Son of God or God the Son?

The pattern offers a powerful argument against the trinity in its evaluation of the sonship of Christ. Whereas most arguments against the trinity leverage individual prooftexts where cracks in the doctrine can be seen, the pattern’s main argument examines a large body of biblical evidence concerning the sonship of Christ, and makes the case that the Son is best understood as Jesus’ human nature relating to God as his Father, rather than God the Son relating to God the Father. Without denying that Jesus is truly God and truly man, patternists argue that scripture is most cleanly harmonized when we recognize that Jesus is a son of God in the same way that Christians are sons of God, according to our human nature. This allows him to be truly regarded as our brother and co-heir, because his sonship flows from his humanity rather than his divinity.

When this case is received and accepted in its full force by trinitarians, most will appeal to a dual sonship concept to rescue “God the Son” from being wholly replaced by “the son of God” in our understanding of Jesus. Simply put, the thesis is that yes — Jesus does have a human sonship toward God as his Father — but according to his divine nature he is still rightly understood as God the Son incarnated within the son of God. Thus we have two sonship relationships in view in the person of Christ, that of an eternal begetting of God the Son from God the Father within the godhead, as well as an in-time begetting of Jesus as a human son of God.

Rescue devices like the dual sonship hypothesis are an important part of building systematic knowledge about a subject. For example, some will challenge the integrity of the gospels’ account of Jesus casting demons out of a man and into a herd of pigs. There are questions about the geography of where this happened (supposed contradictions), as well as a difference in the number of demon-possessed people impacted. For someone who believes that the gospel accounts are reliable, a need therefore arises for a rescue device that will allow all seemingly contradictory passages to be harmonized together. When it is shown that the original view can be reasonably harmonized with information that challenges it, the original view is able to withstand its challenge. Otherwise, it needs to be resolved by another method, such as presenting an alternative understanding of the passages, rejecting the inerrancy of scripture, or rejecting the inclusion of the passage in scripture due to manuscript issues, etc. Often an appeal to ignorance is also viable, where we don’t know a good resolution, but can show that the challenge isn’t a true contradiction, just a mystery.

As we work to build and rebuild knowledge in the face of challenges to existing systems of thought, we therefore need to understand how to evaluate rescue devices in their merits and their limitations. There are three basic questions to ask.

1. Is this rescue device possible? Given everything we know about the subject at hand and its surrounding context, are we able to hold this hypothesis without contradiction? For the Christian whose authority is the Bible, this involves ensuring that the rescue device does not contradict other biblical texts.
2. Is this rescue device likely? There can be a gray area in biblical interpretation where we compare multiple hypotheses that are all possible, and evaluate which is the most likely. This gives us guidance for drawing tentative conclusions while allowing us to revisit the matter when other unforeseen evidence presents itself.
3. Is this rescue device evidenced? The most powerful form of rescue device is one which has additional supporting evidence that establishes it as the most likely alternative. Things that are true tend to leave evidence in the world around us, so building knowledge about the world tends to involve moving toward those explanations that are not only possible, but which also arise from the body of evidence we have.

An example of this dynamic on the patternist side came when a trinitarian pointed out that John 17 shows evidence of a preincarnate sonship for Jesus. If Jesus’ sonship comes through his humanity, then how could he be the son of God before he was incarnated as a man?

This challenge is legitimate, and it forces a patternist to either forfeit his view of the sonship of Christ, or come up with a rescue device to explain Jesus’ preincarnate sonship. The best answer we have is that the Angel of the Lord referenced throughout the Old Testament served as a real, created nature for Jesus’ divine nature, such that this “preincarnate hypostatic union” could be rightly called the Son of God according to his created nature. The reason that this rescue device is so powerful is that not only is it possible, there is also substantial evidence throughout scripture to suggest that it is actually the true way of understanding Jesus’ preincarnate form.

In the same way, trinitarians are equally free to develop rescue devices to the patternist challenge that scripture teaches a human sonship for Christ, rather than seeing Jesus’ divine nature as God the Son. A berean’s task then is to evaluate such rescue devices to determine if they’re A) possible, B) probable, and C) evidenced by anything in the Bible.

Perhaps the strongest case for retaining divine sonship would be the idea that human sonship may be patterned off of it. In terms of Christian philosophy, one can argue that everything in the world needs to trace back to God in terms of its design and meaning. The fact that humans are in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27) is the culmination of God’s work to examine his own nature, and create an entity in the world that is completely based off of that image. Lesser aspects of the world then reflect only a fragment of God’s nature, such as the laws of logic reflecting the way God thinks, or moral laws reflecting the way God feels, etc. Human sonship therefore should trace somehow to a fragment of the nature of God, and the trinitarian belief in God the Son fulfills that expectation. Simply put, humans have children because the concept of child-bearing exists in the very nature of God.

