¶1This is the Reluctant Theologian Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. R.T. Mullins from the University of Lucerne. So social media lost its mind over the weekend.
¶2Why? William Lane Craig released a short video clip on the doctrine of eternal generation. And all of the self-proclaimed theologians who don't understand the doctrine, they just completely lost their minds. So today I'm going to break everything down for you. If you'd like to support the show, you can donate money to my Patreon account or my Ko-fi account.
¶3Any donation helps me out in so many ways. My student loan provider, well, okay, the Trump administration broke my student loan provider, so everything's chaotic and no one's happy. If you have questions or topics you'd like to hear on the show, you can send me a message at rtmullins.com. Ready or not, here I am talking about the processions. Enjoy.
¶4All right, like I said, over the weekend, William Lane Craig released some video clips of an interview that he did. And so Craig talks about the doctrine of eternal generation, or what is sometimes called the Trinitarian processions. In case you do not know, the doctrine of eternal generation says that the Father caused the Son to exist. That's the doctrine. The Father caused the Son to exist.
¶5Now, even though that's what the doctrine says, hardly any theologian online is just going to come right out and say that. They would rather blather on and on about the beauty that you can find in the inefable mysteries, and then they're going to send up some piety signals about how man-made doctrines are just really beyond human comprehension. Oh, sorry, man. I just came right out of the gate with a lot of snark right there. Anyway, lots of people online, they had very strong opinions about Craig's video.
¶6Now, one common opinion is that Craig has become a heretic in recent years, as if Craig like just suddenly changed his mind on the Trinitarian processions. And this is, I'm sorry, this is just funny to me. I mean, Craig has been, Craig's been publishing on this topic for quite some time, and he's not really changed his views on the processions. The first edition of Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, that came out in 2003. So Craig lays out his views on the Trinity there, and Craig has been publishing and debating the doctrine of the Trinity since then.
¶7I mean, that's over 20 years at this point. And Craig's not been hiding his views. Last year, there was the Trinity Four Views debate book that came out. So Chad McIntosh, he edited the book. It's called One God, Three Persons, Four Views.
¶8And in that book, you've got Craig debating the doctrine of the Trinity with Dale Tuggy, William Hasker, and Bo Branson. And I've got an interview with Craig from last year. You can go find it on my podcast here. And I talked to Craig about his contribution to that debate book. So, again, Craig has not been hiding his views on the doctrine of the Trinity.
¶9But for whatever reason, self-proclaimed theologians on the internet, they are rushing to talk about the dangerous heretical turn in Craig's theology. This recent turn towards heresy. Well, what exactly is the heresy? Can you describe the ruckus, sir? So, let's open up Craig's Systematic Philosophical Theology, Volume 2B, On God, No Cap.
¶10Hang on a second. Rodney, is that the right subtitle? Are you sure? On God, No Cap? Oh, oh, I see.
¶11Okay. Rodney's saying that Craig was just trying to appeal to Gen Z with that one. You sure? Okay. Anyway.
¶12All right. Let's turn to page 420 of Volume 2B to see what Craig says about the doctrine of Trinitarian processions. Rodney, why are you laughing now? Oh, 420. I get 420.
¶13Yes. Okay. Gosh, grow up. Next Rodney's going to start laughing about the page number for my essay in the Philosophy of Heavy Metal book. Yeah, yeah, grow up.
¶14Anyway. Anyway, sorry. Craig has a section just on Eternal Generation, just on the Eternal Processions, and so it starts on page 420. Here's what Craig says to open up this section. This is the first paragraph.
¶15He says, Finally, our proposed model does not feature, though it does not preclude, the derivation of one person from another, enshrined in the confession that the Son is begotten of the Father before all worlds, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made. So, Craig's, you know, he's quoting from the Constantipolitan Nicene Creed. So, Craig carries on. And he says, God could simply exist eternally with his multiple cognitive faculties and capacities. This is, in my view, all for the better.
