Μονογενής in the Church Fathers: A Response to Kevin Giles, Part 1

Introduction

As the title suggests, I’m beginning a series of blog posts interacting with Kevin Giles on the topic of μονογενής, a Greek word that is used five times in the New Testament with reference to Christ (John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9) and has traditionally been rendered “only begotten.” Significantly, the original Creed of Nicaea (325) uses the word: “We believe … in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only-begotten, that is, of the essence of the Father.” The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) also uses the word, but places it in a different location. The term is also applied to the Son hundreds upon hundreds of times in the writings of the Greek-speaking church fathers. Here are the results of performing searches on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) database on a number of ecclesiastical writers, ranked by the number of times the word occurs in their writings:

Ecclesiastical Writer	Μονογενής	Dates	TLG #
Cyril of Alexandria	981	d. 444	4090
Gregory of Nyssa	643	c. 330–395	2017
John Chrysostom	465	c. 347–407	2062
Theodoret of Cyrrhus	351	c. 393–460	4089
Didymus the Blind	346	c. 313–398	2102
Eusebius of Caesarea	340	c. 260–340	2018
Epiphanius of Salamis	304	c. 315–403	2021
Athanasius	287	c. 296–373	2035
Basil of Caesarea	281	c. 330–379	2040
Origen	126	c. 185–254	2042
Cyril of Jerusalem	89	c. 315–387	2110
Gregory Nazianzen	27	329–389	2022

Dates from the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3^rd ed.)
TLG # = the TLG author # (an arbitrary 4-digit unique identifier for each author)
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae is based at the University of California, Irvine, and is a database of literary Greek from Homer to the fall of Constantinople (www.tlg.uci.edu).

The current scholarly consensus is that the term, as used in extra-biblical Greek and in the New Testament, simply means “unique” or “only one of his kind,” and does not mean “only begotten.” I am currently engaged in detailed research that would suggest that this is not entirely correct. I argue that while it is used with the meaning “unique” in certain contexts, the most basic meaning is “only begotten” in extra-biblical Greek. I further believe that “only begotten” is the best rendering of the word in the five Johannine passages. Dr. Giles disagrees with me on this point, being convinced of the scholarly consensus with respect to the New Testament usage.

However, that is not the point I am engaging here. In this series of blog posts, I want to interact with his claim that “unique” is also the meaning of the term as used by the church fathers (primarily Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa) and in the Nicene Creed. It is one thing to say μονογενής means “unique” in the New Testament. That claim is widely accepted, and I completely understand why Dr. Giles believes it, even though I am currently engaging in scholarship to call it into question. But it is another thing to say μονογενής means “unique” in the fourth-century church fathers as well. This incredible claim demands a response.

Dr. Giles is an Anglican minister in Australia, who has written a couple of books expounding the orthodox, classical doctrine of the Trinity and critiquing “eternal functional subordination” (EFS) as advocated by men like Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware: The Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporary Gender Debate (IVP, 2002), and Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity (Zondervan, 2006). I share his discomfort with EFS or “eternal relations of authority and submission” (ERAS) in the immanent Trinity (although I don’t share his perspective that EFS is heretical). More recently, he has also written a defense of the historic belief that the Father eternally begets (or generates) the Son in a book titled The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology (IVP Academic, 2012). Chapter 8 of this more recent book includes a critique of EFS.

Where does “only begotten” come in? Well, at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) in San Antonio, Grudem and Ware publicly announced to a very large audience that they now affirm the eternal generation (EG) of the Son. (It isn’t too often you hear a scholar publicly say they were wrong in views they had previously published and that they’re planning to revise their books. That takes humility, courage, and integrity!) This occurred on the first day of ETS, Tuesday, November 15, 2016. There was a panel of four speakers: two opposed to EFS (Giles and Millard Erickson) and two in favor (Grudem and Ware). Grudem held up a paper I had written defending the traditional rendering of μονογενής as “only begotten” and said it played a role in changing his mind on EG. My paper is set to be published in a forthcoming multi-author book edited by Fred Sanders and Scott Swain titled Retrieving Eternal Generation (Zondervan, 2017).