Against this, it can be pointed out that the typological relationship doesn’t fit very well. God designed humanity to bear children as two persons who come together to produce an image-bearer together. The trinity has one person (the Father) eternally begetting God the Son, with a third person (the Holy Spirit) off on the side with no apparent role in the matter. A trinitarian might rescue the rescue hypothesis by arguing that the Spirit could serve as the second person who unites with the Father to beget the Son, but we have no biblical evidence that this is the case, and generally trinitarians seem to view the Spirit as being submitted to both the Father and the Son, in terms of authority in the godhead, which would go against a mothering role.

The issue of names in the godhead is also worth pointing out. Father and Son are related concepts, whereas Word and Spirit (Breath) are distinctly related concepts (i.e. related to each-other, but not to the Father and the Son). In trinitarian language, the second person of the trinity is named both God the Son and God the Word, joining him to either the Father or the Spirit conceptually, depending on which nomenclature is in view. The fact that there no unified nomenclature that conceptually joins all three persons of the trinity together is unusual. We’d expect to see the Spirit represented as God the Mother if human sonship were patterned after some kind of divine generation within the godhead.

To be fair, patternists do view the Spirit as the image after which woman is patterned, just as men are patterned after the Word, without demanding God the Mother terminology. Patternists have a bipartite godhead of Word and Spirit that unites to be the God and Father of Christ, Adam, and Christians. My point here is simply that words and breath are conceptually related ideas, allowing the patternist godhead to make sense in terms of the meaning ascribed to each of its members. The trinitarian godhead has disjointed meaning, such that there is no unifying concept that explains how or why these persons unite together. If creation is based off of the godhead, and man in particular is created in his image and likeness, then we should see the three persons of the godhead reflected in his image-bearers. Trinitarian theology struggles in this area, so basing human sonship off of divine sonship is problematic on account of that struggle.

As for the patternist alternative, one could argue that sonship comes out of God’s nature through the creative impulse that he possesses. If God is the only ultimate category of thought, and God chooses to express what he knows about himself through creation, then one would expect him to create someone in his own image and likeness as the culmination of his creative work. Sonship then is merely the culmination of creativity, man and wife knowing each-other and producing children from that union.

As I stated earlier, I think that viewing God the Son as the source of human sonship is actually a strong aspect of the trinitarian rescue device of dual sonship for Christ. If my only problem with it was quibbling about the names and interactions of the divine persons, I would consider the rescue device to be adequate enough to maintain the trinity as a viable model of the godhead, even if I thought it was less adequate than the pattern.

However, the dual sonship view suffers greatly on an exegetical level in two ways.

1. There is no clear evidence that I’m aware of which indicates that scripture sees Jesus as possessing two sonship relationships with God or a divine person. This is a completely ad-hoc rescue device which may be possible, but for which we have no biblical evidence.
2. Viewing scripture through a lens of dual sonship creates a very practical interpretive problem, in that it becomes difficult or impossible in many cases to know which form of sonship is in view in a particular passage.

Concerning the first point, Wayne Grudem is a formidable theologian and advocate for the trinity whose views and arguments on the subject can be considered representative. When he argued for dual sonship in his Systematic Theology, he used a single verse of scripture which we can assume is the best verse he knows of to support the idea. Grudem writes,

Although Jesus does call us his “brothers” (Heb. 2:12 NIV) and he is therefore in one sense our older brother in God’s family (cf. Heb. 2:14), and can be called “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29), he is nevertheless careful to make a clear distinction between the way in which God is our heavenly Father and the way in which he relates to God the Father. He says to Mary Magdalene, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father to my God and your God” (John 20:17), thus making a clear distinction between the far greater and eternal sense in which God is his Father, and the sense in which God is our Father.

— Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, chapter 37

John 20:17 is a verse that I regularly use to indicate that Jesus and his Christian brethren actually do have the same Father and God, not different fathers, or different senses of fatherhood. I don’t lean heavily on the verse because I’m aware of how Grudem takes it, and I have plenty of other scriptures that argue the patternist case. But it is telling that the one verse I’m aware of that trinitarians use to establish dual sonship for Christ is a verse that may be equally (or better) interpreted to make the opposite case. So I state again that there is no verse in the Bible that I’m aware of which clearly teaches dual sonship.

When you take John 20:17 in context rather than just prooftexting it in isolation, it becomes difficult to make the case that Jesus here is “careful to make a clear distinction” between God the Father and God as our heavenly Father, the God whose image we bear.

