The Heresies of John F. MacArthur Jr.

I had not intended to write this essay.  I was only going to share a link through e-mail to a video that the online Christian (Presbyterian) apologist Redeemed Zoomer had made about the Nestorianism of John F. MacArthur Jr.  In what was supposed to be a brief explanation of why I thought the video was important, I mentioned that MacArthur had taught several other false doctrines.  That grew into a full essay so I decided to share that here.  Here is the Redeemed Zoomer video: Is John MacArthur HERETICAL??? - YouTube

 

 

Nestorianism is a heresy that many prominent evangelical leaders of the last century or so have shared with John F. MacArthur Jr.  Several years ago, for example, I pointed out in an essay that an article the late R. C. Sproul had written criticizing Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can it Be” for the line “that Thou my God shouldst die for me” was based entirely on Nestorian assumptions and reasoning.

 

 

Nestorianism is not the only heresy that John F. MacArthur Jr. has taught over the years.  The only one of his heresies of which he has publically recanted is Incarnational Sonship.  This was his doctrine, shared by J. Oliver Buswell Jr. and Walter Martin among others, that Jesus Christ was eternally the Logos, the Word of God, but that He became the Son of God in the Incarnation.  This is heresy.  Many evangelicals don’t recognize it as such because they think “he’s got three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons, Who are one in essence, that’s the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, this is just quibbling about names and titles.”  This is not the case.  If Jesus is the Son of God only because of the Incarnation, in which He was born of the Virgin without a human father, then the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit are confused.  This is because in both St. Luke’s nativity account and that of St. Matthew, the Holy Spirit is identified as the Agent in the conception of Jesus by Mary.  If Jesus’ Sonship is due to this then the Holy Spirit is His Father.  The confusion of the Persons of the Trinity is one of the most ancient heresies.  Tertullian addressed it under the label Patripassionism in his second century work Against Praxeas.  Historically it was known as Sabellianism after Sabellius who taught it in the early third century.  Today it is called modalism and is taught by the kind of Pentecostals who call themselves “Unity” or “Oneness” Pentecostals.

The orthodox doctrine is the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ.  The Father was always the Father because He always had the Son, and the Son was always the Son because He was Son of the Father.  Closely related to the doctrine of Eternal Sonship is the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son.  Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God because while there never was a time when the Father was without the Son, the Son’s sharing the Godhead, the numerically singular essence/nature/substance of God is derived from the Father in a relational sense that is called Generation because begetting/siring/generation is the closest analogy we have to it.  The implication of the Scriptural references to Jesus as the “only-begotten”, it was articulated by Origen of Alexandria in the third century and was incorporated into the Nicene Creed to combat Arianism in the fourth.  It has been denied by apologist William Craig Lane and theologian Wayne Grudem, although Grudem has apparently since recanted the denial.  MacArthur taught Incarnational Sonship from 1983 until the end of the twentieth century.  He apparently recanted it in 1999, although the article on his website containing the recantation was published in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the flagship publication of complementarianism, the weenie compromise position promoted by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for evangelicals who have enough sense not to fully buy in to feminism and egalitarianism but don’t have the gonads to take a stand for patriarchy) in 2001.  The doctrinal statement of Master’s Seminary has finally been redacted to teach the orthodox view of Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship.  This was not the case a couple of years ago.  It only took him a quarter of a century after his recantation to do this.

 

 

MacArthur has not recanted to the best of my knowledge for the false teaching over which Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University raised the first red flag in an article for Faith for the Family back in 1986.  This is his teaching that the blood of Jesus Christ has no value in se but merely as a sign or symbol representing the death of Jesus Christ.  The following is from a sermon MacArthur preached in April 1976:

 

 

The term “the blood of Christ” is a metonym that is substitute for another term: “death.” It is the blood of Christ that simply is a metonym for the death of Christ, but it is used because the Hebrews used such a metonym to speak of violent death. Whenever you talk about the blood of somebody being poured out, to the Hebrew that meant violent death. And when you commune with the blood of Christ, it doesn’t mean the literal blood of Christ, that is a metonym for His death; you commune with His death.

Now let me say something that might shake some of you up, but I’ll try to qualify it. There is nothing in the actual blood that is efficacious for sin. Did you get that? The Bible does not teach that the blood of Christ itself has any efficacy for taking away sin, not at all. The actual blood of Christ isn’t the issue. The issue is that His poured out blood was symbolic of His violent death. The death was the thing that paid the price, right? “The wages of sin is” – what? – “death.”

He died for us. It is His death that is the issue. The Hebrews spoke of it as His outpoured blood because that was something that expressed violent death. And they believed, for example, in the Old Testament it said, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” And so, the pouring out of blood was the significance of death.

And so, when it says here we are communing with the blood of Christ, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is efficacious, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is involved; it means we enter into a genuine, vital participation in His death. But it is not the blood; the blood is only the symbol of the poured out life. 

 

 

Do you recognize what is wrong this doctrine (which MacArthur shared with the late Col. Robert B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston, Texas)?

 

 

There are different aspects to the Atoning work of Jesus Christ.  The Scriptures speak of it as a ransom paid for the release of hostages.  This was emphasized in the early Church.  The New Testament and the book of Isaiah also use the language of vicariousness and substitution to speak of Christ dying for us.  This was emphasized in the Reformation and this is what MacArthur emphasizes.  There is nothing wrong with that.  However, when the language of blood specifically is used, it is the Atonement as a sacrifice that is being emphasized. 

Now a blood sacrifice involved more than just killing an animal. In the Old Testament, there are three identifiable elements to animal sacrifices – the slaying, the offering, and the eating.  The first is when the animal brought as an offering was killed at the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. (Lev. 1:3-5) This killing of the animal alone did not make it a sacrificial offering.  Indeed, the priests were not the ones who did the killing unless they were offering the sacrifice for themselves.  The priest would burn the portion of the animal that was to be burned – the fat and fatty portions – on the altar (Lev. 1:8-9).  The priest would also take the blood of the animal and sprinkle it on the altar (Lev. 1:5) which was near the door of the Tabernacle/Temple.  If it were Yom Kippur and he was the High Priest he would take it further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat (Lev. 16:14-15).  It is these actions by the priest that turned what otherwise would have just been the slaying of an animal – which the Israelites were permitted to do themselves in their own homes if they lived too far from the place (Jerusalem) appointed for sacrifice (Deut. 12:15, 21-22) – into a sacrificial offering.  Finally, except for the olah or whole burnt offering which was entirely burned,  the rest of the animal was divided between the portions assigned to the priest (Lev. 7:31-35) and the portions assigned to the ones who had brought the offering and eaten (Lev. 7:15-20, ; Deut. 12:6-7). 

In the epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul, for it is he who wrote that epistle, tells us that Moses was given a vision of Heaven on Mt. Sinai, that the instructions for the Tabernacle and system of worship he was given were imitations of the pattern he had seen there, (Heb. 8:5) and that it was into this Tabernacle made without hands that Jesus Christ, as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, entered with His own blood to make the one offering that effectively takes away sin (Heb. 9:11-14, 23-28).  This is not symbolic language for the crucifixion.  The crucifixion took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  It corresponds to the slaying of the animal in the Old Testament sacrifices.  Note that as the OT sacrifices were slain at the door of the Tabernacle, so Jesus was crucified on Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem.  Of course, His suffering and dying had precisely the vicarious significance with regards to our salvation that MacArthur et al. assign to it.  However, the offering of His blood that makes the whole thing a sacrifice is not something that took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  This offering occurred once, but in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle in Heaven, which is situated in eternity, outside of time and space as we know them because time and space are dimensions of Creation.  The death and the offering of the blood are two very distinct elements in the dispensation of Atonement, this is clear in both Testaments, and MacArthur missed it all.  Astonishingly, he repeated this error in his commentary on Hebrews of all places.

 

 

In each of these instances MacArthur’s serious doctrinal error are arguably the result of his taking Protestantism too far.  Protestantism, in the sense of the branch of the Christian tradition that emerged from the sixteenth century Reformation, is alright in itself, since the Reformation was a necessary response to real abuses on the part of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities in the late Middle Ages.  When one acts as if the history of orthodox Christianity took a hiatus after the completion of the New Testament canon until All Hallows Eve in 1517 and so sets his Protestantism against the Catholicism that is the general tradition of first millennium Christianity prior to the East-West Schism, then one can go very far astray.  If he looks with suspicion on Catholicism as defined in the previous sentence, then he feels free to ignore the Creed with which Christians around the world have confessed their faith for almost two thousand years when it says that Jesus is “the Only-Begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made.”

 

 

Furthermore he feels free to ignore the rulings of the Ecumenical Councils to which the bishops of the entire Church were invited (whether they attended or not is another matter) to address problems of doctrine and discipline, the decisions of which were received as authoritative by the Church such as the ruling of third Ecumenical Council, that of Ephesus in 431 AD, that it is heresy to reject the term Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God, for Mary, as Nestorius did on the basis that Jesus did not derive His deity from Mary, because in Jesus deity and humanity, while remaining distinct natures, are united in One Person of Whom Mary was Mother.  John MacArthur wrote “It’s heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood of God, and it demonstrates a failure to understand what theologians have called the hypostatic union, that is the God-man union in Christ.”  Ironically, it is MacArthur’s sentence here which is heretical precisely because he himself fails to understand the hypostatic union a consequence of which is that whatever is the property of Jesus in either of His natures is His property as a Person and can be attributed to Him as such even when speaking of Him in terms of the other nature.  For example, a counterpart in the Scriptures to calling Mary the Mother of God (an equivalent of which also appears in the Scriptures in Luke 1:43) is when Jesus tells Nicodemus “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” thus identifying Himself by His humanity in the same breathe in which He references His omnipresence. 

 

 

Finally, it is because of His suspicion of the Catholic tradition of the first millennium that MacArthur refuses to acknowledge that Christ’s offering of His blood is not just metynomic language for His death on earth, but is rather referring to the one offering Jesus made in His priestly office in the Heavenly Tabernacle in eternity.  If he acknowledged that, then He would have to admit that it is from that offering in the Heavenly Tabernacle, which being situated in eternity is therefore equidistant to every single point in time in history from Creation until the Last Judgement that the benefits of Christ’s Atonement come to us where we are in space and time.  This would be admitting the foundation of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist (the first millennium understanding before it got twisted into a caricature of itself in the late Middle Ages) that the earthly offering of bread and wine in the Eucharist is mystically united to Christ’s Heavenly oblation so that when the faithful receive the bread and wine, Christ’s one sacrifice becomes the meal that sustains the new life as Jesus explained in His Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, which completes the correspondence of the New Testament sacrifice with those of the Old Covenant.  Slaying of animal – Crucifixion.  Offering of blood on altar/Mercy Seat – Offering of blood in Heavenly Tabernacle.  Eating of the sacrifice – the Eucharistic meal.

 

 

One might think from this that MacArthur must at least sound in the teachings that were important in the Reformation.  MacArthur certainly sees himself as a champion of Reformation orthodoxy.  When Hank Hanegraaff, Walter Martin’s successor at the Christian Research Institute, joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2017 MacArthur acted as if Hanegraaff had converted to Islam or Buddhism or just apostatized.  Hanegraaff, quite capable of defending himself, provided clips from MacArthur’s remarks in his response. By joining the Eastern Orthodox Church, MacArthur felt, Hanegraaff had abandoned or was close to abandoning the Gospel.  Not the Gospel as St. Paul identified it in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, of course, because that Gospel is confessed in the Nicene Creed which Eastern Orthodoxy confesses, but the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 

 

 

Justification by faith alone is, of course, a central doctrine if not the central doctrine of the Reformation.  While it was not until the sixteenth century that it was put in that wording it is essentially identical to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works.  In St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, it is stressed that justification is by faith and not by works.  It has to be by faith and not by works, St. Paul argued, because only then can it be by grace, that is, by God’s favour, a gift freely bestowed.  If it were by our works it would be a wage or reward rather than a gift.  This is an important truth and, indeed, in Ephesians 2:8-9 St. Paul says that salvation, which is larger than justification, is a gift of grace by faith and not works.  The importance of this truth should not be minimized, but it does need to be kept in perspective.  It is a truth about what is sometimes called the mechanics of salvation.  The Gospel is the Good News of that salvation proclaimed to the world of sinners, Jew first then Greek.  Its content is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who He is and what He did.  The Gospel is all about Jesus Christ.  Justification by faith and not works is about us, what we believe and what we do or rather what we don’t do to receive what Jesus Christ has done.  It is an important truth, but truths in which we are the subject rather than Jesus Christ are not on par with the Gospel truths about Jesus Christ and we ought not to make them out as if they were.  The evangelical Protestant habit of referring to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as if it were itself the Gospel rather a truth about ourselves derived from the Gospel is a very bad one.  Any truth can become a heresy when it is taken out of its proper context.  The proper context for Sola Fide is as the answer to the question “what is the hand with which we reach out and appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation that God has given to us in Jesus Christ” because this is the role that belongs uniquely to faith. 

 

 

In his negative remarks on Hanegraaff’s chrismation into Eastern Orthodoxy MacArthur treated justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith to which one must formally subscribe to be a Christian.  How much is such subscription worth, however, when you affirm the doctrine formally while stripping it of all real meaning?

 

 

One of John MacArthur’s best known books was The Gospel According to Jesus, first published by Zondervan in 1988.  This book was his response to a real problem afflicting evangelicalism.  MacArthur called the problem “easy believism” but it would have been more accurately called “mass production evangelism” because it was basically large-scale evangelism, designed to get as many conversions as possible no matter how shallow, through a lowest-common denominator approach to the Christian message. Had MacArthur written a book denouncing the factory assembly-line approach to evangelism and its bad “decisionism” theology and tracing it back to the neo-Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney in the early nineteenth century it could have been a very worthy volume.  It would have been a completely different book from The Gospel According to Jesus, however.  Instead, MacArthur’s book retained the basic structure of evangelical decisionism but called for the decision to be defined in the much more demanding terms of total commitment, which arguably merely returned it to the point at which it went wrong in the teachings of Finney.  MacArthur wed this with a type of Dortian Calvinism that is entirely incompatible with it producing theological incoherency.   He is heavily indebted to heretical, liberal, “God is dead” theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thesis, although Bonhoeffer’s  The Cost of Discipleship is not listed in the bibliography, at least in my copy (the 1989 paperback edition), nor is Bonhoeffer listed in the index. There was a revival of interest in Bonhoeffer at the time MacArthur was writing this book, brought about in part by the dishonest promotion of Bonhoeffer as a “martyr.”  A martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith.  Bonhoeffer was not executed for his faith but for his political activities, including his involvement whether actual or merely assumed due to his associations in an assassination plot.  No matter how worthy political activism may be or how deserving of assassination an intended target may happen to be it does not make the person executed for such into a martyr, much less does it transform a heretical theologian into a sound one. Nor did MacArthur succeed in turning Bonhoeffer’s bad theology sound by slapping lipstick on the pig and rebranding it in The Gospel According to Jesus.

