by Anthony F. Buzzard

Jesus’ claims for himself direct us to belief in him as the Son of God, certainly not God as part of a Triune Deity. The paradox to beat all paradoxes appears to be the fact that churchgoers commonly speak of Jesus as the “only begotten” Son of God (John 3:16, etc.) while in the same breath asserting that he is God! But can God be begotten without ceasing to be God?
We recommend some earnest discussion of the word “beget,” admittedly a word which now communicates unclearly. The word may be old, but its meaning is unambiguous. It means “to bring into existence,” “to give existence to,” “to cause to exist,” “to procreate, generate.” Check it in any dictionary or lexicon. Gabriel used it in a statement of doctrine which we think is of paramount importance to our search for truth.
In the enormously significant visitation of Gabriel to Mary the ground rules of all sound biblical theology are laid out. Mary is to become the first woman in history to bear a child without the benefit of a human husband. God Himself, in the execution of His amazing immortality plan for mankind, intervenes in the human biological chain to create in Mary the promised “seed of the woman” (Gen. 3:15) and the son of David promised in 2 Samuel 7:14. This distinguished person will at the same time be the Son of God and the Son of David — “I [God] will be a Father to him [David’s descendant] and he will be a Son to me” (2 Sam. 7:14; Heb. 1:5). In other prophetic passages God had decreed “You are my Son. Today I have begotten you,” or “Today I have given you being,” as the Basic Bible in English helpfully renders the Hebrew of Psalm 2:7.
Such language precludes any possibility that the Son can be without a beginning. He cannot always have existed if God brings him into existence at a given historical moment. That momentous event was announced to Mary. In response to her very reasonable question about having no husband, Gabriel stated: “The one to be begotten will be called the Son of God.” And how was this to be possible? “Holy spirit will come upon you…And for that reason precisely (dio kai), the one begotten will be called holy, Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
The uniqueness of Jesus is precisely expressed in the supernatural circumstances of his conception. Luke 1:35 deliberately explains the basis for Jesus’ divine Sonship. He is creatively begotten by his Father at a moment in the not too distant past. According to the theology of Gabriel, the divine Sonship was first established when God brought His ancient promises about the coming seed of the woman and of David to fulfillment. To say, however, that the Son of God did not really come into existence then, but merely exchanged an eternal existence for a human one, is to ruin the story. It removes the Son of God from the category of real human being. He becomes essentially not like the ones he set out to redeem. Not only is it impossible to preexist one’s own mother, to preexist oneself at all is an equally confusing concept. It has mystery and falsehood written all over it. By the extraordinary developments worked out by the church fathers, leading to full-fledged Roman Catholicism, a strangely non-human Son of God replaced the divinely procreated Son announced by Gabriel to Mary and, thanks to reliable Scripture, to every subsequent generation.
In a recent discussion with an email correspondent I asked for a plain definition of the word “beget.” I received this summary reply: “Beget does not mean to bring into existence.” But it does! We invite our readers to search out the origin of the Son of God (Matt. 1:18, genesis, “origin”) and to place their trust not in human creeds but in the sane and sound theology of the Bible. No one better laid this out, in eighteen brilliant words, than Gabriel in conversation with Mary (Luke 1:35). Because of God’s procreative miracle, and for no other reason, the Son of God, the Savior, came into existence.
To be called Son of God is the equivalent exactly of “to be the Son of God.” The biblical Son is not an “eternally generated” (whatever that means!) God the Son of the ancient creeds. “‘Calling’ brings to expression what one is, so that ‘he will be called’ means no less than ‘he will be.’ The interchangeability of the two phrases is seen by comparing Matt. 5:9, ‘they will be called sons of God,’ and Luke 6:35, ‘you will be sons of the Most High’” (Raymond Brown,
The Birth of the Messiah, p. 289).
The apostles consistently urged belief in Jesus as that uniquely generated Son of God, while celibate, philosophically-minded church fathers lost themselves in a labyrinth of “church-speak.” They eventually decided that the Son was “unoriginatedly begotten.”
With that unfortunate departure from the Christ as the divinely created Son of God, the public was asked to approach the Son via the murky eons of eternity. He was presented by church councils as having a personal pre-historic and pre-human existence for uncounted billions of years. He was then supposed to have made a conscious decision to reduce himself to a fetus and be born as a man. The biblical origin of the Son no longer allowed for his coming into existence as Son (Luke 1:35; Matt. 1:18, 20; 1 John 5:18, not KJV).
The Bible offers us instead an uncluttered straightforward approach to Jesus as the Son of God, the second Adam, the product of a gracious miraculous act of creation by God.