Son of God

“And behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’”

— Matthew 3:17 (ESV)

Son of God is a title Scripture gives to Jesus Christ uniquely, though related language marks other relationships to God: angels are sons of God by creation, Israel and its king by covenant, and believers by adoption in Christ.¹ Applied to Jesus, the title carries a further sense none of these share: he is God’s own Son by nature, eternally begotten of the Father rather than created, adopted, or appointed to the office.² The Gospels show it used first in its lesser, theocratic sense by those around him, before its fuller meaning, equality with God himself, came into view.³

Confessional Witness

Because the question of what “Son of God” means was settled by the wider church long before the Baptist confessions were written, the Reformed confessions state it as a shared inheritance rather than a distinctive of any one tradition. The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) puts the point plainly:

“True God … not only in name or by adoption or by any merit, but in substance and nature … The Jews sought all the more to kill him because he … called God his Father, making himself equal with God.’”⁴

It then names the historic denials directly: “We therefore abhor the impious doctrine of Arius and the Arians against the Son of God, and especially the blasphemies of the Spaniard, Michael Servetus, and all his followers.”⁴

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the same doctrine in its own opening chapter on the Trinity: “the Son is eternally begotten of the Father.”⁵ The confession does not treat this as a separate topic from the Trinity itself; the mechanics of that eternal begetting are the subject of its own article, Eternal generation of the Son.

Biblical Basis

The Old Testament calls more than one kind of figure a “son of God.” The angels are named “sons of God” at creation (Job 38:7). Israel as a nation is God’s son, brought out of Egypt: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1; cf. Exod. 4:22). The Davidic king stands in a covenanted father-son relationship to God: “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son” (2 Sam. 7:14), a promise Psalm 2 develops into God’s own declaration over his anointed king, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you” (Ps. 2:7). Isaiah’s messianic child is given divine names outright, including “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father” (Isa. 9:6). Mastricht reads Psalm 2:7 as reaching beyond any merely human king: David and Solomon cannot be its referent, since the New Testament applies the verse to Christ alone (Acts 13:33; Heb. 1:5, 5:5), and its context ascribes the son omnipotence, omniscience, and divine worship, none of which belongs to David or Solomon in their own right.⁶

The New Testament opens by applying this same theocratic language to Jesus, then deepens it. Gabriel tells Mary her child “will be called the Son of God” because he is conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:32, 35). At Jesus’s baptism and again at his transfiguration, a voice from heaven declares, “This is my beloved Son” (Matt. 3:17; 17:5), language Mastricht reads as a temporal declaration of a sonship that is itself eternal.⁷ Peter confesses, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16), and demons recognize the same title before his own disciples fully grasp it (Matt. 8:29). John’s Gospel calls Jesus God’s “only” or “only begotten” Son (John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18), language the New Testament never applies to angels or to believers, who are sons and daughters by grace rather than by nature. When Jesus called God “his own Father, making himself equal with God,” his Jewish hearers understood the claim well enough to seek his death for blasphemy (John 5:18). Hebrews draws the same line by contrast: “For to which of the angels did he ever say, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’?” (Heb. 1:5).⁸

Historical Development

From theocratic title to essential claim

Bavinck traces how “Son of God” functioned before the resurrection made its full sense clear. In the Old Testament the name applied to Israel, then to the king, and especially to the coming Messiah, and it carried that same theocratic meaning when used by the demoniacs, the Jews, the high priest at Jesus’s trial, and even by his own disciples in the Gospels’ early chapters.³ Jesus, however, invested the title with a deeper meaning of his own: he is king because he is the Messiah, and Messiah because he is the Son of the Father in a sense no one else shares, “the only Son, whom the Father loved.”³ The resurrection did not create this meaning but confirmed and clarified it; the apostles’ later teaching on Christ’s person, Bavinck holds, is already contained in principle in what the Gospels themselves record.³

The medieval Adoptionist controversy

A later Latin controversy took up the title’s meaning directly. Adoptionist theologians distinguished a “natural” sonship of Christ’s divine person from an “adoptive” sonship of his human nature, holding that the adoptive sonship began at Christ’s baptism and was “consummated in the resurrection,” a spiritual birth by which the man Jesus was made God’s adopted Son.⁹ The wider church judged this a fresh threat to the unity of Christ’s person and condemned it at the Synod of Frankfurt, AD 794.⁹ The question of whether Christ’s own sonship is by nature or by adoption recurred again, in a different form, in the eighteenth-century dispute within the Baptist tradition itself between John Gill and the Socinians over eternal sonship, covered at Eternal generation of the Son.

Opposing Views

Arian. Arians held that Christ is called Son of God because he was created by God, in God’s own likeness more fully than any other creature and first in the order of time, not because he shares the Father’s own nature.¹⁰

Socinian. Some who otherwise professed Trinitarian language held that “Son of God” applies to Christ not as the eternal Logos but as Theanthropos, the God-man considered in his mediatorial office, and objected to the orthodox doctrine of Christ’s eternal Sonship on the grounds that sonship implies derivation and therefore inferiority, that the New Testament sometimes uses “Son” interchangeably with the office- titles “Christ” and “King of Israel,” and that Psalm 2:7 and Romans 1:4 show Christ constituted Son in time rather than eternally coexisting as such.¹¹ (See Socinianism.)

