Now I Know

Now I Know November 12, 2015

In a 2002 essay on “The Bible and the Trinity, Jenson reflected on the Trinitarian features of Genesis 22, the Aqedah. Some are obvious and traditional – the relationship between the Angel of Yahweh and Yahweh. Some not so much. 

Jenson stresses that the issue at stake in Yahweh’s test of Abraham was not whether Abraham feared, but about the sort of fear He had and the sort of God He features: “The question, I suggest, was not whether Abraham feared some God or other, for generic fear of gods was indeed simply a given in the world described by Genesis, but rather whether Abraham rightly feared God, which, as Martin Luther above all pointed out, is exactly the same thing as whether he feared the right God. The question was whether Abraham trusted solely in the promises, so that even when the possibility of their fulfillment is taken away, he still holds to them, that is, to the sheerly promissory reality of God, which is all that is left. The test was whether the God Abraham feared was the God of promises, the God for whom it is appropriate to bind himself to act in specific ways within a created story, and to vindicate his deity precisely by faithfulness to such binding, the God who genuinely is an actor both of and in his own story with his people. What God wanted to know about Abraham was whether Abraham was with him in the story to which God must now irrevocably commit himself — or not” (333).

Jenson phrases this as “what God wanted to know” because that is the straightforward import of Genesis 22:12. Citing an essay by James Mays, Jenson concludes that “there apparently was something the Lord did not know before posing the test, and that he has to know before he can proceed to what follows, which is to reiterate the promises in their finally binding form. Only after God knows that Abraham fears specifically him in his identity as the God of promises, are the promises sealed with a divine oath” (333).

But how can this be? Surely what we have here is an anthropomorphic accommodation to our tiny capacities: God speaks and acts in a way that, were He human, could be described as a learning experience; but God knows everything already, and so cannot learn; therefore the text doesn’t actually mean what it actually says.

Characteristically, Jenson refuses to smooth the roughness of the text, and instead takes the text in all its disturbing strangeness as the starting point: “Did God not know beforehand how Abraham would stand the test? If bound by a too-simple doctrine of divine omniscience, we say, ‘Of course,’ we ruin the story. If we say, ‘Perhaps not,’ that does rather offend our usual interpretation of God. Let me put the question so: God presumably knows all things, but what does this passage suggest about how he knows at least some of them? Clearly our passage marks some sort of before and after of knowledge and intention, also for God, and a before and after determined by an event in the temporal story the Old Testament tells about God with his people, an event in which human actors and the Lord as Angel or Glory or Name or . . . are mutually implicated.” On this reading, the text not only tells us something about the character of God’s knowledge, but also points to the Trinitarian reality secreted in the text: “It is this very structure in God and of the relation between what is true in God and his involvement with his people, for which the doctrine of Trinity seeks to give account” (333-4).

(Jenson, “The Bible and the Trinity,” Pro Ecclesia 11:34 [2002] 329-339.)


Browse Our Archives