The Mystery of the One and the Many

This one thing do I seek . . .

Is it too obvious to say that theology is never done in a vacuum? We are people living in a real world both declaring both his glory and the distortion of that glory because sin entered the world. Just like the world out there, my inner world does the same. I have thoughts and desires that tell me both that “you created my inner being” and “sin indwells me.” For this reason I come to the Word of God dependent on God and you, my neighbor, for understanding. I see that my experiences can open my eyes to God’s Word or lead me to distort it. I’ll admit it up front. My circumstances and experiences shape my understanding, which is why I seek to guard my heart and I pray with David, “See if there be . . .”  There are no neutral readers of the Bible. I am not a neutral reader of the Bible, which is why I have tried to give you my context, sharing how I came to study the woman.  I need the Lord and his people to move me forward in my understanding. That's why I am writing here.

My proposal boils down to this: Knowing him and enjoying him in a realm of permanent rest is our goal, our chief end, so God wrote on us (1) himself and (2) his plans for us through making us male and female. The discussion of our maleness and femaleness begins and ends with what God is telling us about himself and the good he has determined for us. 

So I begin with representation. It seems obvious enough. God made us like himself. We replicate him somehow. Discussing representation also takes us beyond that God made us like him to how and why God made us like him. There are those who will say that the way that we are like him is that we were made for earthly dominion. God is a ruling king, and we are ruling kings. Or at least half of us are (patriarchy). Okay, sometimes less than half (patriarchal ethnic elitism). We don’t need to look far and wide to see where that thinking has led many of us today. (If you are wondering, image will get its own Substack as what constitutes our unity as male and female, reflecting God’s unity.)

Answers to the how and the why we are like him orient our souls in this world. Besides dominion, Reformed theologians often tie our likeness to intellect. God made us like him so that we could know him through our reason. Geerhardus Vos says it like this: “God takes the first step to approach man for the purpose of disclosing his nature, nay who creates man in order that He may have a finite mind able to receive the knowledge of His infinite perfections” (Inaugural Address, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1894).  I agree that a strong case can be made for both dominion, explicitly mentioned in 1:27, and human reason, implicitly understood by the very way God chooses to communicate with us, speech. I get why people head in those directions, but I see something different, something that leads us to the mystery of who God is as one and many.

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I think that the first “infinite perfection” which God replicates in us, his finite creatures, is his equally foundational unity and diversity. And I make my case for this with the third word of the Hebrew Scriptures, God’s name or title, Elohim.  Elohim is found over 2,500 times in the Old Testament.  In Hebrew, the im at the end of the Elohim indicates a masculine plural, and yet Elohim is almost always paired with singular verbs. Some call words like “God” (Elohim), including the Hebrew words for “heaven(s),” “water,” “face,” and “life,” plural-singulars. They are nouns that look like they are plural, but they are usually singular in meaning and almost always take singular verbs and referents.  Genesis 1:26 is the only time Elohim is paired with a plural verb (Let us make) as well as two plural referrants (our). In making one mankind, male and female, God is revealing something very basic about his own nature.  He is one and he is many. His oneness and his manyness are equally fundamental to who he is.  Like him, our oneness and manyness are equally foundational to who we are as mankind, male and female, directing our thoughts back to him as our source and greatest blessing. 

In other words, in the very first chapter of his Word, God appears to connect his unity and plurality with the unity and plurality of one mankind, male and female. As Augustine and many have suggested, Elohim suggests not only the Father, but the hovering Spirit of Genesis 1:2 and God’s Word, the eternal Wisdom/Logos, of Genesis 1:3. The plurality of Elohim comes into sharpest focus with God’s creation of man in 1:26-27. Elohim is not only a “he,” “him,” and “his,” but also a “we,” “us,” and “our.” And not only Elohim of Genesis 1, but the covenanting personal Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, of Genesis 2 and 3, is one and many. Although almost always taking singular predicates and referrents, Yahweh is a plurality in Genesis 3:22. Yahweh Elohim says, “Behold, the adam (mankind) has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.” 

So my first suggestion is that in the beginning, God gave us the first overt representation of the unfathomable mystery of who he is by making mankind one and many. Cornelius Van Til says that the paradoxical, “apparently contradictory” oneness and manyness of God gives all things their intelligibility (Common Grace and the Gospel [1972], 8-13). Would this not most especially refer to mankind, his explicit likeness? This is just the first of “many bonds” which tie us to our personal Creator. Although he is incomprehensible, he has engraved “marks of his glory” on us (Calvin, Institutes I.V.1).

I have found this the first step forward in understanding who I am as a woman. It is what God starts with in Genesis 1. Elohim is one and many; the adam (mankind) is one and many. With the man, I stand in the solidarity of our one essence as image-bearing humanity. We are one mankind, yet compared to the man, I have something that he doesn’t have (femaleness). And he has a personal property that I do not share with him — namely, maleness. As I contemplate this, my thoughts do not lead me to compare myself to him in order to exalt myself over him. Neither should his thoughts be carried away to glorify himself over me as male. Perhaps God has told us where he means for our thoughts to go, to himself. God has bound us to himself by bonds that direct our thoughts to the mystery of who he is. The best analogy for the trinity is given by God himself in the very first chapter of the Bible. It is neither the three parts of an egg nor the three states of water — it is ourselves, his likeness, an equally ultimate unity and diversity. Though not the divine Creator, we were made to reflect back to him and to mirror to one another his infinite perfections.

Now few scholars today see it like this. In fact, one of the most prominent Old Testament scholars, Gordon Wenham, writes that, “Christians have traditionally seen this verse (Gen 1:26) as adumbrating the Trinity. It is now universally admitted that this was not what the plural meant to the original author” (Word Biblical Commentary Genesis 1-15, p. 27). This is not exactly true today. For example, David Atkinson favorably quotes Augustine who sees the Trinity in the plurals of Genesis 1:26 (The Message of Genesis 1-11, 39). Rejecting this important connection of ourselves with God’s unity and plurality, Wenham concludes that “Let us . .” indicates that God is addressing his angelic court, while “male and female foreshadows the blessing of fertility to be announced in verse 28” (p. 33).  Then Wenham’s discussion turns to dominion. Already in the first chapter of the Bible, the thoughts of some commentators lead some to set the stage for what they see as our primary earthly “roles” of male kingly dominion and female fruitfulness in reproduction. 

Our uniqueness as male and female is given by God to draw our hearts to contemplation of his “infinite perfections” and all he has prepared for us, because he loved us before the foundations of the world. Instead, we so often turn it to ourselves.  We take the glory of the triune God and its representation in us and feed our preoccupation with things down here. When it comes to our unity as one mankind and our diversity as male and female, I see Genesis 1:26 as God’s first call for us to lift our eyes to him, Father, Son, and Spirit, an equally ultimate one and many, enthroned in Sabbath rest.