The divine sonship of Christ

I'm going to post some email comments I recently made:

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I generally agree with Helm’s reply to Roger Beckwith–which is why I asked Patrick Chan or Evan May to post it for me. There is, however, one position he takes from which I demur:

“As for the verses regarding the relationship between Father and Son which Dr. Beckwith alludes to, such as John 17:5, I believe that they may all be understood, without exception, in the references they make to ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, as reading back into the eternal relationships of the godhead what became true at the Incarnation.”

That’s a very elegant way to finesse the problem that Helm has posed for himself, and it’s the sort of thing I’d expect a philosophical theologian to come up with, but I hardly think it’s exegetically tenable.

i) For one thing, the sonship of Christ (i.e. “Son of God”) is frequently used as a divine title in NT Christology. But it can’t be a divine title if it’s merely an economic title.

ii) Also, the way writers like John present the atonement, there’s something about the Son qua Son, in relation to the Father qua Father, that accentuates the magnitude of the atonement. That relation can’t be the result of the Incarnation. Rather, what makes the Incarnation special is the fact that God the Father is giving his Son, while his Son is volunteering to be given.

As I recall, without pulling it off the shelf just now, that's a point that John Murray makes nicely in his analysis.

To be sure, we’re still moving in the realm of metaphors, but they’re metaphors that do have some analogue in the immanent Trinity. We simply need to abstract the intended analogy. I don’t think Helm has the right handle on the metaphor.

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A merely economic title would denote what God is like in relation to the world, in distinction to what he is like in himself.

To be sure, economic roles are grounded in the immanent Trinity. But there are contingencies to the economic Trinity, whereas the immanent Trinity is essential. An economic role is something voluntarily assumed–rather than a necessary state of being.

And due to the principle of divine accommodation, the revelation economic Trinity can't simply be identical with the immanent Trinity.

To be a divine title implicates the essential nature of the subject.

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That's a complex example. In Hebrews, the sonship of Christ is both a divine status as well as an economic status.

Heb 1:5-6 combines several metaphors involving adoption and primogeniture to underscore the theme that Christ is heir (1:2,4) to the Davidic covenant. There we also have literary allusions to Davidic enthronement psalms and/or Davidic messianic psalms (e.g. 2:7; 89:26-29), which, in turn, go back to 2 Sam 7:14.

Lying in the background of this NT usage is the OT motif of primogeniture, including paradigmatic cases like Isaac (Gen , as well as God's "adoption" of Israel (Exod 4:22), which is, in turn, concentrated on the Davidic line (Ps 89:27).

At one level, that's an economic status.

But at a deeper level, only a divine individual can be the heir presumptive of God's kingdom. Only a divine individual can assume divine honors (e.g. angelic worship).

So there's a dialectical relationship between economic and immanent categories in Hebrews.