Q: How Many Gods Are There In “God”?

One of the first things that the early Jesus followers had to figure out was how, exactly, the person of Jesus related to God. That might seem a simple enough question for Christians today—at least on paper—but it was far from obvious at the time. After all, one of the central planks of Jewish belief in the God of Israel was that he is the one, true God, in contrast to there being many gods (as pagans believed).

The core Scripture for that belief, reflected in the Jewish daily prayer, the Shema, is Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Hence, the idea of a deutero theos (a “second” God of any sort) was, frankly, anathema; and still is, in Judaism today. It is the clearest distinction between contemporary Jewish belief and Christian belief, even though both share a common heritage as followers of the God of Israel. Christianity was a stream within Judaism until their formal separation sometime between the second and fourth centuries (opinions differ as to when this “parting of the ways,” as it’s called, came about, but keep in mind that it was after the New Testament period).  

The first puzzle the early Jesus followers had to solve was Jesus’ relation to God; in due course, they had to do the same concerning the Holy Spirit. Here we will focus on the first of those questions.

Both are wrapped up in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (one God, in three divine persons). The Trinity is one of if not the hardest Christian doctrine to understand and explain (running neck and neck with the person of Jesus as simultaneously “fully God and fully man”). Challenging though it will be, in 1,500 words or so, in this article I will try to explain Jesus as the eternal Son of God in his relation to God the Father.   

Sidebar: A “doctrine” is a belief that serves as an entry requirement for being, in the first instance, accepted as “a Christian,” as historically defined (technically, that’s a “dogma”), and in the second instance for being accepted within a particular Christian stream or organization. For example, Christianity traditionally references the doctrines outlined in the early creeds to define “proper” (aka, orthodox) Christian beliefs. Evangelical Christianity, however—a product of the 500 or so years since the Reformation—typically adds some additional required beliefs, through its statements of faith, for someone to be a “proper evangelical” (in the eyes of that stream or organization). These additional beliefs typically include something about the nature of Scripture as “authoritative” and “inerrant” (both of which require some nuance, that’s usually lacking (!), to be meaningful) and belief in hell as eternal conscious punishment for all non-Christians). Increasingly, the trend is for evangelical organizations to make opposition to same-sex relationships a three-line-whip issue for acceptance and progression in their networks.

The earliest of the major creeds, the Apostles’ Creed (called that not because they wrote it but because the early church perceived it to reflect their passed-down beliefs) says: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord . . .” Short and to the point. But it tells us nothing about the relation of “Father” to “Son” and particularly when and how that relation came about. Logically, a father must precede a son; this would suggest there would have been a time when there was no such Son.

Subsequent creeds sought to address this. The Nicene Creed adds some important additional detail (italicized here): “We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . . We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” The crucial phrase is “eternally begotten,” which is reinforced by “begotten, not made”—speaking of the divine Son’s origins—and further amplified by “true God from true God” and “of one being with the Father”—speaking of his divine nature. “Eternally” begotten is affirming that, unlike our ways of conceiving the chronological relation of a father to a son, there was never a time when there was no divine Son. This is what “begotten” is getting at (over against “made,” or “created”). John 3:16 tells us that God so loved the world that he gave “his only begotten” Son. This is to be distinguished from “created” sons. For example, Adam is described as “the son of God” in Luke 3:38; and God speaks of Israel as “my son” in Exodus 4:22. 

The Greek word here (monogenēs—“only begotten”) is used concerning Jesus only in John’s Gospel and letters, so it’s a particularly Johannine concept. Drawing from this literature, in the Nicene Creed the early church fathers sought to correct the idea that the divine Son was a lesser, created being (a heresy attributed to Arius, known as “the Arian controversy”).

It's important here not to confuse the coming of Jesus into this world (being born, aka, “made” human) with the pre-existent eternally begotten Son who is the second person of the Trinity. The former event we call “the incarnation” is his voluntary entry into the human race, which clearly took place at a particular and later time. The divine Son is eternally begotten; whereas the incarnate Son, the divine-human person who was named Jesus, was “born” of the virgin Mary (as both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds tell us).

We get further insight into the eternal nature of the second person of the Trinity, the divine Son, through a different language and concept in the opening verses of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him not even one thing came into being that has come into being . . .” The word translated “Word” (capital W) is the Greek logos—a Greek philosophical concept borrowed by John to attribute to Jesus, to which a Greek audience would readily relate. This identification of Jesus with the logos sought to make the gospel of Jesus intelligible to contemporary culture (John’s innovation was theologically novel; it wasn’t a pre-existing Old Testament idea).

Logos is somewhat complex, but simply stated it was conceived as the active divine life force permeating the cosmos and holding all things together. The Jewish philosopher, Philo, understood the logos as an intermediary between God and the created order, as both the agent of creation and how humanity understands and relates to God. The Apostle John, however, goes beyond and affirms this logos/Word as the pre-existent divine Son we see in Jesus. From the beginning, he was not only “with” God but also “was” God. Everything created came into being through him (hence, he eternally pre-existed; he himself was not “created”).

We said earlier that a father must precede a son in our way of conceiving things. Why, then, is God presented to us through Scripture in Father and Son terms? Doesn’t that just create an unnecessary problem in understanding him (a complication that theologians then have to try to iron out for us)? In Beyond Personality (later incorporated into Mere Christianity), C. S. Lewis writes, “The New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it.” He continues, “Naturally God knows how to describe himself much better than we know how to describe him. He knows that Father-and-Son is more like the relation between the First and Second Persons [of the Trinity] than anything else we can think of.” For Lewis, this is because such language is not only relational but familial. It speaks to the nature of the relationship between the divine persons better than any other.

Is Father-and-Son therefore “metaphorical” rather than “literal”? Well, it all depends on what we mean by metaphorical and literal, of course! Metaphorical language is a way of speaking of something true and real just as much as literal language! We should not treat “picture language” as inferior in conveying truth (not least because it’s extensively deployed by biblical writers). It is, as Lewis said, God’s choice of imagery, and not just as one characterization amongst many but as the principal expression of the relationship.  

Human father-and-son language is also, of course, potentially unhelpful, insofar as it intimates a hierarchic relationship within the Godhead (especially so in the even more patriarchal Ancient World in which that language was first used). The “eternal subordination of the Son,” as it’s known, is the belief (that some theologians argue for) that although the Son is equal to the Father in his divinity, he is subordinate to the Father in his role and function. This is perhaps not quite in the pointless theological debate category of “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” but for many ordinary Christians, this debate amongst academic theologians will sound like just that: academic.

Since Father and Son are “one” in heart and mind and purposes (which, to my mind, is the critical thing to focus on), I don’t believe it’s worth making anything much of it. We certainly see a form of functional “subordination” in how the Jesus of the Gospels presents his relationship to the Father, but this is, of course, the divine-human Jesus speaking, who for our sakes had laid aside everything to do with “being God” that would have been incompatible with being fully human as we are (Philippians 2:6–7). He modelled for us exemplary humanity and what an exemplary human relationship with God the Father looks like (not to mention, an exemplary relationship with others).