JOSH MALONE
You, oh God, are a fountain of life, and in Your light we see light.
Psalm 36:91
PRO-NICENE THEOLOGICAL REASONING
The doctrine of eternal generation is the church’s attempt to specify the origin of Jesus Christ in the eternal life of the one God.2 Our received formulations of the doctrine were developed and refined around the Arian controversy in the fourth century, and a form of the doctrine is confessed in the Creed of Nicaea (325) and the Nicene Creed (381). Plainly stated, the doctrine teaches that the Son is from the Father, and God has always been this way and did not become this way. Yet in its confession, the church was acutely aware that familiarity of language could threaten to obscure the fact that we speak of the ineffable. The pre- and post-Nicene fathers are united concerning the danger inherent in improper speech about God’s inner life. Irenaeus chastens the Gnostics for speaking of the Son’s generation “as if they themselves had assisted at His birth, thus assimilating Him to the word of mankind formed by emissions.”3 Origen warns that we must not “regard God the Father in the begetting of his only-begotten Son as being similar to any human being or other animal in the act of begetting.”4 Athanasius contends, “It is not holy to venture such questions concerning the generation of the Son of God.”5 Likewise Gregory of Nazianzus claims, “The begetting of God must be honored by silence.”6 Such cautionary impulses occur with regularity across the great tradition pre- and post-Nicaea.
Even so, pro-Nicene theology has insisted on the necessity of affirming the Son’s eternal generation. Why? The answer is bound to a pattern of theological reasoning that holds scriptural language as primary in dogmatic discourse.7 Central to the pro-Nicene approach was securing the biblical name(s) of the one God: Father, Son, and Spirit. This pattern can be observed in the threefold structure of the Creed of Nicaea (325): “We believe in one God Father . . . and in one LORD Jesus Christ, the Son of God . . . and in the Holy Spirit.” By privileging the name “Father, Son, and Spirit,” pro-Nicenes elevated the language of Scripture—giving it primacy over derivative concepts like ingenerate (agenētos), unbegotten (agennētos), or Monad—which they judged to be inadequate to describe the Godhead in toto. Instead, they carefully reflected on the divine name and titles, given in Scripture, to rationally wrestle with the divine mystery of the Father–Son relation, illumined by the Spirit.
From this emerged a very carefully crafted theological grammar, albeit one with a set of technical terms rife for misunderstanding. The danger is such that theologians (both historical and contemporary) have questioned if we should simply avoid making such explicit creaturely reference and eschew speaking in animalistic terms like substance (ousia) and beget (gennaō). Certainly these terms could be replaced with others, far less freighted with corporeality. Yet, the pro-Nicene tradition has refused any such alternative. Trenchantly, it has clung to the primacy of the scripturally given divine names “Father” and “Son” (and “Spirit”), which by analogy were inextricably linked to the concept and language of “generation.” Why? For all the difficulties with human language, the inadequacy of analogy, and the limitations of our creaturely intellect, the language of “generation” names a personal, fecund relation central to the biblical witness to God’s perfection. The divine name was not seen to be merely metaphorically informative but rather metaphysically proper to God’s perfect life. Aquinas states plainly and profoundly, “The names signify procession.”8 In light of this reality, the pro-Nicene tradition came to confess that fatherhood (paternity) and sonship (filiation) are originally true of God (archetype) and only secondarily true of us (ectype).9 This exercise in wise theological reason offered a way to think and speak of the Father and Son that maintained unity of nature, enabled distinction of persons, and echoed the relationally ordered movement from Father to Son (and Spirit) given in the gospel. Now, we turn to an explication of these three themes in Trinitarian dogmatics and then to a few ways that eternal generation is echoed in the created effects caused by the external work of the triune persons.
DOGMATIC FUNCTION
In our dogmatic reflection, we must strike a careful balance between the pro-Nicene pattern of scriptural reasoning and the divine ineffability included in that pattern. The words of the prophet Isaiah provide spiritual disciplinary measures against saying too much: “To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal?” (Isa 40:25 NIV). The answer is “no one.” “God is not human” (Num 23:19 NIV). God is not like us. Yet God, so unlike us in his uncreated being, has made us in his likeness, and he condescends to make himself known—the fullness of deity hypostatically dwelling in the fullness of humanity (Col 2:9). So John the evangelist proclaims, “No one has ever seen God, but the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18).10 This Son is the very radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact imprint of his nature (Heb 1:3). Thus God from God means Son from Father, scripturally expounded as Light (1 John 1:15) from Light (John 8:12), True God (John 17:3) from True God (1 John 5:20).
