Who made God?

CRAIG SAID:

“It doesn't follow that the Son and Spirit are creatures if their origin is in the Father. ‘Origin’ is different than ‘created’. The terms are not equivocal.”

i) They needn't be synonymous. Implication will suffice.

ii) By definition, a creature has its source of origin in something or someone else.

iii) Take the operative category of “generation.” To beget is to cause something to exist. That’s equivalent to creating something. Indeed, children are creatures.

“Is that parity of logic? Dr. Waldron started with the relation of the divine Father and divine Son and moved to creaturely relations of fathers and sons...which is what Paul does in Ephesians 3:14 ‘For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family (or all fatherhood) in heaven and on earth derives its name...’”

You seem to construe Eph 3:14-15 as an archetype/ectype relation. But in context, Paul is using a play on words to indicate that God (the Father) is the Creator of all human and angelic social units. For exegesis, see the commentaries by Hoehner and Thielman.

“On the other hand, you're starting with human relations and moving to God. Biblically, Dr. Waldron would point to the relationship of Christ to His Church when it comes to the economy of marriage and the authority of husbands/fathers for wives/daughters.”

i) You’re confusing the order of knowing with the order of being. I’m merely paralleling Waldron’s methodology.

ii) Is the economy of marriage grounded in the Godhead? A family pantheon?

“We can refer to any of the Persons as God, and even the Trinity as simply ‘God.’”

Which is equivocal given Nicene subordination.

“The Father is referred to as ‘God’ in a distinguishing sense from the Son and Spirit because He is the origin, the fount of divinity.”

Which assumes what you need to prove.

“As Athanasius argued against the Arians, because He *is* Father, He has always been Father to the Son. So when we refer to the Father as "the" God, we are saying that precisely for the reason that Father presupposes the eternality of the Son and Spirit because He is generative.”

That’s a non sequitur. Eternal Fatherhood/Sonship is distinct from what the theological metaphor means. The intended analogy.

“What/who is the source for the Son and Spirit if not the Father?”

Wrong question. Your question takes for granted the sourcehood of the Son and Spirit, then asks the source. But why assume God must have a source of origin in the first place? God is the originator. Must the Father have a source?

“In what sense is the Son begotten?”

i) Are you posing a question about the interpretation of Scripture or the Nicene creed?

ii) If the former, you’re apparently assuming that monogenes means “only-begotten.” But, of course, that’s disputable.

iii) I’ve already indicated that I think it’s equivalent to the theological metaphor of primogeniture.

“Is the ‘unity’ of the Trinity a ‘social’ convention between three divine persons? I doubt this is what you believe, but I am scratching my head as to what you actually believe.”

i) You seem to be grounding the unity of the Trinity in the monarchy of the Father. That amounts to generic identity rather than numerical identity. And that’s a hallmark of Social Trinitarianism.

ii) I’ve presented my own views in tremendous detail in response to Dale Tuggy and Perry Robinson.

“Sure, for a creature. But I wasn't talking about a creature.”

What demarcates a creature from a non-creature? Contingency. Causal dependency. To be the effect of something or someone else. Just consider the same question in reverse: is an entity that’s uncaused and unsourced still a creature?

“The generation of a child is not the same as the Son. What we experience is not the archetype.”

i) You're beginning with a category, the meaning of which we only know from human experience, then stripping away a fundamental feature of what makes generation generative. So what’s left?

You don’t have the archetype. In the order of knowing, you can’t begin with the archetype. You can only begin with the ectype. So what is the archetypal concept of generation? How to you know that your noncausal redefinition of generation corresponds to archetypal generation? Your biblical prooftexts don’t draw that distinction.

ii) Moreover, your position doesn’t even make sense in terms of Nicene monarchy. If the Son or Spirit derive their essence (or person, a la Calvin) from the Father, then that’s a causal relationship. Son and Spirit are the effect of the Father’s eternal sourcehood.

“I'd say that's a fairly limiting interpretation. Chapter 1 and 2 argue for the notion of sonship through Christ and culminate with chapter 3. The context includes much more than the notion that God created these things (which He did, obviously).”

When Paul applies the sonship category to Christians, is that an ontological category, or a forensic category (i.e. sons as heirs)?

“Of course not. The economy of marriage is a shadow of the reality: Christ and His Bride, the Church.”

So that’s a contingent comparison. It doesn’t have an analogue in the immanent Trinity. Which illustrates the weakness of Waldron’s inference.

“What makes you think it's a metaphor? I don't think the relationship of Father and Son is metaphorical. I think the relationship of fathers to sons is ectypal, as you say, while the former is archetypal.”

i) Scripture doesn’t give us the archetype in itself. Scripture gives us the ectype. Scripture takes a category we only know from human experience, and applies that to the Godhead. So in the order of knowing, that’s a metaphor.

You keep confusing the order of being with the order of knowing, as if you can begin with the order of being (the archetype), and then define the order of knowing (the ectype) by reference to the order of being. But we don’t have that frame of reference.

ii) What we can do is consider the scope of the intended analogy. What does the sonship of Christ mean in NT usage? You have to study the usage of different NT writers. It has more than one connotation.

“’Source" points to unity.”

It points to unity of origin, but that’s generic unity, not numeric unity. I originate with my parents, but I’m not numerically identical with my parents.

“If the Son is His own source, for example, in what way is He of one essence with the Father?”

i) I didn’t say he was his own source. To say the Father is not the source of the Son is not to say the Son is his own source. It’s not to say the Son has a source. That’s the point. Sourcehood doesn’t apply to God. That’s bedrock. There’s nothing above and beyond God. Deity is inderivative. Sourcehood applies to creatures.

ii) Having a common source of origin doesn’t yield numerical identity. Two tributaries may have their source in the same headwaters. That doesn’t make the two tributaries numerically identical.

If you want to avoid Social Trinitarianism, then you need a more rigorous and robust unifying principle than a common essence or common source of origin.