Robert Hach
The question of the so-called “pre-existence” of the Messiah is not settled by a biblically-informed rejection of the
doctrine of the Trinity. That the Messiah existed before his birth is clear
from many NT texts. In what sense, or form, he existed remains a question
insofar as it continues to be a matter of debate among those who believe that
Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, while refusing to embrace the
extra-biblical identification of Jesus as the
Trinitarian “God the Son.” Regarding the “preexistence” of the Messiah, the
options can be termed personal
pre-existence, that is, that prior to
his birth, the Son existed in some other-than-human form, and prophetic pre-existence (the option for which I argue in this paper).
Undeniable, I think, is
the fact that the very term preexistence is a product of the post-apostolic debate that gave birth to
Trinitarian theology. While it is possible to reject the Trinity as a
non-biblical formulation and a post-apostolic invention while, at the same
time, retaining the doctrine of the personal pre-existence of the Messiah, it is not possible to trace any term that might
be translated as pre-existence back to apostolic times.
The Athanasian-Arian
debate that was decided at the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. seems to have been
the cradle out of which emerged the terminology of pre-existence, which only afterward became enshrined in
Christian theology.
The term that, in my
view, serves as the biblical equivalent of pre-existence is foreknowledge. The NT claim that the Messiah “was foreknown before the foundation of the world
but was made manifest in the last times” (1 Pet. 1:20) is sufficient, in my view, to explain every NT
text in which the concept of pre-existence is found.
To say that God the
Father foreknew the Son “before the foundation of the world” is to say that the
Son existed in the purpose of the Father from “the beginning” in the form of
“the word” (John 1:1, ‘and the word was God’ in the sense not that “the word”
was part of God’s being but that “the word” was, thereafter, the revelatory form which God used to mediate his
presence and purpose to his people and to the world).
No textual necessity for interpreting “the word” (Greek, ho logos) as a person (or a Person) exists in the
prologue of John’s Gospel. (The Greek
pronoun, autos, is susceptible to either the neuter [“it”] or the masculine [“he”] rendering, depending on what the context makes the more
likely.) The NT writers uniformly use “the
word” to refer to the gospel, that is, the message spoken by and about Jesus. For the NT writers,
“the word” is the message about the fulfillment in Jesus the Messiah of the
biblical God’s purpose in Adam and promise to Abraham.
When “the word became flesh”
(John 1:14), God’s Adamic purpose and Abrahamic promise became God’s Messianic
person. That is to say, the Son existed in the form,
first, of God’s purpose and, then, of
God’s promise before he existed in the form of the person of Jesus.
The biblical concept of foreknowledge is not compatible with the concept of personal pre-existence. If the Son existed as a person from “the beginning,” how was his existence a matter of God’s foreknowledge? That God foreknew the
Messiah would seem to preclude the possibility that God also knew him in some pre-existent other-than-human form. Rather than God having both foreknown the coming Messiah and known the pre-existent Son at the same time (though in presumably two
radically different personal forms), God’s foreknowledge and his knowledge of his
Messiah-Son were one and the same. This is the case in the sense that, from a
biblical standpoint, what (or whom) God foreknew is what
God knew as a
foreordained reality before it came to pass in human history. (This has nothing in common with Calvinistic
predestination, which asserts that God has foreknown and foreordained all that has ever happened or will ever
happen; by comparison, biblical predestination is confined to what God purposed in Adam and, subsequently, promised to Abraham and, therefore, has fulfilled and
will fulfill in his Son and Messiah Jesus.)
God’s foreknowledge of the Messiah, then, is the biblical
alternative to the doctrine of personal pre-existence. Biblical foreknowledge is, in the terminology of pre-existence, best represented in terms of prophetic pre-existence. That is to say, the existence of the Messiah was, prior to his
birth, a matter of prophecy. And, from a biblical standpoint, to believe
that God had made a promise, conveyed by the words of the prophets (that is, in
the form of prophecy), was to believe that what God had promised (and, therefore, previously purposed) had been an inevitable reality from the
instant God purposed it. (The literary rhetorical term for this
figure of speech is prolepsis: to speak of a future
event as a present reality; in the case of “the word,” however, prolepsis becomes
far more than a mere figure of speech in that
it is a matter of God’s righteousness—that is, faithfulness—that what he has promised will inevitably come
to pass and, therefore, can be spoken of as a present reality.)
This is consistent with the
NT definition of faith: “Now faith
is the reality [Greek, hupostasis] of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”
(Heb. 11:1). The existence of the
Messiah was a reality of faith—a reality in the eyes of
God, that is to say, a prophetic reality—from its “beginning” as “the word” (John 1:1). The Messiah’s
existence passed from a reality of faith (“the
reality of things hoped for”) to a reality of fact when “the word became flesh” (John
1:14) in the person of Jesus.
Nothing about this idea
is alien to the biblical testimony; in fact, the idea of foreknowledge-as-prophetic-pre-existence
is rooted in the Hebrew
prophetic tradition. When God promised to make
Abraham “the father of many nations” (Gen. 17:5), Paul pointed out that God spoke as if the promise
had created a present reality—“as it is written, ‘I have made [not ‘will make’] you
the father of many nations’”—and
then calls God the one who “calls into existence the
things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). Literally rendered, Paul wrote that God calls things not being as being. Which is to say that what the biblical God
spoke in the form of a promise—having already been foreknown and, therefore, foreordained (that is, predestined)
according to his purpose (see Rom. 8:29)—was a prophetic reality long before the promise was fulfilled, from the instant that the
promise was made. Accordingly, Abraham
was “the father of many nations” in faith, that
is, prophetically, long before he became so in fact. Likewise, the Son existed—and, further, was
crucified and resurrected and exalted—in faith, that is, prophetically, long before he existed in fact, that
is, personally.