Sanctified reason recognizes the dogmatic task is carefully ordered: first we listen, and only then do we speak. We speak as spoken to. Yet we are compelled by the Spirit to bear joyous witness to the divine reality that the eternal Father and Son have drawn us into familial fellowship by the power of the gospel (Gal 4:6), while simultaneously we are reminded not to overexplain the very same triune God who dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim 6:16). In faith and mystery, we hear the pattern of the prophetic and apostolic witness, and thus we speak of the doctrine’s dogmatic function in theology proper considered under three headings: essential unity, personal distinction, and relational order (taxis).
Essential Unity
First, in what way does eternal generation speak of essential unity? Initially, it appears as though the confession of the Son as the only begotten of the Father must strike against the doctrine of essential unity (divine simplicity). How can the one God be both Father and Son? The pro-Nicene answer can be seen by looking at the language of the two councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381). Both confess that the Son does not proceed from the Father as a creature from the Creator: he is begotten, not made. The Son is not part of the created order; begetting is not the first act of creation. However, neither council attempts to fully explain what it means to be begotten. In fact, they carefully avoid doing so, respecting the ineffability of this act. Rather, they assert there is a way to be “from” that is outside all beginnings (recalling John 1:1). This generation is conceived as an act internal to God.11 “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26).12 And it subsists within God: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:11). Theologically, the Father generates the Son of his substance, ek tēs ousias tou Patros (325), and as such, the Son is consubstantial or homoousion (325, 381) with the Father.
Two things should be noted concerning this strange language, rooted in divine mystery. On the one hand, the word homoousion is not employed to indicate some sensible and detachable metaphysic; the language offers no objective referent on its own. Instead the term homoousion functions as a conceptual summary of the scriptural affirmation of the Son’s unity with the Father, grounded in his ineffable generation.13 On the other hand, this articulation of the Son’s generation is a denial that Begetter and Begotten are related as externally opposed realities. The one God (Father) and one LORD (Son) are truly one (cf. 1 Cor 8:6). Accordingly, generation is conceived as the mode of sharing of the one undivided essence between Father and Son.
Can we say more? Should we? With trepidation, the pro-Nicenes conceived of generation as a communication of the whole undivided essence, or “whole participation,” as Athanasius puts it.14 Reformed scholastic Francis Turretin summarizes the analogy: “All generation indicates a communication of essence on the part of the begetter to the begotten.”15 Notably, these affirmations include the denial that we truly know what the divine essence is. To secure this, the Nicene Creed (381) specifies the qualitative difference between creaturely and divine begetting and being by adding the corresponding clause that the Son is “begotten of the Father before all ages.” Generation is eternal, wholly contained in the indivisible life of God, and incorporeal, since God is Spirit (John 4:24). These guard against any unfitting metaphysical speculation about the one who is sui generis. Dogmatically, begetting is a mode of divine unity, an affirmation of eternal essential unity rather than a denial of it.16
Personal Distinction
Second, in what way does eternal generation speak of personal distinction? To confess eternal generation is to deny that Jesus is Son of God by means of his miraculous virgin birth, no less his baptism or resurrection. Instead, he is begotten of the Father before all ages. That this entails personal distinction seems rather straightforward, but it is crucial for securing this reality as true in God.
