On Fatherhood Divine and Human
![](https://www.reformation21.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_full_image/public/r21_arthead_0.jpg?itok=cKuP4w2R)
In my experience, one of the principal delights of growing
older -- more than adequate compensation for hair loss, aches and pains, and
other unpleasantries associated with the art -- is seeing one's family increase
through the addition of children (and, presumably, grandchildren, though I'm
far from that stage). Last Thursday morning I had the pleasure of holding in my
arms for the very first time my newborn son Austin. Austin is our third child, and
our first boy (not counting our dog, who bears a striking similarity to me, at
least behaviorally, despite our lack of shared genetics).
Children, of course, provide numerous joys (and, to be fair,
numerous anxieties). One of the more easily overlooked of those joys, I think, is
-- at least for a Christian father -- deeper appreciation for the reality and depth
of God's own fatherly love, both as such is realized in the immanent Triune
life of God, and as such is realized in God's relationship to believers. Within
the inner life of God, after all, there is (eternally) a Father and a Son, and
God has revealed himself (in time) as the adoptive Father of those whose
salvation has been purposed from eternity and accomplished in time through the
Spirit's application to them of the Son's saving work (cf. Matt. 3.17 &
Eph. 1.5). Becoming and being an earthly father, I believe, grants experiential
insight into God's sentiments toward his adopted children as well as God the
Father's sentiments toward his proper Son, and so also experiential insight
into the profound sacrifice involved in God the Father's gift of his only-begotten
Son for our salvation (John 3.16).
Scripture itself provides us some license to gauge the depth
of God's (parental) love for us by taking stock of human (parental) love: "Can
a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son
of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you" (Isa. 49.15). The
truth posited in this verse is of course accessible to all, but the nursing
mother will feel the point made in a
particular way. Yet, it is possible to get a bit carried away in this regard.
It is possible to start thinking God's relationship to his elect children, or
even God the Father's relationship to God the Son, is itself somehow modeled
upon the earthly phenomenon of fatherhood -- as if human fatherhood (and,
correspondingly, human sonship) were the architectural plan to which the relationship
between Father and Son in the Godhead must conform, however grander the actual
building might be in comparison to the drawing.
The third-century Alexandrian priest Arius got carried away
in just this regard, at least in terms of his rhetoric. Arius's basic thesis -- namely, that the Son of God is essentially a creature (rather than the
Creator) -- stemmed from other considerations, but in the interest of defending
his position, he explicitly appealed to the analogy between divine and human
fatherhood. And, apparently, his argument struck a particular chord with certain
parents. In his Four Discourses against
the Arians, the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius tells us that Arius made it
his habit to approach "silly women, and address them in turn in this womanish
language: 'Had you a son before bearing? Now, as you had not, so neither was
the Son of God before His generation.'" Arius's reasoning, in other words, was
that since, say, Austin's birth occurred at a point in time (7:37 a.m. last
Thursday, to be precise), and that since prior to his birth (or really
conception) Austin was not, God's Son too must have been born (as it were) at some
precise moment and, prior to that, not have been
per se.
Athanasius reckoned that "words so silly and dull deserve no
answer at all." Nevertheless, in addition to marshalling an impressive number
of biblical texts and theological arguments in defense of Nicene orthodoxy
(which judged the Son "true God from true God, begotten not made, of one
substance with the Father"), Athanasius responded to said words, largely out of
concern for "the silly women who are so readily deceived by them."
In response to Arius's argument, Athanasius didn't shy away
at all from the designation of the second person of the Trinity as "Son" or as "begotten."
He simply pointed out, firstly, that human fatherhood is modeled upon divine
fatherhood (rather than vice versa): "For God does not make man His pattern;
but rather we men, because God is properly, and alone truly, Father of His Son,
are also called fathers of our own children." Thus warning signs are posted along the pathway of attempts to elicit essential truths about the relation of God the Father to God the Son from the
relation of human fathers to their sons.
But Athanasius goes further by, secondly, showing how the
analogy between divine fatherhood and human fatherhood properly understood (i.e,. in conformity with catholic and biblical Christian truth) actually supports
Scripture's broader identification of the Son as eternal and divine. "If they
inquire of parents concerning their son," he writes, "let them consider ... the
child which is begotten. For, granting the parent had not a son before his
begetting, still, after having him, he had him, not as external or as foreign,
but as from himself, and proper to his essence and his exact image, so that the
former is beheld in the latter, and the latter is contemplated in the former."
Athanasius's point is that sons, by the very nature of sonship, share in the
nature of their fathers. Like begets like. Humans, who are temporal by nature,
beget humans. Despite my younger daughter Geneva's earnest hope, revealed when
asked before Austin's birth whether she anticipated a brother or sister, that "mommy's
belly" had a "baby puppy" in it, my wife gave birth to a human being last
Thursday. Austin was born at a point in time -- and so is, by definition, a
temporal creature -- because his mother and father are themselves temporal
creatures who were born at specific points in time.
What human sonship properly implies for non-human sonship, then, is not the temporality of the one born, but the begotten one's participation in (or possession of) the very same nature as the one who has begotten him. If
an eternal (and divine) being begets, then, he necessarily begets an eternal (and
divine) being; the begetting of a temporal being by an eternal being would be
as implausible as the birth of a "baby puppy" to a daughter of Eve. And if the
begotten One is himself eternal (like his Father), then his "birth" cannot have
occurred at any moment; that birth itself is eternal (which is precisely what
the Nicene Creed affirms).
The doctrine of the Son's eternal generation from the Father
(and, correspondingly, the Father's eternal generating of the Son) has fallen
on hard times of late. Several notable evangelicals have openly rejected the
doctrine, suggesting that it lends itself to subordinationism (the position
that the Son is ontologically inferior to the Father). Ironically, subordinationism
is the very thing the Nicene doctrine of the Son's eternal generation, so well
expressed and defended by Athanasius, was intended to subvert. Perhaps better
awareness of historic debates surrounding Christianity's historic doctrines -- buttressed if necessary by some personal experience in fatherhood -- would generate
(no pun intended) greater reservation in rejecting this and other creedal
Christian truths.