Adoptionist. Christ’s human nature became God’s Son by adoption, inaugurated at his baptism and completed at his resurrection, rather than his person being God’s Son by nature from eternity.⁹ (See Adoptionism.)

Objections and Responses

If the Son’s sonship is derived from the Father, doesn’t that make him inferior to the Father? The objection presses the human analogy of father and son too far. Scripture’s own doctrine is that the Father begets the person, not the essence, of the Son: the Father communicates the whole, undivided substance of the Godhead to the Son by an eternal and necessary act of nature rather than a voluntary choice, so the Son is never dependent on or inferior to the Father in being.¹²

Doesn’t the New Testament use “Son” as just another title for the Christ, interchangeable with his mediatorial office rather than naming an eternal relation? In passages such as Matthew 16:16 and John 1:49, it is not that Jesus is Son because he is the Christ; rather, being the eternal Son of God, he is for that reason the Christ, the King of Israel.¹³

Don’t Psalm 2:7 and Romans 1:4 show that Christ was made or constituted Son of God at a point in time, rather than eternally begotten? Commenting on Psalm 2:7, J. A. Alexander read “today” as naming an eternal present rather than a moment of origin: “now always eternally thy Father.” Romans 1:4’s “declared to be the Son of God” uses a Greek verb elsewhere meaning “appointed,” but the majority of commentators, including ancient Greek fathers, take it here to mean “set forth” or “manifested” rather than “constituted”; and even granting the disputed reading, Christ was already recognized and worshiped as Son of God by his own disciples well before the resurrection, so that event could have revealed his sonship but not brought it into being.¹⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 26, “God the Son,” 585: “not through creation, as Adam … and the angels … nor through adoption, which is common to all believers … but by nature and generation.” ↩
Mastricht, 586: “he is not a son from creation, as are Adam and the angels, nor through adoption, as are believers … but rather, through eternal generation.” ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father”: “In the Old Testament this name was applied to the people of Israel, then to the king, and especially to the Messiah, and likely had this theocratic meaning when used by the demoniacs …, the Jews …, the high priest …, and even the disciples in the early period…. But Jesus invests it with another and deeper meaning; he is king because he is the Messiah, because he is the Son of the Father…. he is the only Son, whom the Father loved.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 11, “Of Jesus Christ, True God and Man, the Only Savior of the World.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩
Mastricht, 585: “the discussion is about that Son of God for whom in the context is asserted omnipotence, omniscience, and divine worship.” ↩
Mastricht, 583-584: “he testified this both in word and in deed…. in word, partly in his baptism … and partly in his transfiguration…. at the least in the resurrection.” ↩
Mastricht, 586, citing Heb. 1:5: “For to which of the angels did he ever say, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’?” ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 291: “a distinction was made between a natural and an adoptive sonship, and the latter did not begin with the natural birth of Christ, but had its inception at the time of His baptism and was consummated in the resurrection. It was a spiritual birth that made Christ the adopted Son of God. The Church saw the unity of the person in Christ once more endangered by this view, and therefore it was condemned by the Synod of Frankfort in 794 A.D.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 9, “The Holy Trinity,” 180, Q. 53: “Arians hold that he is so called because he was created by God more in his own likeness than any other creature, and first in the order of time.” ↩
Hodge, 180-181, Q. 54: they hold “that the title ‘Son of God’ applies to Christ not as Logos, the eternal Second Person of the Trinity, but as Theanthropos,” objecting “1st, that Sonship implies derivation and hence inferiority; 2d, that the term ‘Son’ in many passages is applied to him interchangeably with the term ‘Christ’ and other official titles …; 3d, that in Ps. ii. 7 it is expressly declared that Christ is constituted ‘Son of God’ in time …; 4th, the same is argued from Rom. i. 4.” ↩
Hodge, 181, Q. 55: “The church doctrine is that the Person not the essence of the Son is generated by the Father…. the Father begets the Son by an eternal and necessary constitutional (not voluntary) act. This prevents the Son from being in any sense dependent upon or inferior to the Father.” ↩
Hodge, 181, Q. 56: “In none of these passages is it affirmed that he is Son as the Christ, i.e., as Mediator, but that being the eternal Son of God he is the Christ, the King of Israel, etc.” ↩
Hodge, 181-182, Qq. 57-58, quoting J. A. Alexander’s commentary on the Psalms: “Thou art my Son, this day I am thy Father, now always eternally thy Father.” On Rom. 1:4: the verb elsewhere means “to constitute, to appoint,” but “this sense is said … to be adopted by the great majority of commentators, including some of the ancient Greek fathers”; and “it is very evident that Christ called himself Son of God, and was so recognized by his disciples before his resurrection … he might have been revealed or manifested to be the Son of God, but could not have been constituted such by that event.” ↩