The appearing of the Son incarnate evoked wonder and praise as Christians slowly began to articulate both a confession of the one God, creator and redeemer, and simultaneously a confession that Christ, the Son of God the Father, is himself God. And while the Son is not the Father, they share the same life together with the Spirit. The doctrine of eternal generation is the pro-Nicene pathway by which this mystery is conceptually traversed. It asserts that Father and Son are eternally related by origin alone, Begetter and Begotten, not by essential difference (since they share the same undivided essence). This is what makes a divine person, a person.17 In doing so, the doctrine specifies that the two are not primarily differentiated by historical accomplishment; rather, history is an echo of their eternal relation.18 Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:4). Nor are Father and Son eternally differentiated by their “roles,” for these are willingly undertaken in the economy.19 The Son’s external work is willed, temporal, particular to the incarnation, and rooted in his eternal begetting. As such, the state of humiliation is the first movement in the incarnational career of the Son, followed by his present exaltation. Scripture stubbornly resists collapsing Christ in the “form of a servant” backwards to explicate the Son’s filial identity “in the form of God” (Phil 2:6–11).
Instead, eternal generation affirms both the Father and Son’s complete unity in all things pertaining to deity and their personal distinction in all things pertaining to their uniqueness as Father and Son, that is, with respect to one another. In this way, eternal generation attempts to follow the language of Scripture, which affirms that before the beginning the Word who is with God, as God (John 1:1), is none other than the only begotten in the bosom of the Father (John 1:18). Dogmatically, begetting is the eternal ground of personal distinction, an affirmation of the eternal uniqueness of Father and Son without severing the divine essence.
Relational Order
Third, in what way does eternal generation speak of relational order (taxis)? The pro-Nicene tradition has taught that eternal generation speaks of a correlative relation between Father and Son; paternity and filiation are mutually specifying, yet they are relationally ordered and not flatly symmetrical. What does this mean?
Today one might confess the eternal Sonship of Christ yet deny that this implies taxis in the Godhead. Or, as above, one might confess the obedience of the incarnate Son to his Father in the economy and infer a certain form of taxis in the Godhead that could be articulated as authority-submission. In contrast, the doctrine of eternal generation teaches that the Father–Son relation is fundamentally ordered, asymmetrical, and yet by origin alone. The Son is Son because he is begotten by the Father, and the Father is Father because he is from no one, and thus the Father begets his Son.20
This order of personal subsistence is established by an eternal relation of origin, and nothing else, and manifest in the saving economy in the order and manner of the Son’s working from the Father. Indeed, many incarnational texts bear witness to this: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38). The meaning of this obedience must remain a matter of theological interpretation.21 Pro-Nicene theology has understood the temporal obedience of the eternal Son as an economic extension of his eternal generation, in the Spirit’s power, for us and our salvation. Later pro-Nicenes have expressed this by noting that the Son’s earthly mission reveals his eternal procession, while never collapsing the two nor “reading back” unfitting features of the created economy into the divine life.
Carefully articulating the mystery of divine taxis is a continuing challenge for the church. Insightfully, Matthew Levering notes that perhaps our modern concerns about taxis arise from viewing the Trinity through a lens of power (or authority in gender debates) rather than as divine wisdom.22 Here, more than anywhere, the balance of holding the pro-Nicene pattern of theological reasoning together with divine ineffability is central. Doing so enables us to resist the temptation to make eternal relational order a superordinate form of human relational order. Dogmatically, begetting (and spiration) is the root of relational order, an affirmation that eternal personal subsistence describes the very taxis echoed in the saving economy.
CREATED EFFECTS
With respect to God’s life in himself, the doctrine of eternal generation functions to elaborate the Father–Son relation. With respect to God’s external works, the begetting of the Son is revealed in created effects. Thomas Aquinas offers a cogent ground for this mode of theological reflection. Briefly, our theological language employs human speech and words that reflect upon created effects caused by the external work of God. Whatever divine goodness is echoed in these effects can be traced back to God whose perfect life is the source of each created effect.23 What follows is a conceptual meditation on a series of created effects observed to mirror the generation of the Son within the external divine works of creation, redemption, and consummation.24
Creation: Divine Gift and Triune Movement
The act of creation is a movement of divine generosity and life. How might we look back along the act of creation into its ground in God’s life in himself? Gilles Emery explores this trajectory in Aquinas, noting that God’s creative and redemptive activity is “not the first element in the order of speculative exposition, but it can be useful to consider first the influence of the Trinitarian faith.”25 Emery notes that both East and West have maintained a “rule of unity” in the activity of the divine persons.26 This “rule of unity” is a coordination between theology and economy—God’s life in himself and God’s work. In addition to this rule of unity, Emery highlights Aquinas’s coordinating principle: “the processions of the divine persons are the cause of creation.”27
Such a coordination of theology and economy is stunning to consider. For Aquinas this serves to link divine activity ad extra (creation, redemption, and consummation) to divine act ad intra (eternal generation and spiration). Divine act governs and directs divine activity. This brings together essential unity (seen in coordination of action ad extra, rooted in coessentiality), personal distinction (seen as acts of personal agents in the economy, rooted in the processions), relational order (seen in the movement from Begetter to Begotten), and “motive” for divine action in the economy. Why is there a creation rather than nothing at all? Because the eternal God “spoke” rather than remained silent. Creation is a freely created overflow of the eternal movement between Father, Son, and Spirit. This eternal movement is an act of nature concomitant with divine will, and its temporal repetition is an act of divine willing fitting to and free for the divine nature. By an act of divine generosity God wills to establish a reality beyond himself as a further object of his love.
