Divine Hypostasis

How Jesus Became God, p. 69-70

The term hypostasis comes from Greek and refers to the essence or substance of something. In the context in which I’m using the term here, it refers to a feature or attribute of God that comes to take on its own distinct existence apart from God. Imagine, for example, that God is wise. That means he has wisdom. This in turn means that wisdom is something that God “has” — that is, it is something independent of God that he happens to have possession of. If that’s the case, then one could imagine “wisdom” as a being apart from God; and since it is God’s wisdom, then it is a kind of divine being alongside God that is also within God as part of his essence, a part of who he is.

As it turns out, some Jewish thinkers imagined that Wisdom was just that, a hypostasis of God, an element of his being that was distinct from him in one sense, but completely his in another. Wisdom was with God as a divine being and could be thought of as God (since it was precisely his wisdom). Other hypostases are discussed in ancient Jewish writings, but here I restrict myself to two — Wisdom and what was sometimes thought of as the outward manifestation of Wisdom, the Word (Greek, Logos ) of God.