3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7.“This day have I begotten thee”is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ's Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is“born before every creature”(while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and“by the resurrection of the dead”is notmadeto be, but only“declaredto be,”“according to the Spirit of holiness”(= according to his divine nature)“the Son of God with power”(see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com.in loco; also Com. onActs 13:33—“‘To-day’refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.”Philo says that“to-day”with God means“forever.”This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul inActs 13:33refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers inActs 13:34, 35to another Psalm, thesixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn[pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”).Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως =“begotten first before all creation”(Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or“first-born before every creature,i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created”(Ellicott, Com.in loco).“Herein”(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, onCol. 1:15)“is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, onCol. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the“primogenitus mundi.”OnRom. 1:4(ὁρισθέντος =“manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only theinnerof a holy spiritual essence, but also theouterof an existence in power and heavenly glory.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an‘absurd fiction.’But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός,“the only begotten God,”inJohn 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ inRom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,”as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain fromJohn 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”;Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”;Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”;cf.Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”;30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied inJohn 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco;Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.”Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.The Scripture terms“generation”and“procession,”as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is(a) Not creation, but the Father's communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father isfons trinitatis, notfons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299;per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun.[pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered:“The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”(c) Not an act of the Father's will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are“begotten.”The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not“begotten,”but“proceeding.”(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.The subordination of thepersonof the Son to thepersonof the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.”OnJohn 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco.Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be“eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.“Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.”E. G. Robinson:“An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus[pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry,‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’(John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant,‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’(John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source,‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream,‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized,‘in all’(Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called‘the executive of the Godhead.’”Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ's eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit's equal dignity and glory.We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assignopera naturæ; to the Son,opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit,opera gratiæ applicatæ.”All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this loveisthe Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for loveisthe Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of“1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.”Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.
3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7.“This day have I begotten thee”is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ's Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is“born before every creature”(while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and“by the resurrection of the dead”is notmadeto be, but only“declaredto be,”“according to the Spirit of holiness”(= according to his divine nature)“the Son of God with power”(see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com.in loco; also Com. onActs 13:33—“‘To-day’refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.”Philo says that“to-day”with God means“forever.”This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul inActs 13:33refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers inActs 13:34, 35to another Psalm, thesixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn[pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”).Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως =“begotten first before all creation”(Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or“first-born before every creature,i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created”(Ellicott, Com.in loco).“Herein”(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, onCol. 1:15)“is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, onCol. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the“primogenitus mundi.”OnRom. 1:4(ὁρισθέντος =“manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only theinnerof a holy spiritual essence, but also theouterof an existence in power and heavenly glory.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an‘absurd fiction.’But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός,“the only begotten God,”inJohn 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ inRom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,”as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain fromJohn 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”;Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”;Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”;cf.Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”;30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied inJohn 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco;Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.”Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.The Scripture terms“generation”and“procession,”as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is(a) Not creation, but the Father's communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father isfons trinitatis, notfons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299;per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun.[pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered:“The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”(c) Not an act of the Father's will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are“begotten.”The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not“begotten,”but“proceeding.”(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.The subordination of thepersonof the Son to thepersonof the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.”OnJohn 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco.Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be“eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.“Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.”E. G. Robinson:“An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus[pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry,‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’(John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant,‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’(John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source,‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream,‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized,‘in all’(Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called‘the executive of the Godhead.’”Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ's eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit's equal dignity and glory.We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assignopera naturæ; to the Son,opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit,opera gratiæ applicatæ.”All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this loveisthe Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for loveisthe Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of“1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.”Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.
3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7.“This day have I begotten thee”is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ's Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is“born before every creature”(while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and“by the resurrection of the dead”is notmadeto be, but only“declaredto be,”“according to the Spirit of holiness”(= according to his divine nature)“the Son of God with power”(see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com.in loco; also Com. onActs 13:33—“‘To-day’refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.”Philo says that“to-day”with God means“forever.”This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul inActs 13:33refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers inActs 13:34, 35to another Psalm, thesixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn[pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”).Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως =“begotten first before all creation”(Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or“first-born before every creature,i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created”(Ellicott, Com.in loco).“Herein”(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, onCol. 1:15)“is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, onCol. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the“primogenitus mundi.”OnRom. 1:4(ὁρισθέντος =“manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only theinnerof a holy spiritual essence, but also theouterof an existence in power and heavenly glory.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an‘absurd fiction.’But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός,“the only begotten God,”inJohn 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ inRom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,”as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain fromJohn 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”;Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”;Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”;cf.Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”;30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied inJohn 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco;Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.”Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.The Scripture terms“generation”and“procession,”as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is(a) Not creation, but the Father's communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father isfons trinitatis, notfons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299;per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun.[pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered:“The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”(c) Not an act of the Father's will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are“begotten.”The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not“begotten,”but“proceeding.”(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.The subordination of thepersonof the Son to thepersonof the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.”OnJohn 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco.Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be“eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.“Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.”E. G. Robinson:“An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus[pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry,‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’(John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant,‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’(John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source,‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream,‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized,‘in all’(Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called‘the executive of the Godhead.’”Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ's eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit's equal dignity and glory.We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assignopera naturæ; to the Son,opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit,opera gratiæ applicatæ.”All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this loveisthe Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for loveisthe Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of“1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.”Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.