Augustine, too, considers the underpinnings of God’s creative act within his triune perfection. In Confessions,28 he reflects on how God made the world in Genesis 1. He reasons that it could not have been identical to a human worker who envisions a product and then shapes it (e.g., out of wood, stone, or metal). Rather, God made workers and his creative work stands above theirs. Instead, “You spoke and they were made, and by your word you made them.”29 Yet Augustine ponders—what does this mean? Is it parallel to God saying “this is my beloved Son” from the clouds over Jesus’s transfiguration in Matthew 17:5? It is a voice that uttered sound through syllables at one moment and then passed away a moment later? No, Augustine reasons, because God’s Word is together with God before the beginning of creation in John 1:1. Furthermore, if that Word was just like the words uttered at his transfiguration, how is it the Word by which heaven and earth were made?
Here Augustine recognizes what God’s creation by his Word means: the Father creates through the Son.30 Through a freely willed extension of the creative power that God is (that is, God’s eternal life of begetting and spirating), the world comes to be. Creation out of nothing is the Father working through the Son (by the Spirit). No preexisting materials (contra Plato). No eternal creation (contra Aristotle). No emanation (contra the Gnostics). Simply the triune God, working in power as Father, Son, and Spirit. And creation through God’s Word (by the Spirit) is the biblical way of speaking of creation ex nihilo—or creation from God, through God, by God alone. “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Ps 33:6). The triune God needs no material to create from because he is the fountain of life.
But creation is not simply making; rather, it is the beginning of the history of the triune God’s loving care. Consequently, the doctrines of creation and providence are inseparable. The Christian doctrine of providence is an extension of the Christian doctrine of creation, where the Creator governs the works of his hands revealing continued created effects. As John Webster writes, “God is triune . . . his works . . . manifest the persons . . . The Father determines the course of created time (Eph 1:3, 5); the Spirit causes creaturely causes (Eph 1:13); the Son intervenes to draw back creation from ruin so that it may attain its end (Eph 1:7, 10). Only because God is thus does creation issue in providence.”31 The inner acts of divine procession manifest in the external activity of faithful care, “that work of divine love for temporal creatures whereby God ordains and executes their fulfillment in fellowship with himself.”32 And this fulfillment in fellowship is none other than a temporal extension of the eternal fellowship God is in his triune perfection.
