CHAPTER 2
THE ROLE OF PROVERBS 8:
Eternal Generation and Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern
MATTHEW Y. EMERSON
INTRODUCTION
The doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son has come under fire in modernity.1 Detractors argue that eternal generation is an imposition of Greek philosophical categories onto the text rather than a doctrine derived from the biblical data. Contemporary interpreters argue this position especially vigorously in the exposition of Proverbs 8. Even when scholars defend the doctrine, Proverbs 8 is, at worst, passed over as an unfortunate incident of proof texting by the patristic and medieval theologians or, at best, seen as containing the language needed for the doctrine (“begotten”) without actually teaching it explicitly.2
This chapter seeks to explore and compare the hermeneutical presuppositions and methods of early Christian interpreters who saw the doctrine taught in Proverbs 8 and of modern interpreters who do not see eternal generation in this text.3 What makes the difference in interpretation? It is surely not exegetical rigor—both premodern and modern interpreters have rigorously explored the text with every available interpretive tool.4 And if one assumes modern exegesis is more rigorous and scientific than premodern interpretation, it should be noted here that modern commentators cannot come to an agreement on the passage’s meaning, either as a whole or in determining what specific verbs mean (e.g., qanah in v. 22). This is in spite of a general commitment to a method (historical-critical, or its younger evangelical brother, historical-grammatical) and a conclusion (the passage does not teach eternal generation).5 In other words, the issue has to lie elsewhere, and I propose here that the difference between those who affirm eternal generation, both in Proverbs 8 and elsewhere, and those who deny it, is their theological and hermeneutical foundations. This chapter will compare the aforementioned interpreters’ approaches in order to demonstrate that this is indeed the case.
The chapter begins with a brief explanation of eternal generation, including its historical importance to the fourth-and fifth-century Trinitarian debates and its conceptual outline. It then compares the hermeneutical assumptions of early Christian theologians and modern interpreters. To anticipate the conclusion, premodern Trinitarian interpreters tended to focus on the textual interconnectedness, narrative economy, and christological nature of all Scripture, while modern interpreters tend to isolate Proverbs 8 (and other passages) from the rest of the Bible and focus narrowly on individual words in their immediate literary context. Ironically, this latter approach appears in some ways like that of Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Asterius, even if some modern interpreters do not share these anti-Nicene theologians’ dogmatic conclusions.6
WHAT IS ETERNAL GENERATION?
The doctrine of eternal generation was a linchpin for pro-Nicene theology. It was, as Kevin Giles notes, “hugely important because it grounds divine self-differentiation in the inner life of God in eternity, as does the doctrine of the eternal procession of the Spirit.”7 Given the pro-Nicene affirmation that there is one God in three persons, the question becomes how to differentiate these three hypostases without falling into subordinationism on the one hand or modalism on the other. For the patristic and medieval theologians, and indeed for most of the church’s theological reflection, the eternal processions have grounded divine unity together with divine threeness.8 The three persons of God are thus distinguished by their relations of origin: The Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (in the Western tradition).9
Social Trinitarianism is a recent departure from classic Trinitarianism and provides an alternative answer to how God is one in essence and three in person:10 the three persons are distinguished not by their relations of origin but by relationships. That is, the three persons of God each possess what we would call a personality, including a distinct volitional will, and how these relate to one another is what distinguishes Father, Son, and Spirit. Typically, both the economic roles and the volitional relationships that bind them (e.g., eternal subordination) distinguish Father, Son, and Spirit. As Giles and Stephen Holmes (among others) have noted, though, this social Trinitarianism is purely a twentieth-century phenomenon and does not reflect the classic orthodoxy of the ecumenical councils and creeds.11 Further, because of their rejection of eternal generation, social Trinitarians typically do not affirm the early Christian interpreters’ reading of Proverbs 8. Thus while the early Christian theologians read Proverbs with reference to Christ and his relationship to the Father, modern interpreters do not. What, then, caused many premodern interpreters to read Proverbs 8 christologically and in support of eternal generation, and what causes many modern theologians to reject that interpretation? We turn now to discerning the hermeneutical and theological foundations displayed during these two periods in the history of interpretation.
HERMENEUTICAL AND THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS IN INTERPRETIVE HISTORY
The Nature of Theological Reflection
One initial clarification is that theological reflection, and the language used to articulate its conclusions, is not a mere repetition of biblical terms. Rather, as David Yeago argues, it is using a conceptual term (e.g., homoousios) to render accurate judgments about the patterns of Scripture, and specifically its talk of God.12 Further, these conceptual terms and the judgments they render should be a reflection of what is in the text of Scripture, not merely from it.13 In other words, simply because a conceptual term is not found in Scripture or does not have a specific proof text does not necessarily mean that the doctrine to which it refers is not biblical. Thus, the argument that eternal generation is invalid because the term is absent in Scripture or because it does not have a proof text does not accurately recognize the nature of the theological task. Nor does it recognize what the early Christian theologians were doing in using the phrase.
Early Christian Interpretation
Justin Martyr
Reading Proverbs 8 christologically is a tradition that begins very early in Christian interpretation.14 While the apostolic fathers did not reflect on the intricacies of the intra-Trinitarian relations, when the apologists begin to write, we find Proverbs 8 used to explain the relationship between Father and Son. Justin Martyr, for instance, identifies Jesus with Wisdom in Proverbs 8 at least three times in his Dialogue with Trypho (61.1–5; 126.1; 129.3).15 In these passages Justin refers to Christ as begotten and “as a beginning before all creatures” (61.1),16 although Justin’s language is expectedly less nuanced and precise than the later christological debates would be. It also appears that Justin mainly uses the term “begotten” to refer to Christ’s incarnation. Nevertheless, with Justin we see early interpretations of identifying the preexistent Son, as Logos, with Wisdom in Proverbs 8. And while, unsurprisingly, Justin does not articulate a clear hermeneutical method, we can discern at least one of the theological foundations for his interpretation: Christ is referent of all Scripture and, particularly for this apologetic work against Judaism, the referent of all the Old Testament.17 The other apologists shared this foundational commitment to seeing Christ as Scripture’s ultimate referent and therefore the particular referent of Proverbs 8.
