D. A. CARSON
WE ARE NOT THE FIRST GENERATION to reflect on this text and this theme, of course. From the patristic period on, the theological rubric under which the Father–Son relationship within the Trinity has been commonly discussed is the eternal generation of the Son. Certain biblical words, texts, and themes have often been adduced in support of this doctrine, and of what it is said to bring to the doctrine of the Trinity. In this chapter, I shall focus on John 5:26 before briefly integrating other bits of evidence into the discussion, all in the hope of engaging some contemporary Trinitarian debates.
THE INTERPRETATION OF JOHN 5:26
“For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.”1 If the clause “the Father has life in himself” refers to God’s independence and self-existence—that is, the Father, unlike everything in the created order, is dependent on no one and nothing for his life, because he has “life-in-himself”—then the passage is more than a little strange. If it said that just as the Father has life in himself, so the Son also has life in himself, this would be an extraordinarily strong affirmation of the Son’s deity, his unqualified equality with God. On the other hand, it would suggest the Son is a second God. What would be affirmed is a form of ditheism. Alternatively, if the text said that just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life, the logic of the passage would remain less than straightforward, because the exact force of “just as” would be less than transparent (a point to which I shall return), but in any case the Son would be diminished: he would no longer be said to be on a par with God. The life the Son would enjoy, under such a reading of the passage, would not be the life of independence and self-existence, but derived life received at a concrete moment. In reality, the wording of our passage makes its interpretation very difficult: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted (ἔδωκεν) the Son also to have life in himself.” If it is a “grant” or a gift, how is it “life in himself,” that is, self-existent life? If the Son has such life-in-himself, how can it be said to have been received as a grant or a gift from the Father?
Although scholars have advanced many subtle interpretations of this text, in the end there are three that control the discussion. First, probably a majority of biblical scholars today deny that “life in himself” has anything to do with divine self-existence. That stance is well represented by J. Ramsey Michaels, who argues that this passage has nothing to do with God’s self-existence and therefore nothing to do with the eternal generation of the Son.2 What the Father has is ζωὴν ἐν ἑαυτῷ; what he grants the Son is ζωὴν ἐν ἑαυτῷ. But what does that expression mean? In the bread of life discourse, Michaels points out, Jesus tells his hearers that unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood they cannot enjoy ζωὴν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς (6:53). This surely does not mean “self-existent life” or the like; indeed, the parallel in the next verse is ζωὴν αἰώνιον. In other words, the “life-in-oneself” expression does not in John 6 refer to self-existent life but to the eternal life that the believer receives from Christ. So on Michaels’s showing, the Father has life, the Father grants life to the Son, and the Son grants life to believers (cf. 6:57). This does not affirm the eternal generation of the Son any more than the eternal life granted to believers indicates that they have been eternally generated. On this showing, there is no hint of the unique eternal generation of the Son in 5:26.
Of course, for Michaels to be right in his understanding of John 5:26 would require that the expression ἐν ἑαυτοῖς in reference to the life of believers must have exactly the same force as ἐν ἑαυτῷ in reference to the life of God and of the Son—a kind of terminus technicus. But we must ask if that is the most likely reading.
Marianne Meye Thompson’s commentary is similar, but hints at the differences between what “life in him” might mean for God, for Jesus, and for believers:
In the statement “Even as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself” (5:26), we find the epitome of John’s Christology. God, the living Father, has no prior and external cause; now the Son is similarly said to “have life in himself.” The Son has life as God does, but he has it because God has granted (or, “given,” edōken) it to him. The first formulation (“life in himself”) points to independence; the second formulation (“for the Father has granted him”) points to dependence. The Father gives his own kind of life to the Son; the Son in turn gives life to the world.3
Thus, applied to God, “life in himself” signals “independence,” but the same expression cannot be read the same way with respect to the Son, precisely because that life has been “granted” to him, and the Son in turn gives life to the world. So the tension has been deftly removed, and there is little ground for the patristic developments that tie this passage to the eternal generation of the Son. As Raymond Brown puts it, “The common possession of life by Father and Son was used in patristic times as an anti-Arian argument. However, ‘life’ here does not refer primarily to the internal life of the Trinity, but to a creative life-giving power exercised toward men.”4
Second, some commentators tightly tie “life in himself” used of God to “life in himself” used of Jesus, and differentiate that reality from any notion of “life” experienced by believers. Rudolf Bultmann observes that both the Father and the Son raise the dead and give life: that is, “the Revealer is identified with God,” and a similar identification takes place in v. 26. “ζωὴν ἔχειν can, of course, also be said of men who believe; but the latter have life ‘in him’ [3:16; 20:31; cf. 16:33], while God and the Revealer have life ‘in themselves.’ ” In other words, “They [i.e., the Father and the Son] possess the creative power of life; whereas the ζωή which man can enjoy is the kind of life proper to the creature.”5 The sense of identity that Bultmann finds between God and Jesus the Revealer is very strong: “In a certain sense v. 26 goes a step further behind the statement in v. 21, and so gives grounds for it: the Son exercises the office of Judge because he shares the divine nature.”6 But Bultmann feels under no constraint to explain how this “sharing” of the “divine nature” (since it can be said that the Father has “life in himself” and that the Son has “life in himself”) is to be squared with the notion that in the case of the Son, but obviously not the Father, it was something given to him. Thus what Bultmann means by Jesus sharing the “divine nature” does not seem to include eternality.
