There was no Christ prior to Incarnation. Christ means Messiah. The pre-incarnation Son of God is the eternal Logos. You can's speak of "Christ" before Incarnation. The righteous who believed theopany did not distinguish God from God the Word, or God the Spirit. The OT does not have those concepts. They had "seeds" (sporoi), just as other Abrahamic and monotheistic religions have. They did not believe in a Christian God. And it is a guess if they would have recognized Him after the Incarnation.
On theophanies in general, I found this excerpt from answers.com: ... The Encyclopedia Britannica similarly defines this as "a manifestation of deity in sensible form."
I have no clue what "sensible" means in this case. Does it mean as in "makes sense" or as something "detectable?" You get to see God without really seeing Him as He is. The appearance is only an illusion. His Incarnate presence was real. Big difference.
The Orthodox (and Catholics) celebrate the Theophany of the Lord following His Baptism, not as the OT appearances in "sensible" forms.
I have no clue what "sensible" means in this case. Does it mean as in "makes sense" or as something "detectable?" You get to see God without really seeing Him as He is. The appearance is only an illusion. His Incarnate presence was real. Big difference.
I think it just means something easily recognizable to the human. It "appears" real, even though the substance it appears to be isn't true. I read part of a summary of Augustine's Book II of De Trinitate, in which he analyzes the OT theophanies and tries to determine if they are supposed to be the whole Trinity, or individual Persons. The summary said that Augustine doesn't come to any hard conclusions, but he reasoned that the appearances were either by the Son or the Spirit, but not the Father, because of similar language used to describe the Persons elsewhere in the Bible.