Image as Sonship: From Creation to New Creation
In what way are the eternal relations of origin, specifically the generation of the Son, seen in the history of divine fellowship with human creatures?33 Astonishingly, Scripture bears witness to a deep resonance between the eternal Son who is the image of the Father and created sons and daughters made in the divine image. Irenaeus of Lyons powerfully draws on the connection between image and filiation when refuting the Gnostics in Against Heresies. In an ambitious, synthetic retelling of the biblical narrative, Irenaeus sketches how embodied humans are created in the image of the Son of God, himself the true image of the Father—created images of the image: “For in times long past, it was said that man was created after the image of God, but it was not [actually] shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, after whose image man was created.”34 The Son as true image is made manifest and revealed in the incarnation, and we come to see Adam himself is a type of the image of Christ. For Irenaeus, this means the ultimate archetype for humanity is Christ, not Adam.35 It also means that creation was “fitted” for incarnation: “God shall be glorified in His handiwork, fitting it so as to be conformable to, and modelled after, His own Son.”36
The scriptural ground for Irenaeus’s argument can be sketched in brief.37 In the beginning, God created humanity in his “image and likeness” (Gen 1:26–27).38 In the Genesis account, this language is used of both God and Adam as models. First God creates Adam in his “image and likeness” (Gen 1:26–27), then Adam fathers a son according to his “image and likeness” (Gen 5:1–3). Adam, who is made in the divine image, in turn, images through human begetting. Provocatively, Luke the evangelist draws on this connection in his genealogy, tracing the lineage of Christ back to Adam and calling him not “image” but “son of God” (Luke 3:38). In Genesis 3, sin defaces the image in humanity, yet the image is not erased (Gen 9:6; cf. Jas 3:9). Instead, the longing for deliverance through a “son” is now echoed both inside (Gen 3:15) and outside the garden (Gen 5:29). The language of “sonship” is appropriated to Israel in the Exodus, “my firstborn son” (Exod 4:22; Hos 11:1), and continues in the Pentateuch as the LORD carries (Deut 1:31) and disciplines his “sons” (Deut 8:5). The hope for a true “son” is prophetically present throughout the history of Israel, reaching a crescendo in the Davidic promise: “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son” (2 Sam 7:14).
In the New Testament, the reclamation of the sonship of humanity is achieved by Israel’s hope and consolation, Jesus Christ. John the evangelist reveals that the incarnate Son is always the reflection of his Father—he only does what he sees the Father doing (John 5:19) such that if you have seen the Son, you have seen the Father (John 14:9). The apostolic preaching about the Son draws this connection more explicitly. Jesus Christ is the perfect image of the Father (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). In these last days, God has spoken through his Son (Heb 1:2), the exact imprint of the Father’s nature (Heb 1:3). Central to the saving work that the true image and Son accomplishes is relational restoration, a restoration with familial import via Paul’s language of adoption (treated below). Accordingly, the continuing renovation of adoptive sons and daughters entails being “transformed into his image” (2 Cor 3:18)—this language echoing the glorious transfiguration of the “beloved Son” (Matt 17:5). The eternal plan of God is that his created and redeemed children be “conformed to the image of the Son” (Rom 8:29a), where Christ himself is “firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Rom 8:29b NIV). In the eschaton, resurrected children of God will be remade to “bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Cor 15:49).
In the Irenaean account, thinking from the incarnation backward, divine begetting—perfect imaging—in eternity is freely extended in time through the incarnation of the Son, such that Christ, the last Adam, is the true pattern of the imago Dei in humanity. Thinking from creation forward, the first imago Dei in the temporal order, Adam our progenitor, stands in primal history as type of the archetype who is to come, Christ the true Son and image. While admittedly dizzying to comprehend, such an approach offers significant explanatory power for dogmatics.39
Here we note that a great deal hangs on our dogmatic articulation of the image. As archetype, the eternally begotten Son’s relation to his Father is “wholly unique and incommunicable. As Son, he stands at the head of many brothers and sisters among whom he is the firstborn (Rom. 8.29); he is, indeed, the first-born of all creation (Col. 1.15). But prototokos denotes his relation to creatures, not his relation to the Father.”40 However, the absolute analogical interval between Christ’s sonship and ours does not imperil his fraternal fellowship with humanity; rather, it marks the infinite depth and immeasurable power that grounds his saving efficacy. The success of Christ’s mediatorial priesthood is not founded upon a preexisting creaturely possibility but on the power of an indestructible life that both creates creaturely possibilities and completes them (Heb 7:16). This life is none other than the life of the Son, who is eternally begotten from the Father.
Prodigals Return: Adoption and Resurrection
Tracing a final movement in the saving economy surfaces two additional created effects: adoption and resurrection. How do the doctrines of adoption and of resurrection bear created effects that witness to the Son’s eternal begetting? John Calvin illuminates both in his treatment of Jesus Christ, the Mediator.
