Part 3 of a Study in the Nicene Creed

“...And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made.”

“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”

Hebrews 1:3

Here we have a biblical text that strongly supports a central aspect of the eternal generation of the Son. Notice the language of “radiance of the glory,” paralleling the imagery of Light of Light, and that of the same substance, not emanating so as to diffuse and become less than the original. 

In Colossians 1:15 we have a hint of the same. In just the verse that the Arians would want to utilize to speak of the “firstborn” in a temporal or sequential sense, Paul first called the Son, “the image of the invisible God.” If all he had in mind was what was already said about Adam, that would be one thing. But Paul highlights how it is the invisible God that the Son images.

1. Begottenness Grounded in Scripture 

2. Begottenness Distinguished from Temporal Generation

3. Begottenness Necessitated by Logic

Begottenness Grounded in Scripture

1. The word monogenes is used five times in the New Testament. There has been some controversy in recent decades about whether this word ought to have been rendered “only begotten” all those centuries, or else “one and only Son” or “unique Son.”  Those texts are John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18; and 1 John 4:9. 

2. Aside from those texts, passages like John 5:26 (and our opening text, Hebrews 1:3) have been utilized to show eternal generation on the ground that some divine attribute of the Father is both (a) shared with and (b) communicated to the Son.1 Note how if both hold true—that the attribute is shared with and communicated to—between Father and Son, then you have all that is meant by eternal generation. So, Jesus says in John 5:26, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.” Note the words “as,” which to many suggests more than simply that the Father has granted to the son life-giving power. But it is specifically “as” the Father has life in himself, that is the life that the Son has communicated to him. Now Hodge and Warfield both argue that this could refer to the divine logos, or else to the theanthropos who is Mediator,2 though Bavinck agreed with the classical view that this speaks of eternal generation.3

Hodge argued that the context demands that this is the human nature being talked about, specifically when one looks at the context of the human Christ in the two phases of his kingdom. So it is only in the economy in which he is incarnate that the Son is being granted this life. 

3. A handful of Old Testament texts have been appealed to from the very beginning of church history: Psalm 2:7, Proverbs 8:22, 25, and Micah 5:2. Matthew Henry brings together the Proverb on Wisdom and John’s use of logos in a very classical vein: “There is the word conceived, that is, thought, which is the first and only immediate product and conception of the soul … and it is one with the soul. And thus the second person in the Trinity is fitly called the Word; for he is the first-begotten of the Father, that eternal essential Wisdom which the Lord possessed, as the soul does its thought, in the beginning of his way, Prov. 8:22.”4 The Micah passage is famously read at Christmas time. What is easy to miss is not the temporal “going forth” of the ruler as from little Bethlehem, but rather the words that follow: “whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.” If we take the side of the verse “ancient of days” figuratively for eternity, then we must be consistent with the other half of the same thought: COMING FORTH … FROM OF OLD.. A mere word study comes up inconclusive.5 This is the “going forth” that would be eternal.

Begottenness Distinguished from Temporal Generation

1. Needless to say, this idea of eternal generation is not at all a carnal idea. It implies no causation of being, no sequence in time, no genetic relationship of the flesh. I say this is “needless to say,” except that it’s not! Why? Because Muslims and Mormons and all sorts of others in a post-Christian culture will not have any other notion in their minds for these words but of the birthing of a physical offspring and all that goes with that. 

2. Calvin wholly accepted eternal generation, yet he pushed back against what he regarded to be an excessive expression of this doctrine. To the language that the Father was the “fontal source” of the Son, he distinguished. While the Son’s Person was of the Father, it was important that the divine essence shared by the Son to not be conceived as having a beginning in the Father.

And thus Calvin said that the Son is autotheos—God of himself—so that what he was protecting was the truth of the aseity of the Son. If aseity is a divine attribute and the Son did not have this, well, then the Son would not be God.  

