Augustine on the Christian Life: Transformed by the Power of God by Gerald Bray

Author:Gerald Bray
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Crossway

This, of course, is why the messengers of the Old Testament frequently prefaced their remarks with “Thus says the Lord.” In their day there was, or at least there appeared to be, a distinction between the messenger and the message, but this distinction, such as it was, was revealed to be no distinction at all once Christ had come. Even in the Old Testament, the message and the messenger were both Christ—the former being the content of his Word and the latter the human instruments he used to convey it.

Once again, we have to admit that Augustine’s method of arriving at this conclusion was based on a faulty text, but as in the other cases we have looked at, he managed to come to reasonable and even correct conclusions in spite of that fact. In this case, what we find is that his understanding of how Christ was revealed in the Old Testament led him away from certain types of allegorical interpretation that were common in and before his time. The most important of these was the assertion that in the Old Testament, God appeared to the patriarchs and prophets of Israel in the person of the Son, even though he was disguised as an angel.

Such at least was the way most ancient biblical commentators argued. For example, in the case of the appearance of the three angels to Abraham at the oak trees of Mamre in Genesis 18, the only argument was whether this was a manifestation of the Son, accompanied by two angels, or of all three persons of the Godhead. Augustine rejected all such interpretations, however, because of the way he understood the relationship between Christ and angels. To his mind, the persons of the Trinity revealed themselves as such only in the New Testament. In the Old Testament God remained hidden from the eyes of the people, although he occasionally communicated with them by means of angels. In other words, the three angelic figures who appeared to Abraham at Mamre were just that—not God, but three of his messengers. The same principle applied equally to all such angelic manifestations.

It has been established by all rational probability . . . and by firm authority as far as the divine words of Scripture have declared it, that whenever it is said that God appeared to our ancestors before the incarnation of our Savior, that the voices heard and the physical manifestations seen were the work of angels. Either they spoke and did things themselves, as representatives of God, just as we have shown the prophets used to do, or they took created materials that were distinct from themselves and used them to give us symbolic representations of God.94

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