Since many were inquiring about that paper, I wanted to make the substance of the argument available prior to its official publication. So I wrote a brief précis titled “Let’s Go Back to ‘Only Begotten’” (published by the Gospel Coalition on November 23, 2016). This sparked a response by Giles that he published on Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog on December 13.

In response to me, Giles argues that

“the word μονογενής is not the biblical basis for the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, and for this reason how the word μονογενής is translated into English is, as far as the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son is concerned, of little importance.”

He adds:

“In preparing to write my book, The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology, I read carefully Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers who developed the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son in opposition to the teaching of the ‘Arians’ of various kinds. I discovered that the Nicene fathers used the word, μονογενής, to speak of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, making the point that what made him unique above all else was that he was eternally begotten. They never appeal to this word as the basis for their doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. The Nicene Creed of 381 reflects exactly the same thing.”

This is consistent with his book, where he stated that the Greek-speaking fathers

“do not use [μονογενής] or the texts in which it is found as textual support for the eternal generation of the Son. For them, as we would expect if modern discussions on the meaning of this word are correct, the word was understood to mean ‘unique’ or ‘only’” (The Eternal Generation of the Son, p. 81 n44).

To summarize, Giles makes a number of related claims:

• The consensus of modern New Testament scholarship is that μονογενής means “unique,” not “only begotten,” and this modern interpretation is correct not only for the New Testament but also for the Greek-speaking church fathers.
• Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers used the word “to speak of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ,” not to affirm that he is the “only begotten” Son.
• They never appealed to this word, or to the texts in which it is found in the New Testament, to provide exegetical support for EG. Their biblical warrant for EG lay elsewhere.
• Even in the Nicene Creed, the word μονογενής means “unique,” not “only begotten.”

I disagree with each of these points. The focus of this series of blog posts is not to engage the debate over μονογενής in extra-biblical Greek or in the New Testament. My concern is with the fourth-century Greek-speaking fathers, especially Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers. In the series of posts to follow, I will provide plenty of evidence from their writings showing that Giles is simply wrong to read the modern consensus of New Testament scholarship that μονογενής means “unique” back into the fourth century.

Comments

[Kevin Giles]

Dear Lee, Thank you for your work. You are a delight to debate with; gracious, intelligent, sharp, etc etc. I am looking forward to seeing to your work to follow. I very much look forward in particular to your article where you show that for the Greek fathers the texts that use monogenes and the word itself were basic to their biblical case in support of their doctrine of eternal generation.

If you can show that in the church fathers consistently understood monogenes to mean "only begotton, I will be delighted.

Thank you for your meticulous linguistic work. This is not my specialty.

You are a good man. I feel great warmth towards you.

In grace and peace,

Kevin Giles

[Kevin Giles]

PS. On looking at my book on the eternal generation of the Son, I note that in my comments on the use of the word monogenes in the Greek fathers I begin my discussion on the word with Justin Martyr, include Bishop Alexander of Alexandria (Athanasius' predecessor - a fine theologian) and Eunomius. You list none of thse important sources.

Kevin Giles

[Lee]

Justin Martyr seems to understand μονογενής as involving the notion of begottenness: “I have already proved that He was the only-begotten of the Father of all things (μονογενὴς γὰρ ὅτι ἦν τῷ πατρὶ τῶν ὅλων οὗτος), being begotten (γεγεννημένος) in a peculiar manner Word and Power by Him, and having afterwards become man through the Virgin” (Dialogue with Trypho 105; ANF 1.251). Note the use of the perfect participle of γεννάω which draws out and further specifies the meaning of μονογενής. I fully realize that some would argue just the opposite by claiming that this is redundant. But linguists say that redundancy is typical in language, and so a redundant interpretation is more likely than a non-redundant one.

As far as Alexander of Alexandria and the Arian Eunomius, see subsequent posts. The Arian Eunomius thought μονογενής meant "begotten of only one person," but then of course that means the -γενης stem signified "begotten" to him (see Basil, Against Eunomius 2.20-21, where he quotes Eunomius on this point and rebuts his interpretation of the word).