Even after the A.D. 325 Council of Nicaea, at least for a while Augustine too seems to have held this view. Also the A.D. 450 Church Father Theodoret of Cyrrhus agreed with it. Theodoret’s words (in Exodum 3) are: “The whole passage shows that it was God Who appeared to him [Moses].
But he called Him an ‘angel’ [alias a ‘messenger’] in order to let us know that it was not God the Father Whom he saw – for whose ‘angel’ could the Father be? – but the Only-begotten Son, the Angel of great Counsel” alias Christ as the ‘Angel’ or Messenger of the Covenant in Malachi 3:2.
It was only with and after ‘Pope’(?) Gregory the Great (who died in 604), that later Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas systematized an alternative view. Thus it became the view of the mediaeval Deformed Church that ‘The Angel of the Lord’ was merely a created archangel called Michael – and not the divine Michael-Christ as the one and only Archangel and uncreated Leader of all created angels (as in Daniel 12:1, First Thessalonians 4:16, Jude 9 and Revelation 12:7f).