Third, the reference to the Father’s “life in himself” is, in this context, that life that God alone experiences. It is bound up with his divine nature, his independence, his self-existence. The same “life in himself” is possessed by the Son, who shares the Father’s divine nature, independence, and self-existence. And yet John’s Gospel tells us that the Father granted to the Son to have this life in himself. How can both perspectives be simultaneously true?
The best response remains that adopted by Augustine and other fathers of the church: this is an eternal grant.7 It is not as if there was a moment when God granted to the Son to have life in himself, before which the Son did not have life in himself. If such were the case, then whatever it was that the Son was granted could not have been divine, independent, self-existent life. In other words, this grant does not establish a certain time in chronological sequence when the grant took place; rather, if it is an eternal grant, it establishes the nature of the Father–Son relationship. In short, this is a way of establishing the eternal generation of the Son.
The Reformers tended to adopt a similar interpretation.8 The assumption that this is the faithful and orthodox interpretation of the passage continues to surface at the end of the nineteenth century in the recently discovered and incomplete commentary on John by J. B. Lightfoot. Lightfoot’s total preserved comment on John 5:26 reads, “ζωὴν ἔχειν ἐν ἑαυτῷ compared to ἔδωκεν αὐτῷ expresses the whole doctrine of the Person of Christ, derived from and yet subservient to the Logos doctrine, the eternal generation of the Son.”9
ADJUDICATION
How shall we adjudicate among these three major interpretations of John 5:26? We must begin by reflecting on the immediate context of the verse.
(1) Both Jesus’s healing of the man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years (5:1–9) and his instruction to the man to pick up his mat and go (5:8–13), taking place as they do on the Sabbath, arouse the sensitivities of the Jewish leaders regarding Sabbath observance (5:16).10 Jesus might have replied by inviting his interlocutors to engage in halakhic discussion, but instead he defends himself, here as often in the Gospels, by making a christological claim: “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working” (5:17). The Jewish leaders take this as a blasphemous claim. In their view, Jesus is “even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (5:18). From the perspective of the Fourth Evangelist, Jesus’s opponents are curiously right and wrong: Jesus does make himself equal with God, but they imagine that he is doing so in such a way as to claim to be an alternative God, a second God. What they have in mind is apparently ditheism, and this side of the exile they are painfully aware that God stands implacably opposed to all forms of polytheism, including ditheism. As they see it, monotheism is being challenged before their eyes, and they are enraged.
(2) But what Jesus has in mind is rather different. The following verses (5:19–30) find Jesus articulating and defending what would become in time the distinctively Christian understanding of monotheism. Jesus most emphatically insists that he is not a separate deity, an independent deity—far from it. He insists that “the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing” (5:19). Here is dependence of the most thorough kind, a form of subordination (there is certainly no reciprocity in the relationship)—yet it immediately turns out to be a subordination carefully qualified. The Son can do only what he sees his Father doing, we are told, “because whatever the Father does the Son also does” (5:19).
Two elements in this clause are striking. (a) The Son’s activities are co-extensive with those of the Father. Has the Father created all things? So also has the Son, as God’s Word—God’s own agent in creation (1:1–5). Is it the Father’s prerogative to give resurrection life, raise the dead, and exercise final judgment? So also is it the prerogative of the Son (5:24–30). This co-extensiveness of the activities of the Father and the Son is expressed in functional categories: they both do the same things. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to perceive some ontological implications behind the descriptions of common function.
(b) The word “because” (γάρ) demands explanation. In what way does the truth that “whatever the Father does the Son also does” provide the ground or the explanation (surely the force of γάρ in this context) of the truth that the Son “can do only what he sees his Father doing”? The second clause explains the first, on the assumption that the Son sees everything that the Father does, for “whatever the Father does the Son also does.” Once again we have the sweeping coextensiveness of the actions of the Father and the Son coupled with the utter dependence of the Son upon the Father in the discharge of those coextensive actions. In fact, this γάρ-clause at the end of verse 19 is succeeded by three more γάρ-clauses, each one grounding or explaining what immediately precedes it, all four of these clauses having a bearing on our discussion. Observe the sequence of these four “for” clauses. The first, at the end of verse 19, asserts that the Son can do only what he sees the Father doing, for “whatever the Father does, the Son also does”—for “the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does” (v. 20), which grounds the coextensiveness of the actions of Father and Son in the Father’s love for the Son. (In passing, note that the Father’s love for the Son is demonstrated in his placing everything in the hands of the Son, 3:35, or, as here, in his “showing” all he does to the Son so that the Son may do exactly the same things. By contrast, the Son’s love for the Father is demonstrated in his perfect obedience to the Father, 14:31.) There is more the Father “shows” the Son so that the Son may carry out his Father’s will and amaze the disciples (5:20), for “just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it” (5:21): the raising of the dead, accomplished by Father and Son alike, grounds the promise that more is coming, enough to amaze Jesus’s disciples. For “the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son” (5:22)—that is, the Son exercises judgment and raises the dead precisely because the Father has entrusted such work to him (5:22).