Irenaeus
With Irenaeus there is a far more explicit picture of his foundational interpretive assumptions.18 The first of these is the stark divide between Creator and creature; there is no space for a mediating being. The second is that Irenaeus assumes the unity of the Scriptures—a product of its inspiration by one divine author—and that unity manifests itself in a variety of ways. There is a textual unity, so that Irenaeus feels justified in connecting disparate passages that use the same words or phrases; there is a conceptual unity, which he calls the “hypothesis” of Scripture, where the overarching theme or point of the Bible is Jesus; and there is a narrative unity to Scripture, called the “economy,” that shows how the Bible structurally fits together. Additionally, Irenaeus believes that every part of Scripture, whether person, event, or concept, is summed up in Christ. Irenaeus calls this interpretive strategy “recapitulation.” Irenaeus’s The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching is, essentially, a typological and narratively recapitulative reading of the entire Bible that demonstrates its inherent christological character. Irenaeus uses both close textual readings and narrative parallels to make his point that the Bible is a unified story centered on Christ. While it is possible to simply assume, based on Irenaeus’s extensive use of typology, that he would conclude that Christ is the referent of personified Wisdom in Proverbs 8, Irenaeus makes that assumption even more likely through a probable allusion to the passage.19 Finally, Irenaeus distinguishes between the intrinsic (immanent) and extrinsic (economic) life of God and insists that the distinctions between the persons of the Godhead are revealed in the economy but nevertheless fully existent from eternity.20 With these principles, Irenaeus laid the foundations for future orthodox Trinitarianism. Later pro-Nicene theologians would continue to assume the christological unity of Scripture, its economic structure, and the Creator–creature divide. They would also build on Irenaeus’s distinction between the intrinsic and extrinsic relations between the persons of the Godhead.
With the rise of Monarchianism and Sabellianism in the third century, the christological and Trinitarian discussions began to intensify, and thus, with each new challenger, implicit Trinitarian formulations had to be explicitly worked out with more precise language. Additionally, Origen’s and Clement of Alexandria’s contributions to the topic, while not necessarily heretical, were nevertheless mulled over as possibly heterodox. Finally, the christological and theological controversy came to a head in the fourth century with the arrival of the subordinationists, including Arius, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Asterius.
The Nicene Controversy
As Khaled Anatolios has helpfully articulated, both the anti-Nicene and pro-Nicene theologians shared several theological convictions that necessarily influenced their hermeneutical method.21 They agreed that the Bible was normative for theology, that apostolic tradition bore authority in debates, and that arguments were based on a rationally articulated faith. They also shared the conviction that the Father, Son, and Spirit were the “object of Christian faith and worship,” that God created all things from nothing, and that Christ is lord, the way of salvation for the whole world, preexistent creator, and worthy of worship. Finally, all parties clearly distinguished themselves from Manichaeism, gnostic emanationism, the adoptionism associated with Paul of Samosata, and Sabellianism. Particularly important here are the common confessions of Christ as preexistent Creator and the object of Christian worship; these factors especially prompted the questions about the place of Christ in relation to the Father.
Thus in many ways the interpretive controversy over Proverbs 8 stems from that common confession about Christ as well as from recognition that the New Testament identifies the Logos with Wisdom (see 1 Cor 1:24; Rev 3:14) and particularly with Wisdom personified in Proverbs 8. The interpretive history of this passage therefore serves as a helpful test case for the different hermeneutical approaches taken by the parties involved in the Nicene controversy. For the Arians, two fundamental principles were involved.22 The first was distinguishing between the undivided monad and all other beings. For Arius especially, this Platonic view of the deity led him to distinguish God the Father, as the monad, from what was derived from him. The idea of a triune deity unified in essence is therefore antithetical to Arius’s and others’ fundamental beliefs about the nature of the divine being. For the anti-Nicenes, therefore, the Father exists as monad, while the Son (or Logos) and Spirit exist as mediatory beings between Creator and creation who were nevertheless worshiped as divine. This philosophical presupposition resulted in the anti-Nicenes searching for texts that demonstrated a clear separation between the Father, Son, and Spirit. Proverbs 8 certainly seemed to the anti-Nicenes to be an airtight case for their position, and their focus on it resulted in part from their commitment to this first philosophical principle.
The second important methodological strategy was a commitment to find texts that supported the distinction between the Father and Son and to cite them together. Anatolios notes that, according to Alexander, “Arius and his supporters made extensive use of scriptural texts that support their doctrine of ontological inferiority of the Son, particularly texts that pertain to his suffering humanity.”23 Indeed, “his project is fundamentally concerned with integrating a strict definition of divine transcendence with a relativized but, in his view, scripturally adequate conception of the primacy of Christ.”24
The pro-Nicene theologians also had their own precommitments of course; particularly important for them is the Creator–creature divide. Anything that is uncreated is God, while anything that is created is not God. This necessarily excludes any sense of a divine but created mediatorial being.25 Both sides, in other words, interpreted scriptural passages within the bounds of their own version of monotheism.26 As we will see, though, the pro-Nicene interpreters did not approach this task by isolating texts from their narrative and canonical context, while the anti-Nicenes seemed to be more comfortable simply compiling texts without much reference to their literary contexts.
Proverbs 8, especially Proverbs 8:22–25, is particularly important for Arius. The passage provides him with the linguistic precedent for speaking of Christ as “created,” “founded,” and “begot,” and thus as “an event in time, or at least just before time, but with a ‘before’ of its own.”27 Eusebius of Nicomedia and Asterius follow Arius’s pattern here, although Eusebius attempts to widen the divide between unbegotten and begotten, and Asterius seeks to close the gap using the idea of image. In any case, all three focus on individual scriptural verses that support their presuppositions about monotheism while maintaining the Trinitarian nature of Christian confession in worship. There is not, in these theologians’ work, a sense of the economic unity of Scripture or an attempt to place biblical data within the larger pattern of the scriptural narrative. Instead, “a narrow-minded literalism prevented [Arius] from a creative reading which would have orchestrated Lady Wisdom’s speech by calling on the symphonic trends of all scriptures.”28
The pro-Nicene interpreters, on the other hand, used the economic argument as a primary strategy against Arius and other subordinationists. Perhaps beginning with Marcellus of Ancyra, and seemingly echoing Irenaeus, this argument took those passages that Arius and others use to demonstrate that Christ is a subordinate being to the Father and applied them instead “to the incarnate Christ.”29 In other words, it takes into consideration the oikonomia of Scripture—its narrative pattern—which is decisively centered on the incarnation of the Logos in the fourfold Gospel corpus. Therefore, when exegeting passages pertaining to Christ, the interpreter must discern whether it is speaking of the preincarnate or incarnate Word. Athanasius uses this argument prolifically in his Discourse Against the Arians, and the Cappadocians and Augustine followed suit.30 Additionally, in this reading strategy, Proverbs 8 proved important, both because of its use by the anti-Nicenes and because it provided these theologians with a passage that spoke of both Christ’s humanity and divinity. This is perhaps one of the most fundamental hermeneutical moves that the pro-Nicene theologians make, although there are a number of other important methodological features of their exegesis.
