Imagine our delight at finding a refreshingly clear statement about the identity of Jesus in the theological journal, Ex Auditu (7, 1991). The author is Dr. Colin Brown, systematic theologian at a well-known seminary in California. Dr. Brown is rightly critical of the “social Trinity,” the notion that God is three distinct personalities. He traces this mistaken view of who God is to “a systematic misunderstanding of Son-of-God language in Scripture.” Here he puts his finger, surely, on the age-old conflict which has troubled the Church for nearly 2000 years.
Dr. Brown says: “Indeed one may ask whether the term ‘Son of God’ is in and of itself a divine title at all. Certainly there are many instances in biblical language where it is definitely not a designation of deity.” He goes on to illustrate his point from the Bible. Then he says: “In the light of these passages in their context, the title ‘Son of God’ is not in itself a designation of personal deity or an expression of metaphysical distinctions within the Godhead. Indeed to be ‘Son of God’ one has to be a being who is not God! It is a designation for a creature indicating a special relationship with God. In particular, it denotes God’s representative, God’s vice-regent. It is a designation of kingship, identifying the king as God’s son.”
A marvelous statement! Should not this be made compulsory reading for every student in every land entering the halls of theological seminaries? Our joy of course was made even fuller when we read in the same article that it is a systematic mistake to read “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) and statements about the mutual indwelling of Jesus and the Father (John 10:38; 14:10, 11, 20; 17:21, 23) as statements about “inner relations of the ‘persons’ of the Trinity.” “The Fourth Gospel itself does not require such a reading. When read in context the statements are evidently statements about Jesus’ relationship with the Father on earth.”
Dr. Brown continues: “It is a common but patent misreading of the opening of John’s Gospel to read it as if it said: ‘In the beginning was the Son and the Son was with God and the Son was God’ (John 1:1). What has happened here is the substitution of the Son for Word (Greek logos), and thereby the Son is made a member of the Godhead which existed from the beginning. But if we follow carefully the thought of John’s prologue, it is the Word that preexisted eternally with God and is God.”
The Son of God of the Bible is certainly not an uncreated member of a Trinity. The Son of God is a creature, that is, a created being. Luke 1:35 provides the essential data, along with Matthew 1:18, 20, to inform us of the point of time at which the Son was begotten or created. It was in the womb of his mother Mary. Mary had no difficulty believing what the angel announced to her. “For this reason exactly (dio kai), the Son to be begotten will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). For what reason? The miracle which God performed in the creation of His beloved Son who is the second Adam. Just as God created the first Adam from the dust of the ground, so He later (not earlier!) created the second Adam by bringing him into existence within the human family, and precisely as the blood descendant, through Mary, of David, the king. The opening verse of the New Testament is sufficient to correct the age-old error that the Son was sent down literally from heaven and transformed himself into an embryo, while maintaining a full status as God, upholding, as a fetus, the whole universe! Matthew 1:1 informs us of the “generation of Jesus Christ.” Everyone should know that “generation” means the beginning, the coming into existence of a new person. That person could not “come into existence,” i.e., be generated, if he was already in existence. There was no actual unique Son of God until he was generated in Mary. Until then he was a promised Son, a Son whom God intended finally to create. He did this around 3 BC. The present age of the Son of God is thus some 2000 years, not infinity.
The later creeds forced on the Bible a new identity for the Savior. He was declared to be God Himself. Of course this made God into two Persons, Father and Son, and thus ruined the first principle of sound theology that God is only One (Isa. 44:24; Deut. 6:4; John 17:3, etc.) and that He is alone as God, without rival or partner. The Son of God of the creeds originates outside the human biological chain and is thus by definition not really a human person at all. But Mary bore a human being. That is what mothers do. She did not bear a hybrid God/man nor an angel/man.
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