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into an eternal abstraction, far removed from the flesh and blood Jew whose origin (genesis, Mat-
thew 1:18) was in the womb of his mother. Nothing less than this human origin will qualify him to
be a member of the human race. God cannot be tempted, and God cannot die. God was not born,
and God was not a baby. God has no mother. Jesus, on the other hand, died (Revelation 1:18 etc.),
not part of him -- a half-dead Jesus would not atone for sin. Jesus was tempted. Jesus was not in
possession of all knowledge. As the Son of God, he did not know the time of his Second Coming
(Matthew 24:36). The attempts to explain away that awkward fact are among the sorriest in the
history of Bible exposition. Jesus did not know. He was not omniscient and thus he was not God.
He was the Son of God, the Christ. On that great central Truth he promised to build his Church
(Matthew 16:15-19, and constantly throughout the NT). This is the New Testament's central creed.

In Old Testament times, the Son was a, or rather the, feature of future prophecy. Note the
persistent future tenses: "Your [Eve's] seed will be the Savior who will crush the Serpent/Devil."
"The Lord will raise up a prophet like Moses who will speak all My words" (Deuteronomy 18).
"Ask of Me [God says to the future Son] and I will give you the ends of the earth as your inheri-
tance" (Psalm 2). "I will raise up your Son and I will be his Father and he will be My Son" (II
Samuel 7). "A virgin will conceive" (Isaiah 7:14).

On such evidence the idea that the Son thus predicted was already alive and well as the
Son of God, without beginning, should be dropped, as a confusing imposition on the divine story as
told by the Bible. (It is typical of divine figures in all religious traditions that fantasy and mythol-
ogy are later built around them, far beyond the facts.)

There is no eternal Son in the Bible. The distinguished Methodist scholar and commentator,
Adam Clarke, D.D., wrote wisely:

The doctrine of the eternal Sonship of Christ, is in my opinion, antiscriptural and highly
dangerous. I have not been able to find any express declaration of it in the Scriptures
(Commentary on Luke 1:35).

J. O. Buswell, Ph.D., former Dean of the Graduate School, Covenant College, St. Louis,
MO, examined the issue of the begetting of the Son in the Bible and concluded with these words.
He wrote as a Trinitarian:

The notion that the Son was begotten by the Father in eternity past, not as an event, but as
an inexplicable relationship, has been accepted and carried along in the Christian theology
since the fourth century...We have examined all the instances in which 'begotten' or 'born'
or related words are applied to Christ, and we can say with confidence that the Bible has
nothing whatsoever to say about 'begetting' as an eternal relationship between the Father
and the Son (A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion, Zondervan, 1962, p. 110).

F. F. Bruce warned that evangelicals, while they claim the Bible as their sole source of
authority, are often unwittingly just as enslaved to tradition as those whom they accuse of that same
weakness:

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