¶16For although credibly affirmed, the doctrine of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit is a relic of Logos Christology, which finds virtually no warrant in the biblical text and threatens to introduce subordinationism into the Godhead, which anyone who affirms the full deity of Christ ought to find very troubling. Okay, so that's how Craig opens his section on the Trinitarian processions. And there's a lot going on in this paragraph, obviously. I just want to break down a few things for you, just kind of highlight a few things. This is hopefully going to help you understand some of the controversy and help you understand Craig's own position.
¶17Now, nothing that I say in this episode, nothing I say is going to help you understand why so many contemporary Christian theologians are just fundamentally incapable of accurately stating the doctrine of eternal generation. I have no idea why they cannot do that. I mean, it's not that hard. Just repeat after me. Repeat after me.
¶18The Father causes the Son to exist. Just say it. The Father causes the Son to exist. That's it. There you go.
¶19One sentence. But loads of theologians throughout history and today, they shy away from saying that because this orthodox statement, it sounds exactly like the statements from the heretics. Now, even Aquinas gets uncomfortable saying this orthodox statement because he says it just sounds like heresy. I mean, so I'm going to come back to that. I want you to notice something important, though, at this point.
¶20So start by noticing that Craig does not outright preclude the doctrine of eternal generation. I mean, Craig definitely casts a skeptical eye on the doctrine and even argues that it has zero biblical basis. But I want you to notice that Craig does not say that he rejects the doctrine of eternal generation here. He doesn't say that. He says that his model of the Trinity does not need the doctrine, but that his model of the Trinity does not preclude it either.
¶21And if you read the four views on the Trinity debate book, you'll see Craig make very similar statements there. So really, what we have from Craig is him saying that maybe, just maybe, a small group of dead people in the past did not get everything exactly right. I know, that's really shocking. Very shocking. I mean, if you know the history surrounding the Council of Nicaea in 325, this statement from Craig is very shocking.
¶22It's really difficult to accept. It's very difficult to accept the idea that a few hundred politicians and religious leaders in the past, it's difficult to accept that they possibly got a few things wrong. It's really difficult to believe that a small group of people in 325 in Nicaea, people who disagreed with each other on just about everything, it's difficult to believe that they might have stated some finer points of doctrine in some kind of fuzzy and confusing ways. It's just really hard to believe that. I know.
¶23I know. And it's even harder to believe that when you notice that loads of the members of the Nicaea Council, they forgot about the finer points of doctrine that they'd made. Because like the creedal details, these creedal details, they were so important that most people, they just moved on like it never happened. I mean, if you, if you know your church history, this is, this is actually one of the motives for Athanasius, like, like Athanasius, like he gets so mad about this that he makes a huge fuss over Nicaea and tries to like, you know, be like, we got it. We got to bring back Nicaea.
¶24We got to make Nicaea great again. I mean, Athanasius is mad that loads of people forgot about Nicaea and forgot about its doctrines of homoousias, genitas, and genitas. Now, now I know it sounds like I just repeated myself. Those, those, those two last words I said, genitas and genitas or genitas and genitas, you know, they're not the same word. Trust me.
¶25I'm not really repeating myself. Those last two words, genitas and genitas, those are translated in English as begotten and made. The spelling for the word begotten is just like, just slightly different. It's just one extra letter, uh, from the word that, that is used, uh, that we translate as, is made. So the word for begotten that was invented at Nicaea and loads of pro-Nicene theologians, they, they quickly forgot about this neologism.
¶26So a bunch of people quickly went back to saying that the son was made by the father. And this, I mean, this really, I mean, this really annoyed Athanasius and it's one of the many reasons that after Nicaea, we had to have another council in 380 and 381 to codify and develop and clarify what we now call the Nicene Creed. Now the fuzziness of Nicaea, I mean, this is something that's regularly talked about in church history books. I'm not saying anything controversial unless you have never read a church history book. I mean, you know, I don't, I don't know what you've read.