3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7.“This day have I begotten thee”is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ's Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is“born before every creature”(while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and“by the resurrection of the dead”is notmadeto be, but only“declaredto be,”“according to the Spirit of holiness”(= according to his divine nature)“the Son of God with power”(see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com.in loco; also Com. onActs 13:33—“‘To-day’refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.”Philo says that“to-day”with God means“forever.”This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul inActs 13:33refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers inActs 13:34, 35to another Psalm, thesixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn[pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”).Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως =“begotten first before all creation”(Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or“first-born before every creature,i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created”(Ellicott, Com.in loco).“Herein”(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, onCol. 1:15)“is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, onCol. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the“primogenitus mundi.”OnRom. 1:4(ὁρισθέντος =“manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only theinnerof a holy spiritual essence, but also theouterof an existence in power and heavenly glory.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an‘absurd fiction.’But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός,“the only begotten God,”inJohn 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ inRom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,”as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain fromJohn 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”;Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”;Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”;cf.Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”;30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied inJohn 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco;Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.”Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.The Scripture terms“generation”and“procession,”as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is(a) Not creation, but the Father's communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father isfons trinitatis, notfons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299;per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun.[pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered:“The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”(c) Not an act of the Father's will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are“begotten.”The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not“begotten,”but“proceeding.”(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.The subordination of thepersonof the Son to thepersonof the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.”OnJohn 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco.Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be“eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.“Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.”E. G. Robinson:“An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus[pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry,‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’(John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant,‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’(John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source,‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream,‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized,‘in all’(Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called‘the executive of the Godhead.’”Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ's eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit's equal dignity and glory.We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assignopera naturæ; to the Son,opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit,opera gratiæ applicatæ.”All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this loveisthe Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for loveisthe Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of“1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.”Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.
3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7.“This day have I begotten thee”is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ's Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is“born before every creature”(while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and“by the resurrection of the dead”is notmadeto be, but only“declaredto be,”“according to the Spirit of holiness”(= according to his divine nature)“the Son of God with power”(see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com.in loco; also Com. onActs 13:33—“‘To-day’refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.”Philo says that“to-day”with God means“forever.”This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul inActs 13:33refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers inActs 13:34, 35to another Psalm, thesixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn[pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”).Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως =“begotten first before all creation”(Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or“first-born before every creature,i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created”(Ellicott, Com.in loco).“Herein”(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, onCol. 1:15)“is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, onCol. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the“primogenitus mundi.”OnRom. 1:4(ὁρισθέντος =“manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only theinnerof a holy spiritual essence, but also theouterof an existence in power and heavenly glory.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an‘absurd fiction.’But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός,“the only begotten God,”inJohn 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ inRom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,”as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain fromJohn 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”;Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”;Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”;cf.Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”;30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied inJohn 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco;Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.”Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.The Scripture terms“generation”and“procession,”as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is(a) Not creation, but the Father's communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father isfons trinitatis, notfons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299;per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun.[pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered:“The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”(c) Not an act of the Father's will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are“begotten.”The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not“begotten,”but“proceeding.”(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.The subordination of thepersonof the Son to thepersonof the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.”OnJohn 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco.Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be“eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.“Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.”E. G. Robinson:“An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus[pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry,‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’(John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant,‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’(John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source,‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream,‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized,‘in all’(Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called‘the executive of the Godhead.’”Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ's eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit's equal dignity and glory.We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assignopera naturæ; to the Son,opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit,opera gratiæ applicatæ.”All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this loveisthe Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for loveisthe Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of“1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.”Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.
