The Eternal Sonship of Christ

I’m discussing this issue for two reasons. It seems to me that Scripturalism/Clarkianism has come to a crossroads. Will it take the unitarian fork in the road?

I’m not an insider to the world of Clark’s would-be disciples. Viewed from the outside, it appears to me that the Clarkian/Scripturalist movement is increasingly fragmented and diminished. This is, in large part, because it lacks any institutional patronage to unify it and conserve it.

Issues raised by the unitarian turn in some Clarkian/Scripturalist circles also concerns me from a missional standpoint. This sends mixed signals to Muslims. It complicates the task of Christians who evangelize Muslims.

Not that Clarkian/Scripturalist splinter groups have any appreciable impact on outreach to Muslims. That’s a miniscule fringe group. But it draws attention to fault-lines in Nicene subordination. So I’m using it to illustrate larger issues.

I’m going to use D. A. Carson’s recent book Jesus the Son of God to frame my discussion. I don’t always agree with him, but his book supplies a useful backdrop even when he and I differ.

i) In chap. 1 he points out that “sonship” had broader connotations in the ancient world than biological derivation. It had sociological as well as biological connotations. As a rule, your father’s social class determined your social class. If he was a king, you’d become the next king. If he was a commoner, you’d be a commoner. If he was a blacksmith, you’d be a blacksmith.

This stands in contrast to modern 1^st world men and women. Our culture has great social mobility, including upward (as well as downward) mobility. So sonship tends to have a narrower connotation in our own culture.

Therefore, when we come to NT passages about the sonship of Christ, we need to guard against assuming a particular connotation, like eternal generation.

ii) Carson also distinguishes between different connotations of sonship in the OT, as well as how that carries over into the NT. The OT sometimes speaks of Israel as God’s son. That’s a type of collective sonship. It’s synonymous with God choosing Israel, but it uses an adoptive metaphor to illustrate and enrich the concept of divine choice.

In some NT passages, Jesus is God’s “son” in this sense. He assumes the role of the new and true Israel.

Then you have David sonship, with connotations of kingship and anointed office. That theme is obviously picked up in the NT, where it culminates in Jesus.

Both connotations of sonship also trigger further associations with the eschatological notion of hereditary rights, viz. a royal son as titular heir to his father’s throne.

Then, in the NT, there are passages where sonship connotes a relationship which implies the deity of the Son, paralleling the deity of the Father.

iii) Not only does Biblical sonship have various connotations, but each connotation can have its own cluster of OT passages which attest or develop that connotation. Indeed, these may constitute a chain of passages threading through the OT, where a seminal motif is introduced in an earlier book, and that, in turn, gives rise to a series of passages that begin to unpack the implications of that idea. Different connotations of sonship have their own literary allusions, running in tandem with each other. And sometimes in the NT, these become interwoven. Parallel lines of development converge or intersect. That’s not surprising, since these themes are fulfilled in one person.

iv) In chap 2, argues for the functional subordination of the Son to the Father. Up to a point I agree with Carson, but with some important caveats:

a) We need to distinguish between the economic and the immanent Trinity. To some extent the economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity, but there are discontinuities as well as continuities. For instance, things are true of God’s Incarnate Son which aren’t true and can’t be true of God’s Son in isolation to the Incarnation. Jesus obviously has some distinctively human characteristics. So you can’t simply read the economic Trinity back into the immanent Trinity.

b) Moreover, even at the economic level, inequality statements alternate with equality statements.

c) And that, in turn, suggests the direction in which we should harmonize the respective types of claims. The Son can’t very well be economically equal with the Father unless he is ontologically equal with the Father. He can assume a role that’s less than he really is, but he can’t assume a role that’s more than he really is. For no one can be more than he is. He wouldn’t be up to the task assigned to him unless he was naturally suited to the task. If he were genuinely inferior, he couldn’t discharge divine prerogatives. His performance would inevitably be deficient.

Indeed, God sometimes delegates divine responsibilities to human beings, and we see them fail. That’s a common theme in Scripture. God does that to demonstrate our natural and moral inadequacies. But in the NT, Jesus never falls short. His performance stands in stark and studied contrast to merely human performance.

So there’s an asymmetry between equality statements and inequality statements. An ontologically superior being can assume an economically inferior role, but an ontologically inferior being can’t assume an economically superior role.

v) In chap. 3, Carson reviews conventional prooftexts for eternal generation, using Berkhof as his foil.

a) He notes that even Berkhof is ambivalent about Ps 2:7. And he explains the irrelevance of Heb 11:17.

b) That leaves a handful of Johannine passages which talk about the Son as monogenes. Berkhof renders that “only-begotten,” but Carson, following most modern scholarship, renders it “one of a kind.”

c) I’m actually not convinced by that analysis. To begin with, there’s a danger here of committing the etymological fallacy. Meaning is determined by contemporary usage, not historical usage or the original root word. Even if monogenes derives from genos rather than gennao, this doesn’t mean that’s it was understood by John’s contemporaries.

In addition, Scripture often uses folk etymologies. John may well be trading on verbal associations between generation and regeneration.

d) However, even if we retain the traditional rendering (“only-begotten”), that doesn’t imply eternal generation. For one thing, we’re still dealing with a metaphor. So we need to delimit and isolate the intended scope of the figurative analogy. Is John emphasizing derivation, or something else?

Is John’s point that the Son is derived from the Father, or that the Son is divine, just like the Father? In controversial settings, where Jesus is disputing with his opponents, as well as when they accuse him of blasphemy, the stress is on the deity of Christ. Eternal generation isn’t very meaningful in context. That’s not what the testy debates in the Johannine narrative were about.

e) Likewise, the adjective (monogenes) may hold no special significance. After all, John alternates between monogenes huios, or simply the “Son”–often paired in rhetorical opposition to the “Father”–or the “Son of God.” In the Fourth Gospel and 1 John, the Apostle John uses monogenes [huios] 5 times, the “Son of God” 15 times, and the “Son” 34 times. So monogenes huios may just be a stylistic variation, interchangeable with John’s other sonship usages. These linguistic variants may well function as rough synonyms in Johannine usage.

vi)Jesus’ subordinate status is sometimes inferred from the fact that the Father sends the Son. Sending is taken to be an act of authority. The one sent is under the authority of the sender.

However, the Fourth Gospel often discusses the sender/sent relation to accentuate where the Son comes from. To highlight his divine preexistence.

He comes from above. He belongs to the divine realm rather than the created realm. In the divide between God and the world, he occupies the divine side of the divide. The Son can only be sent into the world because he doesn’t come from the world in the first place–any more than God the Father.

You can’t artificially abstract the sender/sent relation from that larger narrative context.

vii) In addition, the Father-sender/Son-sent relationship isn’t equivalent to God sending an angel or God sending a prophet. Notice, in the Fourth Gospel, how the sending of John the Baptist is contrasted with the sending of the Son. Although the Baptist can speak on behalf of God, he doesn’t reveal God in his own person, as Jesus does. There’s a categorical difference.

viii) The upshot of all this is that it’s quite possible–indeed, preferable–to affirm the eternal sonship of Christ, but deny the eternal generation of the Son.

a) One might object that that’s arbitrary, that generation and sonship are interrelated. They may be biologically related, but that doesn’t mean substitutable metaphors in Scripture. Each can have its own set of connotations. Each can have its own set of literary trajectories. They don’t necessarily (or even probably) bleed or blur into each other, any more than Davidic sonship is equivalent to divine sonship.

Even where metaphors overlap, that doesn’t tell you in advance where they overlap in a particular writer’s argument or narrative. Related metaphors may intersect at various points, but that doesn’t mean an author intends all those potential connotations to be active connotations. Indeed, that could be quite confusing.  A writer may just as well exploit what’s distinctive to a particular metaphor, rather than what is common to two related metaphors.

For instance, here are four theological metaphors for God in Scripture: king, father, potter, shepherd. These have overlapping connotations, but they also have distinctive connotations. Indeed, that’s why Scripture uses four rather than one. In some respect they’re comparable, in other respect they’re contrastive.

Moreover, even considered individually, they are intentionally limited metaphors. Many things which are true of human kings, fathers, potters, and shepherds are not true of God. So we must be sensitive to what a bible writer specifically means by any particular metaphor. We must carefully study the context.

b) And that’s even assuming that Scripture uses “only-begotten.” Or that “only-begotten” retains a distinctive semantic nuance. Or that the metaphor is meant to single out source of origin.

vii) Taken to a logical extreme, the alleged monarchy of the Father shifts the Christian faith off-center. NT piety is pervasively centered on the Son, not the Father. Indeed, it’s a tribute to the deferential humility of the Father and the Spirit that the Son takes center stage while they largely remain in the shadows. And that’s because there’s no rivalry among equals. They have nothing to lose or gain. There’s no one-upmanship in the Trinity. Instead of vying for top billing, they honor each other.