A second important methodological tactic was the use of divine names to understand the nature of God. Both Basil of Caesarea, in his first volume of Contra Eunomium, and later Gregory of Nyssa in his Contra Eunomium and Refutatio Confessionis Eunomii, develop a “theology of the divine names.”31 For Basil and Gregory, because Father, Son, and Spirit are “named with the same divine names” and “perform the same divine actions,” we must find a way to speak adequately of one God with one essence but existing in three persons. Further, the three different names for the three persons also speak theologically about their distinguishing features, and for these early Christian theologians that difference lies in the relations of origin (e.g., unbegotten, begotten, proceeding), not in the relations of personality or volition. The latter was the argument of Eunomius that was thoroughly rejected by both Greek and Latin pro-Nicene theologians.32 For Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, the terms “Father” and “Son” imply a relation of origin, or more specifically a relation of begetting. In other words, eternal generation (and subsequently eternal procession) distinguishes the Son from the Father (and subsequently the Spirit from both Father and Son). Furthermore, this argument was, for many of the pro-Nicene theologians, one of the primary keys for proving the Son’s divinity. When a father begets a son, the son is always of the same nature as the father, and so to call the Logos “Son” and the First Person of the Trinity “Father” is to imply a unity of essence. Additionally, the names assigned to the Son, especially Wisdom and Power (cf. 1 Cor 1:24), were crucial in arguing that the Father is never without his word, wisdom, or power and therefore that there never was a time that the Son, who is the Wisdom, Word, and Power of God, was not. Names again demonstrate the unity of essence in Father and Son. This was absolutely central for Athanasius in his argument against Arius, and for Basil and both Gregorys in their arguments against Eunomius.33 And for all three Proverbs 8 was a central text. The use of names led these theologians to understand the Son’s full divinity and therefore also to affirm his eternal generation as the Son of the eternal Father. In these arguments Proverbs 8 is, again, crucial for the early Christian theologians, as it provides them an understanding of the Son’s divinity and humanity, as well as the distinction of relations between the Father and Son.
In addition to the economy of Scripture and reflection on the divine names, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and then later Augustine considered genre a significant feature of particular biblical books. Each of these interpreters saw that the genre of Proverbs makes it especially important to be careful in exegeting individual passages and words. While some books of the Bible are more straightforward in their language, Athanasius, for instance, following Marcellus, argues “that what has been said in the book of Proverbs also has a proper sense (ortē dianoia). The key to understanding it is the Greek title of the book of Proverbs, paroimiai.—paroimia has two meanings: proverb, so proverbium, and likeness.”34 To read Proverbs, then, means to take care not to take statements too concretely when they are, in fact, using language that is metaphorical or figurative.
A fourth common hermeneutical method is demonstrated by these early interpreters’ employment of both Greek and Hebrew linguistic tools to understand the meaning of individual words. Departing from Athanasius’s decisive statements on the meaning of ἔκτισέν με in Proverbs 8:22, Basil uses Hebrew and Greek to argue for his interpretation of the verse, noting that the language of both the Hebrew Vorlage and the LXX translation are ambiguous. Further, Basil notes that the phrase “he created me from the beginning” is a hapax legomenon and should not be used to promote any major doctrine; rather, it should be interpreted in light of other biblical teaching.35 Athanasius, on the other hand, argues from the Greek text for a particular interpretation of the phrase (“he acquired me”), noting verbal parallels for κτιζεῖν (e.g., Prov 9:1) that do not speak of “creating” and employing what Matthew Bates has termed “prosopological exegesis.”36 This tactic identifies the New Testament speaker of particular Old Testament verses; thus for Athanasius the incarnate Christ speaks in Proverbs 8:22, while the eternal Logos speaks in 8:25. Basil disagrees, saying that we cannot determine definitively the speaker in Proverbs 8:22 (while of course still maintaining a pro-Nicene position).37 Thus, while Basil and Athanasius disagree on some of the details, we find them, along with other pro-Nicene theologians, using similar exegetical methods: an understanding of genre, a close reading of textual details, a willingness to read individual passages in light of the entirety of Scripture, an awareness of intertextual links, and the assumption of a prosopological element in passages where different persons speak.38
For Proverbs 8:22 and 25, therefore, the pro-Nicene theologians read a proverbial text, connected closely to New Testament Wisdom Christology passages, that speaks of “begot” and “created” as referring to two different periods in the economy of salvation: verse 22 refers to the incarnation (especially for Athanasius) while verse 25 refers to the eternal Logos. This latter point led them to attempt to clearly articulate how divine Wisdom, as the Second Person of the Trinity, could be “begotten” of the Father while also being eternally and equally God. For the early Christian theologians, eternal generation is the answer to this question. Further, it is a thoroughly textual answer, grounded in clear hermeneutical methods and theological commitments.
Augustine likewise uses these methods and comes to the same conclusions, and again preeminent for him is the New Testament’s identification of Wisdom with the Logos and the shape of the biblical narrative. For the latter, he applies what Keith Johnson refers to as “canonical rules,” or ways of reading the biblical text that pay attention to its narrative contours. In this regard there are two: the “form of God” rule and “form of servant” rule.39 That is, it is important for the interpreter to know when the text is speaking of the eternal Logos and when it is speaking of the incarnate Christ. But in addition to these two rules, Augustine has a third: the “from another” rule. This rule states that there are passages which do not speak either of the Logos as eternal or Christ as incarnate but instead of relations of origin between the Son and the Father (e.g., John 5:19, 26). For these passages, the first two rules cannot help, but the third allows the interpreter to understand the relationship between Father and Son no longer only economically but now metaphysically.40 This third rule is used in support of the doctrine of eternal generation, and it clarifies and strengthens the earlier pro-Nicene theologians’ position on the doctrine.
For the early Christian theologians, then, the Second Person of the Trinity is (a) the object of Christian worship and (b) identified with Wisdom in the NT. Because of the language it uses and its assumed christological referent, Proverbs 8:22–31 was a critical passage for understanding the Trinity. In interpreting these verses, the anti-Nicenes, on the one hand, worked from the philosophical assumption of God as a monad and sought texts to support that notion. In doing so they isolated passages from the rest of Scripture and focused on a limited literalistic meaning. The pro-Nicenes, on the other hand, followed Jewish monotheism in recognizing a sharp Creator–creature divide that did not allow for the mediating role;41 saw the Father, Son, and Spirit spoken of as unified in essence and operation throughout Scripture; and therefore argued for what has become known as the homoousion position. Thus, in their interpretation of Proverbs 8, they followed the following hermeneutical principles:
1. They assumed that the New Testament identifies the Son as Wisdom.
2. The narrative of Scripture must be given attention when the text speaks of Christ. Specifically, the climax of the incarnation provides the reference point for the entire story and for all language about Jesus.
3. The divine names give insight into the Father–Son relationship, both metaphysically and relationally.
4. Anachronistically, we can use Augustine’s “form of God” vs. “form of a servant” distinction to summarize this point.
5. The genre of each biblical book—and, for our purposes, of Proverbs—must be given consideration when interpreting words, phrases, and whole passages.
6. The individual words of Scripture are important, and thus a study of their meaning in the original language, their connection to other parts of Scripture, and their prosopological referent are all necessary components of exegeting a text.
7. Following Augustine, Proverbs 8:25 must follow the “from another” rule; it does not speak of Christ’s incarnation, but neither is it speaking of a subordinated, temporal creation of the Logos. It must, then, like John 5:19 and 26, be referring to the eternal relations between the Father and the Son.
