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The Origin of Jesus, the Son

of God

Anthony Buzzard

In matters of church history and the development of major doctrines defining who Jesus is,
readers cannot afford to be uninformed. Church experience for the great majority leaves them with
almost no knowledge of how their church came to believe and teach as it currently does.

A critically important question is: When did Jesus, the Messiah, Son of God (Messiah and
Son of God are virtually synonyms in the New Testament based on Ps. 2:2, Messiah = 2:7, My
Son) come into existence?

A popular and long-standing answer is that my question is wrongly formulated. Jesus
Christ had no beginning. He was "eternally generated." The doctrine of the "eternal generation of
the Son" is standard in most churches (if your pastor has not preached on this, ask him politely to
do so). The teaching amounts to a proposition which many of you will find baffling (and I think
with good cause). It states that the Son of God was generated eternally, that it was a process en-
tirely beyond comprehension, and that the Son, as well as the Father of course who did the beget-
ting, had no beginning in time. This is the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, to which all are
supposed to conform.

One is tempted to think of the words of Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it
to mean -- neither more nor less." In this doctrine of "eternal generation of the Son," you the pew-
sitter are asked to believe and confess that the Son had a beginningless beginning. Clear? The the-
ory is, again, that the Son of God had no beginning in time. He was eternally generated.

This, we suggest, is a complete mystification. Its enigmatic quality perplexes you as an
English speaker, because you are being invited to accept words in a sense which no dictionary
will support. Look up, please, the word "generate" or "beget" and you will see that it means "to
give existence to, to bring into being." Yet in theological terms the eternal begetting/generation of
the Son means the Son had no beginning. Are you prepared to believe that some church dogma in-
volves the use of words without meaning?

Christians are aware of the enormous power of the theory of evolution as a doctrine of
"science" which contradicts divine revelation. But few seem inclined to reflect on the extent to
which other dogmas can be equally without basis in Scripture. The power of deception on a grand
scale is more obvious to us in relation to camps to which we do not belong. A large section of the
world believes that celibacy is required of clergy. This is an evident contradiction of Paul in I
Timothy 3, where he states that marriage is the normal condition of those presiding over the
church. Another vast mass of human beings believe that Jesus was the Messiah, virginally

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