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Eternal Generation and LDS/Evangelical Dialog

Many of us evangelicals involved in the LDS/evangelical space of evangelism and dialog come from backgrounds where “Only Begotten Son” was taken to mean having unique consubstantiality without derivation (B. B. Warfield) or being incarnate and in the flesh (the early John MacArthur; Walter Martin, William Lane Craig).

The historic Christian doctrine of the Trinity is far greater. It holds that the Son was “begotten of his Father before all worlds.” This is also called eternal generation. This is the Nicene, Niceno-Constantinopolitan, Athanasian, Chalcedonian, Medieval, and Confessional Protestant view of the Son.

This doctrine (along with spiration) helps give definition to the distinctions between divine persons. It also further clarifies that the Trinity is not a mere “abstraction”, nor gas or force, nor akin to some LDS/platonic views of eternal law.

The doctrine of eternal generation is an excellent point of contrast with both early Mormonism (sans eternal progenitorship; favoring incarnational sonship) and later Mormonism (where all sons have fathers, and all fathers are sons).1 I submit that Mormonism’s rejection of eternal generation was its earliest expression of anti-transcendence. The doctrine is woefully missing from evangelical/LDS discussions, and more importantly, it is worth recovering for its own sake.

“Generation occurs also in the divine being. God’s fecundity is a beautiful theme, one that frequently recurs in the church fathers. God is no abstract, fixed, monadic, solitary substance, but a plenitude of life. It is his nature (οὐσια) to be generative (γεννητικη) and fruitful (καρπογονος). It is capable of expansion, unfolding, and communication. Those who deny this fecund productivity fail to take seriously the fact that God is an infinite fullness of blessed life. All such people have left is an abstract deistic concept of God, or to compensate for this sterility, in pantheistic fashion they include the life of the world in the divine being. Apart from the Trinity even the act of creation becomes inconceivable. For if God cannot communicate himself, he is a darkened light, a dry spring, unable to exert himself outward to communicate himself to creatures.”
—Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, transl. John Bolt, and John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 2.308–310.

Online reading

Evangelical

  • Keith E. Johnson, “Is the Eternal Generation of the Son a Biblical Idea?,” The Gospel Coalition, June 18, 2012. Link.
    • If you only have time to read one thing, start here.
  • Josh Malone, “Begotten, Not Made,” Credo Magazine 10, no. 4 (2020). Link.
  • Scott R. Swain, “B. B. Warfield and the Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” Themelios 43, no. 1 (April 2018). Link.
    • Explains how B. B. Warfield’s backed off from the classic Nicene view.
  • Charles Lee Irons, “Let’s Go Back to ‘Only Begotten,’” The Gospel Coalition, November 23, 2016. Link.
    • Argues for a return in Bible translations to “only begotten Son” (instead of “one and only Son”).
  • John MacArthur, “Reexamining the Eternal Sonship of Christ,” Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 6, no. 1 (2001): 21-23. Link.
    • John MacArthur initially taught “incarnational sonship” (as did Walter Martin; the view that “only begotten” chiefly pertained to the condescension of Christ, his incarnation), but then returned to the doctrine of “eternal sonship.”

LDS reading

  • Joseph Smith’s “Sermon in the Grove.” Meeting in the Grove, east of the Temple, June 16, 1844. Link.
  • Blake T. Ostler, “The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 59–78. Link. See also chapter 12 in Line Upon Line.
    • The Book of Moses (LDS scripture) teaching a “conceptual blueprint” category of pre-existence, and not the eternal personalism that we see in the later Joseph Smith, or the spirit birth ideas of Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, or B. H. Roberts.
  • James M. McLachlan, “Is God Subject to or the Creator of Eternal Law?,” BYU Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2021): 49–64. Link.
  • Samuel M. Brown, “Mormons Probably Aren’t Materialists,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 50, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 39–72. Link.
  • Lane Wolfley, “The Book of Mormon’s View of Godhead: Now It All Makes Sense” (presented at the Sunstone Southwest Symposium, 2006/2007). Audio. Transcript.
    • Essentially argues that incarnational sonship (i.e. “only begotten in the flesh”) was common currency in Smith’s theological environment. One could probably also correlate Smith’s early views on incarnational sonship to Adam Clarke’s commentaries.

Books

Evangelical

  • Scott R. Swain, The Trinity: An Introduction (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020).
  • Scott R. Swain, The Trinity & the Bible: On Theological Interpretation (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021).
  • Matthew Barrett, Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2021).

See also

References

  1. The Ostlerian variation is interesting (as I understand it): an eternally emergent social trinity of three beings wherein the Father always gives to the Son the fullness of divine light, without beginning, although perhaps with a pause at incarnation. ↩︎