 

 

In The Gospel According to Jesus, MacArthur affirmed justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith, but gutted it of all its meaning.  Remember that Romans St. Paul argued that justification had to be by faith and not by works so that it might be by grace and therefore a gift rather than a wage.  A gift is something that someone gives and another person receives.  It is not something that one person gives to another in exchange for something else.  MacArthur however wrote “The important truth to grasp is that saving faith is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is.” (p. 143).  This does not describe the giving and receiving of a gift but is precisely the sort of transaction that St. Paul says that justification/salvation is not.  In his next sentence MacArthur says “We need to understand that this does not mean we barter for eternal life.”  However, when you say “the water is full of sodium chloride” you cannot clarify your sentence by adding “this does not mean that it is salty” because this is contradicting not explaining yourself and this is the case with MacArthur.  A barter is precisely what MacArthur had described in the first sentence.  Nor is this the only place in this book where he speaks of salvation as a two-way exchange.  Clearly the man who pastors Grace Community Church and whose radio program is entitled Grace to You understands the word grace rather differently from St. Paul.  Since he has difficulty with the entire concept of a gift of grace that is St. Paul’s reason for stressing justification by faith without works it is not surprising that MacArthur’s book is also chock full of statements like this “True faith is humble, submissive, obedience.” (p. 140).  Note that this does not say that true faith is accompanied by humility, submission, and obedience.  It says that true faith is these things.  Basic deductive reasoning here.  If X = Y and Y = Z then X = Z.  Obedience and works are the same thing.  If faith is obedience then faith is works.  If faith is works, then saying that justification is by faith and not works or that justification is by faith alone is utterly meaningless.  It would be one thing if this were a one-time slip of the pen, but is basically what MacArthur argues for throughout the entire book.  Nor is he merely saying what Jesus said when He answered the question of “what shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” with “This is the work of God, that ye believe in him whom he sent.” (Jn. 6:28-29).  Indeed, his intent is clearly the opposite of Jesus’ in this passage. 

 

 

Ironically, much of this book is dedicated to justifying disobedience, disobedience, that is, to Matt. 7:1.  True, as is indicated elsewhere in the New Testament or even in the verses that immediately follow, Jesus did not intent to prohibit all judgement in this verse.  However, statements like “If a person declares he has trusted Christ as Savior [sic], no one challenges his testimony, regardless of how inconsistent his life-style may be with God’s Word” (p. 59) variations of which complaint are found repeatedly in these pages are evidently calling for a kind of judgement that if it is not fall under Jesus’ prohibition, nothing does.

 

 

The title of the second chapter “He Calls for a New Birth” displays just how muddled MacArthur’s theology is in this book.  When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again this was not a call for a new birth.  It was an indicative statement of the necessity of the new birth.  A call for a new birth would take the form of Jesus telling Nicodemus that he requires a new birth from Nicodemus, that Nicodemus is capable of meeting the requirement and needs to undergo such a birth to meet the requirement.  That, however, is not the conversation Nicodemus and Jesus had.  Nicodemus does not understand Jesus’ statement and when he asks for clarification Jesus tells him that the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is like the wind which blows where it blows, and can be identified by its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it going (Jn. 3:8).  If the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, it is not something Jesus calls for from us.  Jesus does identify in this same passage where our responsibility lies and that is to believe in Him.  MacArthur’s attempt to confuse the simplicity of what is conveyed in this part of the interview involves a textbook example of the meaning of eisegesis “In order to look at the bronze snake on the pole, they had to drag themselves to where they could see it.  They were in no position to glance flippantly at the pole and then proceed with lives of rebellion.” (p. 46) Exposition like this makes one wonder what the expositor was smoking at the time he wrote it.  Oddly, MacArthur’s treatment of the new birth in this chapter is very much at odds with his Reformed theology in which regeneration is very much a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.

 

 

Less oddly, he divorces regeneration from baptism.  With regards to the water of John 3:5 he writes “This has nothing to do with water or baptism – H2O. It cannot be accomplished by a bath” (p. 40).  This comes from his Hyper-Protestantism.  That regeneration is a work that the Holy Spirit accomplishes, that baptism is the sign and seal of this work, and that as a Gospel Sacrament it is used instrumentally to convey the grace it signifies is not merely the Roman understanding but the Catholic understanding of the entire Church of the first millennium.  It is also the understanding of the Lutherans, Anglicans, and even the more orthodox of the Reformed.  Dr. Luther and the English Reformers saw no contradiction between this and their doctrine of justification because there is no contradiction.  There is no contradiction for two reasons, a) Baptism is a Sacrament not a work, and b) the role of Sacraments such as Baptism in salvation is not the same as that of faith.  Faith is the instrument we use to appropriate the gifts God gives us in His grace.  Sacraments and the Church that administers them are like the Word proclaimed the instruments that God uses to give us those gifts.

 

 

If in his error discussed in the previous paragraph MacArthur departs from where the traditions of the Magisterial Reformation are in full agreement with Rome and not only Rome but the entire Catholic tradition when it comes to assurance of salvation he departs from the Reformation tradition on what was one of the most important issues in the Reformation and one on which Dr. Luther and Calvin very much disagreed with Rome.  “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of some experience” (p. 23).  This statement is true in what it denies.  Assurance does not come from “clinging to the memory of some experience.”  It is very, very, wrong in what it affirms.  This is because assurance and faith are the same thing.  It says so explicitly in the Bible.  St. Paul in Hebrews 11:1 writes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  While I am quoting the Authorized Bible and very much hold the position that translations of the last century or so are in general greatly inferior to it in this case where they generally have “assurance” where the Authorized has “substance” or “certainty” in the case of the NASB (the NIV uses “assurance” where the Authorized uses “evidence”) it is helpful in making the meaning of the verse clearer.  Faith is assurance or certainty of its object and content. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work in our lives manifests itself in works.  Saying that assurance comes seeing this transformation, then, is the same thing as saying that we must put our faith in our works.  That assurance is faith, and that faith/assurance is not to be placed in our works or anything else in us but in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel was Dr. Luther’s position and remains the Lutheran view to this day.  John Calvin taught the same thing.  Both men told their flocks not to look for assurance within themselves but to find it outside themselves in Jesus Christ.  John Calvin famously wrote “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life.“  (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.5) MacArthur’s Puritanical view of assurance is a greater departure from the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works than that of Rome.

 

 

MacArthur, in my opinion, missed his true calling.  Instead of teaching the Bible, he should be peddling snake oil or selling used cars.

For God So Loved the World That He Gave His Only-Begotten Son

The most familiar and beloved verse in all the Holy Bible is the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John.   It has been called “the Gospel in a nutshell” and “the Bible in miniature”.   Here it is in the English rendition of the Authorized Bible:

 

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

 

One would think that if there was any verse in Scripture that all Christian believers would agree should be beyond acrimonious disputes about interpretation it would be this one.   That is not however the case.   There have been several such disputes about this verse.   We shall examine three of those here, each having to do with a different word in the Greek text.   Here is that Greek text:

 

Οὕτω γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν,

 ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ' ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

 

The above is the text as it appears in the Textus Receptus, the text underlying the Authorized Bible.   The Nestle-Aland and UBS critical editions have Οὕτως instead of Οὕτω as the first word and leave out the αὐτοῦ.   Neither of these differences affects the meaning of the text.   Οὕτως and Οὕτω are two different ways of spelling the same word.   Most often the former is used before words beginning with vowels and the latter before words beginning with consonants but it is not a hard rule.    αὐτοῦ is the word that means “his” in “his only begotten son”  (1) but this meaning is implicit in the text even without it.  

 

The easiest of the disputes to dispense with is the one pertaining to the seventh word in the verse, κόσμον.   This is the word for “world” and in the first clause of the verse it stands as the direct object of the verb ἠγάπησεν (“he loved”), with ὁ θεὸς (God) as the subject.   A certain type of Calvinist objects to this word being taken in its ordinary sense in this context but it conflicts with his idea that God only loves a tiny portion of the people of the world, His elect, and hates all the rest, having unalterably determined their eternal damnation from before the beginning of time.    This kind of Calvinist argues that κόσμος does not always mean the world in its entirety but can be used in a more limited sense.    This is true, but it by no means follows from this that the term can be used in the specific limited sense that the Calvinists imply, i.e., as referring to God’s elect.   Technically, the basic meaning of the word is “order”.   It can have the subordinate meanings of “good behaviour” and “government” and can even mean such things as “ornament” and “ruler”.  From the basic meaning of “order”, however, it developed the sense in which it was used in serious abstract thought, i.e., the world or universe, considered in regards to its structure and order.  It is in this sense and its subordinate meanings such as “the present world” (as opposed to that of a future age) “mankind in general” (as opposed to a specific people) and the like that we find it in the New Testament.   “Mankind in general” is the sense in which most people would understand this word in John 3:16 and it is itself a subordinate sense to “universe”.  If the common understanding is erroneous, a strong case could be made based on passages like the eight chapter of Romans that the error is in understanding κόσμος in only this limited sense rather than as meaning all of Creation which clearly is part of God’s redemptive plan.   Another limited sense of the word that is prominently used elsewhere in the New Testament is as the designation of the spiritual forces arrayed against God’s kingdom operating in and through human society.   This could hardly be the sense in which the word is used in John 3:16.   What both of these limited senses of the word have in common is that they both refer to something that is so large in scale that calling it by the name of the whole created order does not seem ludicrous or inappropriate.   This could hardly be said of the hyper-Calvinist interpretation of the word in John 3:16.   Yes, hyper-Calvinist is the appropriate term for the interpretation that “world” in John 3:16 does not mean the whole of mankind but only a select number chosen from out of the whole.   “Hyper-Calvinist” suggests taking the ideas of John Calvin and taking them to an extreme beyond what he himself taught.   Here is what Calvin himself had to say about this in his Commentary as translated by the Rev. William Pringle:

 

That whosoever believeth on him may not perish. It is a remarkable commendation of faith, that it frees us from everlasting destruction. For he intended expressly to state that, though we appear to have been born to death, undoubted deliverance is offered to us by the faith of Christ; and, therefore, that we ought not to fear death, which otherwise hangs over us. And he has employed the universal term whosoever, both to invite all indiscriminately to partake of life, and to cut off every excuse from unbelievers. Such is also the import of the term World, which he formerly used; for though nothing will be found in the world that is worthy of the favor of God, yet he shows himself to be reconciled to the whole world, when he invites all men without exception to the faith of Christ, which is nothing else than an entrance into life.   (bold indicates italics in the original, underlining indicates what I wish to emphasize).

 

Calvin went on to mention election in the sentence that immediately follows this quotation, but unlike many of his followers he had the good sense not to force its intrusion into the meaning of the universal terms within the verse.

 

The next controversy that we shall look at pertains to the word μονογενῆ.   It is the singular masculine accusative form of μονογενής, a third declension adjective belonging to a class of adjectives that are highly irregular even for the third declension.  This is the word translated “only-begotten” in the Authorized Bible.   A great many today insist that this is a mistranslation and modern versions tend to use “only”, “one of a kind” or “unique” in place of “only-begotten”.   I have addressed this in the past in the context of discussing the closely related contemporary theological problem in which many recent prominent evangelical leaders have denied the doctrines of the Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ and taught instead Incarnational Sonship while claiming to be sound Trinitarians, a problem compounded by the fact that an even larger number of evangelical leaders who do not reject Eternal Generation and Sonship have nevertheless accepted the claims of the Incarnational Sonship teachers to be orthodox Trinitarians.   The Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ is part of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, of course.   The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not merely that the three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are One in Being, but Three in Person, so that as Persons they are distinct from each other, but each is fully God, and the same One God as the other two.   It is also that the three have distinct relations to each other.   None of the three are created, all have no chronological beginning but are co-eternal, however, the Father is neither begotten nor does He proceed from another Person, whereas the Son is begotten of the Father (eternally, not in a moment of time to which there was a before), and the Holy Ghost proceeds in a manner distinct from what the Son’s being begotten denotes from the Father (the entire Church affirms this, the Western Church adds “and the Son” which the Eastern Church considers to be heresy).   If you fail to see the importance of this, note that Incarnational Sonship, taught by the late Walter Martin, and John F. MacArthur Jr. before he recanted, confuses the Persons of the Trinity.   The Agent in the Incarnation is identified in the Gospels of SS Matthew and Luke as the Holy Ghost, and if Jesus’ being the Son is due to the Incarnation and not to His eternal pre-Incarnation relationship with the Father, that makes the Holy Ghost the Father. 

 

With regards to the word μονογενής the claim is made that while this was previously thought to have been formed by adding μό̂νον (only) to γεννάω (beget) it was actually the noun γένος rather than the verb γεννάω that went into the compound adjective’s formation and since γένος means “kind” the adjective means “one of a kind” or “unique” rather than “only-begotten”.   This first thing to observe about this argument is that even if it is correct to say that μονογενής is formed from γένος rather than γεννάω, the conclusion by no means necessarily follows.   While γένος can be translated “kind” this is somewhat misleading.   The first meaning that Liddell and Scott give to this word is “race, stock, kin”, and the other meanings given are arranged in such a way as to indicate that they are all derivatives of this primary meaning.  A clarifying subhead to the first meaning emphasizes that it refers to “direct descent” as opposed to “collateral relationship”.   The second meaning given is “offspring, even of a single descendent”, which the subhead “collectively, offspring, posterity”, and the third meaning is “generally, race, of beings”.   The meaning “class, sort, kind” is the fifth in the list, and the subentries to it demonstrate that even here it is classes, sorts, and kinds of things that are biologically related that is primarily intended.   The significance of all this is that γένος is a noun that incorporates the verbal idea of γεννάω in itself.   This should surprise nobody as the two words are closely etymologically related.   It is not that γένος first means “kind” or “sort” in a general sense and “race” or “kin” is derived from the general meaning through specific application.  It is the other way around.  The word γένος first denotes groups that share a common biological descent and it is by metaphorical extension that the more general sense is arrived at.   In other words the meaning of γεννάω cannot be eliminated from μονογενής simply by tracing the second part of the compound to γένος rather than to γεννάω.

 

A look at how μονογενής was used both in the New Testament and in ancient Greek literature as a whole shows that those who object to rendering this word “only begotten” have no sound scholarly reason to do so.   The adjective appears nine times in total in the New Testament.   Five of these, including the one we have been discussing, refer to Jesus Christ as the μονογενής Son of God.   One is a reference in the book of Hebrews to Abraham’s offering of Isaac.   The other three, all in the Gospel according to St. Luke, are references to children – the son of the widow of Nain, Jairus’ daughter, and the possessed son of the father whom Jesus encountered upon coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration – and in each case μονογενής was used to indicate that the child was the only child of his or her parent.   This same pattern occurs throughout Greek literature as a whole.   The adjective μονογενής is almost as tied to nouns like παῖς, τέκνον, υἱός and θυγάτηρ (child, child, son, daughter) as Homer’s πολύφλοισβος (much roaring) was to θάλασσα (the sea).   This is a strong indicator that the primary meaning of the adjective pertains specifically to children and that when it is used in a more general sense this is the secondary meaning derived from the primary.  

