Is Jesus Christ a created being (Begotten Son) or has He always existed alongside God the Father (Eternal Son)?

Faith & Science Conversation
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You’re exactly right to tie Psalm 2:7 and its New Testament echoes to kingship, mission, and divine appointment, rather than some eternal, ontological relationship within a Trinitarian framework. The phrase “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee” (Psalm 2:7), quoted in Acts 13:33, Hebrews 1:5, and Hebrews 5:5, is consistently applied not to some timeless divine relationship, but to a moment in redemptive history—a "day” when God declares and reveals something new.

In Acts 13:33, Paul ties the “begotten” declaration directly to the resurrection of Jesus, not His eternal preexistence. In Hebrews 5:5, it’s linked to His high priestly role, and in Psalm 2, it’s clearly tied to royal enthronement—not divine biology. The term “begotten” here, especially in the ancient Hebrew and Greek context, is not about physical origin, but about investiture with authority—crowning a king, establishing a ruler, or publicly identifying a chosen one as God’s representative on earth.

This view aligns perfectly with how Sonship is presented throughout Scripture: as a role and identity rooted in the incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus—not an eternal relationship between divine persons. When Jesus is called the “Son of God,” it’s declaring that this man, born of a virgin, filled with the Spirit, anointed without measure, and raised in power, is the visible image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15), the appointed King, and the redeemer of the world.

So yes—Jesus’ Sonship was fundamentally about communicating His mission, not mapping a metaphysical relationship inside the Godhead. It’s a revelatory title, not a blueprint of divine anatomy. And that’s why Oneness theology holds that Sonship began with the incarnation—when the eternal God stepped into time, crowned Himself with human nature, and fulfilled the mission of salvation as the Son.

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  • Personally? Anybody willing to undergo circumcision to show fealty to me would impress me, and I might go so far as to call him “Son”, but I’m not likely to ask anybody to undergo circumcision just to be my son.
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Yes, I agree with all this. But I still think the concept of “sonship” and how it all relates to the Incarnation and Christology is somewhat distinct from whether or not we call one aspect of God’s Three-in-Oneness “the Son.” So when you are presenting all these very valid points about the concept of sonship, you need to remember that establishing them doesn’t negate or disprove the pre-existence of the Second Person of the Trinity, it just calls into question whether the term “Son” is the best name. I would grant that the label in English (and other languages) has failed to communicate well outside of the original ANE context what God Incarnate in Jesus has been before the Incarnation.

I can see how projecting ideas derived from Jesus’ sonship back onto history as if it is exemplary of how God has always related and functioned as Godself could be theologically problematic and part of the reason people get off on weird Trinitarian tangents that aren’t grounded in actual revelation. But like I have said, all theology involves building concepts and those concepts depend on imagination not simply logical deduction or adding up empirical evidence. But I think it is a legtimate theological exercise to ask where people have filled in the gaps a little too imaginatively and then called it “God’s word.”

That’s partly why in my organization we had a HUGE controversy over the translation of divine familial terms in minority language Scripture translations, and a lot of Reformed English-speaking pastors in America beclowned themselves saying stupid and racist and Islamophobic things as they weighed in with their uninformed (and sometimes downright heretical) opinions.

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I think you might have a messaging problem more than a theology problem (from my perspective) with your insistence that “Oneness theology” is in opposition to “Trinitarian theology” and framing it as a novel interpretation of the texts instead of an important corrective to the constructs that have built up over time around the discussion of the texts.

It’s pretty clear to me that the apostolic message preached the “Three-in-Oneness” of God, and this Three-in-Oneness construct is necessary and foundational for other doctrines in orthodox Christian Christology, pneumatology, eschatology, and ecclesiology, as well as ideas about divine revelation and the inspiration of Scripture.

I think you are right that throughout Christian history and theological thought development, people have tended to discuss Three-in-Oneness using lenses, language, and analogies that center Threeness over Oneness and this has left people with constructs attached to labels like “sonship” and “begotten” and “pre-existence” and “personhood” that are not serving the theology or the interpretation of the texts well. Maybe because our conceptual analogies and linguistic toolboxes deal better with separateness than with integration, it has just been easier to fall into Threeness thinking. Our embodied human experience is as individuals and our experience with collectives is always as differentiatable invididuals united into collectives. We are not hive mind creatures like the aliens in Ender’s Game.

So I agree with much of what you have said about intepreting the texts without imposing a Threeness lens or insisting on Threeness constructs or without projecting our own individual-ness and separate-personhood onto God’s Three-in-Oneness.

