Christ as ‘God-Of-Himself’ (Part One)

”For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself” (John 5:26)

“…we hold that the Son, regarded as God, and without reference to person, is also of Himself; though we also say that, regarded as Son, He is of the Father. Thus His [the Son’s] essence is without beginning, while His person has its beginning in God.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559 edition, translated by Henry Beveridge, Hendrickson Publishers, 2008, 1.13.25)

Why did this statement from John Calvin in the sixteenth century—based off of Jesus’s words in John 5:26—along with other similar declarations Calvin made, garner enthusiastic support from some Christians of his time, but immediate and fierce opposition from others? To find out why there was a backlash against the Son being ‘God-of-Himself’, we must travel far back in time—all the way back to the 4th century AD…

The Cappadocian church fathers of the 4th century in the east—Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus—skillfully and carefully defended the doctrine of the Trinity against heretical views of the Godhead in their time. But although each one of these Christians were careful to stress the equality of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Godhead, there was a partial deficiency in their approach, and by that, I mean that they believed that the Father alone was the ‘principium’ of the Godhead. The late Anglican author T.F. Torrance explained: “…the Cappadocian interpretation, under a lingering Origenist influence, concealed a serious ambiguity. From one point of view the so-called ‘Cappodician settlement’ meant the rejection of subordinationism, but from another it implied a hierarchial structure within the Godhead. This carried with it an ambiguous element of subordinationism that kept disconcerting thought within the Church and opening the way for division…” [T.F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being, Three Persons, T&T Clark, 1996, p. 182]

Furthermore, even Gregory of Nazianzus foresaw some difficulty: “I should like to call the Father the greater, because from Him flows both the Equality and the Being of the Equals…but I am afraid to use the word Origin, lest I should make Him the Origin of Inferiors, and thus insult Him by precedencies of honor. For the lowering of those Who are from Him is no glory to the Source.” [Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40: On The Holy Baptism] In the collective mind of the church, post-Council of Nicaea, “the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit [both of these, I will add, are Biblical in themselves—my note!] had been taken to mean some subordination of essence instead of subordination of personality” [Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1967, p. 101]

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), author of landmark works such as The City of God and On The Trinity, was the first ‘autothean’ Christian—sort of. In Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion [1.13.19], he cites the fifth book of Augustine’s tome, On The Trinity, to give historical support to his belief that the Son is ‘God of Himself’. Augustine wrote these words: “Christ with respect to Himself is called God; with respect to the Father, Son. Again, the Father with respect to Himself is called God; with respect to the Son, Father.” However, Augustine also asserted that the Father had eternally generated the Son’s essence, which was the mainstream Nicean interpretation, as well as the present-day mainstream Reformed position: “But the Father is not God of the Son: the Son is God of the Father; therefore in begetting the Son, the Father ‘gave’ Him to be God, in begetting He gave Him to be coeternal with Himself, in begetting He gave Him to be His equal.” (Augustine, Tractates on John, 48.6) Such was the inconsistent position of this otherwise great Christian apologist.

For approximately 10 centuries afterwards, the idea of the Son (and, of course, the Holy Spirit) as autotheos would remain mostly dormant in Christian literature. Peter Lombard, an 12th-century Italian theologian and author of a four book series called The Sentences, taught that the Son’s essence was generated by the Father before the world began [Peter Lombard, The Sentences, Book 1, translated by Giulio Silano, PIMS, 2010, p. 37]. Also, Thomas Aquinas, the well-known, prolific Scholastic writer of the 13th century, affirmed the idea that the Father had communicated His essence in full to the Son from eternity [Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.41.3]

Now John Calvin’s idea of the autotheos of the Son (as to essence, not to person) was not original to Calvin, as has been mentioned, but came from the mind of Augustine, and was, on the Reformer’s part, a logical outworking of Western, Augustinian Trinitarian thought, rather than Eastern, Greek Trinitarian thought [Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Four: The Triunity of God, Baker Academic, 2003, p. 326].

Dr. Tyler Whitman, a theology professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, defends Calvin’s position: “When Calvin affirmed that the Son is autotheos (God-of-Himself), he denied that the Son possesses aseity as he possesses it from the Father, rather the Son simply possesses aseity because he possesses the same essence as the Father. Such a conclusion is nothing more than an implication of a strict, ruled trinitarian grammar: as God and thus according to his essence, the Son is autotheos; as Son and thus according to his person, the Son is from the Father. But the Son is neither from the Father according to his essence nor autotheos according to his person. This helps to show how Calvin did not reject the doctrine of eternal generation, as some have misinterpreted him; he simply objected to what he saw as an illegitimate understanding of the manner of eternal generation—namely, as essential communication.”https://credomag.com/2013/04/calvin-classical-trinitarianism-and-the-aseity-of-the-son/

In 1545, John Calvin wrote these words in response to some of his theological opponents: “…I confess that the Son of God is of the Father. Accordingly, since the person has an order…I confess that He is not a se ipso. But when we are speaking of His divinity or simply of the essence…apart from consideration of the person, I say that it is rightly predicated of Him that He is a se ipso.” [Brannon Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, & the Aseity of the Son, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 46]

We also have extra insight from Calvin on the autotheos of the Son and Spirit from his commentary on Hebrews 1:3, which reads: “Who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power…” Christ is the subject of this verse, while ‘His glory’ and ‘His person’ are references to the Father.

So what did Calvin say in his Institutes about Hebrews 1:3, which would relate to the subject of the Son and Spirit being God of themselves as to essence? Here is what we wrote, but it is lengthy: “When the Apostle calls the Son of God ‘the express image of his person,’ (Heb. 1:3), he undoubtedly does assign to the Father some subsistence in which he differs from the Son. For to hold with some interpreters that the term is equivalent to essence (as if Christ represented the substance of the Father like the impression of a seal upon wax), were not only harsh but absurd. For the essence of God being simple and undivided, and contained in himself entire, in full perfection, without partition or diminution, it is improper, nay, ridiculous, to call it his express image [charakter]. But because the Father, though distinguished by his own peculiar properties, has expressed himself wholly in the Son, he is said with perfect reason to have rendered his person (hypostasis) manifest in him. And this aptly accords with what is immediately added—viz. that he is ‘the brightness of his glory.’ The fair inference from the Apostle’s words is, that there is a proper subsistence (hypostasis) of the Father, which shines refulgent in the Son. From this, again it is easy to infer that there is a subsistence (hypostasis) of the Son which distinguishes him from the Father. The same holds in the case of the Holy Spirit; for we will immediately prove both that he is God, and that he has a separate subsistence from the Father. This, moreover, is not a distinction of essence, which it were impious to multiply.” [John Calvin, Institutes, Beveridge translation, p. 67]

Now the main point we can derive from this lengthy quote from Calvin is that it is impossible for the Father to generate His essence to the Son, because the irreducibly simple essence of God cannot be divided [this is a big part of the doctrine of the ‘divine simplicity’ of God]. Rather, the Father eternally generates the person of the Son (with the person of the Holy Spirit being eternally ‘breathed forth’ by the Father and Son together)

In the next segment of this essay, we will examine why a few Post-Reformation theologians held to the doctrine of the ‘autotheos’ of the Son, along with subsequent Christian theologians who believed the same thing—even to this very day…

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