¶27And so the fuzziness of Nicaea, this is something that subsequent generations of theologians, they had to debate. They had to, and they had to have another council in 380 to clean up the mess of Nicaea. And then of course, the Nicene Creed that's developed at Constantinople in 380 and 381, that also had some conceptual problems that had to be debated and clarified by later councils. But you know what? I mean, really, when you reflect on all of this, I think it's just really clear.
¶28It's very clear that Craig is obviously wrong to say that maybe those dead guys in 325, maybe they didn't get everything right with absolute analytic precision. I mean, Craig, Craig is clearly wrong in his books. They need to be burned or at the very least, if we're not going to burn his books, we need to place them on a banned book list. We need to shield the public from Craig's dangerous ideas. I mean, otherwise he might start corrupting the youth.
¶29Goodness, I'm clutching my pearls over here. Just thinking about it. All right. Now, anyway, now that we have clarified Craig's dangerous ideas, let's take a deeper look at the doctrine of eternal generation. So by the time we reach the fifth ecumenical council, the doctrine is clarified to the form that we now have it today.
¶30So here's the claim. The doctrine of eternal generation comes to mean that the father timelessly causes the son to timelessly exist. And then further, the father timelessly causes the son to timelessly have the same divine nature as the father. Like that's that is what the doctrine of eternal generation means. The word generation is a causal notion to cause or to generate.
¶31Now, okay, lots of people, lots of people do not like hearing me say that. They really don't. And a lot of people, they want to doubt the truth of what I'm saying. To which I reply, I am sorry to learn of your deep ignorance on this matter. So please allow me to enlighten you.
¶32The first thing to say is that the concept at play here in these early Christological and Trinitarian debates, the concept is causal. It is not metaphorical. So let me give you an example of this. Gregory of Nyssa, in his treatise On Not Three Gods. So this is Gregory of Nyssa, or G-Nyssa, or G-Nys, if you will.
¶33He says, quote, The principle of causality distinguishes then the persons of the Holy Trinity. It affirms that the one is uncaused, while the other depends on the cause. That's a really explicit statement from Gregory there. So Gregory is very explicit that the Father does not have a cause for his existence. And Gregory is here explicit that the Son and Spirit are caused to exist by the Father.
¶34It's right there. Now, sometimes contemporary theologians, they'll try to say that Gregory and then the framers of the Nicene Creed and lots of other people, they had this completely different understanding of causation. Like, it's a completely different view. It's a different account of causation from your modern account of causation. Well, that's just something mediocre minds like to say when they don't know how to deal with difficult objections.
¶35I have no idea what the modern notion of causation is. To see this, just take a look at the Oxford Handbook of Causation. The Oxford Handbook of Causation has 37 chapters discussing different views of causation and different issues related to causation. Which one of those is the modern view of causation? I have no idea.
¶36And you do not have any clue either. So let's just set aside silly talking points and let's get down to brass tacks. The Nicene Creed says that the Father has eternally begotten the Son. The Son has begotten of the Father, not made. What exactly does that mean?
¶37So terms like begotten and made, they are both causal notions in the creed. Because again, the Greek is genitas and genitas or genitas and genitas, depending on how you want to pronounce ancient Greek that no one speaks anymore. Those words mean to generate or produce. Now, according to the patristic scholar Alstair Heron, the term begotten was intended to denote, and this is a quote from Heron, he says it's intended to denote, quote, that which has a cause or source outside itself. That's just what the word begotten means.
¶38That which has a cause or source outside itself. So to say that the Son is begotten, well, that just means that the Son is caused to exist. Now, Heron says this doesn't have to involve the begetting thing coming into existence. In other words, the Nicene Creed is trying to identify an eternal cause with an eternal effect. So to say that the Son is eternally begotten, that just means that the Son is eternally caused to eternally exist.
¶39This is meant to be different from the Nicene Creed's notion of created or made. So according to Heron, the term created or made, you know, what we translate in English as created or made, Heron says this is intended to denote, quote, that which has come into being. So to be created, well, that's to be caused to exist, but to be caused to exist in a way that the effect begins to exist. All right. Now, before we move on, I want you to notice something really important here.