In short, Jesus both repudiates and accepts the charge that he makes himself equal with God (5:18): he repudiates it in that he strenuously avoids any suggestion that he is an independent God, a second God, or an alternative God, since all that he does is utterly dependent on the Father; and he accepts the charge that he makes himself equal with God in that whatever the Father does he also does, to the end that he should receive the same glory as the Father. In other words, the flow of the argument sounds very much like an unpacking of the traditional interpretation of 5:24.
(3) Some thought must be devoted to the ὥσπερ . . . οὕτως (“as . . . so”) construction in John 5:26. The comparison cannot be between two “givings,” as if the Father and the Son each gives “life in himself” to the other. Rather, the construction ensures that whatever “life in himself” means in the Father’s existence, it means the same thing in the Son’s existence. The parallel is so tight that it would be difficult to avoid suspicion of ditheism were it not for the assertion that the Father has given this to the Son. “This means that if we are to understand the kind of life that the Son has, we must look to the kind of life the Father has.”11
(4) This block of material (5:19–30) continues with the same tension voiced in various ways: the tension between, on the one hand, coextensive action and existence between the Father and the Son, and, on the other, the assertion of the utter dependence of the Son on the Father. On the one hand, the Father gives the authority to act as final judge to the Son (5:27), and the Son’s judgment on the last day is never independent of the Father’s will, for the Son never seeks to please himself but only the one who sent him (5:30; cf. 8:16). On the other hand, one of the reasons why the Father has entrusted all judgment to the Son is precisely so “that all my honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him” (5:23).
To summarize, the context of 5:26 describes what God alone does, yet insists that the Son does it, too. This can be cast in universal terms (“whatever the Father does the Son also does,” 5:19, and thus can include things mentioned elsewhere, such as creation) or in the specifics of particular actions that only God can do (exercise final judgment; raise the dead on the last day). In such a context, the “life in himself” terminology of John 5:26 is likely referring to what is exclusively God’s: namely, what we call self-existent life, life that God has because he is God and dependent on no one and nothing, life that is his before creation. If such life is “granted” to the Son, the conclusion of Augustine—that this is an eternal grant—is the only one that makes sense of the text.
(5) This interpretation is readily supported by an array of texts in John that depict the Son coming from the Father and the like—texts to which Augustine readily appealed. The same pattern of tension between bold affirmations of the Son’s deity and unapologetic affirmations of the Son’s dependence upon and submission to his Father permeates the entire Gospel. On the one hand, the Word that becomes flesh is in fact God (1:1, 14), and can affirm, “Before Abraham was born, I am” (8:58)—apparently more than a claim of mere preexistence. This same Jesus unhesitatingly tells his followers, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). After Jesus’s resurrection, Thomas’s confession, “My Lord and my God” (20:28), far from being rebuked, is something Jesus approves. On the other hand, the dependence of Jesus upon his Father, and his submission to his Father, surface not only here in John 5:19–30 but in 8:29 (“The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him”) and in 14:31 (the world must learn “that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me”).12 None of these pairings is reciprocal. It makes most contextual sense to read our text, John 5:26, as comfortably nestling within this larger Johannine matrix.
(6) “Son” terminology in the Bible is remarkably rich and diverse. Even if we restrict our focus from “son” to “son of God” (excluding, for example, “son of Man,” “son of David,” “son of Belial” and a host of other “son”-expressions that don’t make it through the barrier of translation into English), we soon discover that “son of God” can refer to angels (even fallen angels), the first human being, the people of Israel collectively, individual Israelites, the Davidic king, and individual Christians—as well as to Jesus. And when the expression does refer to him, it can refer to him as the Son of God by virtue of his role as the true Israel, or it can refer to him as the Son of God by virtue of his role as the ultimate Davidic, messianic king, without any necessary eternal and “Trinitarian” association. Indeed, a few have argued that sonship terminology is suitably applied only to the human existence of the Second Person of the Godhead—that is, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” are terms appropriately applicable only to the economic Trinity. Yet “son” is clearly sometimes attested in Scripture to refer to the Son before he becomes a human being: for example, God sends his Son into the world (John 3:17). The text does not mean to say that God sends the one who would become his Son into the world. That immediately raises the question of how we are to understand Father–Son language applied to the immanent Trinity.13
Unlike other New Testament writers, John reserves ὁ υἱός for Jesus; his followers are τὰ τέκνα τοῦ θεοῦ or the like. Other New Testament writers have other ways of distinguishing the sonship of Jesus from the sonship of believers (in Paul, for example, only the latter are sons “by adoption”), but John’s way of doing so brings sharp focus on the word “son.” The eternal Word, who was with God and who was God from the beginning (John 1:1), is clearly designated the Son of God, not the Brother of God, still less the Cousin of God—the biblical authors display considerably more discipline than in William P. Young’s fanciful depiction of the Trinity in The Shack. In other words, “Son” language tied to “Father” language is one of the unavoidable hints that the relationship between the “Father” and the “Son” is rightly conceived of in terms of generation—indeed, of eternal generation. More broadly, of course, the Fathers spoke of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit, fastening on specific Johannine words. Augustine’s stress on “not three brothers” remains vital not only for our reflection on the biblical data themselves but also for our attempts at Trinitarian formulation. To obliterate biblical distinctives among the persons of the Godhead “may create individuations [among] the Persons that are our inventions.”14 Hilary rightly perceives that John 5:26 is crucial in combating Arianism because it affirms that both the Father and the Son have the same kind of life.15 To understand what kind of life the Son enjoys, one need only study the life of the Father. As different as Arianism and Sabellianism may be, both heresies have this in common: they both deny the true sonship of the Son, as Hilary saw. The former teaches that he is a creature rather than a son; the latter teaches that he is the same person as the Father and therefore not a genuine son.16 The eternal generation of the Son, rightly understood, effectively rebuts both heresies.
