Sect. 186The Divine Sonship of the Logos as the Only True Sonship of Christ, Excluding Adoption and Human SonshipThe Divine Sonship of the Logos as the Only True Sonship of Christ, Excluding Adoption and Human Sonship

I. If the Divine Sonship of the Logos be considered not as a relation to God the Father, but as the constituent character of His personality, we must evidently attribute this Divine Sonship to Christ as man or to the Man Christ, because the personality of Christ is identical with the personality of the Logos: Christ is the Word Incarnate; the Word Incarnate is the true and only-begotten Son of God, hence Christ is the true Son of God. Christ considered as this particular man (ut hic homo) is the natural Son of God, and has the personal rank and character of Son of God, in the same way as natural man is the image of God, not only in as far as he has a spiritual soul, but also as this particular corporeal and animal being, whose personality is completed by a soul made to the image of God.

II. Sonship may also be considered as relation from person to person, viz. from son to father. From this point of view arises the question: Is Christ as man, or the Man Christ, Son of God? In other words, is the term Sonship applicable to that relation between Christ and God which is distinct from the eternal Sonship of the Logos, and from the sonship by grace of the just? It cannot be denied that Holy Scripture represents this relation as a sonship. Yet, on the other hand, it differs in four respects from the Eternal Sonship of the Logos: (1) It is not based upon the internal and eternal generations in the bosom of the Father, but on a temporal communication, ad extra, and on a gracious assumption into Divine union. (2) Christ as man is, by nature, inferior to the Father. (3) The principle and terminus of the relation of Christ as man to God, is not the Father as Father, but the whole Trinity, including the Logos. (4) The relation in question would remain unaltered if the incarnate Person were the Father or the Holy Ghost.

These considerations have led the Adoptionists to assert that Christ as man is not truly Son of God, but only an adopted Son; and many theologians build upon the same foundation a second Divine Sonship, analogous to the Sonship by grace.

III. The Adoptionists of the eighth century attributed natural Sonship to the Logos alone, the Man Christ being only son by adoption (filius adoptivus sive nuncupativus). Their doctrine, a badly disguised form of Nestorianism, was at once condemned by Pope Hadrian I. and the Council of Franfort (A.D. 792), defining that Christ as man (secundum humanitatem) is, by reason of His personality, which is the personality of the Word Incarnate, the true and natural, not the adopted, Son of God (Denzinger, Enchiridion, xxxii.). Adoption presupposes that the person to be adopted is not a son but a stranger to the adopting father; and, besides, adoption merely constitutes a moral, external union, entirely different from natural sonship: it rests entirely on an act of the will, whereby the adoptive father admits the adopted son to the rights and privileges of a natural son. Wherefore, Christ cannot be called the adopted Son of God, except it be supposed that He is not one Person with the Logos, or that the Logos, by assuming human nature, lost His natural Sonship and became something foreign to God. The first hypothesis is the Nestorian heresy of two persons in Christ. The second is evidently absurd. The fact that the Man Christ has no other personality but the personality of the Logos, prevents Him from having any sonship but that of the Logos: adoption is rendered impossible by His very essence of Word Incarnate. Holy Scripture attributes to the Man Christ all the predicates which belong to the Eternal Son, so much so that most of the proofs in favour of the eternal sonship of the Logos are deduced from these utterances (see Book II. Part II., especially § 93). Again, Christ is adorable, and He is the principle of the adoption of man, because He is the natural Son of God: an adopted son could neither claim Divine Worship nor confer Divine Sonship upon others.

IV. The Fathers often describe the Sonship of Christ as a work of grace and predestination, and some, even St. Cyril of Alexandria (Dial. III., De Trin.), apply to them the Greek equivalent for adopted son (υἱὸς θετὸς μεθʼ ἡμῖν). Such expressions, however, present no difficulty if it be borne in mind that the grace by which Christ is made the Son of God, makes Him the natural Son of God, and excludes the very possibility of adoption. The Greek term for adoption, υἱὸμ τιθέναι, does not, like the Latin adoptare, imply the negation of natural sonship; it directly conveys the notion of “being constituted or installed as son,” and, therefore, it may rightly be applied to the act of grace by which human nature was united to the Logos, and Christ made the Son of God. The frequent expressions to the effect that Christ was “assumed or admitted into Sonship,” are but another way of presenting the same idea.