I’m just not at all convinced that you recover the Three-in-Oneness that the apostles taught by introducing a novel Oneness construct for everything. The reason people react combatively to these “Oneness theology” ideas, (many of which are not at all bad ideas and are quite consistent with ANE informed Bible scholarship) is that you are presenting them as a novel and oppositional take on orthodoxy. Is that really even what you have? If you want a corrective to the privileging of Threeness in Trinitarian (Three-in-Oneness) Christianity, then present a Oneness lens as the corrective to Threeness that gets you back to Three-in-Oneness, don’t try to argue that Oneness is new and better theology than Three-in-Oneness. People are just going to hear the part where you are saying “orthodox Christianity is wrong, listen to my new ideas about the real meaning of the Bible texts” and all their “this is a cult” alarm bells are going to go off.

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Ok. I guess I thought part of the argument was that Jesus was just a human born like any other human, and that god chose to adopt him as his own, giving him a name above all, and elevating him.

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Christy, that’s a very thoughtful and fair reflection, and I want to approach it in the same spirit. I truly appreciate your willingness to acknowledge that some ideas within Oneness theology align with ancient Near Eastern (ANE) understandings of Scripture—and you’re right to sense that the conflict isn’t always over content, but often over how it’s framed and how it challenges long-standing tradition.

But I would gently push back on the idea that Oneness theology is “novel.” What we call “Oneness” today is not a 20th-century invention—it’s a sincere effort to return to the language, categories, and theological worldview of the apostles and the Hebrew Scriptures. The apostles never described God as three persons in one essence. They preached One God (Deut. 6:4) who manifested Himself in flesh (1 Tim. 3:16), and they baptized in the name of Jesus (Acts 2:38) as the revealed name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. These are not novel concepts; they are biblically grounded realities that were later reinterpreted through creeds and philosophical categories unfamiliar to the original Jewish-Christian context.

What may feel “oppositional” isn’t so much about attacking orthodoxy, but about challenging the assumption that the Nicene and post-Nicene formulations were the final and only faithful expressions of biblical truth. Oneness theology doesn’t deny the mystery of God—it seeks to honor it by refusing to divide Him into persons when the Bible so clearly emphasizes His indivisible oneness, and by viewing Jesus not as a part of God, but as the fullness of God revealed (Col. 2:9).

The goal isn’t to be contrary. It’s to magnify the name of Jesus, the One in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily. If the presentation sometimes feels combative, I admit that’s a danger when contending for truth. But the heartbeat behind it is this: to return to the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3), and to proclaim with clarity and love that Jesus is not one of three—He is the One who was, and is, and is to come, the Almighty (Rev. 1:8).

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Well, yes, Jesus of Nazareth the human was a human born like other humans whose physical body had a conception point in time. Jesus is the name of the human. The Incarnation says God became Jesus at his conception, it doesn’t say an unembodied human named Jesus was eternally part of the Trinity. I think the one true God has always existed as a Three in One, and the eternal Son is a convenient label for one member of the Trinity, it’s not an indication that Jesus the human pre-existed. The whole question of the OP is whether Jesus is a created being. To the extent that Jesus is a human with a physical body, yes, humans are created at a point in time. God chose that human for “sonship,” and what sonship entails is what we are talking about. It’s a separate part of Christology to say Jesus is the incarnate eternal Son who is fully God and fully man. Anything involving the Incarnation of Three-in-Oneness is going to be kind of a mindscrew and our words and categories will fail us.

And all of this can be true even if Jesus was God from the moment of his conception. The Trinitarian constructs are in many ways trying to make sense of the sonship and fathering language of the New Testament while maintaining the doctrine that Jesus the human was fully God and fully man.

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What does this even mean?

The problem is that Christianity was in many ways a world-shattering re-interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures that expanded and re-invented those conceptual categories. The Incarnation was a new thing. Jesus was preaching something new. The apostles were teaching something new. Unless you are using Hebrew Scriptures not to mean “Old Testament” but the entire canon, which is not what the term “Hebrew Scriptures” conventionally means.

I think “viewing” is the operative word here and what we can’t escape in our mental limitations. Jesus is the fullness of God, not a “part” of God, true. But the separateness of the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is also revealed, and its useful to attempt ways to speak of this (hence the Trinity construct) even if we can never quite perfectly “view” it.

Agreed, but we already established that “Jesus is one of three” is a strawman and not what “God is a Trinity=God is Three-in-One” teaches.

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Great question, Christy—and one that deserves a clear and scriptural answer.

When I say that the apostles baptized in the name of Jesus as the revealed name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I’m referring to the understanding that the one saving name revealed in the New Testament is Jesus, and that this name encompasses and expresses the full identity of God in His redemptive roles.