Thus the patristic interpreters had clear exegetical and theological grounds for interpreting Proverbs 8:22–31 as both referring to Christ and as teaching the eternal generation of the Son. This doctrine did not arrive based on a suprabiblical philosophical structure or metaphysical reflection; rather, it arose through a careful engagement with the biblical text that sought to reflect an accurate judgment about scriptural patterns regarding talk of Father and Son. The conceptual term used to make this judgment, taken from Proverbs 8:25, is “eternal generation.” To conclude, therefore, that there is no biblical warrant for the doctrine of eternal generation seems a step too far at best and seems to ignore the evidence while misconstruing patristic interpretation at worst.
After Augustine, Christian interpreters continued to reflect on the person of Christ and the Trinitarian relations ad intra, and they continued to operate with these basic theological and hermeneutical presuppositions.42 The support for eternal generation on both exegetical and dogmatic grounds continued virtually unabated until the early post-Reformation period, and even then its detractors were few.43 Not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did it begin to lose widespread support.44
MODERN INTERPRETATION OF PROVERBS 8
Proverbs 8 in Biblical Studies
To say that the interpretive landscape looks quite different today than it did in the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries would be an extreme understatement. Modern interpreters continue to reflect on Proverbs 8, but their methods and theological foundations are quite different. The typical approach is to study the passage in its immediate literary and historical context. Interpreters tend to focus on ancient Near Eastern parallels, such as Egyptian and Ugaritic articulations of wisdom’s relationship with the gods,45 as well as on the meaning of particular Hebrew words given conclusions about historical background.46 Most commentators do not see here either a reference to Christ or to eternal generation.47 Instead, interpreters see in this passage Lady Wisdom as (1) a personification of an abstract concept48 or (2) a created being that is with Yahweh during creation.49 For the second option, there are two additional choices, as some say that Wisdom assists Yahweh in the creative act, while others say she is merely present. Further, many point to Wisdom here as the pattern of creation.50 One notable exception is Richard Davidson, who finds evidence for the hypostatization of the Godhead. He does not, however, explore how that hypostatization relates to Yahweh, nor does he discuss eternal generation.51
Absent in these interpretations, including Davidson’s, is any reflection on either the New Testament’s appropriation of the passage as referring to Christ or how Wisdom relates to Yahweh in Jewish monotheism. The former lacuna is a product of their methodological limitation of study to the immediate literary and historical context. But for evangelical interpreters, this ignores Scripture’s divine authorship and its interconnectedness, both textually and conceptually. Interpreters who do not affirm an evangelical understanding of the Bible’s divine inspiration are not off the hook in this regard either; dismissing the New Testament’s appropriation of the passage still ignores the reception history of the text. Although there are a variety of later interpretations of Wisdom (e.g., Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon), the New Testament is one of those, and as these interpreters are studying the Christian Bible, it seems necessary at least to deal with that issue rather than ignoring it completely. Reception history also brings to mind an important conclusion, or rather lack thereof, about the meaning of the passage and the verbs used in it. Modern scholarship has not arrived at any type of consensus regarding the meanings of, for instance, qanah (v. 22) or ’amon (v. 30), resulting in the variety of interpretations of Wisdom’s nature noted above.52 Thus it is not at all clear that the New Testament’s, and later the early Christian interpreters’, assumption that Proverbs 8 has a christological referent is an aberrant eisegetical reading.
Even more troubling than the lack of reflection on the New Testament’s christological reading, though, is the omission of any reflection on how a preexistent, mediating, created being fits into a Jewish worldview. It is not at all clear that the Jewish monotheism either of premonarchical or postexilic Israel would have accepted a reading of Proverbs 8 that postulates a mediating divine being between Yahweh and creation.53 In fact, this interpretation sounds strikingly like Arius’s, and yet no modern biblical commentator notes that peculiar parallel. More importantly, this lack of engagement with the New Testament’s reception is coupled with a dismissal of the patterns of scriptural language about the relationship of Logos/ Wisdom with the Father, a pattern that continually speaks of the Son as “from” the Father, one with the Father, creator with the Father, and so on. To ignore this language is to ignore completely the theological task of all readers of Scripture, which is, again, to provide conceptual terms that render accurate judgments about the patterns of language in the text.
Proverbs 8 in Theology
Kevin Giles has helpfully summarized the (typically American evangelical) contemporary questioning of eternal generation’s validity as a biblical doctrine. After surveying contemporary evangelical systematic theologies and their comments on the subject, he lists the following as the basic rationales for rejecting, or at least questioning, eternal generation:
1. It has no “biblical warrant.” This is their first and most important objection.
2. It reflects Neo-Platonic thinking about God more than Christian thinking.
3. It makes no sense.
4. Nothing theologically important is lost if it is abandoned.
5. There are better ways to eternally differentiate the Father and the Son.
6. It implies or necessarily involves the eternal subordination of the Son, even the Arian heresy.54
While a complete defense of the doctrine of eternal generation should include a response to each of these, here we are concerned primarily with the first, as it is the most often used and directly contributes to the other objections on the list. More specifically, we are concerned primarily with why these theologians believe there is no biblical warrant for eternal generation.
One of the main reasons that theologians question the biblical basis for the doctrine is that they do not agree with the early theologians’ assessment that the New Testament identifies Christ as the personified Wisdom of the Old Testament.55 Daniel Ebert provides one of the primary exegetical attempts to defend this position, and he argues that 1 Corinthians 1:24, 30 does not speak of Christ as the personification of preexistent Wisdom but as the personification of the Wisdom of the gospel.56 He also rejects the idea that any of the other identifications of Jesus as Wisdom draw on the Old Testament personification of Wisdom, especially as found in Proverbs 8.
While Ebert’s attempt at an exegetical understanding of the relationship between Jesus and Wisdom is laudable, there are three problems with his argument. The first is that one wonders if that background is so easily dismissed, given the New Testament’s constant reliance on the Old Testament for its understanding of Christ and given the development of the personification of wisdom over the course of the Old Testament. A second and related problem is that identifying Christ as the personification of the wisdom of the gospel apart from any reference to the Old Testament material strips the passage of its Old Testament background and thus leaves it standing alone without impetus, warrant, or explanation. To say that Christ as Wisdom refers to the Wisdom of the cross or of the gospel makes no sense apart from an Old Testament background—and the Old Testament personifies Wisdom.
Third, as the early Christian theologians frequently point out, it is illogical to posit that, in the case of Proverbs 8, there are two Wisdoms: Christ as Wisdom and then another attribute of God called Wisdom that is created, the latter of which is the only referent in Proverbs 8. If the Wisdom referenced in Proverbs 8 is not Christ but one of God’s attributes, does this mean that wisdom as an attribute did not exist in God from eternity? This introduces complexity into the nature of God and diminishes his wisdom. The early Christian theologians were at pains to show that God never gains any attribute but is eternal in his essence, and to call Wisdom in Proverbs 8 something other than Christ suggests that wisdom does not exist for God until he creates it. Perhaps some will say that Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is not brought into being, as was just suggested, but instead that it is brought forth to be present and active in creation. This is no solution either: it only suggests that there are two Wisdoms present at creation, the Son and this impersonal wisdom, and that both Wisdoms are active agents in the act of creation.