 

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this insistence that μονογενής means “one of a kind” rather than “only begotten” has less to do with Greek scholarship than with hyper-Protestantism.   Orthodox Protestantism rejects the errors that are distinctive to Rome, especially the Rome of the late Medieval Period, but accepts what is genuinely Catholic, that is to say, the doctrines, practices, etc. that belong to the whole Church going back to the earliest centuries before the major schisms.   Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond this and opposes much that is Catholic as well as that which is distinctively Roman.   Orthodox Protestants confess the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.   Hyper-Protestants do not all reject the Nicene Creed per se, but their thinking is filled with all sorts of wrong ideas that generate suspicion of the Creed as being too “Catholic”.   It is from this sort of thinking the idea has gained traction in certain evangelical circles that one can have orthodox Trinitarianism without the doctrine of Eternal Generation.   The Fathers of the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Councils of the fourth century had it right, however.   It is because we confess about Jesus that:

 

τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων

 

(He was begotten of the Father before all worlds),

 

and that He is:

 

γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα

 

(begotten, not made),

 

that we can confess that He is:

 

ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί

 

(of one substance with the Father).

 

The final dispute that we shall look at concerns the first word in the Greek text, οὕτω.   Again, it makes no difference to the meaning of this word whether it is spelled with the final sigma or not.   This is the word rendered “so” in the Authorized Bible.   It precedes the word for “for” in the Greek, γὰρ, because γὰρ cannot stand in the first position in a Greek clause, although “for” has to stand in the first position in English to convey the same meaning as γὰρ in Greek.   It is frequently maintained that the Authorized Bible misrepresents the meaning of this word in its rendition of the first clause of the verse “For God so loved the world”.   Worded this way, “so” is an expression of extent or degree.  “For God so loved the world” means the same thing as “For God loved the world so much”.   οὕτω, however, means “so” in the sense of “thus” or “in this manner” and so, we have often been told, the Authorized rendition is inaccurate.

 

That οὕτως does indeed mean “thus”, “in this way” or “in this manner” is not in dispute, nor even that this is the primary meaning of the word.   The problem with those who insist that it must have this meaning in this verse is that they maintain that it cannot have the meaning “so much”.   This is demonstrably false, and furthermore, this verse employs the very construction in which οὕτως is most likely to have the meaning of “so much”.  

 

The word οὕτως is the adverbial form of οὕτος.   οὕτος is a demonstrative, or if you prefer the term with Greek rather than Latin roots, a deictic.   Usually classified as pronouns, demonstratives or deictics are words that serve as both pronouns and adjectives.   Unlike most adjectives, however, which ascribe qualities such as “hot”, “red”, “wet”, etc. to nouns, demonstratives point to nouns.   We have two of them in English, each with a singular and plural form – this/these and that/those.   This/these points to something near or pertaining to the speaker and so could be said to be first person.   That/those points to something remote from the speaker and could be said to be third person.   When we need a demonstrative that is second person, that is to say, pointing to something near or pertaining in some way to the person addressed we can use either this or that for this purpose.   In Greek there are three distinct demonstratives, one for each person.   οὕτος is the second person deictic, the one that point to something near or pertaining to the person addressed.  It is also the one that is generally used when you want to point back to something that has just been said, as opposed to pointing forward to what is about to said.  For the latter, the first person personal pronoun which is the definite article compounded with the suffix – δέ is normally used.   Adverbs ordinarily differ from their corresponding adjectives in application rather than meaning.   Think of “quick” and “quickly”.  We use the word “quick” in sentences like “Bob is a quick runner” which ascribe the quality of quickness to persons or things.    We use the word “quickly” in sentences like “Bob ran quickly” which ascribe the same quality to the verb rather than the noun.   Adverbs can also modify adjectives, other adverbs, or even entire sentences such as “Quickly, Bob ran to the bank and took out $100 dollars then went to the store and bought himself an apple” (Bob clearly lived in a time of Trudeau-era inflation).    Just as adding “ly” turns any adjective in English into an adverb, lengthening the final omicron in an adjective into an omega turns it into an adverb in Greek.   This is what we see with οὕτος and οὕτως.   οὕτως, therefore, in its most basic sense, is an adverb that points to verbs, adjectives, clauses, sentences, etc. in the same way that οὕτος points to nouns.   It is to οὕτος, what “thus” is to “this”.

 

While it might seem like that clinches the argument for those who claim that that the οὕτω in John 3:16 means “in this manner” rather than “so much”, note that even in English “thus” is not limited to this meaning.   It is frequently used with the meaning of “therefore” and with reference to extent rather than manner.   “Bob ran thus far” would be an example of thus used with reference to extent.   A familiar example is the saying frequently used in “line-in-the-sand” moments, “thus far, no further”, which is actually a paraphrase of Job 38:11.      Similarly, while the οὕτως was primarily used with reference to manner, this was by no means its only use.  Its second meaning, like that of its English counterpart, was “therefore”, and its third meaning, as given by Liddell and Scott, was “to such an extent, so, so much, so very, so excessively”.   The first example the lexicographers give of this meaning is from the third book of Homer’s Iliad.  This is where Priam, king of Troy, has summoned Helen to the walls and asked her to identify for him a particular warrior among the Achaeans who has caught Priam’s eye.   It turns out that Agamemnon, son of Atreus and commander of the Greek army is the one indicated.  The relevant verse is verse 169 where Priam spells out why the king of Mycenae has so caught his eye:

 

καλὸν δ᾽ οὕτω ἐγὼν οὔ πω ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσιν,

 

which means “but so handsome [a man], I have not yet seen with my own eyes”.   

 

Although οὕτω here is modifying an adjective, καλὸν, rather than a verb as in John 3:16, it has precisely the meaning that some have foolishly claimed it cannot have in the Scriptural text.  

 

That οὕτω had not lost this meaning by the time the New Testament was written can be seen in the third verse in the third chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians.   This verse begins with the question:

 

οὕτως ἀνόητοί ἐστε; 

 

which means “are you so foolish?”   I have never heard anybody try to argue that οὕτως means “in this manner” here.   With the exceptions of one or two which paraphrase the question so that it is impossible to tell what meaning they ascribe to οὕτως, (2) the English translations all treat it as an expression of degree or intensity here.   See also Revelation 16:18 which ends with the words: σεισμὸς, οὕτω μέγας – “so great an earthquake”.   Here the οὕτω modifying the adjective μέγας (great) cannot be anything but the intensifier “so” as in “so much”.   Other New Testament examples that I will not go into at length are Galatians 1:6, 1 Thessalonians 2:8, and Hebrews 12:21.

 

Now, showing that οὕτω can mean “so” in the sense of “so much” is not the same thing as showing that this is what it means in John 3:16.   We have seen that its primary meaning is “in this way” or “in this manner” and, although that meaning would clearly be absurd in Iliad 3.169 this is not the case in the Gospel verse.   Is there any reason for thinking that the meaning of “so much” rather than “in this manner” is what is intended in John 3:16?

 

The answer is a clear yes.   In Greek, as in Latin and English, there is a category of subordinate clauses that we call result clauses.   These can indicate such things as what would naturally be expected to follow from the action of the main verb, whether or not it actually did, and what the actual result of the action was.   There are words that appear in the main clause of sentences that contain result clauses that indicate that a result clause is coming.  οὕτω/ οὕτως is one such word,   Then there are the words which begin the result clauses themselves.   The main one of these is ὥστε which means “so that”.   ὥστε is a compound of ὡς (as, so, that) which can also be used for this purpose.   There is also a kind of clause called a final clause, not because it occurs last in the sentence which may or may not be the case but because it expresses the end in the sense of purpose of the action of the main verb, or, in other words the result that the doer of the action of the main verb intended.   There are a number of words that can begin this kind of clause, the main one being ἵνα which means “in order that”.   If you look above to the Greek text of John 3:16 you will notice that it contains both a result clause and a final clause.    ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν is the result clause.  The final clause is ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ' ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

 

If the final clause were the only subordinate clause in the verse then those who maintain that οὕτω means “in this manner” here would have a much stronger case.   However, between the final clause and the main clause, falls the result clause beginning with ὥστε.   It is when it is used in conjunction with ὥστε like this that οὕτω most often means “so much” rather than “in this manner”.   The two words work together to create the sense of “so much X that Y”. 

 

One example of this from ancient Greek literature is found in the first book of Herodotus’ Histories.   In his account of the life of Croesus, king of Lydia, Herodotus relates a lengthy exchange between the king and Solon, the Athenian reformer and lawmaker.  Croesus asked Solon whom he judged to be the happiest man he had ever encountered.   Solon, not unaware that Croesus expected to be named himself, nevertheless answered Tellus the Athenian, and gave his reasons.   To the follow-up question about who the second happiest was, Solon answered that it was Cloebis and Biton, and explained why.   This irritated Croesus who then asked “ὦ ξεῖνε Ἀθηναῖε, ἡ δ᾽ ἡμετέρη εὐδαιμονίη οὕτω τοι ἀπέρριπται ἐς τὸ μηδὲν ὥστε οὐδὲ ἰδιωτέων ἀνδρῶν ἀξίους ἡμέας ἐποίησας;” which means “O Athenian stranger-friend, is this our happiness so cast away into nothingness to you that you made us less worthy than ordinary men?”

 

Countless other such examples could be given.   This is a very common construction in ancient Greek literature.   Note that in the above example the verb in the result clause, ἐποίησας, is in the indicative mood, which is the basic mood of the verb,  the one used when making ordinary statements about things as they are, as opposed to things which might be, which one wishes would be, etc.   In result clauses a natural but not necessarily actual result is placed in the infinitive, an actual result in the indicative.   When the “οὕτω … ὥστε….” construction employs the indicative in the result clause this raises the likelihood of it being used in the “so much…that” sense to near certainty and this is what we see in John 3:16 where the verb in the result clause is ἔδωκεν, an indicative aorist meaning “he gave”.

 

I am not going to belabour the point much further.   Unlike the first two interpretive problems, this third one does not have much theological significance.   Saying that God gave us His Son as our Saviour because He loved us so much does not exclude saying that the manner in which He loved us was that He gave us His Son or vice versa.   Indeed, since expressions with double meanings are fairly common in St. John’s Gospel – a much discussed example is ἄνωθεν with the double meaning of “again” and “from above” which is a key element in the same discussion in which John 3:16 occurs – not a few have suggested that both senses of οὕτω are being simultaneously intended in this verse.   The reason that I thought this worthy of as lengthy a treatment as I have given it is the frequency with which I have encountered the idea that in John 3:16 οὕτω means “in this manner” rather than “so much” asserted with a dogmatic authority that the facts simply do not bear out.   It seems evident to me that this dogmatism comes from either a) the plethora of Bible-study tools currently available that allow people to pontificate about what “the Greek” means without actually studying it, b) the curious and utterly wrongheaded contemporary notion that the Greek of the New Testament is best studied by itself without reference to any other ancient Greek literature, or c) the combination of the two.   Somebody who studies New Testament Greek and only New Testament Greek might very well be unfamiliar with the “οὕτω … ὥστε….” construction.   John 3:16 happens to be the only verse in the entire Johannine corpus where ὥστε appears.   Needless to say, this very common ancient Greek construction is rare in the New Testament.   This, however, makes it that much more important that we pay attention to how it was used in other ancient Greek literature because when an author uses it rarely, or, as in the case of St. John here, only once, this is a good indication that it was chosen specifically because the established meaning is one that the author wished to particularly emphasize.

 

  

 

 (1)   This word is the genitive (possessive) form of αὐτός the word for “self”, which means “same” when used as an attributive adjective, and which also stands in for the third person pronoun (except when that pronoun is the subject) which is how it is used in John 3:16.

(2)   The Orthodox Jewish Bible, for example, rephrases it from a question into a statement “you lack seichel”.   The adverb in the question disappears completely when this is done.  Seichel, if it is not already obvious, is the opposite of foolishness.

The Holy Trinity

Today is the octave day of Pentecost, or Trinity Sunday. In the older liturgical calendar every Sunday from now until the last before Advent would be dated from today. Since the liturgical reforms of the last century these Sundays have been counted from Whitsunday. Next Sunday, for example, is now generally called the second after Pentecost rather than the first after Trinity. There were reasons for this change, but there are also reasons for preferring the older tradition. These have less to do with what the Sundays in Ordinary Time are called than with the way in which we look at the period that has now drawn to a conclusion. Do we wish to see it culminating in a day that commemorates an event, however important, or in the day that specifically honours all three divine Persons - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?

One reason to prefer the older liturgical emphasis in the Trinity is the disturbing decline among professing Christians in both a basic grasp of this doctrine and an appreciation for how essential it is to the orthodox Christian faith. The last couple of centuries have seen the rebirth of most, if not all, of the theological and Christological heresies that the Church Fathers contended with in the period before, including, and just after that of the first two ecumenical councils which gave us the Eucharistic Creed. In the nineteenth century, for example, Charles Taze Russell founded a well-known sect that preaches a revived version of Arianism. Since the 1960s the standard reference book for evangelical Protestants with regards to this and similar heretical sects was The Kingdom of the Cults, first published in 1965. Its author, the late Dr. Walter Martin, the original "Bible Answer Man" on radio, was a Baptist minister but, ironically, he was not sound on the Trinity himself. He taught the doctrine of Incarnational Sonship - that prior to His Incarnation, Jesus Christ as the second Person of the Trinity was the eternal Word of God, the divine Logos, but that He only became the Son of God through the Incarnation in which He was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. That neither Dr. Martin, nor the many evangelical leaders who considered his views to be orthodox, could grasp why this is inconsistent with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is even more indicative of the decline in question than the revival of these ancient heresies. The reason is that the Holy Ghost is identified in Scripture and Creed as the Agent in the Incarnation. If Christ's Sonship is derived from the Incarnation, logically the Holy Ghost must be His Father, which confuses the first and third Persons. Orthodoxy neither divides the substance of the Godhead, nor confuses the Persons.

Don't mistake what I am saying here. Last century's liturgical reforms are obviously not the cause of the decline into sloppy theology which began long before the reforms were introduced. Indeed, the aforementioned Dr. Martin belonged to a denomination that was not likely to be much affected by said reforms. If any liturgical shift contributed to the theological decline it was the tendency to abandon use of the Athanasian Creed, to which the last sentence in the previous paragraph makes allusion. In Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley, first published in 1849, when the title character, a young heiress who has moved back to the neighborhood, first encounters the Reverend Mr. Helstone, the local rector, he quizzes her about her Christian upbringing. She recites the Apostles' Creed easily enough, and then the rector says "Now for St. Athanasius's: that's the test!" She turns her attention to her flowers and dog and the minister's niece Caroline, and when asked again admits "I can't remember it quite all." The Rev. Helstone's expecting anyone to be able to recite the Quicumque Vult would have been considered very eccentric even in the period in which Miss Bronte was writing. That is rather the joke intended by the passage. A century later the Creed had fallen into such disfavour that a movement to remove it from the liturgy altogether had formed. It was against this movement that C. S. Lewis wrote the defences of the Creed that can be found in his writings, such as God in the Dock. While the primary objection to the Creed are the threats of damnation which it alone of the Creeds contains, there was also the complaint that it was too formulaic.

