by Brandon D. Smith
The doctrine of eternal generation was one of the linchpins of early orthodox Christology, starting most clearly with Origen but flowering in the pro-Nicene era with Athanasius and others. While this doctrine may appear on the surface to be a merely “philosophical” inquiry, it was deeply scriptural for the pro-Nicene theologians.
In his rebuttals of “Arianism,”[1] Athanasius made several basic theological moves based on a few key texts. For our purposes here, we will walk through his argument in Apologia Contra Arianos (A Defense Against the Arians) 1.14 as a representative example of his larger project.[2] We will see here that Athanasius’s case for eternal generation helps buttress the biblical doctrine of the Son’s full divinity.
He begins by addressing one particular “Arian” rebuttal: if the Son is uncreated/eternal, he must actually be the Father’s brother. For these groups, for the Son to be truly a son, he must come after the Father in some sort of sequence; his “begottenness” or “generation” must have had a beginning. Athanasius replies,
For the Father and the Son were not generated from some pre-existing origin, that we may account them brothers, but the Father is the origin of the Son and begot Him; and the Father is Father, and not born the son of any; and the Son is Son, and not brother. Further, if He is called the eternal offspring of the Father, He is rightly so called. For never was the essence of the Father imperfect, that what is proper to it should be added afterwards; nor, as man from man, has the Son been begotten, so as to be later than His Father's existence; but He is God's offspring, and as being proper Son of God, who is ever, He exists eternally.
Put another way, Athanasius is happy to concede some sort of “origin” in the Son’s existence from the Father—for they are truly and always Father and Son—but it must be an eternal begottenness/generation (birth) because the Father is eternal. If the Son is a created being, a creature like us, he is not truly the only begotten Son of the Father. Instead, he is just another generic son, like humans are. But to call Christians “sons and daughters” of the Father is to talk about their adoption as sons through the true Son (e.g. Romans 8). If the Father did beget the Son in time, then the Father would have somehow added to himself by becoming a Father, which would indicate that the perfect God—lacking nothing—would have added to himself. This would mean that God was imperfect or lacking, and that he can change or add titles and/or attributes to himself.
One major issue with Arius—and similar groups after him—was their inability to distinguish between reading Scripture “literally” and analogously, at least on the issue. For them, the Son can only be a son if he is younger or somehow comes after the Father in time. But the Creator/creature distinction limits our ability to make one-to-one comparisons between how human beget children and how the Father does. God is Creator, and thus stands outside of creation and is not bound by the rules of creation. As Athanasius says, “For, whereas it is proper to men to beget in time, from the imperfection of their nature, God's offspring is eternal, for His nature is ever perfect.”
Athanasius then trots out (at least) three passages that help affirm his point:
But if He is Son, as the Father says, and the Scriptures proclaim, and 'Son' is nothing else than what is generated from the Father; and what is generated from the Father is His Word [John 1:1-3], and Wisdom [1 Cor 1:24], and Radiance [Heb 1:3]; what is to be said but that, in maintaining 'Once the Son was not,' they rob God of His Word, like plunderers, and openly predicate of Him that He was once without His proper Word and Wisdom, and that the Light was once without radiance, and the Fountain was once barren and dry?
This is a crucial point made by many theologians throughout these debates: to say that the Son was created is to say that the Father at some point was mute (“Word”), dumb (“Wisdom”), and dull (“Radiance of God’s glory”). Further, they must say that the “fountain of salvation” (Isa 12:3; John 7:37-38) was once dry. When we think of how God is described throughout Scripture—eternal, perfect, unchanging, complete—we would be doing serious damage to the biblical portrait of God if we said that the Son was created.
Instead, the Bible describes that the Son is God, was always with God, and created all things with God (John 1:1-3). So whatever we say about the Son’s “begottenness,” we must say that it is an eternal “birth,” distinct from our finite creaturely conceptions of birth. There is a reality—albeit a mysterious reality—that the Father and Son are fully and truly Father and Son, both are fully and truly God, and yet they are not each other.
We know somewhat intuitively when Scripture says that God “reaches down with his mighty right hand” or “turns his ear toward us” that God doesn’t “literally” have arms and ears in these passages—we know it is an analogy to tell us about his activity. In the same way, eternal generation affirms the Son’s uniqueness as the only begotten Son of the Father, without implying he was created or is somehow of a lower status than the Father.
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[1] I use quotations here because Athanasius used “Arians” polemically as a catch-all term for several likeminded groups who denied the Son’s full divinity, even though some groups weren’t tied directly to Arius.
[2] I highly recommend reading the entire work, but especially Book I to see how wide a biblical-theological net Athanasius casts.