@Halcon
Thank you
for your thoughtful follow-up and for engaging so deeply with this central
aspect of Christian theology. Your questions are both important and subtle, and
I am grateful for the chance to clarify them.
The term
“mystery” does not imply that all
interpretations are equally valid or that our efforts to understand are in
vain. Rather, it means that the reality being described—the inner life of the
triune God—is ultimately above the full grasp of finite human reason, though
not contrary to reason. Within this light, the Church, under the guidance of
the Holy Spirit, seeks to define with precision the boundaries of what is true
about God, even as we confess our inability to comprehend the divine essence
exhaustively. There is therefore a real distinction between a mystery that can
be rationally articulated (even if never fully comprehended) and a simple
admission of total ignorance. The dogmatic definitions are careful attempts
to articulate what God has revealed and to safeguard that revelation from
misunderstanding, rather than to make up for a lack of knowledge with
speculation.
Concerning
your question about the Son “standing next to” the Father in heaven, it is
essential to keep in mind the way in which language about God is necessarily
analogical, especially when speaking of realities beyond time and space. When
Scripture or the creeds describe the Son as “seated at the right hand of the
Father,” this is not a spatial statement, as if the Father and Son were two
finite beings with separate locations in a heavenly geography. Rather, it is a
metaphorical way of expressing the Son’s equality of dignity, authority, and
participation in the divine majesty. In the inner life of the Trinity the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are
not external to one another but wholly indwell one another (circumincession
or perichoresis), since the divine essence is utterly simple and
indivisible.
Yet, as you
rightly note, the Son and the Father are distinct persons. This distinction is
not one of substance, but of relation. The Father is the unbegotten source; the
Son is begotten of the Father; and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father
(and, in Western theology, from the Son). The capacity for communication, so to
speak, between the Father and the Son is not limited to the Incarnation—when
the Word took on human nature and prayed to the Father in a human voice—but is
eternal and intrinsic to the divine life itself. In the eternal Trinity, the
“speech” or “dialogue” between the persons is not that of two individuals
negotiating or conversing from a position of separation. Rather, it is an
eternal act of knowing and loving within the one divine essence. The Son is the Father’s perfect Word—his
self-understanding—and the Spirit is the mutual Love breathed forth by both.
The processions of Word and Love, which are eternally distinct, constitute the
persons and are the ground for all true relationality in God.
When the
Son, in his human nature, prayed to the Father, he prayed as the incarnate
Word, fully divine and fully human. In his divinity, he is eternally united
with the Father; in his humanity, he shares with us the experience of
dependence, trust, and even suffering. But even before (and after) the
Incarnation, the eternal Son “communicates” with the Father by virtue of their
relation of origin, which is not an exchange of information but an eternal act
of divine knowing and being begotten. This is the deep meaning behind the
Johannine language that “the Son is in the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18).
Thus, while
it is true that the Son is not the same person as the Father, their distinction
is never one of separation or externality, but of real relation within the one,
undivided divine reality. The “communication” of the Son with the Father, then,
is an eternal relation of knowledge and love—one that is mirrored in the
Incarnation when Jesus prays to the Father as man, but which pre-exists and
transcends the Incarnation itself. It is precisely because the persons are not
three separate beings sharing a “title,” but three distinct subsistences in one
being, that their communion is perfect, eternal, and without division.
In short,
the Son does indeed “speak” to the Father in spirit, but this is not the
communication of two separate spirits; it is the eternal relation of knowledge
and love within the Trinity itself. The difference between the Son’s prayer in
his earthly life and the eternal “dialogue” within the Godhead is that, in the
Incarnation, the Word communicates as man to God; in the eternal Trinity, the
Son is the perfect self-expression of the Father within the divine life itself.
Both are real, and both are expressions of the unfathomable communion that is
the Holy Trinity.
This is
why we profess not merely a common title or a moral union, but
the ineffable mystery of one God in three persons, eternally distinct in
relation and yet utterly one in being.
@slimboyfat
Your
response reveals a fundamental misunderstanding both of the biblical data and
of the theological categories that have shaped Christian doctrine from the
apostolic age. To assert that “Son of God” must necessarily mean “not God”—and
that, by ordinary language, “if Jesus is the Son of God, he cannot be God
himself”—betrays an uncritical importation of modern, Western assumptions about
personhood and substance, and neglects both the ancient context and the logic
of scriptural usage.
