Worshipping God and the King (A Neglected Verse in a Not-So-Great Trinity Debate)

I have been glancing at, but not following very closely, the “Great Trinity Debate” taking place over at Parchment and Pen. But skimming Rob Bowman’s concluding post, I saw a familiar name – my own! And so I took a closer look.

Alas, what I found there was an assertion that I am wrong (not the first, I might add) which neither does justice to the arguments I’ve made nor includes for consideration all the relevant material. Bowman states “Neither Jews nor Christians employed this principle [of agency], for example, to mean that humans might worship, serve, or pray to angels.” I should perhaps clarify that in this statement angels are just an example, and the point that is being made in its original context is about agents of God in general not receiving worship or prayer.

I can forgive the fact that the material related to angelic figures in my chapter on Hellenistic Judaism in The Only True God is not taken into account. It includes examples of Jewish inscriptions in which angels are addressed together with God in what is at least a prayer-like manner. But it isn’t necessary to be familiar with that material, or even to to read my book, in order to find reason to question Bowman’s claim. Reading the Bible is enough. 

Here’s one example: 1 Chronicles 29:20 depicts the Israelites worshipping/prostrating themselves before Yahweh and the king. One verb, two objects. The king is said a few verses later to sit on Yahweh’s throne.

To claim that in Jewish literature no agent of God ever receives the same kind of worship that Jesus is depicted as being offered in the New Testament is to ignore fairly clear evidence from the Bible itself, never mind relevant extrabiblical evidence. Most scholarly studies recognize that this primary terminology of worship, which has as its root meaning prostration, is not consistently directed only to God Most High in Jewish literature.

But the main reason I have not followed the debate is the assumption both sides seem to share that the Biblical material can all be compiled into one single systematic and unified perspective. And so there is a tendency for each side to simply find “proof texts” that seem to counter their opponent’s view, and yet the debate itself seems to illustrate well that both sides have texts that seem to support them and texts that seem to run counter to their view. Perhaps this suggests that there may have been a diversity of views on these matters among the authors that produced the Biblical texts, and/or that their views may make dialectical or paradoxical statements which cannot be resolved directly into the systematic theology of either modern Unitarianism or Trinitarianism.