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Hebrews 1:5
“To which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’? Or again, ‘I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son’?” (v. 5).
Each person of the Holy Trinity is distinguished from the others by means of Their relations to each other, sometimes called unique personal properties or processions. Properly speaking, we use the term procession only for the personal properties of the Son and the Holy Spirit because the Son and the Holy Spirit both proceed from the Father and the Father proceeds from no one. Nevertheless, the Father does have a personal property that distinguishes Him from the Son and the Spirit, the property of paternity or eternal unbegottenness.
God the Son possesses the unique personal property of filiation (sonship)—that is, He is eternally begotten of the Father. Again, we see this property revealed in texts such as John 3:16, which most literally refers to Jesus as the “only begotten” Son of the Father (e.g., NKJV). Today’s passage likewise refers to the Father’s begetting of the Son.
The notion of the Father’s only begotten Son has been the source of no small controversy in church history. Reasoning from the premise that a father exists before his son and that a son is in some sense lesser than his father, the Arians in the early church contended that the begottenness of the Son means that He is a creature of the Father—the highest and most perfect creature, but a creature nonetheless. The Arians erred, however, in reading human realities back into the life of the Trinity in a completely identical way. The analogy between divine begetting and human begetting consists in “fromness,” not a temporal sequence of existence. When we consider that Hebrews 1:1–4 says that the Son is the express imprint of the Father’s nature, we understand that this can be possible only if the Son has a nature identical to the Father’s. Thus, John 1:1 can tell us that the Word, or Son, is God. The Son, then, is from the Father, and this must be so from all eternity if the Son is also God. Because He is Father, the Father has never been without His Son, and because He is Son, the Son has never been without His Father. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father, not created by the Father.
Augustine of Hippo, commenting on John 5:26 and the Son’s filiation, says that it is not as if the Son “was without life, and then received life. For if thus He received life, He would not have it in Himself. For, indeed, what is in Himself? That He should Himself be the very life.” The Son is from the Father from all eternity in such a way that like the Father, He has life in Himself and everything else that is true of the divine nature.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
We do not know all that it means for the Father to beget the Son other than to say that the Son is from the Father, but the Father is not from the Son. Moreover, this is an eternal reality and is necessary to the very life of God. It also assures us that God is a personal Being to whom we can relate with love and affection, not an abstract force unable to concern itself with the affairs of creation.
For further study
- Psalm 2:7
- Hebrews 5:5
The bible in a year
- Leviticus 18–19
- Matthew 27:32–66
- Leviticus 20–23
- Matthew 28