(7) Some writers, both ancient and modern, focus on the word μονογενής. God so loved the world that he gave τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ (John 3:16), translated, in the KJV, “his only-begotten Son.” Most contemporary English-language translations render the expression “his only Son” or “his one and only Son” or “his unique Son.” Etymologically, the former in effect read μονογενής as deriving from μόνος + γεννάω, and the latter read μονογενής as deriving from μόνος + γένος. Of course, nowadays we all know that etymology is a horribly unreliable way to determine the meaning of words, best reserved for rare words that show up so infrequently we have too few contexts to help determine their meaning. Across the centuries the common understanding of μονογενής (and of its Latin equivalents, unicus filius or unigenitus; Jerome opted for the latter in the five Johannine occurrences) was that it meant “only begotten,” that is, in a biological sense, “without a sibling,” with various extensions in meaning. This consensus was powerfully challenged by Dale Moody in an article published in 1953,17 supported by Longenecker and others.18 The new consensus dispensed with “only begotten,” opting for “only,” “unique,” or “one and only,” and swept along the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars, myself included.
One of the things that convinced us was that the New Testament, quite apart from extrabiblical sources, provides one instance where the meaning simply cannot be “only begotten”: in Hebrews 11:17, the author tells us that Abraham was about to sacrifice τὸν μονογενῆ—that is, “his one and only [son].” Isaac certainly wasn’t Abraham’s “only begotten” son: Abraham was also the father of Ishmael and became the father of a packet of progeny by Keturah (Gen 25:1–2). But Isaac was Abraham’s unique son, his only-one-of-a-kind son. Of course, the precise meaning of words can change with context, so the fact that this must be the meaning in Hebrews 11:17 does not establish that the word must have the same meaning in, say, John 3:16, or in the four other instances in the Johannine writings where Jesus is referred to as the μονογενής (1:14, 18; 3:18; 1 John 4:9). What we can say from the use of μονογενής in Hebrews 11:17 is that it is seriously mistaken to hold that μονογενής must mean only begotten in any particular passage. Like many others, I was inclined to think that μονογενής never means more than “one and only” or “unique” anywhere in John, whatever it might mean elsewhere.
But now an important series of excellent papers by Charles Lee Irons has challenged the modern consensus and urged us to return to the rendering “only begotten.” This represents one of the best parts of a flurry of hundreds of exchanges on the Trinity that have lit up the digital world during the last couple of years.19 Irons’s five digital papers20 are especially strong in their survey of the uses gathered from TLG across several centuries: if Irons is right to assert that “only begotten” is the most common meaning of the Greek word when a responsible synchronic study is undertaken, the default assumption ought to rest with the older interpretation, not with the modern consensus. Nevertheless, three observations might not be out of place.
First, Irons himself (unlike some of his supporters and cheerleaders) is careful to say, “My claim is not that monogenēs always means ‘only begotten’ and never means ‘only one of its kind’ in biblical and extrabiblical Greek.” I confess that “only” seems to be a perfectly adequate understanding of μονογενής in such passages as Luke 7:12; 8:42; and 9:38.
Second, even if μονογενής really should be rendered “only begotten” in all five of its Johannine occurrences, a reasonable conclusion, by itself that would not establish the eternal generation of the Son but only the unique generation of the Son. “The ancient Arians were very ready to call the Son ὁ μονογενὴς θεός; this appellation, in their view, happily distinguished him from the Father, who alone was God in the highest sense, as unbegotten, uncaused, and without beginning.”21 The Arian Eunomius, according to Gregory of Nyssa, appealed to the “only begotten” label as part of the evidence that shows the Son is not divine, for God alone is “ungenerate” (Expositio Fidei, c. AD 383).22 The point is that both the Arians and the orthodox appealed to the “only begotten” understanding of μονογενής but came away with diametrically opposed conclusions.23 In other words, even if someone holds that, on balance of probabilities, μονογενής in John means “only begotten,” one must recognize that the expression itself is an exceedingly weak reed to support the eternal generation of the Son. It needs the support of John 5:26 and other passages. Conversely, if it were decided that μονογενής in its Johannine occurrences is best rendered by “one and only” or the like, it would not rule out the generation of the Son. “It is fundamentally misguided to move from isolated exegetical discoveries, such as monogenēs in texts like John 1:18 not necessarily denoting ‘begotten,’ toward denying eternal generation.”24
Third, it must be said that Irons’s treatment of Hebrews 11:17, referenced above, is less than satisfactory. He points to the passage where Josephus explains the love of Monobazus for one of his sons: “He had an elder son by Helene . . . and other children by his other wives; but it was clear that all his favour was concentrated on Izates as if he were an only child (ὡς εἰς μονογενῆ).”25 Irons, then, argues that in a similar way Hebrews 11:17 presents Isaac as if he were the only begotten son, since in Genesis 21:10–12 Abraham, compelled by Sarah, disowns Ishmael. But this really will not do. The passage in Josephus deploys ὡς (rendered “as if,” above); Hebrews 11:17 has no similar construction. More importantly, Abraham sired not only Ishmael and Isaac but several others by Keturah (Gen 25:1–2), as we have seen. Hebrews 11:17 makes perfectly good sense if it is not saying that Isaac was the “only begotten” son but the unique son, the son of promise, the son of the covenant.
