Retrieving Eternal Generation by Fred Sanders & Scott R. Swain

Author:Fred Sanders & Scott R. Swain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSIONS

Three brief conclusions will suffice. First, the title μονογενής is, for Origen, not by itself the source for the doctrine of the Son’s eternal generation. It is part of and points toward a wide constellation of texts that must be read individually and separately in a manner worthy of the divine existence. Second, the doctrine of eternal generation is a central nexus within Origen’s account of God as eternal, rational, diffusive, governing, and communicative benevolence. His teaching on eternal generation is not a detachable extra in his theology of God but a vital strand in its cardiac muscle.

Third, and as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, there is much in Origen’s account that will not pass the scrutiny of the fourth-century controversies. Origen attempts to show us that the Son’s mode of generation reveals the divine nature to be eternally communicative and benevolent, even as the Father is the one principle of all. Origen finds himself somewhat caught between asserting the Son’s closeness to the Father—only he knows the Father, only he draws his being directly and eternally from the Father—and arguing that the Son possesses his goodness somehow in a derivative sense.36 Nicene theologians will eventually reconceive the second of these concerns. They will find ways of presenting the one divine power as either possessed by all, or as shared by the Father with Son and Spirit, such that any “derivation” is the derivation of an equality in power and will. But they will not abandon the first of Origen’s principles. Right at the heart of Nicene theology is the principle that as we grow in attention to the Son’s eternal generation we see ever more clearly how the triune life is a rational, willed, and benevolent goodness. This principle is one of the foundations of Trinitarian life, and we are forever in Origen’s debt for pushing us to consider it more deeply. Perhaps better, we are ever in the Spirit’s debt for raising up Origen to do so for us!

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