Fourth and perhaps most important, rejecting the link between New Testament talk about Christ as Wisdom with the Old Testament personification of Wisdom ignores the textual links between New Testament passages and Proverbs 8 (see John 1:1–3;57 1 Cor 1:24, 30; Heb 1:1–4; and, perhaps most notably, Rev 3:14). In Revelation 3, the phrase ὁ Ἀμήν appears to be a direct transliteration of the Hebrew word ’amon of Proverbs 8:30, and the rest of the verse may well be a presentation of Christ in light of that word. Further, both Colossians 1:15–17 and Revelation 3:14 identify Christ as the beginning of creation (with Paul using πρωτότοκος and John using ἀρχὴ), a phrase that has its only possible Old Testament background in Proverbs 8.58 Finally, with respect to the preexistent power and creative work of Christ in John 1 and Hebrews 1, we are once again left in a position to find an alternative Old Testament background for these ideas if it is not found in Proverbs 8. To put it simply, for each of these New Testament texts Proverbs 8 provides the most appropriate and explicit, and probably the sole, Old Testament background for talk of the Logos as preexistent, holding creation together, and taking part in the act of creation. To reject it as such is to leave these New Testament texts without an Old Testament branch on which to stand. Using Yeago’s terms, we are left without biblical warrant for judgments that need to be rendered about the language of the Son as preexistent Creator.
An additional supposed biblical warrant for the dismissal of eternal generation comes from Wayne Grudem and John Feinberg, who argue that, because Proverbs 8:25 can be read as “he acquired me,” there is no biblical support for the language of eternal begetting.59 The problem with this argument is at least threefold. First, Grudem and Feinberg have ignored the ambiguity of the Hebrew, as noted above, which provides at least permission for the reading of “he begot me.” Second, Athanasius had no problem seeing this verb translated as “he acquired me” and at the same time teaching that the Son is eternally begotten. Third, Grudem’s argument for “he acquired me” provides simply another set of questions rather than a solution. If this is the correct reading, what exactly does it mean? Is the reference still to Christ? If so, what does it mean for him to be “acquired from the beginning”? If the reference is not to Christ, are we then rejecting the readings of the entire history of the church for the first eighteen centuries of its existence? This may be an option for those such as Feinberg,60 but should evangelicals be so quick to dismiss the ecumenical conclusions of the Christian tradition? The reading of Proverbs 8 as teaching eternal generation has been virtually codified in the Nicene Creed. To reject the Creed’s language is to implicitly reject this interpretation of Proverbs 8, and vice versa, and I for one am not comfortable with so easily dismissing either. Perhaps most important, if we reject or question the usefulness of eternal generation, what biblical warrant are we left with to distinguish the three persons of the Trinity?61
Grudem, Ware, and others choose to answer this vexing question with the doctrine of eternal functional subordination. Arguing from texts such as 1 Corinthians 11:3, 15:28, and the “sent” passages in John, Ware believes that these passages, as well as the names Father and Son, teach that the Second Person of the Trinity (and, by implication, the Third Person as well) is eternally subjected to without becoming ontologically subordinate from the Father.62 Again, there are a number of problems with this position. First, the texts Ware cites do not clearly teach the subordination of the Son in the Trinitarian life ad intra, but rather all refer to the Trinitarian work of salvation, the Trinity as it is made known ad extra. While the economic Trinity certainly reflects the immanent Trinity, we need to be careful not to read all aspects of the economic back into the immanent. As the fathers were at pains to note, the narrative of Scripture, the economy of salvation, is distinct from the life of God from eternity. The incarnation is a unique event that changes the way we talk about the Second Person of the Trinity, namely, as taking on flesh and submitting to the Father. It is in this sense, the sense Augustine calls “form of a servant,” that the texts cited by Ware speak of the Second Person of the Trinity. 1 Corinthians 11:3 and the Johannine “sent” passages clearly refer to the incarnate Christ, while 1 Corinthians 15:28 in context is referring to the man Christ Jesus handing over his kingdom to the Father.63 This is not the life of God as it existed prior to creation but the life of God as it exists in the economy of salvation. Further, it is not clear at all that we should read the Johannine sending passages as teaching subordination. Instead, we see here the order, or taxis, of Trinitarian activity in the salvific economy. While the Son’s coming is fitting, it does not imply or necessitate subordination in the immanent Trinity. Eternal functional subordination therefore cannot be relied upon to provide a fitting and biblical distinction between Father and Son. We are thus left again with the question of how to distinguish the three persons of the Godhead without lapsing into tritheism or modalism.
One final problem with doubting or rejecting the biblical basis for eternal generation lies in the names given to the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. Surely the biblical authors, under the inspiration of the Spirit, could have chosen different names that implied both ontological unity and relational differentiation without implying begetting. And yet they did not, and so we must deal with the theological implications of the divine names. As Alan Gomes notes in his description of W. G. T. Shedd’s method,
The Bible describes the members of the Trinity by the titles Father, Son, and Spirit, and it follows that there must be something about these persons that warrants such designations. Now, it is impossible to conceive of the father/son relationship apart from some concept of generation. And if there is generation and if the Son is the same ontological being as the Father, who is eternal, then the generation must be an eternal generation.64
What, then, are we to conclude about modern biblical scholars’ and theologians’ rejection of the biblical basis for eternal generation, especially in Proverbs 8? First, there seems to be a lack of engagement with the unity of Scripture conceptually, textually, and narratively. Conceptually, these interpreters reject the unity of the descriptions of Wisdom throughout the canon, including the New Testament’s identification of Christ as Wisdom. Textually, the links between, for instance, Proverbs 8:30 and Revelation 3:14, which provide clear warrant for the previous conceptual link, are either dismissed or ignored. Narratively, the economy of Scripture is minimized as a factor, either by affirming eternal subordination from texts that do not support it or by ignoring the culminating typological fulfillment of all Old Testament figures, including Lady Wisdom, in Christ.
This dismissal or minimalization of the biblical narrative and its conceptual and textual unity is seen not only in the rejection of eternal generation but also more broadly in the contemporary theologian’s approach as a whole. For biblical scholars, the basic approach is to isolate a passage from the larger biblical context, both narratively and textually. For theologians, the tendency is toward a stark biblicism, where we have doctrines in search of a verse or a collection of disparate verses in search of a doctrine.65 For the biblical scholars, they cannot see how Proverbs 8 in its historical context is a description of the Logos who took on flesh. Systematicians like Grudem and Ware cannot find their verse, and so they question eternal generation’s biblical warrant. Both approaches are effectively the same in that they isolate texts from their larger narrative and textual context, which is ultimately all of Scripture.
As mentioned above, Ware and Grudem have affirmed eternal generation in public (at the 2016 ETS annual meeting) if not yet in publication. Grudem’s change of mind was prompted by a prepublication version of Lee Irons’s chapter in this volume. But the methodological problem remains—only a stark biblicism, one which only affirms those doctrines for which can find a proof text, would shift so dramatically based on the translation of one word (μονογενής). While I am grateful for Grudem’s and Ware’s very recent, clear affirmation of eternal generation, I see no reason to assume that this shift is due to a change in method but rather is actually another example of the method described here.
