Nicaea and the Analytic Unfolding of Divine Sonship

The December 2025 issue of Reformed Theological Review is devoted to Nicaea and its reception; it features articles by Michael Haykin, Ryan McGraw, Glenn Butner, editor Grand Sutherland, and me.

My article is an attempt to make explicit something that has been implicit in a lot of my thinking about Christology lately, and I hope the clarification proves helpful. I think the category of “Son,” given to us by divine revelation, is a fundamental datum that we ought to unfold or elaborate on rather than paraphrasing. That normative judgement is my main point: there’s no getting around sonship. But in this article I explain it by engaging Nicaea and Aquinas.

Here’s the abstract:

The doctrine of eternal generation sometimes draws the objection that it sounds like it is covertly telling a story about how the Son came to be. This objection, called here the story objection, can be answered in several ways. Trinitarian theology will never be able to preempt the raising of the story objection, because Scripture itself reveals the second person as the Son, and the Nicene Creed rightly models the classical theological practice of unfolding that revealed term by the use of action verbs: if Son, then generated. Thomas Aquinas is a key example of a trinitarian theologian who accepts both the biblical name and its Nicene unfolding as action that does not reduce to story.

And here are the opening paragraphs:

A common objection to the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son is that the doctrine, as classically stated, seems to present itself in terms that presuppose narrative development and perhaps even to claim that the Son was narratively constituted. To say that the Son is, or was, eternally generated from the Father seems like an origin story explaining where the Son came from. To claim that the second person of the Trinity is the Son because he was begotten from God the Father seems to posit a founding event in the past: God the Father begat or has begotten God the Son. This suggests some kind of theogony, if not at the level of divine substance, then at least at the hypostatic level. ‘Once upon a time’, apparently, within the domain of the divine being, something definitive happened that resulted in the Son being with the Father. However, if God is immutable, then a divine person cannot have an origin story, so the doctrine of eternal generation is incoherent. This can be called the story objection.

The story objection has considerable force, especially when all parties in the discussion agree in advance that the Christian confession of God’s eternity does not permit any origin stories about how God came to be God. A God with an originating narrative that accounts for his existence or even his way of being God cannot be God. If trinitarian theology claims that God eternally exists as Trinity, then it must offer some explanation of why eternal Sonship and eternal generation do not entail an origin story for the Son.

There are several possible replies to the story objection to the doctrine of eternal generation. Below, four will be briefly described before turning to the fifth, which will emphasize the analytic unfolding of Nicaea along Thomist lines.

For the full article, see Reformed Theological Review.

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(pssst)