Calvin spends a good deal of effort explicating the meaning, reality, and spiritual grace of our adoption as sons and daughters in the gospel. He does not treat it as a discrete theme, instead distributing his discussion throughout his Institutes.41 Broadly, divine Fatherhood is the faithful care by which God sustains all humans and angels by virtue of their created relation to him. “At their creation angels and men were so constituted that God was their common father.”42 More narrowly, another kind of divine Fatherhood comes as a benefit of adoption by grace (not by created relation), which is “the free benevolence of God.”43
Calvin’s understanding of our humanity is twofold: we were originally created in a state of integrity due to our creation in the imago Dei, but the image is pervasively corrupted (either entirely or almost entirely) in the fall.44 Because of the fall, we are no longer sons in any real sense because “our sin [is] just cause for his disowning us and not regarding or recognizing us as his sons.”45 Our only hope for returning to God’s fatherly care is through the preaching of the cross, “if we desire to return to God our Author and Maker from whom we have been estranged, in order that he may again begin to be our Father.”46 This redemptive sonship is the matter to which our adoption refers. For Calvin, it is qualitatively different than created sonship, which pales by comparison, since “to neither angels nor men was God ever Father,” but he becomes so to us only “by free adoption because Christ is the Son of God by nature.”47
Here especially Calvin carefully safeguard the distinction between Christ’s sonship and ours. God is the Father of Christ as “only-begotten Son.”48 Our sonship by adoption is “free benevolence.” Son by nature and son by grace are the key qualifiers that distinguish eternal begetting from temporal created effect.49 With this distinction in place, Calvin can see the incarnation as the event upon which our adoption is founded: “Who could have done this [restored us] had not the self-same Son of God become the Son of man, and had he not so taken what was ours as to impart what was his to us, and to make what was his by nature ours by grace?”50
Notice that the approach Calvin uses to weave the scriptural account together mirrors what we saw in Irenaeus. The story of salvation is that from eternity: “[the Father] predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph 1:5). Our creation as the divine image is parallel to the relation of created sonship. The fall distorts this relation in the sense that the image is essentially gone; this means we have been disowned by the Father. Yet, “when fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son . . . so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal 4:4–5). Christ, the Son incarnate, enters into our predicament, bearing true Sonship as the true image. In the gospel we are drawn into vital relation with God, through union with Christ, reclaiming us as sons in the Son—redemptive sonship—and imparting “the Spirit of adoption . . . [who] bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:15–16). Westhead aptly summarizes Calvin, “In a word, the climax of this grace of adoption is renewal in God’s image. This image, as we have seen, is the ground of our being children of God by creation.”51
Eschatologically, the Spirit who begins the renovation of the image in our adoption completes this work in our resurrection. “We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:23). In a glorious final created effect, our fraternal union with Son is consummated in resurrection. The fountain of life that the Son is as eternally begotten necessarily remakes us by virtue of our union with him (John 11:25). He “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil 3:21), and that power is the power of his eternally begotten divine life. Calvin sees this final phase of our adoption as essential, for without the redemption of our bodies, “the sacrifice of the death of Christ would be in vain and fruitless.” Accordingly, our future inheritance is found precisely in resurrection as conformity to Christ, “all whom he has adopted should bear the image of Christ.”52 While we are “God’s children now,” what we will be has “not yet appeared,” but in the glorious visio Dei when “he [Christ] appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
In sum, our God is a fountain of life, and the church confesses this mystery to entail that the Father begets, the Son is begotten, and the Spirit proceeds. These eternal acts are temporally manifest in love and grace in the missions of the Son and Spirit. Before all ages, the Father has life in himself and grants the Son life in himself (John 5:26), and in creaturely time the Son gives life to whom he will (John 5:21). The wonder of the gospel is that the eternal Son, for whom and through whom are all things, has in these last days come from the Father to the far country to bring many sons to glory (Heb 2:10).
Trinity and Retrieval
Here are three things by way of conclusion. First, faithful theological reasoning is biblical reasoning. Retrieving the pro-Nicene pattern traced here matters precisely because it claims to be faithful to Scripture. Namely, it offers the most compelling reading of the God of the gospel delivered by prophetic and apostolic emissaries.
