What the Early Church Believed: Christ's Eternal Sonship

The error

Some Evangelicals, such as J. Oliver Buswell and the late Walter Martin, have abandoned the Trinitarian faith defined at the First Council of Nicaea by denying Christ's eternal Sonship. They claim the second person of the Trinity was God but became the Son only at his incarnation.

This destroys the relations within the Trinity. If the Son was not eternally begotten by the Father, neither did the Spirit eternally proceed from the Father through the Son. And without a Son there is no Father. The familial relations of the Godhead would be reduced to three persons, "Number One, Number Two, and Number Three."

What Scripture shows

God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him (1 John 4:9): he was already the Son when he was sent. John 1:1, 14 teaches the same under another image: the Word was with God and was God from the beginning, and became flesh. Just as speech proceeds from a speaker, or a son from his father, the second person eternally proceeds from the first.

Passages in which early Christians speak of God as Father before the Incarnation imply the Son's role before it, since without a Son there is no Father.

The witness of the early Church

• Ignatius of Antioch (110): Jesus Christ was with the Father before time began.
• Justin Martyr (151, 155): Christ is God's only proper Son, begotten before all creatures.
• Irenaeus (189) rejects attributing a beginning to the eternal Word.
• Tertullian (216) calls the Son first-begotten and only-begotten, citing Psalm 45:1-2.
• Hippolytus (228), Origen (237) and Gregory the Wonderworker (265) teach that the Word is begotten of God's own substance, the true Son of the true Father.
• Lactantius (307): the name "Father" cannot exist without the Son.
• The Council of Nicaea I (325) and Council of Constantinople I (381): the only-begotten Son, born of the Father before all ages, begotten, not made.
• Cyril of Jerusalem (350): the Son did not come to exist in time but is eternally begotten of the Father.
• The Long Ignatius (350), citing John 1:14: the only-begotten Son and Word before time began.
• Athanasius (360) answers the Arian charge that an eternal Son would be the Father's "brother": the Father is the source and begetter of the Son, and God's offspring is eternal because God's nature is ever perfect.
• Basil the Great (368), Ambrose (379) and Gregory of Nazianz (380) explain why he is called Word and Son.
• The Council of Rome (382) calls it heresy to deny the Son is begotten of the Father's substance.
• The Athanasian Creed (400): the Son is begotten of the Father's substance before time.
• Augustine (416): God begot the Son outside of time.
• Patrick of Ireland (452): Christ was begotten of the Father before all beginning.
• The Council of Constantinople II (553) anathematizes anyone who does not confess two generations of the Word: one from the Father before all ages, the other in the last days.