¶40Notice what I just did. I quoted a patristic scholar clearly saying that the language of the Nicene Creed explicitly means that the Father causes the Son to exist. I did not speculate. I did not draw out an inference. I didn't make this up.
¶41I quoted a patristic scholar saying that the eternal generation denotes the Son being caused to exist. And in my publications on this topic, I also point out that you can find the exact same claims about causation from scholars like Richard Cross, Michelle Barnes, Rory Fox, and on and on and you can go. So here is the point I need you to understand. The early church did not have some magically different understanding of cause. By cause, they meant production or generation.
¶42The word is genetos, or to generate. A cause that produces an effect. A cause that generates an effect. We are talking about efficient causation when it comes to the generation of the Son by the Father. Now, if you go fast, like if you fast forward in history to like the Middle Ages, you're definitely going to find theologians in the Middle Ages who talk about the generation of the Son in terms of all four of the Aristotelian causes.
¶43But there's still a widespread agreement that is in congruency with the early church in saying that the Father is the efficient cause of the Son. So efficient causation is still part of the story, even if you want to add more Aristotelian four causes here. So Andrew Hollingsworth, he's published some really good papers on this. J.T. Pash has a good book on the history of this in the Middle Ages as well.
¶44And what's really clear throughout all of this is the concept is most certainly efficient causation or production. And even when you get to Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas, like I said earlier, he tries to fudge the language of eternal of eternal generation. He tries to fudge it because he's like, man, if you say cause, it just looks like it just looks like heresy. It looks exactly like what the heretics are saying. So so Aquinas tries to fudge the the language here and talk about the father being the principal of the Son.
¶45But what J.T. Pash points out is that Aquinas is still just using the notion of production or efficient causation here. Now, now here's something else I want you to know. Eternal generation is allegedly supposed to secure the homoousius of the divine persons. That's what the doctrine is is is supposed to do.
¶46That's what it's claimed to have done, that it secures the homoousius of the divine persons. So let me give you some more quotes here. So Stephen Holmes, church historian, wrote a really good book called The Quest for the Trinity. So here's a quote from him. So Holmes says the claim is that the father is the personal cause of the Son.
¶47And then Holmes goes on to say that because of this, like because the father is the personal cause of the Son, quote, they share the same nature. So somehow the father's volitional activity to bring about the existence of the Son and the Holy Spirit, somehow the father's volitional activity to bring them into existence is such that the Son and Holy Spirit perfectly share in the divine nature. Somehow the father's causal activity guarantees the full divinity of the Son and Spirit, as well as guarantees the unity of the three such that there is one God and not three gods. That's supposed to be the claim in the doctrine of the processions. But it's controversial.
¶48It's controversial. It has always been and it always will be controversial. So allow me to get a bit deeper here into this into this controversy, because I want you to understand why this is so controversial in the past and today. So homoousius, what does that mean? Homoousius means that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share the divine essence.
¶49Okay, so what's the divine essence? Well, at minimum, in order to have the divine essence, a person needs to have all of the great making properties or perfections. To be God is to be perfect, and you can't be perfect if you don't have all of the great making properties. Okay, great making properties, what are those? Those are attributes that explain why God is a perfect being.
¶50These are attributes that are better to have than not have all things considered. So attributes like omnipotence and omniscience, eternality, like that kind of stuff. So the claim that the Father causes the Son and Spirit to exist, it's somehow meant to secure that the Son and Spirit eternally exist and eternally have the same great making properties or essence as the Father. Like that is the claim in the doctrine of eternal generation. And that, of course, was deeply controversial in the 4th century, and the controversy, well, the controversy never went away.
¶51I mean, obviously the controversy never went away because we are still debating it today on X. X, or the artist formerly known as Twitter. So to help you better understand the controversy, let me briefly take you through some of the different arguments and positions that you're going to find in the 4th century, and you're also going to find today. Now again, when the Council of Nicaea happened, people had very strong opinions, like really strong opinions about it. There was a massive debate at the time about the significance of this causal relationship between the Father and the Son.