Furthermore, the questioning and/or rejection of eternal generation is reliant on and contributes to social Trinitarianism, a seemingly modern innovation and one lacking in biblical warrant.66 The early Christian theologians were not satisfied with finding unity between the Trinitarian persons in three separate wills. In other words, they were not comfortable saying that what distinguishes the three persons of the Trinity are three separate volitional wills, precisely because, along with being unconvinced by the biblical data, the anti-Nicenes used that argument (not to mention the metaphysical problems that arise from such an affirmation).67 While some, like Bruce Ware, deny trithelitism, it is hard to imagine how the persons can be distinguished as personal agents, two of whom submit to others in the case of eternal functional subordination (or eternal relations of authority and submission), without an implicit trithelitism. Again, while these theologians rightly affirm homoousios, they do so in such a way that was foreign to the pro-Nicene theologians who coined the term. In other words, their approach is in many ways divergent from the approach taken by the pro-Nicene theologians. Strikingly, therefore, the approach of some modern theologians is very similar to the anti-Nicenes’ approach to the Bible, where the idea is to collect all the disparate data and make a conclusion based on the sum of the parts. I am of course not arguing here that Ware, Grudem, Feinberg, and others are anti-Nicene; rather, in spite of their orthodox conclusions about the homoousios nature of the three persons of God, their (at least previous) questioning of the corollary doctrine of eternal generation reveals a hermeneutic that finds more in common with the anti-Nicenes than with the pro-Nicenes.
CONCLUSION
The early Christian interpreters’ belief in the eternal generation of the Son was based on theological and hermeneutical foundations such as recognizing Christ as the referent of all Scripture; paying attention to the narrative contours of the canon, and especially its climax in the life and work of Christ; noticing textual links between passages; reflecting on the implications of the divine names; understanding the importance of genre and textual details; and using conceptual terms to render accurate judgments about the patterns of the biblical text. For them, therefore, Proverbs 8 was read both as about the Second Person of the Trinity, both as he exists ad intra (v. 25) and ad extra (v. 22), and thus as supporting the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son via verse 25. Their support of that doctrine is thus robustly founded in biblical reflection, and to say that there is no biblical warrant for eternal generation is to deny the profundity of biblical interpretation, including interpretation of Proverbs 8, in the patristic and medieval periods.
Modern scholarship, on the other hand, has tended to read texts in a more isolated fashion, separating them from their narrative and textual canonical context. Their methods, therefore, appear more like that of Arius than of Athanasius. This has even produced interpretations of Proverbs 8 that mirror Arius’s, with Wisdom seen as a mediating semidivine being. Even when that latter interpretation is not taken, as it is not in evangelical systematicians’ works, Proverbs 8 is still rejected as a reference to Christ or to eternal generation. Subsequently, these theologians question or reject the doctrine and prefer eternal functional subordination as a means to distinguish between the three persons of the Trinity. Their case for eternal subordination, though, is also plagued by the same methodological problems that caused them to reject eternal generation in the first place (namely, a method akin to proof texting), as well as by the thorny problem of departing from the classic doctrine of the Trinity in favor of the twentieth-century innovation of social Trinitarianism. For these reasons, I suggest that we, first, continue to affirm eternal generation as a crucial doctrine for maintaining Trinitarian orthodoxy and, second, affirm Proverbs 8 as a supporting text for that doctrine. The eternal generation of the Son is the doctrine that allowed the pro-Nicene theologians to speak of the one God in three persons with biblical warrant, including warrant from Proverbs 8.
1. I use “eternal generation” synonymously with “eternal begottenness” throughout this chapter.
2. See the otherwise excellent work of Kevin Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 78–87. Giles believes that eternal generation is a biblical doctrine, but he also thinks that it is not taught explicitly but only “suggested” in Prov 8:22–31 (p. 78). Especially curious is his statement about a related passage, Ps 2:7, on which he says, “It is true that Psalm 2:7 read critically and historically does not speak of the eternal begetting of the Son of God. . . . However, we learn from . . . New Testament appeals to Psalm 2:7 that the apostolic authors read this psalm christologically. They did not assume that the words of Psalm 2:7 were limited to or constrained to their historical meaning and application” (p. 79). The reader can presume that this same sort of conclusion can be made about Prov 8, dealt with by Giles in the following paragraph. It seems to me that more nuance and exegetical precision is needed to say that Prov 8 supports eternal generation.
3. By “modern” I mean post-Enlightenment, which includes both modern and postmodern readers. Modern readers tend to eschew the objectivism and scientific positivism with which moderns approach the text, and postmodern readers still tend to retreat to modernistic exegetical methods in their interpretation.
4. Thus this chapter is not primarily an exegetical defense of eternal generation from Prov 8, but rather, by means of historical comparison, it is an argument that those who see the doctrine taught here have legitimate theological and interpretive rationales for doing so. For a recent essay that reaches similar conclusions, see Daniel J. Treier, “Proverbs 8: Hearing Lady Wisdom's Offer Again,” in Theological Commentary: Evangelical Perspectives, ed. Michael Allen (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2011), 57-72. Treier’s work here, and in his 2011 commentary on Proverbs (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011]), constitutes an exception to the rule that modern commentators refuse to see the connection between Prov 8 and eternal generation.
5. One notable exception is Richard M. Davidson, “Proverbs 8 and the Place of Christ in the Trinity,” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 17, no. 1 (2006): 33–54, but even here it should be noted that he does not use the language of eternal generation but only hypostatization. His focus is more on the incarnation language in the passage than on the relationships between the persons of the immanent Trinity. See also Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., “Wisdom and Creation,” JBL 104, no. 1 (1985): 3–11.
6. See Sarah Parvis’s description of these three interpreters’ methods in “Christology in the Early Arian Controversy: The Exegetical War,” in Christology and Scripture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Angus Paddison and Andrew T. Lincoln (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 120–37.
7. Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son, 20, 258.
8. Ibid., 92.
9. While this chapter focuses on the hermeneutical issues involved, it should be noted here that some deny eternal generation based on an assumption that “generation” and “procession” imply ontological subordination. As Johnson points out, though, eternal generation is the timeless communication of the divine essence from Father to Son, not a generation in time in which the Son becomes divine. In other words, if generation is not eternal, it is Arian subordinationism. Keith Johnson, “Augustine, Eternal Generation, and Evangelical Trinitarianism,” TrinJ 32 (2011): 142n1, 142n2, 148–49.
10. For an introduction to this view that also discusses eternal generation, see J. Scott Horrell, “The Eternal Son of God in the Social Trinity,” in Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective: An Introductory Christology, ed. Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2007), 44–79.
11. Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son, 91–204; Stephen R. Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History, and Modernity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012).
