“Son” without Eternal Generation?

To maintain eternal sonship without linking it to eternal generation is to take up a theologically eccentric position.

It is eccentric not just in the sense of being outside the mainstream of the Christian doctrinal tradition, but also in the sense of being a kind of mixed view, an uncentered position midway between the logic of consistent Nicene Trinitarianism and the logic of consistent Socinianism.

In the hands of conservative theologians who place a high value on careful reading of Scripture, the resulting doctrine exhibits very little actual resemblance to Socinianism. In fact, such theologians can remain in such close proximity to a Nicene-style Trinitarianism that the differences rarely emerge into view. After all, they affirm the full divinity of Christ, his eternal Sonship, and the Triunity of persons in the one Godhead. That’s certainly not nothing! But for a variety of reasons, they either deny eternal generation, or (while affirming it) consider it poorly grounded in Scripture, or treat it as marginal to the question of what it means to call Jesus the Son of God.

One of the motivations that drives theologians who affirm eternal sonship but deny that it is connected to eternal generation is that they see the former (sonship) revealed clearly in Scripture, but do not see the latter (eternal generation) there. They are wrong, but wrong for the right reasons. If eternal generation were not Scriptural, it should not be believed. What these sonship-minus-eternal-generation theologians fail to see, however, is that (a) eternal generation is Scriptural, and (b) without it, the case for eternal sonship is weaker than they imagine.

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This 260-word fragment is something I wrote for my chapter in the volume On Classical Trinitarianism (ed. Matthew Barrett, IVP Academic, 2024), but then cut before publication. I’m not sure why I removed this section. I suspect it was an early, concise statement of one of my theses, which then became redundant once I had set up the whole argument at greater length.