First, your
insistence that “the Son of God means Jesus is not THAT God whose Son he is” is simply wrong: it only follows the the Son is not the same person (i.e. Modalism) that whose Son he is. Your logic is
based on an anthropomorphic projection: as if divine sonship must be strictly
analogous to human generation, in which a son is a separate being, temporally
posterior, and subordinate to his father. This is precisely the
misunderstanding refuted by the Gospel itself. In ancient Jewish and
Greco-Roman contexts, the “son of” idiom very often denotes not mere biological
derivation but identity of nature. The son of a man is a man; the son of a
horse is a horse; and the “Son of God,” in Johannine usage, is of the very
essence of God. In John 5:18, when Jesus calls God his Father, his
contemporaries immediately grasp the implication: “He was calling God his own
Father, making himself equal with God.” The charge of blasphemy in John 10:33
is not that Jesus claims to be a created subordinate, but that “you, being a
man, make yourself God.” This is not a “4th-century dogmatic confusion,” but
the clear logic of the text and the lived theological context of Second Temple
Judaism.
The titles "Son of God" and
"Son of Man" stand at the center of Christological reflection, each
expressing distinct but complementary aspects of Jesus' identity. These
expressions, deeply rooted in biblical language and ancient Near Eastern
cultural context, have often been misinterpreted, sometimes even by those who
employ them in theological argument. A careful, philologically and contextually
precise reading is essential for a proper understanding—particularly in
response to objections that would reduce "Son of God" to a merely
created or subordinate being, or "Son of Man" to simple humanity. These
titles both reveal and safeguard the mystery of Christ’s full divinity and true
humanity.
In both Hebrew and Aramaic, as in many languages, the
construction “son of…” (ben in Hebrew, bar in Aramaic) typically expresses a
genealogical or familial relationship: “Simon, son of Jonah” (cf. Matthew
16:17). However, it is also a rich idiom capable of expressing moral or
qualitative identity. The Old and New Testaments refer to “sons of
disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2) to mean those characterized by disobedience, or
“son of death” to mean “doomed to die.” Thus, “son of…” formula may signify either
literal descent or, by extension, the possession of a certain nature or
quality. This semantic versatility is critical for understanding Christological
titles.
It is crucial to avoid importing anthropomorphic assumptions into our understanding of “sonship.” In human experience, the father necessarily precedes the son in time and dignity. But in the context of ancient Semitic culture, the son is also the father’s representative, the heir of all his possessions, and the sharer of his authority. In the biblical context, the son may be seen as a virtual extension—indeed, the “image”—of the father. This analogy is applied analogically and elevated: the eternal generation of the Son does not imply temporal succession or subordination, but rather the communication of the same divine essence from the Father to the Son.
The distinction between "who" (the Son) and
"what" (God) is vital. The Son of God is a person—“who”—the Second
Person of the Trinity. "God" is the nature—“what”—which Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit possess in perfect unity. To deny the deity of the Son based
on His title is to misread both the language and the theology of the New
Testament and to sever the link between the economy of salvation and the
eternal life of God. For only if Christ is true God and true man can He mediate
between God and humanity and effect the reconciliation at the heart of the
Gospel.
You appeal
to the notion that John 20:28 can be explained by social or political
context—specifically, that Thomas calls Jesus “my Lord and my God” as a polemic
against the imperial titles of Domitian. Yet this approach not only lacks
manuscript or patristic support, but fails to account for the immediate,
personal, and confessional nature of Thomas’s words. The Greek is explicit: “he
said to him (εἶπεν αὐτῷ).” The address is directed to the risen Jesus, who stands before him in
bodily glory, bearing the marks of crucifixion. To reduce this climactic
moment—the only time in the entire Gospel where Jesus is directly addressed as
“my God”—to a mere political gesture is to evacuate the narrative of its entire
theological force, and to ignore the literary structure of John’s Gospel,
which, from its Prologue (“the Word was God,” 1:1) to its conclusion, proclaims
the full deity of Christ.
