (hypostaseōs)” (Heb. 1:3*). The Son is not here identified with God: he is differentiated to the extent that light or reflected light is different from the source, or that an impression or imprint is different from the object which made it. This sounds very much like a wisdom christology and is perhaps a conscious rewriting of a tradition such as this:

For [wisdom] is a breath of the power of God and an emanation of the pure glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection (apaugasma) of eternal light and a spotless mirror of the activity of God and an image of his goodness. Although she is one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things…. (Wis. 7:25-27)

It is not wisdom but the Son through whom the ages were made and all things are sustained.

3. The affirmations of verses 5-6* develop the kingship motif implicit in the earlier statement that Jesus “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in the heights.” God establishes his king in Zion and makes him heir to the nations: “You are my son, today I have begotten you” (cf. Ps. 2:6-9). God will be to the king a father and the king will be to God a son (cf. 2 Sam. 7:14). The “firstborn” brought into the oikoumenē to be worshipped by angels is Israel’s king, who will be “high among the kings of the earth” (Psalm 88:28 LXX = 89:27 MT). No angel has been told: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Heb 1:13; cf. Ps. 110:1).

4. The angels are winds and fire, servants of God, but to the Son (pros… ton huion) he says:

“Your throne, O God, is for the age of the age, and the sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of your kingdom. You loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore, God, your God, anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” (Heb. 1:8-9*)

This is a quotation of Psalm 45:6-7. It is addressed to the king on the occasion of his wedding, and “O God” is obviously problematic. The Hebrew is sometimes vocalised differently to give “the eternal God has enthroned you,” which makes much better sense but is speculative:

The only evidence for this proposal is its manifest good sense, its concordance with the Ugaritic-Hebrew proclivity for coining such verbs… and, negatively, the unsatisfactory nature of the numberless solutions which have been proffered on behalf of this crux interpretum.1

But the Septuagint version, quoted in Hebrews, is unequivocal. The king is first addressed as “God” and then differentiated from “your God,” who has anointed him with the oil of gladness.

On the face of it, Jesus as the righteous king who will rule throughout the ages, is now also to be accorded a divine status—worshipped by angels and acclaimed as “god,” at least indirectly through the language of the Psalms, perhaps originally in the context of worship. Jesus can be called “god” because the king was called “god” before him.

Presumably, then, the application of Psalm 102:25-27 to Jesus reinforces both the creational function (“through whom also he made the ages, …bearing all things by the word of his power”) and the subsequent eternality of Israel’s new king.

So my first qualification is that the writer argues that Jesus is first Davidic king, then theos.

5. The second qualification is eschatological. The king becomes theos for the “world to come.”

For not to angels did he subject the oikoumenē to come, concerning which we speak. It was testified somewhere saying: What is man that you remember him, or a son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than angels; having crowned him with glory and honour, you subjected all things under his feet. For by subjecting all things [to him] he left nothing unsubjected by him. Now we do not yet see all things subjected to him; but we see the one who was made a little lower than angels, Jesus, through the suffering of death, having been crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God for everyone he might taste death. (Heb. 2:5-9*)

The writer foresees a new political-religious order or oikoumenē in which all things will be subjected to the Son. This new reality is not yet apparent to his readers, who in all likelihood will first have to share in the suffering of Jesus. But they know that he has been “crowned with glory and honour” as Israel’s king at the right hand of God, and they can expect history to catch up with this heavenly state of affairs sooner or later. Now and not yet—though not as we usually construe it.

But the point to note here is that the statement in verse 5 frames the whole preceding argument about the Son who is greater than the angels: the writer has been speaking not about the world that has existed since creation but about the new order that will come into being when finally it becomes concretely and publicly evident that all things have been subjected to the Son—and importantly, when persecution and suffering are no longer the order of the day.

So I would suggest that the rhetoric of Hebrews 1:1-2:9 bends towards the idea that in the age to come, of which the writer has been speaking, in the new political-religious order of which the “Christianised” Roman Empire was the fitting historical embodiment, Jesus will be acclaimed and worshipped as a divine person. Exactly what happened.

This whole new reality had its origins in the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of the Father, when he was given the nations of the Greek-Roman oikoumenē as his inheritance and became a divine king, so deeply assimilated into the heavenly realm that he could be addressed in language taken over from the old creation. He was the Lord who created—or was the wisdom through whom was created—the oikoumenē to come, and he would rule as king until the last enemy is put under his feet.

Then finally, perhaps, as Paul suggests, this divine king will give back the kingdom to the Father and become subject again so that the God who really did make the heavens and the earth “may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:24-28).

• 1

  M. Dahood, Psalms I 1-50 (1974), 273.