1. Jesus isn’t presenting doctrine to his disciples in any kind of a teaching role. He is asking Mary to alert his disciples about his pending ascension and (by implication) his victorious resurrection. It is strange that such a crucial interpretive key which impacts so many of his teachings would be given to someone who wasn’t even part of the twelve, long after so many teachings about his relationship with the Father have already passed, in an off-handed comment rather than a formal gathering for rabbinic instruction. He isn’t being “careful” to relay this crucial instruction, at least.
2. Jesus has just completed the very cornerstone of his work to abolish sin and death, and reconcile man to God. Given this context of restoring man to God, is it more likely that he is drawing a precise theological distinction between two senses of sonship, or that he is exulting in the fact that his Father is now also the Father of the disciples, on account of his completed work of reconciliation? One can quibble that Jesus often called God the Father of the disciples prior to the resurrection, but the point is that Jesus’ death and resurrection is the event which made it all possible. Without Christ’s work on the cross, we would all be children of Satan, whether we lived before or after that moment in history (Jhn 8:41-44). So it is far more likely that Jesus is exulting in the great work that he accomplished on the cross, to reconcile God’s estranged children back into a relationship with him. Far from separating his relationship with the Father from our own, Jesus is rejoicing that they are one and the same through his finished work on the cross.

Without any alternative verses that demonstrate a distinction between Jesus’ relationship with the Father and our own, I think it is fair and generous to allow John 20:17 to be neutral on the subject, and say that at best trinitarians have no verse that establishes dual sonship. A less generous (though likely accurate) view would be to say that John 20:17 actually argues against dual sonship, when taken in context.

At this point it’s well enough established that the dual sonship hypothesis is a possible rescue device for trinitarian christology, but it is an ad-hoc (unevidenced) view that may or may not be likely. When we look at how the dual sonship view impacts hermeneutics (Bible interpretation) it should move the rescue device into the “highly unlikely” category. Large numbers of scriptures become difficult to interpret because it is unclear whether the author is speaking of the divine sonship of Christ, or his human sonship. If dual sonship is accurate, then the authors of scripture come across as deeply negligent in their communication of crucial information, failing to disambiguate between the two sonships in every moment that the relationship between Jesus and the Father comes up. Furthermore, even if trinitarians could shoehorn a verse like John 20:17 to provide such disambiguation, there should be disambiguation statements all over the text of scripture, in the same way that the common names “Simon,” “Judas,” and “Mary” etc. are frequently disambiguated with clarifying information. Yet scripture regularly speaks of Jesus’ sonship toward the Father as if we should just know which sonship is in view.

A concordance search for the word “Son” in the New Testament yields plenty of places where the ambiguity of dual sonship creates two viable interpretations of a verse. Here are just a few that I found in preparation for this article.

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. (Rom 8:29)

The “firstborn among many brothers” statement pushes this verse toward human sonship as the likely interpretive grid, but the verse can be fairly interpreted with God the Son serving as the source of the image to which we are conformed, if God the Son is a real entity in the backdrop of the biblical authors’ worldview. Gen 1:26-27 has us bearing the image of God in our creation, so it creates expectation for a divine source of our new image in Christ. Yet Gen 5:1-3 and 1Co 15:47-49 has us bearing the image of at least one created being (Adam), so it could be equally interpreted as our bearing the image of Christ in his resurrected human nature. The question of which nature provides Jesus with his sonship in this passage therefore greatly impacts our interpretation and integration of the verse with the rest of our theology, and no disambiguating phrase is given by Paul to help us understand his meaning. Paul frequently clarifies himself in his arguments, thinking about the perspectives and potential objections of his readers, yet here it’s almost as if he doesn’t see anything that needs to be clarified in the sonship of Christ.

No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. (Jhn 1:18)

Even taken in its broader context, there is no clear indication of which sonship is in view in this passage, if the dual sonship hypothesis is accurate. Concerning divine sonship, trinitarians will often take this in a metaphysical sense, placing God the Son at God the Father’s side (metaphorically) as the person in the godhead responsible for revealing God to his creation. This means that Jesus’ manifestation through the Angel of the Lord and his incarnation as a man are instances of God the Son revealing the invisible Father to creation. Both God the Father and God the Son are outside of creation and intrinsically invisible to creation, but the Son is particularly tasked with revealing the invisible God to creation.

Daniel 7 pushes against such an interpretation, with Daniel at least being a man who saw the Father, given that both the Father and the Son were distinguishable in that passage. This would mean that something other than metaphysical invisibility is in play in the hiding of the Father, and a viable alternative would be to interpret this as ethical separation rather than metaphysical separation. The general theology of what happened in Eden, with man being banished from the presence of God, makes an equally viable (if not better) interpretation. Man is unable to see God on account of his sin, not his metaphysical distinction from the creator, and Jesus is the ethically perfect, human mediator through whom we are able to be reconciled to God, and thereby see him again (cf. Isaiah 6:1-7).