Second, faithful dogmatic reasoning entails a conceptual meditation on God in his inner and outer movements: paternity, filiation, and spiration, as well as creation, redemption, and consummation. The order is nontrivial; without a firm grasp on the Trinity we will have a dangerously impoverished understanding of the created economy.
Third, faithfully meditating on God’s created effects, centered on Christ in his filial identity, is promising for a synthetic reading of Scripture, which is critical to theology’s constructive task. In this vein, we see the biblical story is about Christ: last Adam, architect, and archetype. At the center of creation itself is Christ: Logos, Image, and Son. And precisely because he is the eternal Son of the Father, he is fitted to mediate redemption by becoming the firstborn among many brothers and sisters (Rom 8:29).
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.
Romans 11:36
1. Author’s translation. Unless noted otherwise, the remaining English Scripture translations come from the ESV.
2. This chapter is written in memory of my Doktorvater, John Webster, and it indelibly bears his mark. Working under his supervision was a true joy—a brilliant man shrouded in humble self-forgetfulness in imitation of Christ. His great work remains unfinished, but he left a legacy of students. We are your “letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone,” and may God “show that [we] are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God” (2 Cor 3:2–3).
3. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.28.5–6 (ANF 1:401).
4. Origen, On First Principles, trans. George William Butterworth and Paul Koetschau (repr.; Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 1.2.4 (17).
5. Athanasius, C. Ar. 2.36 (NPNF2 4:367).
6. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. Bas. 29.8 (NPNF2 7:303).
7. The broader pro-Nicene pattern of exegesis from which the doctrine of eternal generation emerged is explored in Josh Malone, “God from God: The Origin, Function, And Meaning of the Doctrine of Eternal Generation” (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen, 2014). In sum, the exegetical reasoning starts from the one God declared in the Hebrew Scriptures; gathers the exalted titles ascribed to that one God (title-exegesis); notes how these titles are ascribed to Christ; explores scriptural use of those titles, making a distinction between all other titles and the name “Son”; uses the name “Son” (and relatedly the title “only-begotten”) to collect this constellation of texts, explicating the meaning of the analogical language of “Father” and “Son”; and draws on the analogy, titles, intertextual witness (disambiguating voices through prospological exegesis), and the acts of Christ to explicate the meaning of “only-begotten Son.” Emerging from this reading strategy, pro-Nicenes refined the proper dogmatic use of language of “will” and “being” to relate Father and Son, and located the origin of the Son in the eternal life of God informing the analogical interval between Creator and creation.
8. ST 1.27.1. English translation from Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 6, The Trinity (1a. 27–32), trans. Ceslaus Velecky O.P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
9. Provocatively Paul writes that God is “the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph 3:14–15).
10. Author’s translation.
11. The description of generation as an internal act that is “within God himself” is seen most clearly in Aquinas (ST 1.27.1; against the Arians and Sabellians), but the concept appears as early as Origen, who claims the Son is not Son “by any outward act, but by his own nature,” Princ. 1.2.4 (ANF 4:247).
12. Emphasis added. This text was important in Augustine’s Trinitarian thought; see Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 11–27, trans. John W. Rettig, Fathers of the Church 79 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988).
13. Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 128.
14. Athanasius, C. Ar. 1.14 (NPNF2 4:315).
15. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison, trans. George Musgrave Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992–94), 1:292–93.
16. Historically there was a simmering debate about whether the manner of eternal generation is properly conceived as a communication of essence. The majority of patristic, medieval, and Reformation authors do affirm it as such. For an account of the minority report and incisive contribution to this debate see Brannon Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
17. Like the careful grammar above—ousia, gennaō, homoousion—the term hypostasis came to be used technically by the Cappadocians as theological shorthand for this reality. Gregory Nyssa, On the Difference Between Ousia and Hypostasis. In Basil’s canon, Letter 38 (NPNF2 8:137–41).
18. For recent competing accounts that make history constitutive to the Son’s divine identity, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Robert Jenson, and the continuing work of Bruce McCormack.
19. As some recent theologians have suggested with competing formulations of Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS), Eternal Submission of the Son (ESS), or Eternal Relationship of Authority and Submission (ERAS).