Accordingly, when John’s
Jesus asks the Father to “glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I
had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5), he speaks of “the glory”
that God had purposed in “the beginning” to manifest in the crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah. This is clear
in that Jesus asks the Father to “glorify me . . .
with the glory that I had with you”: the very same “glory” that the Father and
the Son shared “before the world existed” would now be manifested in Jesus’
crucifixion and resurrection. Not a “glory” that was manifested then (to whom?) and another
“glory” that would be manifested now in his crucifixion and resurrection. Rather, the Son asks the Father to “glorify” him now in fact and in person “with the glory
that I had with you” in faith and in prophecy from “the
beginning” (John 1:1). Which is to say that Jesus’ prayer to the Father was a prayer of faith, arising out of what Jesus believed the Father to have purposed and promised regarding
his Messiah.
Only if the Messiah is
understood to have been (as he is invariably and consistently affirmed to have
been by the NT writers) a fully human being—one whose person originated in his mother’s womb—can his proclamation of the word and his crucifixion by the world be understood as the manifestation of his faith in the promise of God. Otherwise, when John’s Jesus speaks of his “glory” with the
Father, he speaks not out of his faith in “the word” (John 1:1; 3:31-34), through which God revealed his destiny
to him, but out of a god-like memory of an extra-human pre-existence.
(Noteworthy in this
regard is the fact that precisely the same
construction in the original language for “the faith of Abraham” [Rom. 4:16]
appears in multiple Pauline texts regarding faith and Jesus: Rom. 3:22, 26; Gal. 2:16, 20; 3:22;
Phil. 3:9. Each of these texts is best understood as contrasting “works of law” with the “faith of” Jesus as the condition of his
followers’ righteousness, just as “the faith of Abraham” [Rom. 4:16] rather than his works was the condition of Abraham’s
righteousness. The fact
that English NT versions almost invariably
render these texts in terms of “faith in” rather than the “faith of” Jesus may
be indicative of their Trinitarian bias. A Trinitarian “God the Son” would have had no need for faith. Neither, however,
would a Son who could recall a pre-existence as a god like spirit being.)
The NT writers’ insistence on
Jesus’ humanity, and their testimony
to his faith in the promise of God, must call into question any interpretation
of so-called pre-existence texts that would cast doubt on either his
exclusive humanity or his faith. The concept of personal pre-existence requires that, prior to his conception (laying
aside the question of how a pre-existent being could be said to have been conceived) and birth, the Son must have been some-other-than-human-kind-of-being who would not have fit into any biblical
category of being—neither God nor human nor angel (at least
according to Hebrews 1) nor nonhuman animal. Such a god-like spirit being that the Son is believed to have been prior to
his birth (?) in the person of Jesus, if he existed, did not begin as a human
being but somehow “morphed” into humanity in
the process of transitioning through the womb of Mary. (The question here is not whether or not God could have created such a being but whether or not the NT
writers are best understood as testifying that God did so.)
If this is the case, the
NT writers seem to have seen no need to name or explain this unique kind of
being. Instead, they were content to repeatedly claim and affirm that he was a
fully human being. For the NT
writers, the Messiah’s uniqueness was not that he was a one-of-a-kind other-than-human being before he was human. To the contrary,
for them, the uniqueness of the Messiah was that he was a one-of-a-kind human being (whose resurrection, according to the NT
writers, makes him the prototype for the new humanity of the coming age).
That he was “the firstborn of
all creation” (Col. 1:15) identifies
Jesus not as a pre-existent
person but as the one who was purposed from the beginning to inherit (according to Hebrew tradition, the right of
the firstborn son) all things from the Father (see Matt. 28:18; Eph. 1:22;
Phil. 2:9-11; etc.). That God created
“all things . . . in [Greek, en, in other texts not usually
rendered ‘by’] him” and “through him and for him” (Col. 1:16) does not make him the co-Creator but,
rather, means that “the word” that purposed and later promised his
coming was the blueprint and the instrument
and the rationale for God’s creation (which, after all, agrees with the testimony of Genesis 1 that
the biblical God spoke his creation into existence).
When Jesus was created in
the womb of his mother by the power of
God, “the word became flesh” (John 1:14) in that God’s promise to send his
Messiah to deliver God’s people from sin and death through his proclamation of the kingdom,
crucifixion for sins, resurrection from the dead, and exaltation to God’s side (that is, “the word”) was fulfilled (that is, “became
flesh”).
The biblical concept of foreknowledge establishes the prophetic pre-existence of the Son in the Adamic purpose and, subsequently, in the Abrahamic promise of God. Moreover, biblical foreknowledge provides a reasonable and sufficient biblical
paradigm for interpreting each of the NT texts that are used by both
Trinitarian and some non-Trinitarian believers to support the personal pre existence of the Son. Given that this is the case, the
burden of proof would seem to rest with those who insist that the Son existed
as some-other-than-human-kind-of
being in heaven before he
existed as a human being on earth.