God, of course, is greater than any formula. He cannot be contained in a formula, and any "god" who can be so contained is an idol made in our own image, rather than the True and Living God Who created us in His image. The purpose of a Creed, however, is not to contain God or to define or even explain Him. It is to affirm our faith in the truths that He has revealed about Himself in the Holy Scriptures. The purpose of the Athanasian Creed, which is not a Creed proper so much as an exposition of or commentary on the Apostles' Creed, is to guard the faith we confess against error and heresy.

God has revealed in the Scriptures that He is One. The best known example of this is found in Deuteronomy 6:4: "Hear O Israel, the LORD our God is one Lord". This verse, known as the Shema Yisrael after the Hebrew words for "Hear, O Israel", is ritually recited by observant Jews twice a day. The unity of God is contrasted in the Scriptures with the multiplicity of the idols made by men.

God has also revealed in the Scriptures that He is Three. Jesus Christ told the Jews of His day that His Father was the God they professed to worship. He spoke of God as "My Father" and to His disciples as "your Father", but never as "Our Father" in a way that would include both Himself and His disciples as being God's children in the same way. The Lord's Prayer or "Pater Noster" (Our Father) was a form prayer that He prescribed for His disciples, not one that He prayed on their behalf. His relationship as Son to His Father was different than any other sonship to God that can be predicated of men. Men are sometimes said to be children of God by creation, redeemed believers are said to be God's children by regeneration and adoption. Jesus, however, said of Himself that He was the "Only-Begotten" Son of God. The significance of this is that any father who begets a son, begets a son after his own kind. Therefore, the Only-Begotten Son of God, must Himself be God. On the night of His betrayal, Jesus told the Apostles that after He returned to the Father, the Father would send to them another Comforter. This Comforter, Whom He identified as the Holy Ghost, is also said to be God. These Three Persons were manifested at the baptism of Jesus, when the Father spoke from Heaven claiming Jesus as His Son and when the Holy Ghost descended upon Him like a dove. It is in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost that Jesus commissioned His disciples to baptize the nations. Clearly the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are distinct, yet they are each God. Therefore God is Three.

How can God be Three and One at the same time?

The Church has never professed to be able to explain this perfectly. All illustrations - and there have been many - fail at some point. Obviously, God is not One in the same way that He is Three, nor is He Three in the same way that He is One. The Church struggled in the early centuries to find the right words in Greek to describe both the way in which God is One and the way in which He is Three, and this struggle carried over into Latin and English. "Substance", "Being" and "Essence" are among the words we use in English to denote that which is One about God. "Person" is the word that we, or rather the Latin Church from which we borrowed it, settled upon for denoting that about God which is Three.

None of these words fully do justice to the matter. But then, words seldom if ever perfectly capture things as they are in themselves. This brings us back to the old question from Plato's Cratylus of whether words have any essential relationship to the things they denote or are merely conventional. Socrates' middle answer, that words are crafted to be appropriate to the things they denote and vary in their degrees of accuracy but are accepted by convention in the absence of anything better has never been improved upon.

The Creed named after St. Athanasius guards against heresies which would confuse or, in the English of Cranmer's day "confound" the Persons:

For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost.

It also guards against heresies which would divide the Substance:

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal.
Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost.
The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible; the Son incomprehensible; and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.(1)
The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal.
And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal.
As also there are not three uncreated; nor three incomprehensibles, but one uncreated; and one incomprehensible.
So likewise the Father is Almighty; the Son Almighty; and the Holy Ghost Almighty.
And yet they are not three Almighties; but one Almighty.
So the Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God.
And yet they are not three Gods; but one God.
So likewise the Father is Lord; the Son Lord; and the Holy Ghost Lord.
And yet not three Lords; but one Lord.

Finally, it guards against heresies that would compromise either the unity of Substance or distinctness of the Three Persons by erring with regards to the relationships between the Persons within the unity:

The Father is made of none: neither created nor begotten.
The Son is of the Father alone: not made, nor created, but begotten.
The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son: neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.

The Eastern Church would take issue with the last sentence in the above wording. As with the Nicene Creed, in which the Greek original says that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father without adding the filioque or "and the Son" that appears in Western versions of the Creed, so here the Greek version, which in this case is probably the translation of a Latin original, has the Holy Ghost proceeding only from the Father. This was the primary theological disagreement which divided the Western from the Eastern Church in the eleventh century. Eastern theology would see the above wording as contradicting itself. It says that the Father possesses the Godhead - the divine Substance or Essence - in and of Himself and not of or from the other Persons - but is the Source from which the other two Persons possess the Godhead through the begetting of the one and procession of the other. The Eastern theologians maintain that to say the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Son as well as the Father is inconsistent with what is asserted of the Father. Western theologians, obviously, have traditionally disagreed. Some on both sides have suggested that the issue could be resolved if "through" were to replace "and" for this would be more consistent with what is seen to be unique about the Father. Both sides certainly agree that the words "begotten" and "proceeding" here denote eternal relationships rather than temporal events akin to the "making" or "creating" with which they are contrasted, for all Three Persons are eternal.

That which we cannot know or understand about our Triune God is far greater than the little we do know. We have a duty, however, to hold faithfully the truths that have been entrusted to us, and for that end the Athanasian Creed is a most appropriate instrument. Perhaps we should consider reviving its liturgical use. In this day and age of abounding error, we could do with more orthodox Trinitarian truth.

(1) Incomprehensible here means "unlimited" or "infinite."

Jesus Christ: The Eternal Son of God

I wrote this essay for my friend Mitchell Richard to whom I dedicate it.  May it edify and bless him and all who read it, to the glory of Him Who is its subject. - GTN

Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius

Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father – from “Te Deum Laudamus”, the Latin original, and the English rendition in the Book of Common Prayer. (1)

In his epistles St. John the Apostle (2) warned the Church against false teachers that he called “antichrists”.  In his first epistle, he alluded to previous warnings about an antichrist that would come in the last time, and told his readers that it was now the last times, and many antichrists had entered the world.  These had abandoned the Apostolic fellowship and doctrines and denied that Jesus was the Christ.   By denying the Son, they denied the Father also. (1 John 2:17-24)   In his second epistle, he warned the elect lady about deceivers who “confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” (v. 7).  She was warned against allowing such antichrists into her home and even bidding them “God speed” lest she become a partaker in their evil doings.

In the history of the Church which Jesus founded, during the first few centuries after the deaths of His Apostles, she was engaged in several struggles which culminated in the formulation of the ecumenical Creed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and its revision into its present form at the Second Council of Constantinople in 381 AD. (3)  There were struggles to establish and maintain her legal right to exist in peace against external opposition and persecution, particularly from the civil authorities of the Roman Empire.   There was also the internal struggle to maintain orthodox, Apostolic, doctrine against various heresies that arose.   In the Johannine warnings against the antichrists in the Sacred Canon we see the beginnings of that internal struggle and in the Creed that is commonly called Nicene we find the Church’s definitive confession of the Apostolic faith and doctrine. 

The early heresies were many and they differed from themselves as much as they differed from Apostolic orthodoxy.   What they had in common was that they defected, in one way or another, from the doctrine that Jesus Christ was both fully God and fully man and from the doctrine of the Trinity, that God is One in Being, and three in Person, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.   Some taught that Jesus was divine but not truly human.  The Docetists, (4) for example, taught that He was pure spirit and that He had only the appearance of a physical body.   This doctrine appealed to the Gnostics, such as Mani (5) and Marcion (6), who taught a form of dualism to their followers, in which a good God created the spiritual world which was incorruptible, but the evil Demiurge created the physical world which was irredeemable.   Others taught that Jesus was truly human but denied His full deity.  The Theodotians (7) taught that He was only human at His birth but that He was adopted as the Son of God when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him at His baptism.   Arius (8) taught that He had pre-existed before His Incarnation but that He was a created being and not equal with God the Father.   Sabellius (9) accepted the full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, but rejected the distinction between the Persons of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, teaching that these were different roles which God played at different stages in the divine economy.

Incarnational Sonship

There is a disturbing new trend among some evangelical leaders today.  It is not a revival of any of these particular early heresies.   The leaders I have in mind all assert their belief in One God, Who is three co-equal and co-eternal Persons.  They all profess faith in the hypostatic union of full deity and full humanity in the Incarnation and Person of Jesus Christ.   They deny, however, that He was the Son of God from eternity past, maintaining that prior to His Incarnation He was the eternal Word of God, but that His Sonship is derived from His miraculous conception and Virgin Birth. (10)

This is a heresy that is tailor made for the day and age in which we live, for the initial reaction of many evangelicals, upon hearing of this new doctrine, will probably be to think that it is not important, that it is a semantic argument.   If these leaders accept the deity and humanity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, many will reason, why quibble about something like this?  If we agree that Jesus is God from eternity past why is it important that He was also eternally the Son of God?

There are several answers to these questions.   To reject the eternal Sonship of Christ and declare that His Sonship dates to the Incarnation is to contradict the Creed which asserts that He was “begotten of the Father, before all worlds”. (11)  It is also a step in the direction of Sabellianism.  The assertion that in the Incarnation the Second Person of the Trinity became the Son of God is a step towards asserting that in the Incarnation the Father became the Son.   It reduces His Sonship from being an element of His essential deity to being a role He assumed at a point in history.   Most importantly, the eternal Sonship of Christ is essential to the doctrine of the Trinity, which requires an eternal relationship between the Father and the Son.

Sadly, the first of these points, that Incarnational Sonship involves a contradiction of the Creed will be dismissed by many evangelicals as unimportant and irrelevant.   This is because the Reformers’ doctrine of Sola Scriptura, by which they meant that the Word of God is the final authority over Church doctrine, discipline, and tradition, has degenerated in much of evangelicalism into Bible-onlyism, a kind of ultra-individualistic approach to doctrine in which the understanding and interpreting of the Word of God is a private matter between the individual believer and the Holy Spirit, into which Church Creeds, history, doctrines, and tradition must not intrude.

Jesus, on the night of His betrayal, told the disciples that when He went to the Father, He would send them a Comforter, the Holy Spirit, and that “when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” (John 16:13)   In the Greek and in the Authorized Version, “you” is a plural, a fact obscured in translations where the single and plural second person pronouns are identical in form.   Was Jesus addressing His disciples as a group but meaning that they would each individually be guided by the Holy Spirit into all truth, or was He saying that the Holy Spirit would guide His disciples as a corporate body into all truth? (12)

If the latter is the case, then the Nicene Creed, the Church’s corporate declaration of belief, drawn up before she was divided by schism, as an act of faithfully contending for the doctrine of Christ against the heirs of the antichrists the Apostle warned against, and still confessed regularly by the various branches into which the early Church divided, should not be lightly set aside as being of little to no importance to how we as individual believers understand our faith and the doctrines of Scripture today.  One of the tragedies of modern evangelicalism is that many with an admirably high view of the authority of the Scriptures seem to feel that such a view requires a corresponding low view of Church tradition and authority, even that of the Church in its early, undivided state. (13)

Does the Gospel of Luke Teach Incarnational Sonship?

Those evangelicals who teach Incarnational Sonship maintain that their doctrine is more true to the teachings of the Holy Scriptures than that of the Nicene Creed.   The most obvious verse to use as a proof-text in favour of that claim is found in St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation.  In this account, Gabriel, visits the Blessed Virgin and greets her with the Ave Maria.   This disturbs her peace of mind, and the angel explains that she has found favour with God, that she will conceive a Son Whom she is to name Jesus, and that He will be the long-awaited Messiah.   When she then asks how this is possible since she is still a virgin he begins his answer by saying:

The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. (Lk. 1:35)

Now at first glance this verse does seem to support the idea that Jesus’ Sonship is due to His miraculous conception and Virgin birth.   The Virgin’s pregnancy will be a miracle wrought by the power of the Holy Spirit, for this reason her Son will be called the Son of God.

Note, however, that the verse does not say that Jesus will be the Son of God because of His miraculous conception, only that He will be called the Son of God due to it.   This alone is insufficient to establish that the Incarnational Sonship interpretation of this verse is in error, but look at what else this verse says about Jesus’ conception.

Who is the divine Person Who actively brings about the miraculous conception of Jesus by the Virgin?

According to this verse it is the Holy Spirit.   Does St. Matthew concur with this in His account of Jesus’ miraculous conception and birth?

Yes he does.   The Evangelist both states in his role as narrator that Mary “was found with child of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 1:18) and records the angel’s having told Joseph “that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost” (1:20).

Incarnational Sonship is a Gateway Heresy to Sabellianism 

 

We have a problem here.  If Luke 1:35 teaches the doctrine of Incarnational as opposed to Eternal Sonship then it also teaches that the Holy Spirit is the Father of Jesus.   That would be an argument for Sabellianism, in which the Persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit (and the Son for that matter) are identical.

Sabellianism, however, or modalism or Patripassionism (14) by which alternative names the heresy of Sabellius is also known, is clearly not consistent with the teachings of the Holy Scriptures.  This ancient heresy, which was  revived in certain Pentecostal circles in the 20^th Century, (15) teaches that God is one in Person as well as in Essence and Being, and that “Father”, “Son”, and “Holy Spirit” are merely different titles, roles, and offices for that one Person. The Father, this doctrine teaches, became the Son in the Incarnation, and after the Ascension returned to earth as the Holy Spirit to indwell the Church.

What do the Holy Scriptures say about this matter?

 

St. Matthew, in the third chapter of his Gospel, tells of the ministry of St. John the Baptist and how Jesus came to him and asked to be baptized.  After Jesus was baptized:

lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. (vv. 16-17)

This is also recorded by St. Luke in the twenty-second verse of the third chapter of his Gospel, and by St. Mark in the tenth and eleventh verses of the first chapter of his Gospel.

If you had been present at this event, and had seen the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus and heard the voice of the Father speaking from Heaven identifying Him as His Son, would you have concluded that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were just three titles or roles of the same Person?   If the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were three titles or roles of the same Person, what would be the purpose of that Person putting on a show like this that would be guaranteed to produce the impression that He was three different Persons among all who witnessed it?

St. John, in his Gospel, records this event indirectly by giving John the Baptist’s account of it at a later date (1:32-34).   Later in his Gospel, however, he presents an extended discourse that Jesus gave to His Apostles following the Last Supper.  In that discourse Jesus had much to say about the Father and the Holy Spirit.  