To summarize, the recent work of Irons is important and thought-provoking and may in time change some “default” assumptions about the meaning of μονογενής, but like all ground-breaking work, it needs further testing. His actual exegesis of the five Johannine passages that deploy the word (which I do not have space to discuss) calls for careful and respectful probing. Under the most optimistic reading of his work, the restoration of the meaning “only begotten” drives reflection on the generation of the Son, but not, by itself, on the eternal generation of the Son. It may thus provide tacit confirmation of a doctrine established on other grounds, but it cannot itself establish the doctrine.
FURTHER EVIDENCE AND REFLECTIONS
The following points either support the interpretation of John 5:26 offered in this chapter or provide some theological reflection flowing out of that interpretation.
(1) Numerous biblical scholars and theologians have gathered other biblical passages together, not least drawn from John’s Gospel, that are said to support the eternal generation of the Son.26 There is no space to survey their work here, except for a couple of representative instances.
(2) Many point to the prologue of Hebrews. In these last days, the writer avers, God has spoken to us ἐν υ͑ιῷ (1:2)—this Son who is immediately described as “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (1:3).27 The Son, as it were, is the shining of the Father’s shining. Even though this imagery is not immediately tied to notions of generation, nevertheless the passage is pretty compelling as a picture where Son-language is used, where, as it were, both God and the Son shine, where nevertheless the Son’s shining is somehow derived from the Father’s shining, and where, in context, the Son, as also the Word in John’s prologue, is one with God in creation.
(3) Some church fathers, not least Augustine, point to Psalm 2:7 as a place where the eternal generation of the Son is affirmed. Here God says to the Davidic king, “You are my son; today I have become your father.” This interpretation is a misreading of the passage. For this verse to support the weight of the eternal generation of the Son, the “today” would have to be an eternal “today.” This is most unlikely. The imagery used here is first established at the time of God’s establishment of the Davidic dynasty (2 Sam 7:14), when God announces, with respect to Solomon, “I will be his father, and he will be my son.” As I have argued elsewhere, “sonship” is often a functional category in Scripture.28 Insofar as one makes peace, for instance, one is acting like God the supreme peacemaker, so along the axis of peacemaking one shows oneself to be a son of God (like Jesus in the beatitudes, Matt 5:9). Again, insofar as one tells lies and kills, so along the axis of lies and murder one shows oneself to be a son of the devil, who has been a murderer and a liar from the beginning (John 8:44). Similarly, when a Davidide becomes king, he is to act like the King par excellence, God himself. Ideally, the Davidide reigns with justice and integrity, defending the covenant and protecting the people, thereby showing himself along the axis of kingship to be a son of God. So also in Psalm 2:6: the day when God says, “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain” (2:6a), labelled “the LORD’s decree,” is the day when the Davidide steps up to the throne. God pronounces, “You are my son; today I have become your father.” In other words, in this context the “son of God” terminology is connected with the ascension of a particular Davidide to the throne; it is not obviously being used in the same way as in John 3:17 or Hebrews 1:2. Elsewhere I have argued that in Hebrews 1:5ff., the sonship terminology, including the citation of both Psalm 2:7 and 2 Samuel 7:14 in verse 5, makes reference to the Davidic kingship. Yet at the same time, the sonship terminology in verse 2, which cannot be said to focus on Davidic kingship but has overtones of the eternal generation of the Son, is certainly referring to the same person as the sonship terminology in verse 5; probably the two different meanings of “son” are intentionally confused, or better, merged. But I remain unpersuaded that Psalm 2:6 itself can be said to support, exegetically, the eternal generation of the Son.
(4) Note carefully how in the relationship between the Father and the Son, the relationship between command and obedience, plays out between sending and going, between showing and doing, and between standard and comparison: it is always in one direction, from the Father to the Son. In none of these cases is the action reciprocal. The Father sends the Son, and the Son goes, never the reverse. The Father loves the Son and insists that all must honor the Son as they honor the Father: the reverse standard is not argued. The Father demonstrates his love for the Son by “showing” the Son all he does, such that the Son does everything the Father does; nowhere do we read that the Son demonstrates his love for the Father by showing him all that the Son does, such that the Father does everything the Son does. In fact, the Son displays his love for the Father by obeying him perfectly; we are not told that the Father displays his love for the Son by a kind of reciprocal obedience. The Father entrusts all judgment to the Son, while of the Son we are told that he judges only as he hears, for he seeks not to please himself but rather him who sent him. Along exactly the same lines, our verse, John 5:26, asserts that as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself; it does not assert that as the Son has life in himself, so he has granted to the Father to have life in himself. The pattern is starkly persistent, unidirectional, without exception, and will not be denied. Indeed, although it is true that the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son by the Father is designed not only to explain certain biblical passages, and within that framework to uphold the ontological equality of the Father and the Son, the raw fact remains that although the church has long confessed the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, it has nowhere confessed the eternal generation of the Father by the Son. For a start, this would be horrendously incongruous with the Father–Son terminology of Scripture.