3. So have all of the Reformed been in agreement on all of this? Not exactly. Some have followed the Augustinian-Thomistic consensus in its totality. However, Hodge and Warfield (without perfect agreement between them) approached the relations among the three persons with greater hesitation. Where Calvin balanced out the Son’s derivation of personal relation from the Father with him being autotheos—so “person” yes, “essence” no—the Princetonians further developed Calvin’s hesitancy. Hodge and Warfield insisted that neither the essence, nor the personal relation, is given to the Son. And when the Scriptures use the language of sonship or spirituality to those two Persons, all the emphasis is on likeness and never derivation.6

Objection 1. But how can eternal generation not imply causation of the Son?

Reply Obj. 1. Swain writes, “The person of the Father eternally communicates his simple essence to the person of the Son in eternal generation”;7 and elsewhere, that this identifies the Father “as the principal or fontal source of the Son.”

So we “must speak of the Father as ‘a principle without priority’ … However, the Father’s identity as fontal source of the Son and the Spirit is not (even logically) prior to the existence of the Son and the Spirit but is rather constituted by his eternal relations to the Son and the Spirit.”8 

Going back to Hebrews 1:3, the imagery of light is helpful here because if we distinguish between light and its source, one immediately recoils and says “A source implies a sequence.” But here, “from eternity, the Second Person of the Trinity subsists as the Son, Word, and radiance of the Father.”9 So in other words, this light radiates as eternal, undivided, pure act. 

Begottenness Necessitated by Logic

1. This truth of the Trinity—undiscoverable by reason, yet unavoidable by logic. R. L. Dabney put things in this way:

In a word, the generation of the Son, and procession of the Spirit, however mysterious, are unavoidable corollaries from two facts. The essence of the Godhead is one; the persons are three. If these are both true, there must be some way, in which the Godhead multiplies its personal modes of subsistence, without multiplying its substance.10

This is where the deep end of the pool can only be swam in a library. And there is a section in Aquinas about the unique status of the divine persons as possessing the only real distinctions between their subsistence that does not imply distinct entities.11  

2. Are the relations of origin logically necessary for a sound understanding of Trinitarian revelation? The classical view has argued in the affirmative. In other words, the missions are a reflection of the processions. Let me say that one more way (with respect to the Son’s begottenness): What is revealed on earth is first real in essence, so that the Son being “firstborn” of all creation (Col. 1:15) is a reflection of the essential reality of the Son being begotten of all eternity. 

3. Against the Voluntarist strand in Hodge and Warfield, we need not position (1) the agreement of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit concerning their redemptive missions (covenant of redemption) against (2) the eternal processions of the Son and the Spirit, which root the sending, as a fitting analogue, of the Son and Spirit in their eternal filiation and spiration. Why should not the free agreement in the pactum salutis be necessarily fitting according to that which is eternally proper to the Persons? Thus divine freedom and divine fittingness are not foes but friends.12  Problems emerge otherwise. For example, could the Son have sent the Father? If not, why not? If we resort to divine will alone, are “Father” and “Son” and “Spirit” merely economical names? If so, has one not denied what is proper to the Persons? 

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1. D. A. Carson, “John 5:26: Crux Interpretum for Eternal Generation,” in Sanders & Swain, Retrieving Eternal Generation, 79-97.

2. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I:471

3. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:272

4. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1991), 1915.

5. cf. Mark S. Gignilliat, “Eternal Generation and the Old Testament: Micah 5:2 as a Test Case,” in Sanders & Swain, ed. Retrieving Eternal Generation, 75-76.

6. cf. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I:467; Warfield, Biblical Doctrines, 166.

7. Swain, The Trinity, 62

8. Swain, Christian Dogmatics, 99.

9. Swain, Christian Dogmatics, 100.

10. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 209.

11. cf. James E. Dolezal, “Trinity, Simplicity and the Status of God’s Personal Relations.” International Journal of Systematic Theology. Volume 16 No. 1 (January 2014), 79-98.

12. Is this not representative of Voluntarism over Realism? Did Warfield fully understand the concept of fittingness as used by Augustine, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas?