FRED SANDERS AND SCOTT R. SWAIN
THE TRIUNE GOD IS NOT COMPOSED of parts, but the doctrine of the Trinity has parts. There are a number of discrete theological commitments that go together to compose the fully developed, properly functioning doctrine of the Trinity. When any of them are removed or underdeveloped, Trinitarian theology suffers and, in the worst cases, comes apart.
One of the most widespread ways of considering the parts of the doctrine of the Trinity is to chart the three persons in their relations to each other and to divinity. The resulting logical diagram shows the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each specified as being God but not being each other. At a bare minimum, the doctrine of the Trinity can be stated as the teaching that the one God is three persons who are each God but are not each other.
But this common schematic account of Trinitarianism focuses too much on the three-one dynamic at the expense of the character of the relations among the three persons. Leading with the three-one dynamic of the doctrine of the Trinity tends to suppress the crucial insight that first led to the formulation of Trinitarianism at all. That insight is that the Son is eternally begotten (or generated) from the Father. It is not enough to say that the Son is God; we must see that he is God the Son, not just God in general. Sonship, or eternal generation, is what gives both form and content to the relation between the Father and the Son: the relation has the form of fromness and the content of filiality. Whenever the nature of that relation is left unspecified, any articulation of Trinitarian theology becomes brittle and disconnected. Without eternal generation, the constellation of truths that compose the doctrine of the Trinity remain just so many points of stellar light; they are stars that fail to constellate. They remain strangely isolated facts about threes and ones, essences and persons, in the cold vacuum of theologoumenal abstraction. In modern times, the doctrine of the Trinity is often taught in this misconfigured, unconstellated way: set forth as a teaching about one God in three persons as if that were the main business of the doctrine, with the possibility left open that the actual relations of the persons do not need to be specified, but could be as a matter of detail. But this rough-and-ready approach is clean contrary to the systematic needs of a coherent doctrine of the Trinity. It is not how the great, central tradition of Christian teaching has presented the doctrine. Nor is it how we first encounter the reality of the Trinity in Scripture. The goal of Retrieving Eternal Generation is to make three cases in adequate detail: that this classic piece of theological confession is in fact biblically, traditionally, and systematically satisfying. It is our hope that these three are one persuasive argument for retrieving the doctrine of eternal generation and recognizing its central importance for the doctrine of the Trinity.
THE NEED FOR RETRIEVAL
Nearly all the chapters gathered in this volume begin with a brief report on why the doctrine has fallen on hard times in recent decades and what kind of recovery is needed. The fact that this set of biblical scholars, historical theologians, and contemporary constructive theologians can all recognize the same problem from their various angles is telling. In cases where the doctrine has been actually rejected, the following chapters engage those arguments on the appropriate grounds (especially exegetical, hermeneutical, and philosophical). But even where the doctrine has not been rejected, it has been neglected. A few years ago Kevin Giles identified the need for a defense of eternal generation, and in 2012 he published a volume with that goal.1 Giles certainly filled a gap in the literature. In fact, it is hard to say when the doctrine had been given a book-length treatment prior to his study, perhaps not since James Kidd’s 1823 Dissertation on the Eternal Sonship of Christ, in which he said, “The doctrine of the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ has been received by the Orthodox Church in all ages. Of late years, however, its truth has been questioned.”2 Like Kidd in 1823, Giles in 2012 was roused to defend the doctrine when he noted defections from it taking place. In Giles’s case, he was worried about developments in American evangelical theology that tend toward subordinationism, and he threw everything he had at the task of rescuing eternal generation from that error.
While the gratitude toward Giles felt by several authors in this volume is evident in their chapters, the goal of this book is considerably different from his. These chapters have been gathered in the conviction that eternal generation secures Trinitarian theology against a broad array of disorders, scleroses, and deflections. Subordinationism is only one of the errors against which a clear confession of eternal generation secures Christian doctrine.3 As is evident from the scope and range of the chapters gathered here, the task of retrieving eternal generation is a wide-ranging project that requires the cooperation of theological collaborators from across the full range of theological disciplines. Eternal generation needs to be retrieved from Scripture and from classic Christian formulations so that it can be planted in contemporary theological work where it will bear fruit.
SURVEY OF THE CHAPTERS
The chapters follow the conventional sequence of the theological curriculum. After we begin with biblical studies (chapters 1–7), we move through historical theology (chapters 8–12) and finally reach contemporary systematic formulation (chapters 13–15, which include philosophical theology, spirituality, and dogmatics).
However, the integral nature of the doctrine under examination seems to have exerted a beneficent pressure on each of our authors. While plying the specialized tools of their respective guilds, each of them has taken their bearings from outlying disciplines to an unusual degree. Each of the chapters in the biblical section of the book is informed by acute awareness of the hermeneutical situation in which exegetical decisions are embedded, and several of them analyze that situation at length. Each of these exegetical chapters is already informed by the history of interpretation and by the dogmatic consequences of exegetical decisions. The chapters covering historical witnesses pivot from biblical interpretation on the one hand (because each historical figure under consideration was directly concerned with the interpretation of Scripture) to constructive doctrinal moves on the other hand (partly because most of the authors are in fact systematic theologians by training and partly because retrieval entails handling historical theology as more than reportage). By the time we reach the final section, on contemporary statements of the doctrine of eternal generation, the synthetic task has already been engaged repeatedly; so the final three chapters do not have to gather up fragments and see how they might combine for a constructive project. Instead, each of them can survey a broad field of maneuvers that have already been synthesized and constructed in various ways. The ampleness of theological scope by such a diverse array of authors, it seems to us, can be credited to the doctrine under consideration. The doctrine of the Son’s eternal generation calls forth the most comprehensive and well-connected thinking of practitioners who turn to the task.
The unity and the diversity of the chapters in this volume are worth noting. As already mentioned, the attentive reader will see that most chapters include a brief report of the way eternal generation has come to be questioned, marginalized, or even rejected in modern scholarship. But as our respective authors cite representative examples from the literature they have engaged, it is striking that no two authors cite the same evidence. The reason for this is that the trend toward marginalizing or rejecting eternal generation has been pervasive. It would not be possible to catalogue it exhaustively, but we hope that the differentiated agreement among the authors in this volume may count as the testimony of many witnesses from many points of view. To collate all their evidence in one list, here in this introduction for example, would still fail to be comprehensive and would lose the virtue of presenting testimonies without collusion. On the other hand, alert readers will note that our authors disagree with each other on a few points. They construe evidence differently and build their cases in ways that are incompatible with each other. There is even some diversity in how they identify the core terms and concerns of the doctrine of eternal generation.
In chapter 1, Scott Swain provides the orientation for the entire book by calling to mind the great tradition’s witness to eternal generation, noting recent demurrals, and introducing the properly theological task of retrieval. Under the title “The Radiance of the Father’s Glory: Eternal Generation, the Divine Names, and Biblical Interpretation,” Swain correlates two different ways Scripture names God: as the one divine Being, and as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit identified by their relational, personal names. Because he is outlining a comprehensive program of biblical interpretation centered on a theology of the divine names, Swain does not set out to provide biblical warrant for eternal generation (though he does deliver some). Instead, he shows how eternal generation is integral to the kind of biblical reasoning that takes Scripture seriously as a guide to knowing God’s identity.
Matthew Emerson continues the necessarily broad hermeneutical considerations with chapter 2, “The Role of Proverbs 8: Eternal Generation and Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern.” One of the most striking contrasts between patristic and modern Trinitarianism is that in the early church orthodox and heretics alike agreed that Proverbs 8 was about the Son of God; what they disagreed about was whether it considered him a creature or the Creator. Modern Trinitarians almost never consider an appeal to the wisdom figure of Proverbs 8 as anything but a fanciful illustration. If they do treat Proverbs 8 as evidence for the Trinity, the focus is narrowly on the character of Wisdom, or at best on the hypostatization of this divine attribute as a glimpse of distinct personhood. Instead, Emerson attends not to Wisdom but to the way Wisdom proceeds from God while remaining in him. Here we have the movement of thought necessary for confession of eternal generation.
In chapter 3, Mark S. Gignilliat takes up another passage that was dear to the church fathers but highly suspect under the modern regime: Micah 5:2. This text’s prophecy that from Bethlehem would come one “whose origins are from of old, from ancient times” is an especially clear instance of a text from which no support for Trinitarian theology can be coaxed by conventional grammatical-historical analysis. But Gignilliat, by attending closely to the way the words run, shows that the prophet does provide instruction about what lies behind the predicted or predetermined birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem. Something has happened in primal days in the divine council, and this something is the mysterious aspect of a going-forth behind the Messiah’s coming-forth. In this chapter Gignilliat only takes up one text that played a role in patristic Trinitarian reading of the Old Testament, but he intends the single demonstration to be an example of the way to approach much of the Old Testament’s particular witness to Trinitarianism.
In chapter 4, D. A. Carson identifies John 5:26 as a crux interpretum for the doctrine of eternal generation. This is an interesting observation because neither the vocabulary of eternality nor of generation/begetting is even present in this passage. Instead, the terminology of John 5:26 trades on categories of giving, receiving, and having “life in oneself.” Nevertheless, as Carson shows, the relation of the Father and the Son is worked out in this passage in ways that are normative for understanding their eternal relations of origin. Modern scholarship has often failed to recognize the broad biblical foundation for the doctrine of eternal generation because its research has been misdirected by a large-scale instance of the word-concept fallacy, as if eternal generation can only be present where the words eternal and generation are present. Carson redirects our attention to the subject matter itself by expounding the Johannine theology of gift and life in the context of the being of God; the benefit is a biblical doctrine of eternal generation that operates with one of the alternative vocabularies provided by Scripture itself.4
In chapter 5, Charles Lee Irons argues that the Johannine word monogenēs, contra the strong modern consensus that renders it “unique,” ought to be translated “only begotten.” Irons introduces an innovative lexical argument that reconsiders the way the word (and other compounds using the same root) started from a literal biological meaning and extended to various metaphorical senses. Readers who think this case was decisively settled in the last century will want to attend to the way Irons queries the entire database of extant Greek sources because his superior search strategy has introduced new evidence that contributes to a compelling case for reconsidering “only begotten.” As Irons notes, his argument is about a single word that occurs only five times in only one biblical author. The doctrine of eternal generation has a much broader foundation than monogenēs, as Irons and several other authors in this volume agree. Nevertheless, if the argument of this chapter were to win the day (or even just demote the consensus translation from its current reputation of being self-evident rather than a relatively defensible option), the plausibility of eternal generation would be greatly increased even in the popular mind by the rehabilitation of one of its most eloquent terms.
Madison Pierce, in chapter 6, interprets the classic text “You are my son, today I have begotten you,” which bestrides the two testaments with one foot in Psalm 2 and the other in Hebrews 1. Ancient interpreters read it as powerful support for the doctrine of eternal generation; in modern times it began to be urged instead as an objection to the doctrine. Much depends on the meaning of the word “today” in the psalm, and even more depends on its appropriation within the theology of Hebrews. Attending to the interpretive moves made by the author of Hebrews, Pierce argues that if “today” sets a beginning point for the begetting of this royal son, it is the today of God’s own eternity. This chapter gives the volume’s closest attention to the New Testament’s own strategies for reading the Old Testament and handling its claims. Because the apostolic way of handling the prophets underlies theological interpretation of Scripture in our own day, the observations of this chapter are foundational for the historical and constructive moves in the rest of the book.
Chapter 7 rounds out the biblical section of the volume with Kendall Soulen’s investigation of the giving of the divine name. Indeed, the theology of divine self-naming presented here provides the bookend to Scott Swain’s opening chapter, rightly framing the entire task of Trinitarian exegesis as an exercise in understanding God’s name. Soulen’s essay investigates the various ways that Scripture speaks of the relation of the Father and the Son and draws conclusions about the total message of Scripture about the nature of God. The Father gives the name above all names to the Son; Soulen invites us to think of this giving of the divine name as an eternal event that takes place between the Father and the Son. It is a striking proposal that makes sense of much biblical language. Soulen goes on to exploit a set of “happy correspondences” between biblical language on the one hand and later technical Trinitarian terms on the other, an illuminating use of his argument, which also marks our volume’s transition to the historical elaboration of eternal generation.
In Chapter 8, Lewis Ayres examines the earliest surviving patristic development of eternal generation, that of Origen of Alexandria. Though Origen’s program included elements that later generations would recognize as heterodox, his biblical reasoning about eternal generation has the status of a theological classic. Ayres traces Origen’s interpretive strategies closely, paying special attention to the way Origen took up multiple biblical texts at once and then established a web of implications from reading them all simultaneously as implicating each other. Origen is also instructive, according to Ayres, because of the way eternal generation is deeply embedded in the core of his ideas about God and Christ. Since Origen, eternal generation has had a special rank among doctrines and has been recognized as uniquely integral to any coherent Christian teaching on God.
While much could be said about several figures of earlier pro-Nicene theology, our selective survey leaps to the fifth century with chapter 9, Keith E. Johnson’s study of Augustine. Augustine focuses on the Johannine theology of sending, and he connects the sending of the Son into the world quite directly to the prior procession or generation of the Son in the life of God. Having established these long, solid lines that unite mission to procession, Augustine’s display of biblical interpretation is masterful. There is probably no theme in this entire volume that is not in one way or another worked out by Augustine as he takes on the project of interpreting Scripture in a Trinitarian fashion. Johnson’s careful analysis of Augustine’s interpretation showcases Augustine at his holistic, synthesizing best.5
The Reformed tradition has a complex history of various ways of handling the doctrine of eternal generation. To this day, there are persistent rumors that some of the Reformers and the Protestant Orthodox theologians were interested in reimagining the Son’s relation to the Father along less Nicene lines. While the Reformed tradition at large has taught the eternal generation of the Son quite vigorously, it has also included some persistent minority reports that are worth considering. In chapter 10, Chad Van Dixhoorn examines the broader Reformed trajectories on eternal generation by focusing on the Westminster Assembly’s history and documents. It is an illuminating example because of the way various competing concerns were brought into alignment by the work of the Westminster Assembly. The tensions and balances worked out in Westminster’s Trinitarian theology have long deserved the kind of closer attention that Van Dixhoorn applies to them here.
In chapter 11, Christina N. Larsen explores the theology of Jonathan Edwards, who published robustly traditional affirmations of eternal generation but who also worked out (mostly in documents not published during his lifetime) some idiosyncratic ways of talking about the doctrine. Among Edwards’s theological gains in this area are the implications of eternal generation for God’s single essence and its attributes. In particular, eternal generation provided the foundation for Edwards’s confession of God as happy, or infinitely pleased in himself with himself. Edwards, according to Larsen’s account, provides a strong example of a thinker for whom eternal generation held a central role.
In chapter 12, Michael Allen traces a number of trajectories in modern theology after Barth. In addition to clarifying some interpretive controversies that have drawn much attention in Barth scholarship in recent years, Allen uses Barth to show how modern theology as a whole has grappled with the doctrine of eternal generation and identifies a number of temptations for modern theologians that a firm doctrine of eternal generation would provide protection against.
Mark Makin turns our attention to philosophical theology in chapter 13, “Philosophical Models of Eternal Generation.” Makin reports on various philosophical construals of eternal generation, explains how philosophers have dealt with them, and identifies their strengths and weaknesses. Makin then picks a favorite and devotes considerable attention to what the model makes of the metaphysics of essential dependence. Readers familiar with the conventions of analytic theology and the philosophy of religion will find in this chapter a careful specification of alternatives and a willingness to offer a hypothetical account in service of giving a responsible account of what faith affirms.
In chapter 14, Fred Sanders argues, in a somewhat homiletic register, that the doctrine of eternal generation and the doctrine of salvation enjoy mutual fittingness. Eager to ensure that the doctrine of God has priority over the doctrine of salvation, Sanders does not recommend this fit as a ground for affirming eternal generation; instead Sanders argues the other way around, showing that eternal generation is a doctrine that is fruitful for an understanding of salvation and the Christian life. If one of the objections urged against retrieving the doctrine of eternal generation is that the doctrine is simply too abstract and speculative to be relevant to Christian experience, to soteriology that argument is a good defense. Eternal generation is the reality in the life of God that unfolds in the life of the redeemed as adoptive sonship based on eternal sonship.
The volume ends with Joshua Malone’s chapter 15, the most explicitly systematic of the chapters, which offers a wide-ranging survey of the place of eternal generation in dogmatics. Malone explores the patterns of thought implicit in affirming eternal generation. These patterns are pro-Nicene, but Malone is speaking constructively rather than merely historically or descriptively. What previous chapters (including this introduction) have assumed, Malone makes explicit: the dogmatic function of eternal generation is to secure Trinitarianism more broadly. The grammar of eternal generation is what allows Trinitarians to recognize God’s essential unity, personal distinctions, and relational order. Finally, Malone turns his attention from this center point of the doctrine of God to what he identifies as a few of the “created effects” of the incarnate Son’s eternal generation. He finds these effects in creation and in new creation, in adoption and in the resurrection.
One way to approach Retrieving Eternal Generation is as a series of counter-arguments against recent rejections of the doctrine of eternal generation. That is, if in some quarters the doctrine of eternal generation has been subjected to critique designed to defeat its cogency or relevance, the chapters assembled here offer defeaters for those defeaters. We hope it functions that way, because defeaters need defeating. But this volume should also contribute to a vigorous retrieval of classic Christian doctrine for contemporary theology and the church in a deeper and broader way. Eternal generation may be one of the parts of which Trinitarian theology is composed, and Trinitarian theology may in turn be one of the parts of which Christian doctrine is composed. But the doctrine of the Trinity is also the entirety of Christian doctrine seen from the angle of the identity of God. And eternal generation is in its own way the entire Christian doctrine of God and salvation seen from the angle of the Son’s relation to the Father. Recognizing this crucial role of the doctrine is an urgent task in our time. The eternal generation of the Son, wherever it is confessed, ought to be celebrated; wherever it is not confessed, ought to be established; and wherever it is attenuated or marginalized, ought to be retrieved.
1. Kevin Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012).
2. James Kidd, Dissertation on the Eternal Sonship of Christ (Philadelphia: Alexander Towar, 1823), 1.
3. This volume as a whole is not conceived as a response to developments within the evangelical debates about gender roles, as the work of Giles quite explicitly was. Several chapters do allude to the controversy when appropriate, according to each author’s judgment. But the editors believe those controversies to be regionally contained and short lived. Our reasons for retrieving eternal generation are part of a broader project of restoring classical wisdom to contemporary systematic theology.
4. The other vocabularies that Scripture uses to teach eternal generation include image, radiance, word, and wisdom. Each of these make appearances throughout this volume.
5. Perhaps the most obvious omission from this lineup of historical figures is Thomas Aquinas. We have three excuses to offer. First, the book needed to be kept to a reasonable size. Second, excellent analysis of Aquinas on eternal generation is widely available in recent scholarship by Gilles Emery (The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas [Oxford University Press, 2010]) and Matthew Levering (Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology [Wiley-Blackwell, 2004]). And third, Johnson presents Augustine as so comprehensive a thinker on this point that he covers much of the ground we might normally assign to Aquinas as master synthesizer.