In that discourse He said that He was the way to the Father (14: 6) that He was going to the Father (14:12, 28; 16:5, 10, 16-17, 28), that He will answer their prayers in order that the Father would be glorified in the Son (14:13), that He will ask the Father in prayer to send a Comforter (14:16), that the person who loves Jesus is loved by the Father (14:21, 23; 16:27), that the words they hear from Him are not His own but His Father’s (14:24), that the Father sent Him (14:24; 15:21; 16:5), that the Father will send the Comforter (14:26),  that He loves the Father (14:31) and does what the Father commands (14:31; 15:10), that He is the vine and His Father the husbandman (15:1), that He loves His disciples the way the Father loves Him (15:9), that He has made known what He has heard from His Father (15:15), that if they abide in Him and bring forth fruit the Father will give them what they ask in His name (15:16; 16:23), that He will send them the Comforter from the Father (15:26; 16:7), that the Spirit proceeds from the Father (15:26), that the Spirit will testify about Jesus (15:26), that the Comforter will not come unless He departs (16:7), that the Comforter will convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgement (16:8-11) and will guide them into all truth, not speaking of His, the Spirit’s, Own Self, but speaking and showing the things which He, the Comforter, has received from Jesus (16:13-14), Who in turn shares in what is the Father’s (16:15), that He will pray to the Father for His disciples (16:26), that He came from the Father (16:27-28), and that He is not alone because the Father is with Him (16:32). (16)

Each of these statements indicates that the Persons Who are mentioned, sometimes the Father and the Son, sometimes the Son and the Comforter (the Holy Spirit, cf. 14:16-17, 26; 16:13), sometimes all three, are distinct from each other.   Other statements in this discourse speak of their essential unity.  Those who know Jesus should know the Father (14:7), he who has seen Jesus has seen the Father (14:9), the Father is in Jesus, and Jesus is in the Father (14:10-11, 20), Jesus says of the coming of the Comforter “I will come to you” (14:18) and “we [The Father and Jesus] will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (14:23),  and the person who hates Jesus hates the Father (15:23-24).   These statements pose no problem to the orthodox believer because the unity or oneness in essence, being, and substance of the divine Persons is part of the doctrine of the Trinity.   The statements previously mentioned pose a major problem to the Sabellian, however, because his doctrine denies any distinction in Person between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

If this were not sufficient evidence of the distinction of the Persons, immediately after this discourse, the next thing we find in the Gospel is a prayer of Jesus.  He begins by lifting up His eyes to Heaven and addressing God as “Father”.  Six times in the prayer He addresses the Person to Whom He is speaking as “Father”, “O Father”, or “Holy Father”. (17:1, 5, 11, 21, 24, 25).   This is inexplicable if “Father” and “Son” are merely two roles of a single Person.   The prayer is for Christian believers, the Church, who are spoken of throughout the prayer as the ones the Father has given the Son from out of the world (17:2, 6, 9, 11, 12, 24).  Throughout the prayer He constantly makes references to His having been sent into the world by the Father (17:3, 8, 18, 21, 25).   He requests that the Father glorify Him with the glory He shared with the Father before the world (17:5), that He might in turn glorify the Father (17:1).  He also speaks of the love which the Father had for Him before the creation of the world (17:24).  He has shared the glory and love, which He and His Father shared before the world, with those whom the Father had given Him, and prays that they may be united as the Father and Son are one, and that they may be sanctified and kept from the evil of the world.

The heresy of Sabellianism would turn this prayer from a beautiful, intimate, expression of the Son’s desire that those whom the Father had given Him would share in the love, glory, and unity which the Father and Son shared from eternity past into an ugly farce, in which either Jesus was talking to Himself or His human nature was talking to His divine nature.  No, the plain teaching of the New Testament is that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three Persons.   The defining characteristic of a person, in the sense in which we use the word to refer to the Persons of the Holy Trinity, is the conscious awareness of self and of the other as distinct from self. (17)   The Father is eternally aware of Himself as Father, distinct from the Son and Holy Spirit, the Son is eternally aware of Himself as the Son, distinct from the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is eternally aware of Himself as the Holy Spirit, distinct from the Father and the Son, just as the three are also eternally aware that although they are distinct Persons from each other, they are in essence and being, One God.

That Sabellianism is a heresy and that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost have eternally existed as three co-equal Persons in the Trinity is acknowledged by the evangelical leaders who teach Incarnational Sonship.  If the distinction between the Persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit is accepted, however, the doctrine of Incarnational Sonship becomes untenable for all the references to Jesus’ conception say that the Holy Spirit was the Divine Person active in the conception.   If Jesus’ Sonship is due to His miraculous conception and birth, then He must be the Son of the Holy Spirit rather than the Son of the Father. 

That is clearly not Scriptural, however.   Scriptural references to God the Father as a distinct Person from the Son and the Holy Spirit speak of Him as the Father because He is the Father of Jesus Christ.  Other ways in which God is Father, such as the universal Fatherhood which St. Paul referred to in his address to the Epicureans and Stoics at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:28-29), apply to all three members of the Trinity – hence the interesting reference to the Son as the “everlasting Father” in the prophecy of the birth of the Messiah in the ninth chapter of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. (18)   Similarly, all Persons of the Trinity are Spirit, (19) but Holy Spirit is the special designation of the third Person of the Trinity because of His relationship with the Father within the Trinity.

The Orthodox Doctrine of the Trinity Includes the Relationships Between the Three Persons

 

The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity includes more than just the fact that God is one in essence and three in Person.   It also includes the relationships between the three Persons.   The designations of the Three Persons each arise out of their relationships within the Trinity.   The Father is the Father because He begat the Son, the Son is the Son because He is begotten of the Father.   The designation of the Holy Spirit also arises out of His relationship to the other Persons of the Trinity but it is less obvious why.   The Creed, in its Greek formulation of 381 AD, states that the Spirit proceeds from the Father.   The Latin version of the Creed, upon which most English renditions, including that of the Book of Common Prayer are based, was amended by the Third Synod of Toledo of 581 AD to include the word “filoque” – “and the Son”.   The Greek Churches and Latin Churches have disagreed over whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son ever since, and this became part of the basis of the Schism between East and West in 1056 AD. (20)  Where they do agree, is on the use of the verb “proceed” to describe the way in which the Spirit comes from either the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son.   The term “proceed” does not immediately suggest His designation, “Holy Spirit”, the way the term beget suggests the designations Father and Son.  There is a term that theologians use interchangeably with procession to describe this relationship which does indicate why He is so called, and that term is spiration. (21) It literally means “to breathe.”  The Spirit is breathed forth by the Father and hence is called the Holy Spirit, for both of the original languages of the Holy Scriptures employ a single word to express the ideas of breath, wind, and spirit. (22)

The Eternal Generation of the Son 

So, in the ad intra relationships of the Holy Trinity, i.e. the relationships and interaction between the Divine Persons as opposed to their ad extra relationships with the created world, the Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten of the Father.  

 

What does the word beget mean?

It is a word that is not as common as it used to be.  It refers to the generation of children from the seed of their parent(s).  While it has a less common generic sense in which either parent can be said to beget, in the vast majority of cases it is the father who begets, and thus beget has a more specific meaning of the father’s act in generating his children from his seed.   If one wanted to distinguish between the father and mother’s part in the generation of their offspring, one would say that the father begets and the mother conceives.  Thus, “sire” and “father” when used as verbs, are synonyms of beget.    It is a concept that is easy to grasp when used of the reproduction of created life.  It is more difficult to understand what it means when predicated of the relationship between two Eternal Persons.   

To understand what it means that the Father begat the Son, we must take the meaning of beget as we would use it with regards to an ordinary human father and son, and strip it of all connotations that could only apply to created beings.   A human father cannot beget a son without the cooperation of a human mother.   Indeed, a human father’s begetting and a human mother’s conceiving are two different aspects of the same act.  A human father is prior to the son he begets.  The father exists first and by the act of begetting brings his son into existence.  In begetting a son, a human father duplicates or reproduces, his essence, that which makes him a human being.  Thus the father and son have the same essence in the sense that they each possess a human essence, the son’s human essence being a duplicate of the father’s.

None of this can be true of God the Father’s begetting of God the Son.   Jesus did have a mother, of course, the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Her miraculous conception of Jesus by the power of the Holy Ghost was not the same act as the Father’s begetting of Jesus, however.   The conception of Jesus was a temporal act, an act that took place in human history, at a specific time and in a specific place.   The Father’s begetting of the Son is eternal, beyond time and space.   

The Father is not prior to the Son because both are co-eternal, as is the Holy Spirit.  There was never a time before any of them existed, therefore there was never a time when the Father existed and the Son did not.   This is why the words γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα – “begotten not made” – were placed in the Creed.   This distinction between begetting and making was not put in there just to say that the Son is a Person, an I and a Thou rather than an it, although it does, of course, mean this.   It was placed there to say that in the case of God’s Son, begetting does not carry the connotation of beginning to be, when one was not before, a connotation the concept of begetting would ordinarily carry.

The Son has the same essence as the Father but not in the same way a human son has the same essence as his human father.   The Son’s essence is not a duplication of the Father’s essence but literally the same essence.   This is what the Nicene Fathers meant when they included the words ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί - “being of one substance with the Father” – in the Creed.   The word ὁμοούσιον was deliberately chosen instead of the alternative ὁμοιούσιον which was preferred by the Arians, for precisely the reason that it expressed this meaning.

One in Essence 

This last point deserves emphasis because of its importance to the doctrine of the Trinity.   God is one in essence, three in Person.  What we mean when we say God is one in essence is not the same thing we mean when we say that Joe, Bob, and Louie, all have the same human nature.  When we speak of human beings having the same essence, we mean that they have the same kind of essence, that their individual essences belong to the same general category.   When we say that the three Persons of the Trinity have one essence, we mean that there is only one divine essence.   The divine essence is sine divisione et multiplicatione – without division or multiplication. (23)   If it were divided among the three Persons, so that each possessed a third of it, each would be only a part of God, rather than fully God.   If it were multiplied among the three Persons, so that each possessed an individual divine essence that was one in kind with that of the other two, we would not have one God but three Gods. 

What this means for our understanding of the Father’s generation of the Son is that it is not a reproduction of one’s own essence in another new being as it is among human beings or any other created living being. 

So what is left to the concept of generation if we remove from it the necessity of a mother’s cooperation, the father’s having existed prior to the son at a time when the son did not exist, and the duplication of essence?

What is left is the idea that the Father is the source of the Son, that the Son comes from the Father, and that the Son obtains His essence, from the Father.   Since the Son’s essence is not a duplicate of the Father’s essence but literally the same divine essence, this means that the Father’s generation of the Son is a communication or sharing of His divine essence rather than a reproduction of it.   Since the Father and Son are co-eternal, so that there never was a moment in which the Father existed but the Son did not, the generation of the Son is not an event, with a before and after, but an eternal relationship.  This is the doctrine of the eternal generation or filiation of the Son. (24)

Jesus’ Sonship Denotes His Deity

The doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son and the doctrine of the eternal Sonship of Christ are two sides to the same coin, despite the efforts of some theologians to separate them. (25)  Both doctrines are Scriptural.   If Jesus’ being the Son of God meant only that He had no human father, that it was by the power of the Holy Ghost that He was conceived and born of the Virgin Mary, then the title Son of God would describe Him in His humanity.  The New Testament, however, constantly links His Sonship to His deity.

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel According to St. John, for example, we read that after Jesus had justified His healing on the Sabbath by saying “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” this only made His enemies wish to kill Him all the more because He  “said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.” (John 5:18).

It is natural that they would have drawn the conclusion that He was claiming equality with God by saying that God was His Father.   The Torah begins with the account of God’s creation of the world, in which it is stated of each order of living things that they reproduce after their own kind.   If like begets like, then for Jesus to claim that God was the Father Who begat Him, was to claim that He was the same kind of being as God, in other words that He was God.

It is natural that they would have drawn the conclusion that He was claiming equality with God by saying that God was His Father.   The Torah begins with the account of God’s creation of the world, in which it is repeatedly stated of all living things God creates that they reproduce after their own kind.   If like begets like, then for Jesus to claim that God was the Father Who begat Him, was to claim that He was the same kind of being as God, in other words that He was God.

For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will.  For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: (vv. 21-22)

The Son will raise up the dead, restore them to life, and be the One to pass final judgement upon them.   These are all acts that belong to God alone, and for Jesus to say that He as the Son of God, will be the One to do them, is for Him to claim, loudly and clearly that He is God.   If that was not enough to clobber it into the heads of His hostile audience, He then explained the purpose for which the Father has committed all judgement to the Son:

That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him. (v. 23)

All men are to honour the Son, even as, i.e., in the same way, that they honour the Father.   This means, of course, that they are to worship the Son as God.   It is God the Father’s intent that they do so, for this is the reason He has committed the judgement of men to the Son.   In making these further claims, Jesus has intensified, bolstered, and amplified the meaning which the Jews had attached to His claim to be the Son of God, i.e., that it was a claim to be equal with God, to be God.   He also turns it around on them, by saying that their refusal to honour Him, to believe that He is God and worship Him as such, means that they do not even honour the Father, the God of the Old Testament.

Note that in all of this, the attributes of deity that Jesus has been claiming for Himself as Son, thus cementing the interpretation of His claim to Sonship as a claim to deity, He says that He got from His Father. This can only mean one of two things.  Either Jesus obtained these divine attributes from the Father at a specific point in time prior to which He did not possess them or that He has eternally possessed them and thus has eternally existed in a relationship with the Father in which He, the Son, obtains the divine essence with all its attributes from the Father.  The first of these would mean either that Jesus is a non-eternal God, Who was born to the eternal God, or that Jesus underwent an apotheosis, prior to which He was not God, after which He was God.  Either way, if this is the correct interpretation it would also mean that the Father and Son are two different Gods.  This cannot be the correct interpretation, because the Scriptures are clear that there is only One God and that He is eternal.  Eternity and oneness are both qualities of the divine essence.  This leaves us with the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son - that the Father eternally generates the Person of the Son with Whom He communicates or shares His undivided and unmultiplied divine essence. (26)

That this is, in fact, the correct interpretation can be seen in an interesting statement Jesus makes a few verses further down.   Jesus is continuing on the topic of His being the One Who will raise the dead and sit in Final Judgement over them on the Last Day.   In this context Jesus declares:

For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself. (v. 26)

This is a basic ontological statement.  (27)  The Father “hath life in himself”.  So does the Son.  This created a contrast with those of whom He has just been speaking, i.e., the dead who hear His voice at the Last Judgement and receive life.   These have life, but not in themselves, it comes to them from another, from Jesus.

The ontological distinction between God as Creator and His creation is that God has being or existence in and of Himself, whereas all of creation has being or existence in a secondary, derived, sense. (28) Although Jesus is here speaking of the Resurrection at the end of history rather than the Creation at its beginning and of life rather than existence, the thought is otherwise the same.

Note, however, that the Son has life in Himself, because the Father has given to the Son to have life in Himself.   Only God has life in Himself.  All other life, created and resurrected, has life as a gift from God.   The Son has life from the Father, but the life He has from the Father, He has in Himself.  The only way to understand this is that the quality of having life in One’s Self is a property of the divine essence, never passed on to created beings, but eternally shared by the Father with the Son.