In Matthew 28:19, Jesus told the disciples to baptize “in the name [singular] of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” He didn’t say “names” (plural), but “name”—implying a single, unified authority. Then, in Acts 2:38, Peter obeyed that command under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost by baptizing in the name of Jesus Christ. This pattern continues consistently throughout Acts (Acts 8:16, 10:48, 19:5)—there is not one recorded instance of anyone being baptized by repeating the titles “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Why? Because they understood that those were titles, not names. The name that fulfilled all three roles was Jesus.

  • As Father, God is the Creator and source of all life (Isaiah 64:8).
  • As Son, He manifested Himself in flesh for redemption (1 Timothy 3:16).
  • As Holy Ghost, He indwells and empowers believers (John 14:17–18; Romans 8:9–11).

All of these roles are fulfilled by one God, and His revealed name is Jesus (John 5:43; Philippians 2:9–11). So when the apostles baptized in the name of Jesus, they were not disobeying Jesus’ command in Matthew 28:19—they were fulfilling it by invoking the name that carried the authority and identity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. That’s what I mean by “Jesus is the revealed name.” It is not a denial of the roles—it’s the revelation of the One Name behind them all.

Yes, the Scriptures clearly show the Father sending, the Son redeeming, and the Spirit indwelling—but none of this requires separate divine persons to be meaningful. What we see in Scripture is not separateness of divine essence, but distinction of manifestation, function, and role. The One God reveals Himself in different ways for different purposes—not because He is three, but because He is infinite and relational in His dealings with us. Isaiah 43:10–11 makes this crystal clear: “Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no saviour.”

The Oneness perspective embraces the full range of God’s self-disclosure. We believe the Father is God in His transcendence, the Son is God in incarnation, and the Holy Spirit is God in His indwelling and empowering presence—not three persons, but one God revealing Himself in three primary ways. The early believers didn’t have to coin philosophical terms to explain this; they simply pointed to Jesus as the fullness of all God is (Col. 2:9), and they experienced His Spirit as the very presence of God dwelling in them (Romans 8:9–11).

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I see. I was not really raised up with the belief of the trinity. The discussions never make sense to me. But that was mainly the Holy Spirit. That the Holy Spirit was not a bring, but the power of god. Like a magician full with magic. The magic is not a being but a power even if it sought out goodness. So I see it , if supernatural, that Yahweh is god. Yahweh is full of supernatural power. That power is called the Holy Spirit. Somehow Jesus was conceived, abd Jesus a man was born with complete control and authority with this power that Yahweh gave him. As Jesus grew the power revealed more to him. When he died, God used this power to bring him back. We as Christians receive a minute mustard grain size of this Holy Spirit to help guide us. Jesus has full access to it. Those chosen had a lot more access to it then we do now. That’s about as “magical” I can accept. Though I tend to think the fo conception was not supernatural.

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I don’t disagree at all with what you are asserting (that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit refer to One God, one source of authority and honor and salvation, that’s what Christians believe), but “name” here doesn’t mean “personal word used to refer.” Also the distinction between title and name in English is irrelevant to discussing the Greek. Both titles and names in English are “personal words used to refer.” “In the name” here in the Greek (and elsewhere in the Hebrew) means by means of the authority or honor, or reputation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A singular authority or a singular reputation can be ascribed to a collective, so you can’t prove “God is One not Three” by pointing to the grammar here. Just for the record.

But Jesus of Nazareth was a human being and that human being does not in fact indwell and empower me. And Jesus of Nazareth the human being did not in fact create the world, because he did not yet exist. So this makes no sense to me. God created, God became incarnate in Jesus and reconciled the world to himself through Jesus (the human being’s) death and resurrection, and God indwells the church. God’s name is not Jesus, it’s YHWH, the Eternal One.

We’ve already agreed that “separate divine persons” is a construct and what people mean by it depends on how they construe the word person as it applies to God. What I mean by God is Three-in-One and by naming Persons of the Trinity is not that God is Three Individuals. Insisting that it has to mean that is arguing with a strawman. I honestly don’t see how what you are saying is any different from what I was taught the Trinity is by Trinititarians.

This is almost verbatim what I learned as a “Trinitarian persepective on the missio dei.” If you want to insist that God has three simultaneous and distinct “ways” of being God instead God existing in three simultaneous and distinct “Persons,” I feel like it’s semantics and you arguing for your preferred way of labeling your concepts. Sure, if that works for you, why not? It’s just two different ways of trying to get at the same reality with language.