The
argument that “Son of God” and “God” are mutually exclusive terms in John is,
moreover, a categorical error. The Gospel makes clear that to be “Son of God”
in the unique, “only begotten” sense (μονογενής, John 1:18; 3:16) is to possess
the very nature of God, not by adoption or creation but by eternal generation.
Jesus never includes himself with his disciples in addressing God (“my Father
and your Father,” John 20:17), because his sonship is ontological and unique.
The Church Fathers distinguished carefully between the sonship of adoption
(applicable to believers by grace) and the sonship of nature (applicable only
to the eternal Word). To insist, as you do, that the apostolic confession of
Jesus as “Son of God” precludes his divinity is simply to ignore the burden of
the entire New Testament, which uses the title “Son of God” precisely to mark
him as the divine revealer and consubstantial with the Father.
You further
suggest that reading full deity into Thomas’s confession is “shoehorning
4th-century Christology” into the text. On the contrary, it is precisely the
Christology of the New Testament that compelled the Church to articulate, with
philosophical rigor, the distinction between person (hypostasis) and nature
(ousia), lest the unity and fullness of the biblical witness be lost. The
charge that this is “proof texting” is simply unsustainable given the
structural and thematic coherence of John’s Gospel: it opens with the Word who
“was God” (John 1:1), depicts the Son as the only one who has “seen the Father”
(1:18), affirms the Son’s possession of all that is the Father’s (16:15), and
closes with the direct acclamation of Jesus as “my Lord and my God” (20:28).
The appeal
to “ordinary usage” is further complicated by the unique nature of biblical
revelation and its use of familial, legal, and royal metaphors to describe the
mystery of divine life. In the biblical context, to be called “Son of God” in
the unique sense attributed to Jesus is to claim what no mere creature, angel,
or prophet could claim: a participation in the divine name, authority, and
prerogatives reserved to YHWH alone. When Jesus is worshipped as God by Thomas,
and accepts that worship without rebuke—unlike the angels in Revelation who
redirect worship to God (Rev 19:10)—the Gospel writer signals his intention
unambiguously.
Your
attempt to historicize the confession, limiting its meaning to a protest
against Roman imperial ideology, is both anachronistic and reductionist. While
it is true that Domitian was addressed as “dominus et deus noster” in some
inscriptions, the context of John 20:28 is entirely distinct: it is the
culmination of resurrection faith, rooted in the Jewish monotheistic tradition,
not a coded polemic against the emperor cult. Moreover, there is no evidence in
the Johannine community or patristic commentaries that Thomas’s words were so
interpreted. Early Christian interpreters, from Ignatius of Antioch and Cyprian
to Athanasius and Augustine, uniformly read John 20:28 as a confession of
Jesus’ true deity—precisely the point denied by all subordinationist or Arian
revisions.
Finally,
your attempt to draw a hard distinction between “Son of God” and “God”
collapses under the weight of the Johannine theology itself. The Son is
eternally begotten, not made; he is, in the language of Nicaea, “God from God,
Light from Light, true God from true God.” The unity of divine essence does not
preclude distinction of persons, but rather grounds it. The fact that John is
able to speak of Jesus both as “Son of God” and, in the climactic moment, as
“my Lord and my God” demonstrates the elasticity of biblical language in the
face of transcendent mystery, not the exclusion of divine identity.
In
conclusion, your approach is governed less by a careful reading of the text in
its literary and historical context, and more by a prior theological commitment
to non-Trinitarian dogma. The ordinary rules of language, when applied to the
unique subject matter of divine revelation, must be informed by the context,
intent, and cumulative witness of Scripture. The confession of Thomas is the
high point of Johannine Christology, the direct, personal, and Spirit-inspired
acknowledgment that the risen Jesus is, in the fullest sense, “my Lord and my
God.” The patristic and ecclesial tradition did not invent this meaning—it
received and preserved it in fidelity to the apostolic witness. To be the Son
of God, in the sense ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament, is to be the very
God whose Son he is—not a mere emissary, not a created agent, but the living
and consubstantial Word, worthy of all worship and adoration. Any reading that
fails to do justice to this mystery is not exegesis, but eisegesis in the
service of a diminished Christ.
