Claim
SMM’s identification of Old Testament Jehovah as an angel — not the Creator God directly — is the most polemically charged single claim in CSG Book 1; it stands or falls on whether Acts 7 and Genesis 18 can bear the weight SMM places on them against the unified counter-testimony of mainstream OT scholarship, classical Christian Trinitarian doctrine, and Jewish theology.
Reasoning
SMM grounds csg-jehovah-was-an-angel-not-god in two pillars. (1) The moral-character argument: a God of love cannot be the one who orders Canaanite extermination and enforces lex talionis; the OT portrait of jealousy, revenge, and cruelty “cannot stem from the character of the Creator God” (124-202, 1983.2.15). (2) The exegetical argument from 30 and 7:53, which describes the burning-bush theophany and Sinai law-giving as mediated “by angels,” extended by analogy to Genesis 18’s three beings visiting Abraham.
The framing reason is providentially principled, not ad hoc: csg-old-testament-age-of-servant establishes that the OT was an age when fallen humanity could occupy only the servant position — “God cannot appear as a father to a servant” — so direct revelation was structurally impossible. Angels stood in as mediators (csg-angels-mediated-gods-ot-providence). The pattern extends globally: most world religions occupy the same “archangel realm” of mediated divine encounter (csg-religions-as-archangel-realm).
If the reading holds, every OT command attributed to YHWH is angelically mediated. This re-frames OT authority without rejecting OT scripture, and it answers the standard atheist objection that the OT God is morally inconsistent with the NT God.
Counter-argument
Three converging traditions reject the identification of Theophany-acting-YHWH with a created angel.
Mainstream OT scholarship identifies YHWH as the high God of Israel, not a delegated subordinate. Mark Smith, in The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Smith 2001), argues that the developmental trajectory of Israelite religion shows YHWH absorbing the roles of El and other Canaanite deities — emerging as the singular Creator God — not as a created angelic mediator. The OT’s own self-presentation in Isaiah 44-45 (“I am the LORD, and there is no other … I form light and create darkness”) treats YHWH as the Creator directly, with no intermediate angelic stand-in.
Classical Christian Trinitarian doctrine identifies OT YHWH with the Godhead — most often with the Father, sometimes with the pre-incarnate Son (Athanasius, Augustine; later patristic and medieval tradition). The Son-identification reading is theologically distinct from SMM’s: it treats the Theophany-acting-entity as a divine person of the Trinity, not a created angel. Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm (Heiser 2015), often cited as supporting a “second YHWH” reading, is in fact a sharper counter to SMM: Heiser argues for “two YHWHs” (a visible Angel-of-the-Lord identified with the pre-incarnate Son alongside the invisible Father) — but both are divine, both are within the Godhead, neither is a created angel.
Jewish theology, from Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (Maimonides II.6, c.1190) onward, holds that the Tetragrammaton is the proper name of the Creator. Angelic theophanies (Genesis 18 in Rabbinic readings) are taken as God’s name placed in an angel — the angel speaks God’s words but is not identified as God — sharply distinct from SMM’s “Jehovah is an angel” formulation. Acts 7’s “delivered by angels” is, in mainstream readings, a Jewish tradition about angelic assistance at Sinai (cf. 19) — not an identification of the law-giver as an angel.
Response
Three sub-claims to disentangle. (1) On the moral-character argument: SMM’s force lands against the univocal reading that treats OT and NT divine characters as identical surfaces. But classical theism’s response — that OT severity reflects the Creator’s holiness under a covenant of law, NT love reflects the same Creator under a covenant of grace — preserves YHWH’s identity without contradiction. SMM’s argument is strongest against folk-religious univocity, weaker against developed classical theism.
(2) On the Acts 7 exegesis: SMM’s reading is plausible but not forced. “Delivered by angels” can mean “with angelic assistance” rather than “by angels acting as God.” Stephen’s rhetorical point is to indict the Jewish leaders for unfaithfulness to the law, not to make a fine-grained Christological claim about who appeared in the bush. Still wrestling — the burning-bush text in Exodus 3 itself reads “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire” (Ex 3:2), then immediately “God called to him out of the bush” (Ex 3:4). The text itself is ambiguous about whether the angel is God or mediates God; SMM’s reading is not arbitrary.
(3) On Heiser specifically: the binitarian “two YHWHs” reading is the closest mainstream-adjacent position to SMM, but Heiser identifies the visible YHWH as the pre-incarnate Son — divine, not created. SMM’s commitment is to a created angelic mediator. The gap is unbridgeable without either (a) SMM revising the “angel” to mean a divine hypostasis short of the Father (Christological-adjacent), or (b) the counter-position conceding that “angel” can name a divine hypostasis (Heiser’s move).
The thread’s deepest unresolved point: SMM’s framing requires that the OT covenant relationship was with the angel, not with God directly. If so, what was the spiritual status of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets — did they relate to God or to His delegated mediator, and does the distinction collapse under SMM’s own claim that “the angels are also divine beings”? Still wrestling — the answer probably requires a sharper UC angelology than CSG Book 1 alone provides.