3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7.“This day have I begotten thee”is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ's Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is“born before every creature”(while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and“by the resurrection of the dead”is notmadeto be, but only“declaredto be,”“according to the Spirit of holiness”(= according to his divine nature)“the Son of God with power”(see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com.in loco; also Com. onActs 13:33—“‘To-day’refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.”Philo says that“to-day”with God means“forever.”This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul inActs 13:33refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers inActs 13:34, 35to another Psalm, thesixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn[pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”).Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως =“begotten first before all creation”(Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or“first-born before every creature,i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created”(Ellicott, Com.in loco).“Herein”(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, onCol. 1:15)“is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, onCol. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the“primogenitus mundi.”OnRom. 1:4(ὁρισθέντος =“manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only theinnerof a holy spiritual essence, but also theouterof an existence in power and heavenly glory.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an‘absurd fiction.’But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός,“the only begotten God,”inJohn 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ inRom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,”as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain fromJohn 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”;Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”;Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”;cf.Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”;30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied inJohn 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco;Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.”Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.The Scripture terms“generation”and“procession,”as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is(a) Not creation, but the Father's communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father isfons trinitatis, notfons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299;per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun.[pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered:“The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”(c) Not an act of the Father's will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are“begotten.”The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not“begotten,”but“proceeding.”(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.The subordination of thepersonof the Son to thepersonof the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.”OnJohn 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco.Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be“eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.“Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.”E. G. Robinson:“An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus[pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry,‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’(John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant,‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’(John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source,‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream,‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized,‘in all’(Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called‘the executive of the Godhead.’”Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ's eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit's equal dignity and glory.We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assignopera naturæ; to the Son,opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit,opera gratiæ applicatæ.”All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this loveisthe Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for loveisthe Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of“1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.”Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.
That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7.“This day have I begotten thee”is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ's Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is“born before every creature”(while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and“by the resurrection of the dead”is notmadeto be, but only“declaredto be,”“according to the Spirit of holiness”(= according to his divine nature)“the Son of God with power”(see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.
Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com.in loco; also Com. onActs 13:33—“‘To-day’refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.”Philo says that“to-day”with God means“forever.”This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul inActs 13:33refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers inActs 13:34, 35to another Psalm, thesixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn[pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”).Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως =“begotten first before all creation”(Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or“first-born before every creature,i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created”(Ellicott, Com.in loco).“Herein”(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, onCol. 1:15)“is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, onCol. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the“primogenitus mundi.”OnRom. 1:4(ὁρισθέντος =“manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only theinnerof a holy spiritual essence, but also theouterof an existence in power and heavenly glory.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an‘absurd fiction.’But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός,“the only begotten God,”inJohn 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ inRom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,”as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain fromJohn 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”;Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”;Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”;cf.Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”;30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied inJohn 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco;Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.”Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.
Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com.in loco; also Com. onActs 13:33—“‘To-day’refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.”Philo says that“to-day”with God means“forever.”This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul inActs 13:33refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers inActs 13:34, 35to another Psalm, thesixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn[pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”).Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως =“begotten first before all creation”(Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or“first-born before every creature,i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created”(Ellicott, Com.in loco).“Herein”(says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, onCol. 1:15)“is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, onCol. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the“primogenitus mundi.”
OnRom. 1:4(ὁρισθέντος =“manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only theinnerof a holy spiritual essence, but also theouterof an existence in power and heavenly glory.”Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an‘absurd fiction.’But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”
If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός,“the only begotten God,”inJohn 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ inRom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,”as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain fromJohn 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”;Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”;Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”;cf.Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”;30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?”The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied inJohn 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco;Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.”Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.
The Scripture terms“generation”and“procession,”as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is
(a) Not creation, but the Father's communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.
The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father isfons trinitatis, notfons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299;per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.
The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father isfons trinitatis, notfons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299;per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.
(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.
If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun.[pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered:“The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”
If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun.[pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered:“The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”
(c) Not an act of the Father's will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.
The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are“begotten.”The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not“begotten,”but“proceeding.”
The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are“begotten.”The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not“begotten,”but“proceeding.”
(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.
The subordination of thepersonof the Son to thepersonof the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.”OnJohn 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco.Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be“eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.“Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.”E. G. Robinson:“An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus[pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry,‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’(John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant,‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’(John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source,‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream,‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized,‘in all’(Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called‘the executive of the Godhead.’”Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.
The subordination of thepersonof the Son to thepersonof the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.”OnJohn 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco.
Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.”Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.”Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be“eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.
The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.“Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.”E. G. Robinson:“An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus[pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry,‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’(John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant,‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’(John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source,‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream,‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized,‘in all’(Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called‘the executive of the Godhead.’”Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.
The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ's eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit's equal dignity and glory.
We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.
We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.
John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assignopera naturæ; to the Son,opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit,opera gratiæ applicatæ.”All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this loveisthe Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for loveisthe Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of“1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.”Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.
John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assignopera naturæ; to the Son,opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit,opera gratiæ applicatæ.”All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this loveisthe Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for loveisthe Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”
Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of“1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.”Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.