¶52The heretics and the Orthodox, they all agreed that the Father causes the Son to exist, but they disagreed about what the entailment is from that. So here is a very popular argument in the 4th century from different heretical groups. Groups like the Aryans, the Unomians, the Homo Eusians, and like, you know, a bunch of these kind of types. So these groups, they said that this causal relation means that the Son is the firstborn of creation, and thus to be highly exalted. But, but, they said, the Son is not fully divine because he's caused to exist.
¶53In other words, the Homo Eusias doctrine is false, according to these groups of people from the 4th century. Let me put the argument in a different way. So their argument, it could go a little something like this. An obvious great-making property is auseity, or self-existence. To be God is to exist ause.
¶54To be God is to not have a cause for your existence. Hence, the Father is God because the Father is not cause to exist. Now, the Son, well, the Son's cause to exist. So clearly, the Son is not God. The Son cannot be God precisely because the Son is cause to exist.
¶55That's the argument. That's the argument you see from different Aryans and Unomians and other people who affirm some kind of subordinationist view where the Father and Son are not equally divine. Now, that's the argument, but the so-called Orthodox, they disagree with the conclusion of the Aryan arguments, but again, the so-called Orthodox, they clearly agree that the Son is cause to exist. So they agree with the Aryans on that point. So the so-called Orthodox, they said that this causal relation somehow means that the Son is fully God.
¶56You can be cause to exist and somehow still be God. So the homoousius doctrine is true in their opinion. Let me say that again in case you missed it. The Orthodox position says that auseity is a great-making property that God has. To be God is to not have a cause for your existence.
¶57But then the Orthodox position says that the Son is cause to exist, oh, but in such a way that the Son is cause to be ause. And that's a bold move. And you might be wondering, how did the Orthodox avoid the conclusion that the Aryans pointed out? Well, let me tell you. The Orthodox avoided the conclusion by appealing to ineffable mystery.
¶58We just cannot understand how all this works, you see. Really obvious logical entailments, they just don't go through because it's all an unspeakable mystery. That is the Orthodox position you find in the fourth century. Okay, so that's the past. Let's bring the conversation back today.
¶59Let's return to William Lane Craig. So in Systematic Philosophical Theology, Volume 2b or Not to Be, Craig discusses this point. He quotes Athanasius, he quotes Hillary, he quotes Basil, all saying that the Father is greater than the Son because the Son is cause to exist. Let me repeat that. Athanasius and company, they say that the Father is greater than the Son because the Son is cause to exist.
¶60And so Craig's just quoting them saying that stuff. And then what Craig does is he points out that Athanasius and company, they also want to say that the Father and Son are equal in divinity. And you might just be left scratching your head about how does that work? I mean, how is the Father and the Son, how can they be equal when the Father has the great making property of being unbegotten and the Son just doesn't have that great making property? Like, how does that work?
¶61Well, what does Craig say about the situation? So here's what Craig says. This is a direct quote from Craig. He says, quote, This is to talk logical nonsense. It is like saying that six is greater than four, but four is not less than six.
¶62Woo, goodness. All right, so there you go. Craig thinks this is all just logical nonsense. It's logical nonsense to claim that a caused being is equal in greatness to an uncaused being. Hmm, goodness.
¶63All right. Well, my dear listener, I don't know what you think about the matter. I mean, my goal today is just to tell you the basics and to help you have a better understanding of the controversy surrounding William Lane Craig at the moment. So allow me to leave you with some parting questions. Do you think that the Son can be caused to exist and still be considered God?
¶64Do you think that Christian apologists should learn the basics of eternal generation before they start trying to defend it? Should Craig's systematic be banned before he starts corrupting the youth? I don't know what you think, but this whole situation, it raises a lot of really interesting questions that we have to consider. I'm not going to answer those questions today. That's all for today.
¶65I'll see you next time. And there you have it, another episode of the Reluctant Theologian Podcast. Stay tuned for more episodes on philosophical theology.