It is by Eternal Generation that Jesus’ Sonship is Unique

The doctrines of the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal Sonship of Christ are required by the uniqueness of Jesus’ Sonship.   When Jesus speaks of Himself as the Son of God, or is spoken of as the Son of God, it is either understood or stated explicitly, that He is God’s Son in a way that nobody else is.  As we have just seen, the Sonship which He claims for Himself and for Himself alone, means that He is God as His Father is God.    This cannot be said of any of the others who are called sons or children of God in the Bible.  

This is actually a fairly large group.   In the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis, there is an account of how the “sons of God” took wives of the “daughters of men”, resulting in the birth of a race of giants, the Nephilim, who “became mighty men which were of old, men of renown” (v. 4).  God does not appear to have been pleased with this, for the context would suggest that this is somehow tied to the wickedness which brought about the judgement of the Deluge.   Exactly who the “sons of God” are who are referred to in the passage is unclear, (29) but whoever they are they are many and they are obviously not Jesus.   The first and second chapters of the book of Job tell of two occasions on which “the sons of God” came to pay homage in the heavenly court, and Satan came amongst them to make accusations against the book’s eponymous protagonist.   The “sons of God” referred to here, are usually understood to be the angels.  In the fourth chapter of the book of Exodus, the Lord tells Moses to tell Pharaoh that Israel, i.e., the Hebrew people, is His firstborn son, and that if Pharaoh does not let Israel go, He, The Lord, will slay his, Pharaoh’s, firstborn son.   In his speech to the Athenian philosophers in Acts 17, St. Paul quotes the fifth line of Phaenomena by the 3rd Century BC poet Aratus of Soli, “Τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος εἰμέν”, “we are also his offspring.” (30) That which Aratus wrote of Zeus, St. Paul applied to the true God of Whom He was speaking, thus saying that all people are God’s children.   The Apostle John, in the first chapter of his Gospel, writes that the Word, Jesus, came unto His own, i.e., the Jewish people, but they did not receive Him, i.e., did not believe in Him.  To those who did receive Him, who did believe in Him “gave he power to become the sons of God,”  sons born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (vv. 12 and 13).  St. Paul, writing in the first chapter of his epistle to the Church at Ephesus, says that God “hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ unto himself” (v. 5).

So then angels and all human beings in general are spoken of as children of God by virtue of creation, Israel the nation was collectively spoken of as God’s firstborn son, believers in Jesus are children of God both by spiritual rebirth and by adoption, and some unidentified group in the book of Genesis are also called sons of God.   That is quite a few “sons of God”.   In the sense in which Jesus is the Son of God, however, He is the only One.

We already know that Jesus Sonship is not via creation, because His Sonship means He is God and not a created being.  He is therefore not the Son of God in the same way that angels and other human beings are children of God.  He was born of the Virgin Mary, and announced as God’s Son by the Father at His baptism, but these cannot be the basis of His unique Sonship, for all who believe in Him are born of the Spirit and adopted as children of God.

The uniqueness of His Sonship, therefore, is due to His having been begotten of the Father, and since this Sonship means that He is Himself God, equal with His Father, the begetting and Sonship must be eternal.

His Only-Begotten Son

Those who are familiar with the Scriptures in the English translation, authorized by King James VI of Scotland, and I of England, for use in the services of the Church of England, first published in 1611 AD, will recognize that this is what the Bible actually says of Jesus.  In that venerable old translation, St. John, immediately after saying that the Word “was made flesh and dwelt among us” wrote that “we”, meaning the Apostles, “beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (v. 14), and a few verses after that wrote “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (v. 18).  Later, in the third chapter, he recorded the most well-known and most loved words Jesus ever spoke, of which in English, the Jacobean rendition simply has no parallel “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (v. 16).   Two verses later, the words “only begotten” appear in reference to the Son for a fourth time.

The word translated “only begotten” in these verses is the Greek word μονογενῆς.   This word was also used by the Nicene Fathers in the Creed, which declares: καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν Μονογενῆ.  As with the Authorized Version of the Bible, Thomas Cranmer rendered μονογενῆς as “only begotten”, and thus this part of the Creed appears in the Book of Common Prayer as “and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God”.

Now you may have noticed that more recent translations tend not to translate μονογενῆς as “only begotten”.  Nor do they update it to something less archaic in English, like “only fathered.”   The New International Version and New Century Version render it as “one and only”,  Eugene Peterson in The Message renders it as “one and only” and “one-of-a-kind”, the English Standard Version,  Revised Standard Version, Good News Version,  Contemporary English Version, Common English Version, New Revised Standard Version, God’s Word Translation and New Living Translation simply translate it as “only” as do James Moffett and J. B. Phillips, while the Amplified Bible uses “only begotten” but suggests “unique” as an alternative.  (31)

What are we to make of all of this?   Does the New Testament, in saying that Jesus was τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆς, actually call Jesus the only begotten Son of God, or just the unique Son of God leaving us to infer that it is in being eternally begotten of the Father that He is unique?

The translators who have opted for “one of a kind”, “one and only” or “unique” in more recent translations have done so because they believe that the earlier translation of “only begotten” was a mistake.   There is a theory as to how this mistake came about.   The word μονογενῆς is a compound word, formed by the combination of μόνος which means “alone”, “solitary” or “only” (32) with the word γένος which means “race”, “stock”, “kin”, “offspring”, “clan”, “family” “posterity” or “class”. (33)  According to the theory someone, at some point in time mistook the word for a compound formed from μόνος and γεννάω, which is the verb meaning “to beget” (34).   Thus μονογενῆς was misunderstood to mean “only begotten” instead of “only one of a kind.” (35)  While early translations of the New Testament, such as the earliest Latin versions, translated μονογενῆς with words like unicus that mean “one and only”, the mistake about the word’s origins and meaning spread due to people reading the Nicene Fathers’ doctrine of eternal generation and Sonship back into the word, and thus St. Jerome translated μονογενῆς as unigenitus, only begotten, rather than unicus, unique, from which the error spread to other translations. (36)

While this seems like a rather solid theory at first glance, there are a few observations which may call its plausibility into question.  The first of these is that to maintain that because μονογενῆς is a combination of μόνος and γένος  and not of μόνος  and γεννάω  it therefore can only mean unique in the sense of one of a kind and not only-begotten, is to assume that only a lesser, secondary meaning of  γένος was carried over into the meaning of μονογενῆς.   If you look up γένος in Liddell- Scott, for example you will find that “class, sort, kind” is the fifth definition.   The first and main definition of γένος is “race, stock, kin”.  Now each of these words, race, stock, and kin, denotes the concept of a line of generational descent.   Every other definition that precedes the fifth includes this concept as well. The second definition, for example, is “offspring, even of a single descendent”, which comes with a sub-definition “collectively, offspring, posterity.”   Moreover, when you get to the fifth definition, which for the theory that μονογενῆς cannot mean “only begotten” to work must be the only meaning of γένος to carry over into the compound, you discover that it too has sub-definitions, and that these, which include such meanings as “species”, “class”, and “genus” bring the idea of biological descent back into the definition.   The idea, therefore, that γένος  refers to “kind” or “class” in the sense of a category, with no basic connotations of familial relatedness and common descent, is just plain wrong.  (37)

Our second observation is that the theory that “only begotten” is a misinterpretation of μονογενῆς based upon a faulty etymology seems to assume that there is no relationship between γένος and γεννάω.   Given the common stem of the two words, this is a rather huge assumption.  (38) That γένος and γεννάω are unrelated is, however, seriously argued by those who maintain that μονογενῆς means “unique, one of a kind”.   The argument is basically as follows: there is a single nu in γένος and μονογενῆς demonstrating that these words are of a common etymological descent that differs from that of the double nu’d γεννάω, that γίνομαι is root of γένος, and that because γίνομαι is a “verb of being”, γένος does not derive from it any sense of birth or begetting but must mean class, category or type.  (39)

This entire line of argument, however, is spurious.  Indeed, it is wrong on every point and strung together from errors that are so basic, one can only wonder that the kind of people who should know better, have been putting it forth seriously. (40)

To claim that the doubling of the stem consonant in γεννάω indicates that it is unrelated to γένος is hardly more plausible than to claim that the different stem vowels in γίνομαι and γένος show that they are unrelated, both claims having no plausibility whatsoever to anyone familiar with the kind of stem changes that take place in Greek. (41)  Moreover, the claim ignores the existence of such words as γενεά, (race, family), (42) γενεαλογία which is transliterated into English to become genealogy, (43) γενέθλιος (pertaining to birth) (44), γένεσις (origin, source, birth) (45), and γενετή (hour of birth) (46).  Note that all of these have a single nu.

To say that γένος means class, kind, or type because its root verb γίνομαι is a verb of being is to ignore how the word γένος was actually used, which is the basis of the definitions in lexicons like Liddell-Scott and Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich, all of which give “race” as the primary meaning of γένος.    Furthermore, γίνομαι is a verb of becoming, not primarily a verb of being.  Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich gives its basic meaning as “come to be, become, originate”, immediately under which they give the first sub-definition as “be born or begotten.”   (47) Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich does identify a second class of definitions with the basic sense of to be, but these it says, are not γίνομαι being used as a verb with its own meaning, but “as a substitute for the forms of εἰμί, which is the verb of being. Liddell-Scott also identify γίνομαι as being primarily a verb of becoming, assigning it the basic meaning of “come into a new state of being”. (48)

So, the basic meaning of γένος is “race, lineage, stock”, categories whose members are connected to each other by means of common descent, i.e., through birth or begetting, and the root verb of  γένος is γίνομαι the basic meaning of which is “to become”, of which one of the first connotations is “to be born or begotten”.   The argument against “only begotten” as the meaning of μονογενῆς requires the basic, lexical, meanings of both γένος and γίνομαι to be ignored and secondary meanings to be substituted as the primary meanings.

Our third observation is that μονογενῆς is not the only word to use γενῆς as a suffix.   If this suffix does not have any connotations of birth and begetting due to its etymology, a conclusion which we have just seen is based upon rather dubious grounds, then it would not be likely to have these connotations in other compounds that use it either.   In fact, however, all of the other compounds have connotations of birth or begetting. (49)

Our fourth observation is that μονογενῆς itself, is generally used to modify nouns like παῖς (child, boy, girl) or υἱός (son) and that when the adjective is used substantively, i.e., on its own with an implied noun it typically implies the meaning of one of these words. This strongly suggests that μονογενῆς is not just a word denoting a generic uniqueness, the idea of being the only member of a category, but that it denotes a specific kind of uniqueness, one which is connected to the idea of the generation of children.  (50)

On the basis of these observations, a strong case can be made that in verses like John 1:18 and John 3:16, the Scriptures do indeed explicitly state that Jesus was the “only begotten” Son of God.   Even in the unlikely chance that those who say μονογενῆς means “unique, one of a kind” rather than “only begotten” are right, these verses do still point to the eternal generation of the Son because it is His being eternally begotten of the Father, and thus eternally God as the Father is eternally God, that makes His Sonship unique.

What About the Word?

The doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, let us reiterate, is that the Father is the source of the Son and that the Son comes from the Father, not through either a division or multiplication of the divine essence, but a communication or sharing of it, so that the Father and Son each possess the same divine essence in its entirety, and that this relationship between the Father and Son, in which the divine essence comes to the Son from the Father and not the other way around, is an eternal relationship which never began but always was.  Those who teach that Jesus’ Sonship is a relationship with the Father that began with the Incarnation, while still claiming to be orthodox Trinitarians, say that prior to becoming the Son in the Incarnation Jesus was the eternal Word of God.  Yet by making this claim, they cannot escape that which they object to in the doctrines of eternal generation and eternal Sonship, the idea of an eternal genitive-of-source relationship between the Father and the Son.   The relationship of speaker to word is as much a genitive-of-source relationship as that of father to son.

Now it might be argued that that reasoning does not hold because it depends upon the translation of λόγος as “Word”.   The word λόγος, despite its direct correspondence to the verb for speaking, λέγω, has a wide range of meanings, and can express rational thought or wisdom as well as its verbal expression in speech. (51) St. John’s use of the term in reference to Christ refers back to its use in Greek philosophy, in which it referred to reason as the divine order underlying reality. (52)

 It also, however, points back to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.  When John 1:1 begins by saying Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, “in the beginning was the Word” this is a direct reference to Genesis 1:1: וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”.   A couple of verses later St. John writes that πάντα δι’αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν ὃ γέγονεν, “all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.”  The words δι’αὐτοῦ which are rendered “by him” in English, express agency or instrumentality.  It is “through” the Word that God created all things, St. John is saying, and this too points back to the first chapter of Genesis.   The words וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים are found at the start of verses 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, and 26, beginning each of the six days of creation, and occurring twice on the third and sixth days.   The English translation of these words is, of course, “And God said”.   St. John’s declaration that it was through the λόγος that all things were created is clearly referring to this.   This means that in John 1:1-14 the meaning of speech in the word λόγος is actually emphasized, although it clearly has other connotations here as well.  The word λόγος as used of Jesus, therefore, does establish a Speaker-Word relationship that is as much a source relationship as Father-Son.  The eternal generation and Sonship cannot be escaped by the fact that Jesus is the eternal λόγος as well as the eternal Son. (53)

What Day is This Day?

There is one last potential argument against the eternal generation and Sonship of Christ that we will consider.  The Second Psalm speaks of the enmity between the heathen nations on the one hand, and God and His king on Mount Zion, on the other hand.   It begins with the heathen nations and their rulers raging against God and conspiring against Him.   God’s response is to laugh, to hold them in contempt, and then to pour out His wrath upon them.  He declares that He has set His king on His holy hill, that He has given him the nations of the world as an inheritance, and that all the kings and nations of the world had better serve the Lord and pay homage to His king or else they will face His wrath and perish.
 
So what does this have to do with the matter we are discussing?


In this Psalm, the Lord proclaims the king to be His Son. The king says

I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. (v. 7)

King David, in writing these words, presumably was referring to himself, but, as with many other verses in the Psalms, there is a dual application. We know this, because St. Paul, in his first recorded sermon in the Book of Acts and the author of the Book of Hebrews both quote this very verse, and attribute it to Jesus. The author of the book of Hebrews does not tie the verse to any specific event, but rather uses it to demonstrate the superiority of the Son over the angels, writing:


For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son? (1:5)

The Apostle Paul, however, preaching at the synagogue in Antioch in Pisidia, quotes this verse and ties it to the Resurrection:

God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again; as it is also written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee. (Acts 13:33)

Does this mean that the begetting of Jesus as the Son of God was an event that took place in time after all?

It does not, because if St. Paul’s application of Psalm 2:7 to Jesus means that He was begotten as the Son of God at a time and place in history, it therefore means that He was begotten as the Son of God on Easter Sunday. Yet the Gospels are quite clear that Jesus was God’s Son long before that. God the Father spoke from heaven and identified Jesus as His Son at His baptism (Matthew 3:16-17, Mark 1:10-11, Luke 3:22). He did so again at the Transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:5, Mark 9:7, Luke 9:35). Throughout His ministry, Jesus referred to God as “My Father” that indicated that He had a special Son-Father relationship with God that no one else had.