(5) Without wanting in this chapter to enter the lists in the frequently heated debates between egalitarians and complementarians, nevertheless some of the issues raised by both sides in that controversy intersect with our exegesis of John 5:26, and therefore we cannot ignore them. We have observed that the eternal generation of the Son, expressed in John 5:26 (assuming our exegesis is correct), simultaneously preserves, indeed asserts, the full deity of the Son (measured not least by the fact that the actions of the Father and the Son are coextensive and that the Son is to receive the same honor as the Father) and the dependence of the Son upon the Father. This dependence of the Son upon the Father is not a casual or indifferent detail; it is intrinsically bound up with the very notion of eternal generation, which is not a reciprocal operation. The question then becomes: Is there some measure of the Son’s submission (subordination? obedience?) to the Father that reaches back into preincarnation eternity? Or is such terminology locked into the incarnation? Often the debate is cast in terms of the relationships among the persons in the immanent Trinity versus the relationships among the persons in the economic Trinity.29 Is the appeal to a headship distinction between God and Christ (1 Cor 11:3) restricted to the Son in his incarnate state, or is there an “eternal functional subordination” (inevitably abbreviated EFS) of the Son to the Father?
The lines are strongly drawn. On the one hand, Kevin Giles may be taken as a representative of those who insist that the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son reflects subordination neither in the economic Trinity nor in the immanent Trinity, neither in the incarnate Son nor in the preincarnate Son.30 Whatever subordination is found in the incarnate Son is restricted to his incarnate existence, and in any case is not enmeshed in his eternal generation. For Giles, the only distinction between the Father and the Son in the immanent Trinity has to do with their respective origins, not with differences in authority, obedience, functional roles, or anything else. To allow any exceptions is to jeopardize the full deity of the Son, which the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son was designed to defend, for, according to Giles, it is unavoidably the case that all forms of subordination presuppose some kind of inferiority. On the other hand, Randy Rheaume may be taken as representative of those who insist that the biblical texts, especially John’s Gospel, consistently portray the Son both as the Father’s equal and as the Father’s subordinate, both in time and in eternity, both in the incarnation and in eternity past.31 Between the polarities of these two opinions, there are of course many variations, but to set out the polarities has the advantage of making clear not only what is at stake but what the fundamental issues are on which the polarized positions turn.
How, then, shall we think our way through the interaction of our exegesis of John 5:26 (and, implicitly, other texts supporting the eternal generation of the Son) with the issues of what we have (sometimes rather glibly) referred to as the Son’s submission or dependence or subordination? Five reflections follow:
First, all sides ought to agree that one may distinguish certain personal properties among the persons: in particular, the Father’s paternity (specifically, his unbegottenness), the Son’s filiation (or generation), and the Spirit’s procession. It is therefore appropriate to speak of a certain taxis in the immanent Trinity. Nicaea affirms that the only distinctions to be drawn among the eternal persons are their relations of origin: unbegotten Father, eternally begotten Son, and the eternally proceeding Holy Spirit; similarly, Augustine asserts that the divine persons ad intra are one in substance, distinguished only according to their relations of origin. But Augustine adds that the divine persons are also united ad extra (i.e., in their Trinitarian operations) even though they are distinguished in their operations in terms of their respective economic missions (viz., the sending of the Son and the Spirit), which missions in some sense reflect the immanent relations.32 One recalls the influential assertion of Rahner, still debated, that the economic Trinity, the Trinity as God is revealed in redemptive history, is the immanent Trinity.33 At the very least we must conclude that the immanent Trinity does not abolish or contradict itself in the outworking of the economic Trinity. “I believe that there is something about the persons of the Father, Son, and Spirit that made it appropriate for them to take on the economic roles they did. This does not involve ontological subordination.”34
Second, not a few have drawn attention to the terminology and argumentation in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28.35 All the Son’s authority between his ascension and his return has been granted to him by his Father: it is a mediated authority. Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (15:25): all of God’s authority is mediated through him (15:27; cf. also Matt 28:20). But once he has destroyed the last enemy, he “hands over the kingdom to God the Father” (1 Cor 15:24), and “then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all” (15:28). The most natural reading of these verses is that the Son, the exalted God-man, remains, after the consummation, eternally subject to his Father, no longer the exclusive mediator of the Father’s sovereignty—though the final clause, “so that God [not the ‘Father’] may be all in all,” lays the emphasis on (the Trinitarian) God. If being “made subject to” the Father does not entail some kind of intrinsic inferiority (which is at this juncture almost unthinkable), then why should any sort of functional submission among the persons of the Godhead be thought to entail ontological inferiority?
Third, John’s Gospel asserts that the Paraklētos, variously designated “the Spirit” or “the Spirit of truth,” will be sent or given by the Father (John 14:16, 26) or by Jesus (15:26)—“the Spirit of truth who goes out [procee-deth in the KJV, or ἐκπορεύεται] from the Father” (15:26). As in the case of the sending of the Son and in the generation of the Son, so in the case of the “sending” or the “procession” of the Spirit: there is a certain taxis that spills over into the Trinity’s economic mission. What is worth pondering in the case of the Spirit, however, is that the obedience of the Spirit cannot be cast in terms of his human nature since he has no human nature: arguments relevant in the case of the incarnate Son cannot be relevant in the case of the Spirit, yet there is demonstrable taxis, with the Father (and the Son) sending or giving the Spirit and the Spirit going and being given. It is hard to know what can wisely be made of this observation, but the least that must be inferred is that within the Trinity, being at the “receiving” end of a relationship—the end that receives commands and obeys, the end that is commissioned to go and proceeds, the end that is sent, the end that is “shown” what the Father does and does the same thing—cannot be said to betray any sort of inferiority.