Regardless, while I think the human sonship / human mediation view better harmonizes with the rest of scripture, both divine and human sonship would be viable interpretations of John 1:18 if the dual sonship hypothesis were accurate. Yet we are given no indication in the text which form of sonship is being examined. One would expect there to be disambiguation between God the Son and the Son of God in John 1 of all places, if dual sonship were in the backdrop of John’s thinking. As it stands, John doesn’t seem to care about clarifying which sonship is in view, either here or in the rest of his gospel or letters.

And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Mat 3:16-17)

Trinitarians reference the baptism of Jesus a lot, because it is one of the few places where all three persons of the alleged trinity interact together, as compared to the more common interactions between the Father and the Son apart from the Spirit. If there were no viable interpretation of the verse that used a human sonship for Christ, then the rescue device would have no problem in this particular passage; it would obviously be referring to Jesus’ divine sonship. However, a viable interpretation using human sonship does exist, meaning that here too we have a problem because no indicator is given by the author to help us understand which sonship is in view.

This ambiguity alters the theological impact of the verse by making it either about the nature of God, or about the nature of salvation, depending on which form of sonship is in view. Here again, espousing a dual sonship view has a substantive impact on our ability to understand the meaning of a passage.

These three passages are given as a sample of the impact that dual sonship has on our ability to understand the Bible, but there are many more for those willing to sift through the myriad of scriptures that reference the sonship of Christ toward the Father. Conceding human sonship while attempting to retain divine sonship as an interpretive option does violence to biblical interpretation, to the extent that it becomes prohibitively unlikely that the authors of scripture believed in a dual sonship for Christ.

Trinitarians should stop straddling the fence as they grapple with the force of patternist arguments concerning the human sonship of Jesus toward God. Either Jesus experiences a divine sonship as God the Son, or he experiences a human sonship as the Son of God. Both conclusions cannot be reasonably seen as arising together from the text of scripture.

While a dual sonship for Christ may be logically possible as a rescue device for trinitarian theology, it is prohibitively unlikely when we try to interpret the Bible through that grid. Whereas the patternist rescue device for Jesus’ preincarnate sonship is evidenced in scripture and harmonizes the Bible well, the trinitarian rescue device for Jesus’ human sonship is unevidenced in scripture and it makes Bible interpretation prohibitively difficult. If scripture gives evidence of Jesus sharing with his brethren a human relationship toward God as his Father, then this is biblically incompatible with the idea that he also possesses a unique Father/Son relationship within the trinity. Simply put, God the Son cannot coexist with the Son of God in the Bible that the apostles handed to us.

Acknowledging human sonship for Jesus does not mean that his true divinity is compromised. It simply means that Jesus’ divine nature should be called something other than “The Son,” and that he possesses a human relationship with God as his father, rather than a divine relationship between two persons within the godhead. If Jesus is a human son of God, then trinitarians need to do the hard work of reevaluating what that means for their theological system, rather than patch it up with a rescue device that doesn’t ultimately work.

For those who do somehow view dual sonship as viable, the ambiguity that it introduces into biblical interpretation should lead them to be gracious toward those who interpret the Bible differently. Trinitarians regularly speak and behave as if their view is inescapably obvious as the only possible conclusion of the Bible, such that they can label those who disagree as categorically outside of the Christian faith. Whatever other problems may exist in such a posture, one certainly has no justification for it when relying on a theological framework that is as scripture-obscuring as the hypothesis of dual sonship. The trinity is not an obvious conclusion of the Bible, and the ambiguity introduced by dual sonship makes it even more understandable that honest students of the word would come to a variety of conclusions about what it teaches about Christ and the godhead.

So while I would argue that God the Son and the Son of God cannot coexist in the pages of scripture, trinitarians and patternists should be able to coexist in the body of Christ through the same kind of good faith debate and discussion that we see between calvinists and arminians concerning the nature of salvation, or dispensationalists and covenantalists in the framing of redemptive history. All of these are theological systems that represent man’s best attempt to understand what the Bible is teaching on a subject, and all bring to the text the same fallible human reasoning that makes knowledge building a cyclical process in all human disciplines. May we never come under the rebuke that Jesus gave to the Pharisees and scribes when they elevated their own tradition to a point of practical inerrancy.

So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.'” (Mat 15:6b-9)

The trinity is not scripture, nor is it an essential part of the Christian faith. It is a fallible system of theology that needs to be treated as such.