When King David wrote the Second Psalm, and originally applied to himself the words that the Holy Spirit through St. Paul applied to Jesus, it is widely, although not universally, (54) believed that the occasion was his coronation as king of Israel. It was therefore a declaration that his kingship was endorsed by God, Who had acknowledged David as His own, and that those who looked to stir up trouble against the newly crowned king had better beware, for they risked the ire of God. The statement “thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee” as applied to David, would not mean that God had literally begotten David, in the sense of having brought him forth as the fruit of His seed, much less that He would have done so on the very day that David was crowned. The declaration was, then, an emphatic way of saying that God claimed David as His very own.

We would expect, therefore, that the same words, when applied to Christ in the New Testament, would have a similar meaning, that they would be a public acknowledgement of Christ by God. This is, in fact, the way they are used. St. Paul himself gives this very interpretation to the event. The key to understanding his use of the Second Psalm is found in his Epistle to the Church in Rome. In the introduction to that epistle, he writes that the Gospel of God, of which he is an apostle, concerned:

His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh: And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness; by the resurrection from the dead. (1:3-4, bold indicating italics in the Authorized Version)
  It is not that Jesus became the Son of God or was made the Son of God by the Resurrection. By the Resurrection, God declared Jesus to be His Son. It is the third time God did so – the first two being at His Baptism, and Transfiguration, but on both those occasions God was speaking to a select audience. In the Resurrection He speaks to the whole world.

Furthermore, the Resurrection, in which God declares before the whole world that Jesus is His Son, is also the answer, or the beginning of the answer at any rate, to Jesus’ request of John 17:5 “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” With the Resurrection, His Humiliation was over and His Exaltation, in which He would ascend to Heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty had begun. Thus, Jesus having glorified the Father in the world, the Father was now glorifying the Son, with the glory they had shared together, in eternity past.

Hence, therefore, what God declares of His Son in the Resurrection, is what has been true of the Son, from eternity past. Far from being a declaration that Jesus was begotten as God’s Son on a particular day in time, it is a declaration of His eternal filiation. The final word on the subject, with which we close this essay, we will give to St. Augustine of Hippo, whose commentary on Psalm 2:7 declares:

Although that day may also seem to be prophetically spoken of, on which Jesus Christ was born according to the flesh; and in eternity there is nothing past as if it had ceased to be, nor future as if it were not yet, but present only, since whatever is eternal, always is; yet as today intimates presentiality, a divine interpretation is given to that expression, Today have I begotten You, whereby the uncorrupt and Catholic faith proclaims the eternal generation of the power and Wisdom of God, who is the Only-begotten Son. (55)

(1) Traditionally, the writing of this ancient hymn is ascribed to St. Ambrose of Milan. The English version in the Order for Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer was translated by Thomas Cranmer.

(2) Traditionally, the composition of the Fourth Gospel, the three Johannine epistles, and the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine, are attributed to the Apostle John. While there are early dissenting voices to this tradition, the modern critical attitude which takes as its starting point that tradition must be assumed to be wrong unless there is overwhelming evidence that it is correct, is unjustifiable folly. The opposite attitude, that tradition should be assumed to be right except in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is far more reasonable. This is the attitude we will take, towards Johannine authorship, as well as other matters.

(3) The discussion at the Council of Nicaea concerned the Father and the Son, the question being whether the Son was equal to the Father , of one substance or essence with the Father, and thus fully God. Thus the original Nicene Creed contained only the sections pertaining to the Father and the Son. The Second Council of Constantinople revised the original Nicene Creed and expanded it to include the third section on the Holy Spirit that is in the Creed as it has come down to us,

(4) Docetism is the name given to his heresy by Serapion, a second century Bishop of Antioch. He coined it from the word δόκησις which means “opinion, fancy, apparition, phantom, appearance”. He was writing to the Church of Rhossos to condemn the non-canonical, pseudepigraphical Gospel of Peter, which taught the doctrine. Serapion’s epistle is only known to us through a reference to it in Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica, although fragments of the Gnostic pseudogospel were rediscovered in Egypt in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The heresy predates both Serapion and the Gospel of Peter, being condemned by St. John in his epistles in the New Testament.

(5) Mani, born in 216 AD, borrowed elements from Buddhism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of his homeland Persia, which he joined into a new religion. One of the key elements of his religion, taken from Zoroastrianism, was the idea of dualism. Today, the name of his sect, Manichæism is virtually synonymous with dualism. He taught that there are two eternal beings, the Father of Light and the King of Darkness, whose realms are infinite except where they border on each other. At one point, Mani taught, the Kingdom of Darkness tried to invade the Kingdom of Light, and the children of Light who were sent to fight the archons of Darkness, were swallowed by their enemies. As the war continued, the physical universe was fashioned out the fallen bodies of the archons of Darkness. Some of the swallowed Light was released to form the heavenly lights, but sparks of light remained as the spirits of men. The physical world is doomed to destruction, he taught, but human spirits can be saved from the destruction, and reunited with the kingdom of Light, through attaining gnosis or knowledge. To help men achieve this salvation, he taught, Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus had been sent, and now he, Mani, was come. About Jesus, he taught the Docetist heresy, that Jesus was pure light, who took on the appearance of man, and the appearance of suffering and death. About himself, he made the less-than-modest claim to be the Paraclete which Jesus had promised to send. A century after Mani was put to death by the Persian Emperor, the man who would become St. Augustine of Hippo, joined the Manichæan religion while studying rhetoric at the University of Carthage. He turned away from Manichæism prior to his conversion and baptism into the Christian Church. Later, as a Christian bishop, he wrote and preached extensively against Manichæism, including his Contra Faustum Manichaeum, written against the Manichæan bishop Faustus of Mileve.

(6) Marcion, born sometime late in the first or early in the second century AD, was the son of the bishop of Sinope in Pontus, now Sinop in Turkey. Consecrated a bishop by his father, he was later excommunicated by him, and fled Asia Minor for Rome. Arriving just after the death of Pope Hyginus around 142 AD, he donated a large sum to the Roman Diocese, presumably in expectation of becoming the next Pope. He did not receive the position, and the money was returned to him when he was put out of the Church in Rome over his heresy. He believed, despite Jesus’ warnings against this very error (Matthew 5:17-19) that the teachings of Jesus were incompatible with those of the Hebrew Scriptures. He believed that Jesus was the Son of a God of love, and that YHWH, the God of the Tanakh, was a God of severe justice and wrath. He taught, therefore, YHWH, the God who created the world in the Book of Genesis, was the Demiurge, and not the supreme God and Father of Jesus Christ. The latter was not known, Marcion taught, until Christ revealed Him. Like Mani, Marcion taught the docetist view that Christ only manifested Himself in the flesh, but did not actually become incarnate. He founded a rival episcopal hierarchy to that of the orthodox Church and his rejection of the Old Testament in its entirety and most of the New Testament prompted the orthodox Church to discuss and determine the matter of the canon of Scriptures. According to Tertullian, he recanted prior to his death (De Praescriptione Haereticorum, chapter XXX). His followers were absorbed by other Gnostic sects, especially that of Mani. The most thorough still-extent rebuttal of Marcionism by a Patristic author is the five book Adversus Macionem  by Tertullian.

(7) Also known as Dynamists and Adoptionists, the Theodotians are named after their founder, Theodotus of Byzantium, a tanner who came to Rome towards the end of the second century, and taught that Jesus was merely a pious man until His baptism, at which point the Spirit descended upon Him and He was adopted as the Son of God. Variations of the heresy have popped up from time to time, some arguing that the adoption took place at the Resurrection, some that it took place at the Ascension.

(8) Arius, who studied under St. Lucian in Antioch, was ordained a deacon by Peter bishop of Alexandria, then excommunicated by the same bishop, then readmitted and ordained a priest by the next bishop of Alexandria, Achillas, only to shortly thereafter get into the most famous theological controversy of all time. He taught that the Son was of a different essence or substance from that of the Father. This had previously been taught by Origen of Alexandria, from whom Arius probably learned it, but he took it one step further and taught that the Son was a created being Who had a beginning. The controversy over his teachings began in the Diocese of Alexandria, where Arius had been placed in an influential position y Achillas. Arius provoked the controversy, by denouncing Alexander, who had succeeded Achillas as bishop, as a Sabellian for teaching the unity of the Godhead. Alexander called a local synod at which Arius was denounced and excommunicated. The controversy did not end there, however, for Arius found supporters among ecclesiastical leaders elsewhere in the region. At a regional council, Arius was anathematized, and finally the controversy came to the attention of Emperor Constantine who summoned Arius and Alexander to appear before an ecumenical Council of the Church at Nicaea in 325 AD, which Council was be charged with dealing with the matter. Although Alexander was present, the charges against Arius were made primarily by his deacon deputy, St. Athanasius. The Council condemned Arius, upheld his excommunication, and produced the Creed that declares the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.

(9) Sabellius, who was excommunicated by Pope Callistus early in the third century, was not the first to teach the heresy that bears his name. It was taught first – that we know of – by Noetus, then by Cleomenes, then by Sabellius.

(10) Examples of evangelical leaders who taught or who teach this doctrine include Walter Martin, John F. MacArthur Jr., and Millard Erickson. Martin was the founder of the apologetics organization the Christian Research Institute and of the radio problem the Bible Answer Man, on which he was the host/speaker until his death in 1989. He was the author of The Kingdom of the Cults, (Minneapolis: Bethany House Books, 1965, 1977, 1985), a book consisting of profiles of sects that defected from orthodox Christian teaching regarding the Trinity, Jesus Christ, and eternal salvation. Ironically, it is in this book, that he disavowed the orthodox Christian doctrine of the eternal Sonship of Christ. John F. MacArthur Jr., a minister in the IFCA International (formerly the Independent Fundamental Churches of America), is the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, the president of The Master’s College and Seminary, the Bible teacher on the radio program Grace To You, and the author of a large number of Christian books. He has caused controversy by espousing a number of less-than-orthodox views over the years, including Incarnational Sonship, but to give him due credit, he has recanted this heresy. His recantation can be read here: http://www.gty.org/Resources/articles/593 Millard J. Erickson, who currently teaches theology at Western Seminary (formerly Western Baptist Theological Seminary) in Portland, Oregon, espoused the Incarnational Sonship view in his God In Three Persons (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1995).

(11) The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

(12) A related question is the question of whether the indwelling of the Holy Spirit referred to in the New Testament is an indwelling of individual believers, an indwelling of the Church as an organic body, or both.

(13)   http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2012/12/evangelicalism-is-not-enough.html


(14) The heresy is called Patripassionism because it teaches that the Father suffered on the Cross. Note carefully the reason that this is a heresy. God is both One and Three. He is not One in the same way He is Three, or Three in the same way He is One. He is One in Essence and Three in Person. The Three Persons of the Holy Trinity eternally share the same One Divine Essence. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity, from the Incarnation on, is One in Person, Two in Essence. In the Incarnation, the Son took unto Himself a human essence so that in His One Person, the Divine Essence and the human essence are united (but not mixed). It is only in the Person of the Son that the Divine Essence and the human essence are united. Since, in the One Person, the two natures are united, what can be predicated of the Son as man, can be predicated of Him as God, because He is One in Person. Therefore, when we say that the Son underwent terrible physical agony, shed His blood, and died on the Cross, we can say that God underwent terrible physical agony, shed His blood, and died on the Cross. If however, in saying that God underwent terrible physical agony, shed His blood, and died on the Cross, we were to mean that the Father underwent terrible physical agony, shed His blood, and died on the Cross, we would be in error. It is only in the Person of the Son, not in the Persons of the Father and the Holy Ghost, that Deity and humanity are united. It is in this sense that the condemnation of Patripassionism, “the Father suffering”, as a heresy, should be understood. It does not mean that orthodoxy teaches that the Father was hard-heartedly indifferent to the agony which the Eternal Object of His Eternal Love underwent on our behalf.

(15) Variously called “Oneness”, Unity, or Apostolic, this kind of Pentecostalism is also known as “Jesus Only” Pentecostalism because of its insistence that only the name “Jesus” be invoked in the baptismal formula, its assertion that baptisms in which the formula “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” is used are invalid, and that only those baptized in the name of Jesus alone are saved.

(16) He also says in this discourse that the Father is greater than Him (14:28). Since this comes towards the end of a Gospel that began by asserting that He was in the beginning with God and was God, throughout which Jesus repeatedly asserts His deity, His oneness with His Father, His doing the works of His Father, His sharing the same glory as His Father, and basically His equality with the Father, this requires some explanation. The first part of the explanation, is the doctrine of the hypostatic union as explained in endnote 14. In the One Person of Jesus Christ, the Son, the Divine and human natures are united so that what can be said of either of the two essences can be said of the Person in Whom they are united. In the Divine Essence He shares with His Father, He is, of course, equal with His Father. In His human nature, He is less than His Father, for humanity is less than God. Uniting these two natures in His One Person, Jesus can both declare both His equality with His Father in His Divine Essence and, in His humanity, that the Father is greater. Note also, that in this verse, Jesus connects the thought of the Father being greater than Him, to His going to be with the Father. This points us to the second part of the explanation, that when Jesus made this statement, He was still undergoing His Humiliation. In His prayer, immediately after the discourse, He asks the Father to glorify Him, with the glory He had with the Father, before the world was made. The idea here is that in some way, the Son left behind the glory He had shared with the Father from eternity past (the Humiliation) in order to accomplish the work the Father had set for Him, and with that work completed would resume the glory (the Exaltation). Compare Jesus’ prayer in John 17, to the Christ-hymn quoted or composed by St. Paul in the second chapter of his epistle to the Philippians, which also speaks of the Humiliation and Exaltations of Christ, offering the Humiliation as a model of humility to be followed. The exact nature of the Humiliation is a bone of theological contention, but it makes sense that Jesus would speak of this aspect of His human nature in a context where He was anticipating His Exaltation and thus speaking from a standpoint within the Humiliation. At any rate, the Quicumque Vult, or Athanasian Creed, the third of the great Ecumenical Creeds of the undivided Church, declares both the co-equality of the Persons of the Trinity, and the two natures of Christ. Of the first it says “And in this Trinity there is no before or after, no greater or less: But all three Persons are co-eternal together, and co-equal.” Of the second it says “Equal to the Father as touching his Godhead, less than the Father as touching his Manhood.”

(17) Charles Hodge, the 19th Century Presbyterian theologian and president of Princeton Theological Seminary, put it this way:

The Scriptural facts are, (a) The Father says I; the Son says I; the Spirit says I. (b) The Father says Thou to the Son, and the Son says Thou to the Father; and in like manner the Father and the Son use the pronouns He and Him in reference to the Spirit. (c) The Father loves the Son; the Son loves the Father; the Spirit testifies of the Son. The Father, Son, and Spirit are severally subject and object. They act and are acted upon, or are the objects of action. Nothing is added to these facts when it is said that the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct persons; for a person is an intelligent subject who can say I, who can be addressed as Thou, and who can act and can be the object of action. Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995 reprint of 1872 original). p. 444.

