In Front | Workbook: Is There Precedent for the Incarnation in the Old Testament?

Grab your Workbook Journal!

[Record your answers in the workbook provided at the beginning of this course.]

While Jewish thinkers like Philo and Josephus did not see precedent for the incarnation in the Old Testament, there are some passages in the Old Testament in which God takes on a body or physical presence. The early Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo wrestled with this juxtaposition of natures in his work, On the Trinity. While reading Genesis 3:8 he notes that the language suggests, “… that God then spoke with man in the appearance of a man.” 

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Genesis 3:8, NIV

Augustine continues: 

For I do not see how such a walking and conversation of God can be understood literally, except He appeared as a man. For it can neither be said that a voice only of God was framed, when God is said to have walked, or that He who was walking in a place was not visible; while Adam, too, says that he hid himself from the face of God. Who then was He? Whether the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit? Whether altogether indiscriminately did God the Trinity Himself speak to man in the form of man?

Augustine is asking important questions that arise from sacred Scripture itself. Living In Front of the Text is sometimes about grappling with the Bible’s more complex passages and asking difficult questions with the benefit of historical theological reflection by the Church. 

Source: Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 1905, p. 45.

6. We always want to make sure to look at the biblical evidence for our theological positions. In the space provided, offer three questions of your own on the subject that are prompted by Augustine’s thinking above. Consider the three passages below as you work on your three questions.

• Genesis 18:1-15
• Genesis 32:22-32
• Exodus 33:11