20. So Aquinas reasons, “Because he is Father, he begets (quia Pater est, generat),” and not the inverse proposition: Because he begets, he is Father. See ST 1.40.4, ad 1.
21. Scott R. Swain and R. Michael Allen. “The Obedience of the Eternal Son,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 2 (2013): 114–34.
22. Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphyiscs: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 172.
23. ST 1.13.2, ad 2.
24. For an insightful comparison of Aquinas and Barth (with deference to Barth) coordinating Trinity, Christology, and creation, see Keith L. Johnson, “Natural Revelation in Creation and Covenant,” in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue, ed. Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). I hope some of the paths traced here provide additional trajectories picking up Johnson’s concluding suggestions.
25. Gilles Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 527.
26. Opera ad extra trinitatis indivisa sunt—the external works of the Trinity are undivided. This rule itself is rooted in the affirmation of the coessentiality of the divine persons.
27. ST 1.45.6, ad 1. Emery notes this is present in all of Aquinas’s works: “Outside the commentary on the Sentences (which contains more than ten passages developing this thesis), cf. notably De Potentia, q. 10, a. 2, arg. 19, sed contra 2, and ad 19; ST 1.45.6 and 7, ad 3.” Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism,” 528n23.
28. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11.5–7.
29. Ibid., 11.5.
30. Ibid., 11.9.
31. John Webster, “On the Theology of Providence,” in The Providence of God: Deus habet consilium, ed. Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 167.
32. Ibid., 158.
33. A fuller form of the argument traced below, linking image and sonship, is in progress for future publication.
34. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.16.2 (ANF 1:544). Emphasis and brackets original.
35. A parallel theme in patristic Christology is explored in Alasdair Heron, “Logos, Image, Son,” in Creation, Christ and Culture Studies in Honour of T. F. Torrance, ed. Richard W. A. McKinney (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1976).
36. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.6.1 (ANF 1:531).
37. Irenaeus does not trace his full scriptural reasoning in one place, but reference to a number of the texts cited here are distributed throughout Against Heresies.
38. For Irenaeus, unlike most modern exegetes, the terms image (tselem) and likeness (demuth) each have a different sense.
39. Col 1:15–18 bears witness to this pattern in nuce. Paul begins with the Son’s eternal begetting (Col 1:15), next weaving together all created effects under the creational work of Christ (Col 1:16). From this vantage he looks backward to Christ’s ground in God’s eternal life (Col 1:17a) and forward to his work in all creation (Col 1:17b). Importantly, we see that Christ’s creational work is distinct from, and prior to, his redemptive work as the head of the church (Col 1:18a). In his redemptive work he is the beginning of new creation, firstborn in the resurrection (Col 1:18b), ultimately manifesting his supremacy in all things (Col 1:18c). The distinction and order here is critical, and the dogmatic possibilities offered by grounding creational work in eternal generation and viewing redemptive work as its outflow might form a rapprochement for Thomists and Barthians about how to Christologically relate creation and covenant.
40. John Webster, “Eternal Generation,” 33. Webster notes that Turretin exerts great energy here to secure the dogmatic import of this difference in Elenctic Theology, 298–300.
41. For a helpful synthetic treatment of Calvin on adoption, see Nigel Westhead, “Adoption in the Thought of John Calvin,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology (13 Aug 1995): 102–15.
42. Inst. 2.14.5 (1:489).
43. Inst. 3.1.3 (1:540).
44. Inst. 1.15 (creation) and 2.1–4 (fall). Calvin’s later work seems to soften on this point. See Randall Zachman, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 64–68.
45. Inst. 2.6.1 (1:341).
46. Inst. 2.6.1 (1:341).
47. Inst. 2.14.5 (1:488).
48. Inst. 2.14.5 (1:488).
49. The same careful distinction is seen in the Heidelberg Catechism written around the same time, “Christ alone is the eternal, natural Son of God; but we are children of God by adoption, through grace, for his [Christ’s] sake,” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 33).
50. Inst. 2.12.2 (1:465).
51. Westhead, “Adoption in the Thought of John Calvin,” 112.
52. John Calvin, Commentary on Romans (Albany, OR: Ages Software, 1998), Logos electronic edition, on Rom 8:29.