Fourth, why should this surprise us? In the light of the Jesus who insists that proper stances of rule are characterized less by authoritative rights and more by self-sacrificing service for the good of those ruled, in a way that leads directly to the cross (Matt 20:20–28), to discuss the relationships among the persons of the Godhead in terms of authority structures (as we have been taught by our culture to think of authority structures) might be hugely misleading. Clearly we are running into trouble with our terminology. It is difficult to read John’s Gospel and avoid the language of the obedience of the Son, the language of his subordination to the Father; indeed, it is difficult to avoid such terminology of the Son within the immanent Trinity, as we have seen. If we review once again all the ways in which the Son in John’s Gospel obeys, speaks as he is given words to say, comes and goes on the Father’s command, performs the Father’s will not only in coming into the world through the incarnation but also in going to the cross and in securing those whom the Father has given him, what term shall we use to describe his relation to the Father in all of its unidirectional obedience and dependence (another word on the edge of saying too much), if not subordination? Yet if in our culture “subordination” is corrupted by the tincture of inferiority, it is not a happy term to use. Again, if there is a certain taxis in the Trinity, then in some highly qualified ways it may not be inappropriate to speak of the obedience and subordination of the Son even while we robustly insist that he is in no way inferior to his Father in essence, glory, power, majesty, perfections, and holiness, which of course is what the eternal generation of the Son is designed to protect while still depicting him as the Son of God.36 Indeed, John 5:26 celebrates that the Son has the same “life in himself” as the Father, which implicitly denies dependence and contingency, at least in the immanent Trinity, while the same verse in making such “life in himself” an eternal grant surely bespeaks some kind of dependence, however carefully we wish to guard the expression. Or is part of the problem that we know too little about eternity, with the result that while we read John 5:26 and blithely affirm that “life in himself” is an eternal grant made by the Father to the Son, although we have very little idea of what “eternal grant” means?37
In short, even though we affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity is warranted by Scripture and rightly affirmed in the ecumenical creeds, it remains, at numerous junctures, impenetrably mysterious, at many points beyond our comprehension. All of us must own that Scripture gives us little more than glimpses of the relations among the Persons, and certainly not a well-elaborated depiction of those relations. Of no part of the discussion is this observation more relevant than of the eternal generation of the Son. Tim Keller recently reminded me of an oft-repeated adage of the late Reformed theologian Roger Nicole, who liked to say that, with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, it is much easier to be precise about what we are denying than about what we are affirming.
1. Unless otherwise indicated, the English Bible cited in this chapter is NIV 2011.
2. Michaels, The Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 318.
3. Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), 130.
4. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I–XII (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 251.
5. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), 260. Somewhat similarly, George R. Beasley-Murray, John, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 77.
6. Bultmann, John, 260.
7. Augustine, Trin. 1.5.26; 1.5.30; 2.2.3; cf. also Ambrose, On the Christian Faith 3.16.133 (NPNF2 10:261); Hilary of Poitiers, De trinitate 7.27 (NPNF2 9:130).
8. Cf. Aegidius Hunnius, Commentarius in Joannem, 336–37, trans. Craig S. Farmer, in John 1–12, Reformation Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2014), 178: “In two ways the Father gives to the Son to have life in himself. First, by the eternal, ineffable generation through which he essentially shared with the Son all his life, divinity, essence, majesty, power and glory. . . . Second, he gave to the Son this same life or power to make alive at the ‘fullness of time,’ when he assumed that human nature.” On Calvin’s development of patristic Christology, see the superb volume by Brannon Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
9. J. B. Lightfoot, The Gospel of St. John: A Newly Discovered Commentary, ed. Ben Witherington III and Todd D. Still (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2015), 146.
10. It is well known that οἱ Ιουδαῖοι in John’s Gospel has a variety of referents, depending on the context: all Jews, Jews of Judea (i.e., Judeans), Jewish leaders, and yet other options. As such variations have little effect on the interpretation of our passage, I shall opt for whatever English equivalent seems best to me, without pausing to argue the case.
11. Michael J. Ovey, Your Will Be Done: Exploring Eternal Subordination, Divine Monarchy and Divine Humility (London: Latimer Trust, 2016), 84.
12. Other examples in John’s Gospel where Jesus unilaterally submits to his Father include 6:38; 7:16, 28; 10:29; 12:49–50; 14:28; 17:4; 20:17. Cf. the discussion of Randy Rheaume, “John’s Jesus on Life Support: His Filial Relationship in John 5:26 and 6:57,” TrinJ 33 (2012): 49–75.
13. I have discussed many of these things at greater length in my Jesus the Son of God: A Christological Title Often Overlooked, Sometimes Misunderstood, and Currently Disputed (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).