12. David Yeago, “The New Testament and Nicene Dogma,” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 93.
13. Ibid., 87.
14. I am not here attempting to provide a comprehensive survey of the history of interpretation of Prov 8 but instead to highlight the interpretation of prominent figures in the Trinitarian debates, which in turn will allow us to draw conclusions about their hermeneutical and theological foundations. On the patristic interpretation of Prov 8, see the classic study of Manlio Simonetti, “Sull’interpretazione patristica di Proverbi 8, 22,” in Studi sull’Arianesimo (Rome: Editrice Studium, 1965), 9–87. For a much briefer summary, see Davidson, “Proverbs 8 and the Place of Christ in the Trinity,” 34–37.
15. St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, rev. ed., trans. Thomas B. Falls, ed. Michael Slusser (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003).
16. As William G. Rusch notes, the apologists used the language of generation to hold together the unity of the divine substance with the identity of the Logos with the Father. See the introduction to The Trinitarian Controversy, ed. and trans. William G. Rusch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1980), 5.
17. Ibid., 4–5.
18. This paragraph is primarily a summary of John O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 33–44.
19. See section 43 of The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, trans J. Armitage Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 108: “Because, for God, the Son was (as) the beginning before the creation of the world.”
20. William G. Rusch, The Trinitarian Controversy, ed. and trans. Rusch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1980), 7.
21. This paragraph is a summary of Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 38–40.
22. Sarah Parvis notes that while “Arians” may be anachronistic, it is still helpful in providing workable categories (Parvis, “Christology in the Early Arian Controversy,” 120).
23. Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 43.
24. Ibid., 52.
25. See, for instance, Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. Bas. 29.4, 14; Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, 16.37, 20.51, 24.55; Augustine, Trin. 1.2.9. It should also be noted that this commitment was for these writers thoroughly scriptural. While Arius seems to have taken his precommitments from Platonic philosophy, Athanasius et al. are at pains to show that this sharp Creator–creature divide is taught in Scripture.
26. Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition I: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), 2nd ed., trans. John Bowden (Louisville: John Knox, 1975), 222.
27. Parvis, “Christology in the Early Arian Controversy,” 123.
28. Charles Kannengiesser, “Lady Wisdom’s Final Call: The Patristic Recovery of Proverbs 8,” in Nova Doctrina Vetusque: Essays on Early Christianity in Honor of Fredric W. Schlatter, S.J., ed. Douglas Kries and Catherine Brown Tkacz (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 72.
29. Parvis, “Christology in the Early Arian Controversy,” 130, 135. In addition, I am not arguing that Marcellus is fully Nicene, but he is a vital influence on Athanasius’s interpretive approach and thus worthy of noting here.
30. See C. Ar. especially bk. 2.
31. Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity, 101–11.
32. Ibid., 109.
33. Athanasius, C. Ar. bk. 1–4 (on Prov 8, see especially 2.19ff). See also Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. Bas., and Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius.
34. Luise Abramowski, “Das Theologische Hauptwerk Des Athanasius: Die Drei Bücher Gegen Die Arianer (Ctr. Arianos I–III),” Communio Viatorum 42, no. 1 (2000): 17. Abramowski’s original German is “daß das in den Proverbien Gesagte auch einen richtigen Sinn hat (όρτή διάνοια). Der Schlüssel zum Verständnis ist ihm der griechische Titel des Proverbienbuches, παροιμίαι.—παροιμία hat zwei Bedeutungen: Sprichwort, also proverbium, und Gleichnis.”
35. Mark DelCogliano, “Basil of Caesarea on Proverbs 8:22 and the Sources of Pro-Nicene Theology,” JTS 59, no. 1 (2008): 183–90. See also Eugen J. Pentiuc, “A Self-Offering God and His Begotten Wisdom (Proverbs 8:22–24),” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 46, no. 3–4 (2001): 259–60.
36. Abramowski, “Das Theologische Hauptwerk Des Athanasius,” 18. On the basic approach of prosopological exegesis, see Matthew W. Bates, The Hermeneutics of Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul’s Method of Interpretation (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), 183–222.
37. DelCogliano, “Basil of Caesarea on Proverbs 8:22,” 187.
38. For a short overview of Athanasius’s hermeneutics, in addition to Abramowski, “Das Theologische Hauptwerk,” see Kannengiesser, “Lady Wisdom’s Final Call.” For a fuller treatment that also includes an assessment of Athanasius’s philosophical presuppositions, see Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), esp. 57–88, 117–46. On the Cappadocians, in addition to DelCogliano, “Basil of Caesarea,” see Michel Van Parys, “Exégèse et Théologie Trinitaire: Prov 8,22 Chez Les Pères Cappadociens,” Irénikon 43, no. 3 (1970): 362–79.
39. Trin. 1.3–4. English trans. from Augustine, The Trinity, 2nd ed., ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New York: New City, 2012).
40. See Johnson, “Augustine, Eternal Generation, and Evangelical Trinitarianism,” 149–50.
41. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), esp. 1–59.
42. This is not to say that the Christian tradition remained unchanging; on the contrary, both foundations and method changed dramatically in the late medieval period. Unfortunately, space does not permit an exploration of these changes. For a detailed explanation of how interpretive foundations and methods shifted in the last few centuries prior to the Reformation, see G. R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Road to the Reformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 3, trans., E. M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).
43. On what many would consider the height of medieval theological reflection, and particularly Trinitarian doctrine, in Thomas Aquinas, see Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. F. A. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and for an examination of John Calvin’s questions about eternal generation’s relationship to aseity, see Brannon Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 64–102.
44. Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son, 91–204.
45. For example, Jean de Savignac’s claim that the background for ’amon (v. 30) lies in Egyptian checkerboards. J. De Savignac, “La sagesse en Proverbs VIII 22–31,” VT 12, no. 2 (1962): 211–15.
46. For a survey of possible ancient Near Eastern backgrounds, including Gen 1–2, as well as a critique of the definitive conclusions some interpreters make about which background is correct, see R. N. Whybray, “Proverbs VIII 22–31 and Its Supposed Prototypes,” VT 15, no .4 (1965): 504–14. Mitchell Dahood also lists several possible ancient Near Eastern backgrounds in “Proverbs 8,22–31: Translation and Commentary,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 30, no .4 (1968): 512–21.
47. R. P. C. Hanson has even characterized both parties’ reading of Proverbs 8 as referring to Christ and their subsequent exegetical arguments as “two blindfolded men trying to hit each other.” See P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1:440.
48. See, for example, Stuart Weeks and Gale Yee, who both argue that Wisdom is merely a literary device, not an actual person or being. Stuart Weeks, “The Context and Meaning of Proverbs 8:30a,” JBL 125, no. 3 (2006): 433–42; Gale A. Yee, “The Theology of Creation in Proverbs 8:22–31,” in Creation in the Biblical Traditions, ed. Richard J. Clifford and John J. Collins (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1992).
