7 His Only Son
His Only Son
When you hear a young man introduced as “my only son” you know he is the apple of his father’s eye. The words reveal affection. When the Creed calls Jesus God’s “only Son” (echoing “only begotten” in John 1:18; 3:16, 18) the implication is the same. Jesus, as God’s only Son, enjoys his Father’s dearest love. God said so himself when speaking from heaven to identify Jesus at his baptism and transfiguration: “This is my beloved Son . . . ” (Matthew 3:17; 17:5).
Fully God
Moreover, this phrase of the Creed is a bulwark against such lowering and denial of Jesus’ deity as one finds in Unitarianism and the cults. Jesus was not just a God-inspired good man: nor was he a super-angel, first and finest of all creatures, called “god” by courtesy because he is far above men (which is what Arians said in the fourth century, and Jehovah’s Witnesses say today). Jesus was, and remains, God’s only Son, as truly and fully God as his Father is. God’s will, said Jesus, is that “all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father” (John 5:23), a statement which knocks Unitarianism flat.
But is it not mere mythology to talk of a Father-Son relationship within the Godhead? No; for Jesus himself talked this way. He called God “my Father,” and himself (not “a” but) “the Son.” He spoke of a unique and eternal Father-Son relation, into which he had come to bring others. “No one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:27).
Begotten
“Begotten of his Father before all worlds . . . begotten, not made” says the Nicene Creed. This is the language of fourth-century debate. The point of it is that though the Son lives his life in dependence on the Father, because that is his nature (“I live because of the Father,” John 6:57), he is in himself divine and eternal, and is not a created being. The phrase is not suggesting that the Son originated after the Father, or is in himself less than the Father.
“Begotten” in John’s adjective “only begotten” cannot signify an event in God’s past which is not also part of his present, since it is only for us creatures who live in time that momentary events exist. Time as we know it is part of creation, and its Maker is not subject to its limitations, any more than he is subject to the limitations of created space. For us, life is a sequence of moments, and future and past events (begettings, or any other) are both out of reach; but to God (so we must suppose, though we cannot imagine it) all events are constantly present in an eternal Now.
So the pre-mundane “begetting” of the Son (as distinct from the temporal and metaphorical “begetting” of the king in Psalm 2:7, which is applied to Christ in Acts 13:33 and Hebrews 1:5, 5:5, and which means simply bringing him to the throne) must be thought of not as a momentary event whereby God, after being singular, became plural, but as an eternal relationship whereby the first person is always Father to the Son and the second is always Son to the Father. In the third century Origen happily expressed this thought by speaking of the “eternal generation” of the Son. It is part of the unique glory of the triune God.
Mystery
Formulae for the incarnation—the Council of Chalcedon’s “one person in two natures, fully God and fully man,” or Karl Barth’s “God for man, and man for God”—sound simple, but the thing itself is unfathomable. It is easy to shoot down the ancient heresies that the Son took a human body without a human soul, or that he was always two persons under one skin, and with them the modern heresy that the “enfleshing” of the Son was merely a special case of the indwelling of the Spirit, so that Jesus was not God, but merely a God-filled man—but to grasp what the incarnation was in positive terms is beyond us. Don’t worry, though; you do not need to know how God became man in order to know Christ! Understand it or not, the fact remains that “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14); it was the supreme, mind-blowing miracle; love prompted it; and our part is not to speculate about it and scale it down, but to wonder and adore and love and exalt “Jesus Christ . . . the same yesterday and today and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8).
Answer thy mercy’s whole design,
My God incarnated for me;
My spirit
make the radiant shrine,
My light and full salvation be;
And through the shades of death unknown
Conduct me to thy dazzling throne.
Further Bible Study
God’s incarnate Son:
Colossians 1:13-23
Questions for Thought and Discussion
Why is it not enough to call Jesus God-inspired, a superior angel, or even a god?
What is the significance of the fact that the Son is not a created being?
Why does facing Christianity mean facing up to Jesus Christ?