14. This is a comment by the late Mike Ovey in a personal communication, dated April 12, 2014.
15. Hilary, De trinitate 2.11.
16. Ibid., 1.16–17.
17. Moody, “God’s Only Son: The Translation of John 3:16 in the Revised Standard Version,” JBL 72 (1953): 213–19. The RSV committee had opted for “only” in the light of the unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Francis Marion Warden, “ΜΟΝΟΓΕΝΗΣ in the Johannine Literature” (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1938). It is important to recognize that this understanding of the word was anticipated by Westcott, who argued for “unique, only one of its kind”: see Brooke Foss Westcott, The Epistles of St. John (Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1886), 169–72.
18. Richard N. Longenecker, “The One and Only Son,” in The NIV: The Making of a Contemporary Translation, ed. Kenneth Barker (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 119–26.
19. The most comprehensive list of these exchanges, as far as I know, is being tracked by Books at a Glance: see their “Twenty-sixth Updated Edition of the Trinity Debate Bibliography” at http://www.booksataglance.com/blog/twenty-sixth-updated-edition-trinity-debate-bibliography/.
20. Not to mention his contribution to this volume, which, at this writing, I have not seen. All my references to his work are drawn from his digital contributions.
21. Ezra Abbot, The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel and Other Critical Essays (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1888), 285.
22. Gregory of Nyssa, Answer to Eunomius’ Second Book, in NPNF2 5:252–55.
23. On Athanasius’s response to the Arians on this and related matters, see the treatment by Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011).
24. Daniel J. Treier, “Incarnation,” in Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 228.
25. Josephus, Ant. 20.20 (emphasis added by Irons).
26. E.g., Keith E. Johnson, “Augustine, Eternal Generation, and Evangelical Trinitarianism,” TrinJ 32 (2011): 141–63.
27. See Scott Swain, “The Radiance of the Father’s Glory: The Hermeneutical Basis of the Doctrine of Eternal Generation,” ETS paper, November 21, 2013.
28. Carson, Jesus the Son of God.
29. As a way of setting the egalitarian/complementarian debate to one side, I should say that the strongest biblical model for husband-wife relationships is the relationship between Christ and his church (Eph 5) rather than the relationships among the persons of the Godhead (notwithstanding 1 Cor 11:3).
30. Kevin Giles, The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012).
31. Cf. Rheaume, “John’s Jesus on Life Support”; Rheaume, An Exegetical and Theological Analysis of the Son’s Relationship to the Father in John’s Gospel: God’s Equal and Subordinate (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2014).
32. Cf. the important discussion of Keith E. Johnson, “Trinitarian Agency and the Eternal Subordination of the Son: An Augustinian Perspective,” in The New Evangelical Subordinationism? Perspectives on the Equality of God the Father and God the Son, ed. Dennis W. Jowers and H. Wayne House (Eugene: Pickwick, 2012), 108–32.
33. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. J. Donceel (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), 22. Cf. Robert Shillaker, “Rahner’s Axiom and the Hermeneutic Foundation of Thomas Weinandy’s Reconceiving the Trinity,” EurJTheol 25 (2016): 33–43.
34. John Frame, “John Frame on the Trinity,” http://frame-poythress.org/john-frame-on-the-trinity/, accessed April 5, 2017.
35. See especially Craig S. Keener, “Subordination Within the Trinity: John 5:18 and 1 Cor 15:28,” in The New Evangelical Subordinationism?, 39–58.
36. See the thoughtful explorations of Scott R. Swain and Michael Allen, “The Obedience of the Eternal Son: Catholic Trinitarianism and Reformed Christology,” in Christology Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013), 74–95. To begin to deal with this more adequately, it would be necessary to double the length of this chapter and explore what John’s Gospel might contribute to debates about Monarchianism and the monothelite/dyothelite controversy. For competent introductions to the topic, which adopt somewhat different conclusions, see D. Glenn Butner Jr., “Eternal Functional Subordination and the Problem of the Divine Will,” JETS 58 (2015): 131–49; and Michael J. Ovey, Your Will Be Done. The classical understanding is that while Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God had two wills (the two wills tied respectively to the divine and human natures of the incarnate Son, united by the hypostatic union in one person; monothelitism was formally condemned in the Council of Constantinople in 680), nevertheless in eternity past the persons of the Godhead exercised one will only, for otherwise God’s rule would be in some sense divided (hence the connection with discussions over Monarchianism). For a summary of the historical developments in brief compass, including the important role played by Maximus the Confessor, see Gerald Bray, God Has Spoken: A History of Christian Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 384–93. Yet here too our overly crisp definitions are in danger of domesticating contributing evidence. The one will of the triune God in eternity past must be articulated in such a way that allowance is made, for example, for the fact that the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father.
37. Cf. Scott R. Swain, “The Mystery of the Trinity,” 195: “Eternal Generation is not something our minds can comprehend, so determined is our thinking by the categories of time and finitude. According to Martin Luther, the doctrine of eternal generation ‘is not even comprehensible to the angels’, and ‘those who have tried to grasp it have broken their necks over it’ [Martin Luther, The Three Symbols or Creeds of the Christian Faith, in LW 14.216–18.]. Nevertheless, Luther also insists, eternal generation is a doctrine ‘given to us in the gospel’ and glimpsed ‘by faith.’ The doctrine is, furthermore, beautiful teaching, for it indicates the kind of perfection that characterizes the Father as an eternally radiant, communicative perfection, and it indicates the kind of perfection that characterizes the Son: when we see the Son, we see deity shining forth in its full brilliance, supreme over all creaturely lights.”