49. E.g., along with the aforementioned de Savignac, Whybray, and Dahood articles, Shimon Bakon, “Two Hymns to Wisdom: Proverbs 8 and Job 28,” Jewish Bible Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2008): 222–30; William P. Brown, “Proverbs 8:22–31,” Interpretation 63, no. 3 (2009): 290–92; Michael V. Fox, “’Amon Again,” JBL 115, no. 4 (1996): 699–702; Alan Lenzi, “Proverbs 8:22–31: Three Perspectives on Its Composition,” JBL 125, no. 4 (2006): 687–714; Cleon L. Rogers III, “The Meaning and Significance of the Hebrew Word 
in Proverbs 8,30,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 109, no. 2 (1997): 208–21; Bruce Vawter, “Prov 8:22: Wisdom and Creation,” JBL 99, no. 2 (1980): 205–16; and Daniel H. Williams, “Proverbs 8:22–31,” Interpretation 48, no. 3 (1994): 275–79.
50. For a survey of contemporary interpretive conclusions, see Davidson, “Proverbs 8 and the Place of Christ in the Trinity,” 37–41.
51. Davidson, “Proverbs 8 and the Place of Christ in the Trinity.”
52. For the variety of modern interpretations of the passage, see note 49. For an example of an argument that the Hebrew of Prov 8 is ambiguous, see R. B. Y. Scott, “Wisdom in Creation: The ’āmôn of Proverbs VIII 30,” VT 10, no. 2 (1960): 419–27. Scott notes that because of this ambiguity, the variety of interpretations of Prov 8 cannot be decided upon by mere historical-critical exegesis. Instead, reception history plays a major role. It is for this reason that the Christian interpretation of the text must seriously consider the New Testament’s reading.
53. See e.g. Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 1–59.
54. Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son, 36–37. This list is based on Giles’s reading of Wayne Grudem, Bruce Ware, Paul Helm, William Lane Craig, and John Feinberg, among others. Feinberg’s analysis contains most of the points listed by Giles and can be used by readers unfamiliar with the parties involved. See John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 489–92. Note also that Feinberg misreads the fathers and their supposed reliance on monogenēs as one of the biblical cruxes for the doctrine. Grudem also mistakenly reads the early Christian theologians’ position as reliant on translating the word monogenēs as “only begotten” instead of “only.” See Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 1233–34. For evidence of Grudem’s and Feinberg’s misreading of the patristic theologians, see Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son, 63–66. See also Johnson’s summary of objections in “Augustine, Eternal Generation, and Evangelical Trinitarianism,” 143–46.
55. This in and of itself should be astounding to those familiar with the historical development of the doctrine of the Trinity, as the development of this preeminent Christian doctrine “was decisively shaped by the use of Proverbs 8:22–31 (LXX) as a passage dealing with the relation between the preexistent Logos and the Father.” Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Christian Tradition (100–600), vol. 1, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 61.
56. Daniel J. Ebert IV, Wisdom Christology: How Jesus Becomes God’s Wisdom for Us, ed. Robert A. Peterson (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2011), 12–15, 64–66.
57. Davidson notes that this passage is a combined reading of Gen 1:1 and Prov 8:23. “Proverbs 8 and the Place of Christ in the Trinity,” 34. On the textual relationship between Gen 1 and Prov 8, see Michaela Bauks and Gerlinde Baumann, “Im Anfang war . . . ? Gen 1,1ff und Prov 8,22–31 im Vergleich,” Biblische Notizen 71 (1994): 24–52.
58. Scott, “Wisdom in Creation,” 218. Scott also sees a possible reference to ’amon in John 7:5. For the Rev 3:14 parallel, see also Kannengiesser, “Lady Wisdom’s Final Call,” 65–66. While Scott focuses on the transliteration of ’amon, Kannengiesser sees the explicit parallel more so in the phrase hē archē tēs ktiseōs tou theou. The 4th ed. of the UBS GNT lists Rev 3:14 as a textual quotation of or allusion to Prov 8:22.
59. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 229–30. Grudem also argues that we are justified and even compelled to reject a reading of Prov 8:22–31 as referring to an actual person because there are other personified concepts in Proverbs (e.g., Lady Folly in 9:13–18) that are not taken as actual persons. While we should appreciate here Grudem’s detailed inspection of the surrounding text, the logic is nevertheless faulty. Lack of reference to an actual person for one personification does not a priori rule it out for another. Further, and as noted above, the New Testament seems to make clear reference to this passage as referring to Christ.
A similar interpretation comes from Daniel Ebert, who prefers to see Wisdom’s role in creation “as a type of Christ’s role in creation” instead of as a reference to the eternal Logos (Ebert, Wisdom Christology, 70). But one wonders how this makes any sense of either Wisdom or typology. In regards to Wisdom, if she is a part of creation, what part does she play? How does that reading interact with Jewish monotheism? If she is merely a type and not an actual reference to the Logos, does this accurately reflect the nature of Old Testament typology? Old Testament types are always rooted in actual events and never literary inventions; does this mean Wisdom and the Logos are both involved in the creation event?
Derek Kidner makes exactly this point when he argues that “the personifying of wisdom, far from overshooting the literal truth, was a preparation for its full statement, since the agent of creation was no mere activity of God, but the Son, His eternal Word, Wisdom, and Power (see also John 1:1–14; 1 Cor 1:24, 30; Heb 1:1–4).” In other words, the typological reading of Prov 8 does not negate the actuality of Wisdom’s personhood but instead only strengthens it, based on the NT’s appropriation of the passage and assertion that the Logos is the agent of creation. See Derek Kidner, Proverbs: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1964), 79.
60. Feinberg, No One Like Him, 492.
61. We should note here that Grudem and Ware have both publicly affirmed eternal generation at the 2016 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Antonio, Texas. They have not yet done so in a professional publication.
62. Bruce Ware, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 76–83.
63. As Augustine rightly argues in Trin. 1.3.15–17.
64. Alan W. Gomes, “A Historical and Theological Introduction to W. G. T. Shedd and His Dogmatic Theology,” in William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 3rd ed., ed. Alan W. Gomes (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003), 29n60 (emphasis added).
65. See Grudem’s explanation of his method in Systematic Theology, 35–37. For a similar approach with more detailed explanation, see Millard Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998), 70–82. Erickson also rejects eternal generation. See Millard Erickson, God in Three Persons: A Contemporary Interpretation of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995), 305–6, 309–10. Interestingly, Erickson (and others) continue to rely on the economic argument advanced by the fathers to explain language about the Son that refers to his incarnation versus language about the Son that refers to his relationship with the Father ad intra (see Erickson, Christian Theology, 713–14). The problem is that while they use the fathers’ arguments about the humanity of the incarnate Son, they do not then adequately explain exactly how the Father and Son (and Spirit) can be one God and yet three distinct persons using biblical language and taking into account the “from another” passages. In other words, Erickson here uses part of the logic of the early Christian theologians’ arguments without referencing, and indeed while rejecting, the other crucial half of that same logic.
66. E.g., reading Trinitarian language about the three different persons of God as implying a difference in personality, that is, three separate seats of consciousness that are nevertheless united in their will. Ironically, this “unity of will” is precisely what Arius and other Monarchians argued united Father, Son, and Spirit rather than unity of being (homoousios). Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 41–79.
67. Ibid.