“The Problem of the Pre-existence of the Son,” The Christian Experience of God as Trinity, by J.P. Mackey, 1983.
Hengel [in his book The Son of God, 1973] wishes to rebut, once and for all, a prejudice that proved common to some Jewish scholars and some Liberal Protestants that a theology of Jesus as incarnation of a pre-existent divine being represented a Hellenistic (and probably originally a Pauline) accretion, covering over the pristine purity of the purely Jewish faith of Jesus himself, an accretion which Harnack once described as the suppression of the historical Christ by the pre-existent Christ. So he quotes a hymn which Paul himself, he says, quoted to one of the communities of the messianic sect which he had founded in the Roman colony of Philippi (Philippians 2, 6 11). Then, without any attempt whatever to say what is meant by this peculiar term pre-existence, and with no effort at all to show that whatever it means is in fact intended by this particular hymn, Hengel adds:
“The discrepancy between the shameful death of a Jewish state criminal and the confession that depicts this executed man as a pre-existent divine figure who becomes man and humbles himself to a slave's death is, as far as I can see, without analogy in the ancient world.”
The fact that in the context of the hymn in the actual epistle there is no mention at all of this anonymous “pre-existent divine figure who becomes man”, the fact that the subject of the hymn is specifically named as Messiah Jesus, a man like ourselves “whose physical brother James”, as Hengel remarks, “Paul himself had personally known well," must not of course be allowed to hold up the argument.
Hengel [in his book The Son of God, 1973] wishes to rebut, once and for all, a prejudice that proved common to some Jewish scholars and some Liberal Protestants that a theology of Jesus as incarnation of a pre-existent divine being represented a Hellenistic (and probably originally a Pauline) accretion, covering over the pristine purity of the purely Jewish faith of Jesus himself, an accretion which Harnack once described as the suppression of the historical Christ by the pre-existent Christ. So he quotes a hymn which Paul himself, he says, quoted to one of the communities of the messianic sect which he had founded in the Roman colony of Philippi (Philippians 2, 6 11). Then, without any attempt whatever to say what is meant by this peculiar term pre-existence, and with no effort at all to show that whatever it means is in fact intended by this particular hymn, Hengel adds:
“The discrepancy between the shameful death of a Jewish state criminal and the confession that depicts this executed man as a pre-existent divine figure who becomes man and humbles himself to a slave's death is, as far as I can see, without analogy in the ancient world.”
The fact that in the context of the hymn in the actual epistle there is no mention at all of this anonymous “pre-existent divine figure who becomes man”, the fact that the subject of the hymn is specifically named as Messiah Jesus, a man like ourselves “whose physical brother James”, as Hengel remarks, “Paul himself had personally known well," must not of course be allowed to hold up the argument.