(18) Of this, John Theodore Mueller, early 20th Century Lutheran theologian and Professor of Systematic Theology at Concordia Seminary wrote:

The name Father is sometimes used essentially (οὐσιωδῶς), referring to the divine Persons equally (Jas. 1, 7; 2 Cor. 6, 17. 18; Luke 12, 32), and sometimes personally (ὑποστατιχῶς), referring alone to the first Person of the Godhead, John 10, 30; 14, 9; 1 John 2, 23. Christian Dogmatics: A Handbook of Doctrinal Theology for Pastors, Teachers, and Laymen (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1934), p. 157. Bold indicates italics in original.

(19) Cf. John 4:24, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”

(20) Jesus, in John 15:26 says “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me”. The Eastern Orthodox position is derived from the words ὃ παρὰ τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορεύεται, “which proceedeth from the Father”. Conversely, the Western position is based upon the words ὃν ἐγὼ πέμψω, “whom I will send”. If this verse were the sole factor in the debate, the Eastern position would seem to be the strongest. When the Second Council of Constantinople added the section about the Holy Spirit to the Nicene Creed, the words τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον which were adapted from John 15:26, were placed in the Creed to describe the Spirit’s eternal relationship to the Father. By adding the filioque, the Third Synod of Toledo seems to have equated the Spirit’s proceeding from the Father with His being sent by the Son from the Father. The latter, however, clearly refers to a temporal act, which was yet future when the words were uttered. From the Eastern perspective, therefore, the Western position must look something like Incarnational Sonship looks to orthodox believers, Eastern and Western, in the Eternal Generation and Sonship of Christ, i.e., the confusion of the temporal with the eternal. The Western position is strengthened, however, by other New Testament verses which place the Son in a genitive relationship to the Spirit, such as Romans 8:9 and Galatians 4:6 .

(21) The need for another term to express the way in which the Spirit proceeds from the Father – or from the Father and the Son – is evident from the fact that the Son also proceeds from the Father (John 8:42), although it could be argued that the latter is a reference to Son’s entry into the world rather than His eternal generation. Both the Son and the Spirit come from the Father. In both cases it is the Person Who comes from the Father, with the whole divine essence communicated to Him. There must, however, be a difference, because otherwise, there would be two Sons. Hence the need for the term spiration, or “breathing forth”, to signify that the procession of the Spirit, spiration, is different from that of the Son, generation. According to Methodist theologian Justo L. Gonzalez :

It was the Cappadocians – Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa – who first sought to establish this distinction, claiming that while the Son is begotten directly by the Father, the Spirit proceeds “from the Father, through the Son” by spiration. Essential Theological Terms (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005) p. 141.

Gonzalez went on to say that:

In the West, however, Augustine understood this procession in a different way. For him the Spirit was the bond of love joining Father and Son.

This, he added, “lies at the root of the controversy surrounding the Filioque”.

The Augustinian understanding can be seen in Western liturgical traditions, such as the phrase “in the unity of the Holy Spirit” that is typically found in the Trinitarian formula that closes Anglican Collects and the Prayer of Consecration over the elements of the Eucharist. Nevertheless, the West also uses the language of spiration to describe the Spirit’s procession. At the Second Council of Lyons in 1262, called for the purpose of reunifying the Western and the Eastern Churches, it was declared that the “Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, yet, not as from two origins, but as from one origin, not by two breathings but by a single breathing”, quoted by Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology (New York: HarperOne, 1992), p. 521.

(22) In Greek this word is πνεῦμα. In Hebrew it is רוּחַ.

(23) “If God is one indivisible unity, any distinction referred to must not divide God into two, three, or more separable parts…God is one. Father , Son, and Spirit are three. God’s unity is not a unity of separable parts but of distinguishable persons.” – Thomas C. Oden, op. cit., p. 109.

(24) Origen of Alexandria was among the first to use this terminology. As he was not exactly the most orthodox of the Church Fathers, and taught like the Arians that the Son was not of the same substance or essence as the Father, some, for this reason, consider the doctrine of eternal generation to be suspect. The Fathers at Nicaea, however, rejected the Christological heresies of both Origen and Arius, and affirmed both the eternal generation of the Son and the cosubstantiality of the Father and the Son.

(25) J. Oliver Buswell, a past president of Wheaton College, for example, affirmed the eternal Sonship of Christ, while denying the doctrine of eternal generation. A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion , Vol. 1,(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1962) pp. 106-112. Charles Hodge, while not denying the doctrine as taught in the Nicene Creed, questioned the larger explanation of it given by the Nicene Fathers, i.e., the communication of the divine essence. Hodge, op. cit., pp. 468-471.

(26) It is the Person of the Son not the divine essence that is generated, but that generation involves the communication of the divine essence which, because it includes the attributes of eternality and unity, means that the generation had no beginning but always was, and hence is eternal.

(27) Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being or existence.

(28) That God alone has being or existence, in Himself, is part of the metaphysical concept of God, which is human reasoning derived from natural revelation, such as that St. Paul writes about in Romans 1:20. All things are either causes or effects, and the causes we see are themselves the effects of previous causes. Ultimately, however, there must be a First Cause, which is itself Uncaused, a Prime Mover, an Unmade Maker. The Uncaused Cause of all other causes, the Unmoved Mover, the Unmade Maker, by definition is, in and of itself, rather than by derivation from anything else. While the metaphysical concept of God falls far short of the divine revelation of Who, as opposed to What, God is, beginning in the Old Testament and culminating in the Incarnation of His Son, Jesus Christ, note that when asked by Moses for His name, the God of the Patriarchs of Israel answered I AM that I AM.

(29) Theories as to their identity include the angels (presumably the fallen ones) and men of Seth’s lineage (as opposed to Cain’s, from whom the “daughters of men” would have sprung in this interpretation).

(30) A similar phrase with the same meaning is also used by Cleanthes in his Hymn to Zeus, but St. Paul’s quotation is closer to Aratus’ wording, the only difference being that the Apostle uses the indicative form of the verb instead of the optative.

(31) Newer translations that have retained the use of “only begotten” include those whose translators were consciously trying to stay in the tradition of the Authorized Version, such as the New King James Version, the King James II, and the Twentieth Century King James Version, and the American Standard Version family of translations, although the New American Standard Version offers “unique” as an alternative in its notes.

(32) Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart James, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th Revised Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1843, 1925, 1996) is to ancient Greek, what the Oxford English Dictionary is to our language. This work will be referred to in the body of this essay as Liddell-Scott, and cited in the references as LSJ. Citations will appear as LSJ, followed by the word being defined, which will be a hyperlink to the entry for that word in the online edition of the lexicon. Here, the reference is to LSJ, μόνος
(33) LSJ, γένος 

(34) LSJ, γεννάω  

(35) Liddell and Scott originally defined μονογενῆς as “only begotten”. The online entry, based upon the current print edition of the 9th revised edition of their work that came out in 1925, defines it as as “the only member of a kin or kind: hence, generally, only, single” LSJ, μονογενῆς . In 1889, an intermediate lexicon based upon the 7th revised edition of the original was published entitled An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. The online version of this, which is usually referred to as Middle Liddell, still gives the definitions “only-begotten, single” and “one and the same blood.” Middle Liddell, μονογενῆς. The change made to the basic definition in LSJ, reflects the fact that since Liddell and Scott first put out their lexicon in the middle of the 19th Century, scholars have concluded that it means “unique” rather than “only begotten”. Since I will be calling into question the line of reasoning by which this conclusion was derived in the body of the essay – and LSJ remains an invaluable resource for calling this reasoning into question – I will not dwell on it further in this note, but wish simply to point out that the idea of “only begotten” has not really been eliminated from the current edition of LSJ. If someone is the “only member of a kin” he has no siblings – in which case he is an “only-begotten” son.

(36) Fenton John Anthony Hort, who along with Brooke Foss Westcott put out the critical edition of The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881) that was the antecedent of later critical editions such as the Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies, and served on the revision committee that produced the Revised Version, the New Testament of which came out the same year and was largely based upon the Westcott-Hort text, was one of the first proponents of the school of Textual Criticism in which the Alexandrian text type of the New Testament was considered to be superior to the Byzantine text type due to the earlier dates of the Alexandrian manuscripts. I disagree with that school, but for the purposes of this essay that is neither here nor there. In the first of his Two Dissertations, published in Cambridge by MacMillan and Company in 1876, he defended the Alexandrian reading of the last verse in the prologue to the Gospel of John, in which the words μονογενῆς θεός appear instead of μονογενῆς υἱός as appear in the Byzantine text (which in this case as in most cases is also the Majority Text). His Note D to this dissertation begins on page 48 and is entitled “Unicus and unigenitus among the Latins.” He first lists the various readings for μονογενῆς in “Passages referring to our Lord”, then for “Other passages”. The first list includes John 1:14, 1:18, 3:16, 3:18, and 1 John 4:19. For each of these, there are both unicus and unigenitus readings, and for John 1:14 there are four different variations that use unici. For each of these verses except John 3:16 and the 1 John reading, in which it is basically even, unigenitus is the most often used. In the other New Testament references, where μονογενῆς is used of someone other than Jesus, such as the widow’s only son in Luke 7:12, unicus is almost universally used. Hort also notes that יָחִיד is the only one word in Hebrew that is translated μονογενῆς in Greek, and that it is “uniformly rendered by ungenitus in the Vulgate where an only son or daughter is meant.” He then points out that the LXX, in all but one of these instances, uses a different Greek word, although “μονογενῆς was used by one or more of the other translators in at least five of the other places.” He then identifies witnesses to a no longer extent LXX reference to Isaac that must have used μονογενῆς and notes that the majority of remaining Latin references use unicus. His conclusion from all of this, is that “unicus is the earliest Old Latin representative of μονογενῆς; and unigenitus the Vulgate rendering of יָחִיד, however translated in Greek, except in St. Luke and the Apocrypha, where Jerome left unicus untouched, and the four peculiar verses from the Psalter…where he substituted other words”. He concludes that in the verses where μονογενῆς refers to Jesus “unicus had been previously supplanted by unigenitus”, i.e, before Jerome, and that “in the Prologue of the Gospel the change took place very early”. It is not obvious, however, that the conclusion that unigenitus supplanted unicus, however early, is demanded by the evidence cited.

(37) The reasoning of those who say that γένος means “kind” or “class” seems to be that even if γένος has clear implications of the idea of blood descent in the vast majority of its uses, if one or two instances can be shown where this idea is unclear or does not seem to be present, then the idea of “category” must be the primary thought.

(38) It is also a blatantly false assumption. Both γένος and γεννάω are derivatives of γίνομαι, as can be found in their entries in Liddell-Scott (see endnotes 34 and 35) and for that matter any competent lexicon that includes etymological references.

(39) Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, for example, makes this argument in a footnote in his The Forgotten Trinity (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1998), p. 201. He also makes the argument that the suffix may not impart much meaning to the compound as a whole, but rather intensify the meaning of μόνος.

(40) See previous footnote. E. F. Harrison also argues for “only” or “unique” over “only begotten” as the meaning of μονογενῆς in his entry under “Only Begotten” in Walter A. Elwell’s Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001) without making these basic mistakes, correctly defining γένος as “origin, race, stock”, and noting that:

the old rendering, “only begotten” is not entirely without justification when the context in John 1:14 is considered. The verb genesthai occurs at the end of 1:13 (“born of God”) and ginesthai in 1:14. These words ultimately go back to the same root as the second half of monogenes. Especially important is 1 John 5:8, where the second “born of God” must refer to Christ according to the superior Greek text.

(41) One of the most basic rules with regards to searching for a verb’s root stem, in ancient Greek, is that the root stem can often be found, by simplifying a doubled consonant. To say that two words do not have the same source because of a difference which may occur in the inflected forms of a single word is absurd.
(42) LSJ, γενεά
(43) LSJ, γενεαλογία
(44) LSJ, γενέθλιος
(45) LSJ, γένεσις
(46) LSJ, γενετή    

(47) William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, Fourth Revised and Augmented Edition translated and adapted from Walter Bauer’s Griechisch-deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 157.

(48) LSJ, γίνομαι  

(49)   Examples include  εὐγενής means “well born”, γηγενής means “earth born”, μεταγενής means “born after”, οἰκογενής means “born in the house, homebred”, πρωτογενής means “first born, primeval”.  Hyperlinks to the online LSJ entries are included in each word.
.

(50) F. J. A. Hort remarks: “The sense of μονογενῆς is fixed by its association with υἱός in the other passages, especially v. 14, by the original and always dominant usage in Greek literature, and by the prevailing consent of the Greek Fathers. It is applied properly to an only child or offspring; and a reference to this special kind of unicity is latent in most of the few cases when it does not lie on the surface, as of the Phoenix in various authors” Hort, op. cit., p. 16-17.

(51) LSJ, λόγος  

(52) In pre-Socratic philosophy, the composition of reality was the major subject of discussion. The famous four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, was the answer Empedocles of Agrigentum gave to the question of what substance the universe is made up of. About a century before Empedocles, however, Heraclitus of Ephesus, had identified fire as the basic element of reality. Other elements were formed out of fire, and to fire they returned, he argued, and in the meantime were always moving and changing, thus the universe could be described as being in a constant state of flux. “You never step in the same river twice” he famously put it. Although a constant state of flux may seem to be the epitome of disorder, this was not how Heraclitus saw it. Beneath the flux, there was a principle which ordered all things. This principle was λόγος – reason, wisdom, word. From Heraclitus, this concept spread throughout other schools of philosophy. The school of Stoicism, for example, adopted it, regarding the λόγος as soul to which the physical universe was the body. Obviously not all of the connotations of the pagan concept were carried over into the Christian concept, but see the next note.

(53) It should be noted, that in addition to the reference to God speaking in Creation, which St. John is obviously alluding to with his use of λόγος, the Old Testament frequently speaks of “The Word of the Lord” in a personalized sense. Examples of this include, but are by no means limited to, Genesis 15:1, Isaiah 55:11, Ezekiel 27:1, Psalm 33:4,6, 107:20, and 147:15). Thus in the Targum, the Aramaic translation of and commentary on the Tanakh, and other rabbinic literature, the concept of the “memra”, developed parallel to that of the λόγος in Greek . Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenized Jewish philosopher who lived in the first centuries BC and AD, used the similarities between these two concepts to attempt a synthesis between Hebrew thought and Greek philosophy. See The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906), memra 

(54) Derek Kidner, who was Warden at Tyndale House in Cambridge, acknowledged the usual understanding, but suggested that it might have been written for a later time of trouble, such as that described in 2 Samuel 10, because “At David’s own accession there were no subject peoples to grow mutinous”. Psalms 1-72: An Introduction & Commentary (Leicester, England and Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1973), p. 50.

(55)   http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801002.htm