V. The Schoolmen of the Middle Ages constructed several systems of adoptionism free from heresy, yet incorrect as theological speculations. No “second Sonship” of Christ is admissible, according to the principle laid down by St. Thomas: “Terms used of a person in their proper and fullest sense (secundum perfectam rationem), cannot be applied to the same person in a figurative or imperfect sense (secundum rationem imperfectam). Thus Socrates, being termed ‘man’ in the full and proper sense of the word, cannot be called man in the improper sense in which a portrait is called man, though Socrates may bear in him the likeness of some other man. But Christ is the Son of God in the full and proper meaning of the term sonship or filiation; wherefore, although created and sanctified as man, He ought not to be called Son of God either by creation or by justification, but only by eternal generation, according to which He is Son of the Father alone” (3, q. 24, a. 3; see also Franzelin, thes. xxxviii.).

VI. The attempts to establish a second filiation in Christ, existing side by side with His eternal Sonship, are either heretical or confusing; they also fail to exhibit in its real light the organic connection between the Man Christ and God. Theologians have been so much bent upon finding analogies for this connection in the relation of natural filiation and of filiation by grace, that none of them has thought of another and far better analogy suggested by St. Paul (1 Cor. 6:17; cf. Gen. 2:24). Christ as man stands to God in a relation similar to that of son-in-law, although the term son-in-law, because implying independent personality, cannot be applied to the Man Christ, Who is constituted a person by the personality of the Logos. The Greek Fathers also use this analogy—kinship by marriage—to illustrate the relations of sonship by grace, and the same is in their mind when they speak of Christ as the assumed or adopted Son of God. They represent the Hypostatic Union as a matrimonial union, accomplished in the original thalamus of Mary, between the Logos and the flesh, whereby the flesh is made “one spirit” with the Logos far more really than the soul sanctified by grace is made one Spirit with God (1 Cor. 6:16). From this point of view they see the human nature as a Bride, without, however, treating it as a hypostasis or quasi-hypostasis, for the notion of bride carries with it an idea of inferiority and dependency similar to the relation of a part to the whole. The function of the bride is passive: she is made a member of a whole whose head is the bridegroom; in the mystical marriage of the Logos with the flesh, this function is carried out with the highest perfection; for the union of the flesh with the Logos results in one physical Person, whereas bride and bridegroom remain physically distinct persons. If, then, we consider the human nature as virtually distinct from the Logos, and united to Him in bridal or matrimonial union, that relation of kinship arises which exists between a father and his daughter-in-law. Yet we cannot designate this affinity by terms denoting personality, e.g. bride, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, but must confine ourselves to impersonal expressions, e.g. Christ as man is the Lamb of God, the Flesh of God (caro Dei), and more strictly, a member under God as Head.

VII. From the above we infer that the relation of the Man Christ to God, if conceived as affinity by espousals—rather than as a second sonship different from the eternal Sonship of the Logos—does not endanger the Hypostatic Union, but formally presupposes it. Further, that this affinity, being real kinship, expresses the relation of Christ as man to God better than sonship by adoption or by grace alone. Again, this mode of considering it does away with the four difficulties mentioned above (n. II.). And lastly, it has the advantage of uniting in one beautiful organism the Eternal Sonship of the Logos and the kinship of Christ as man.

VIII. To sum up this exposition of the Sonship of Christ as man: there is but one Sonship in Christ, and that is the Eternal Sonship. This belongs to the Man Christ by redundancy, so that He participates in it, and so that through it and from it His own specific relation to God receives the form and character of a Sonship. Hence the two different relations of Christ to God—as Logos and as Man—do not merely coexist side by side, but organically work together and into one another, so as to constitute the peculiar Sonship proper to Christ as man. The constitution of Christ being unique, His Sonship must be unique, and no perfect analogy for it can be sought for in heaven or on earth. It is neither the human sonship of a man, nor the Divine Sonship of God as God, but it is the Divine Sonship of a man. Hence the notion of generation, on which Divine and human sonship is founded, must be modified before it can be applied to the present case; the perfect similarity of nature which results from ordinary generation, becomes here an imperfect similarity of nature, but a perfect similarity of person.

IX. The peculiar character of the Divine Sonship in the Man Christ, as distinct from both the Eternal Sonship of the Logos and the adoptive Sonship of the just, is aptly expressed by the Scriptural name, ὁ Παῖς τοῦ Θεοῦ, Puer Dei, = the Boy or Childe of God, applied to Christ. So Matt. 12:18, quoting Isa. 42:1, after the Septuagint; Acts 3:13, 26, and 4:27, 30. The boy bears to his father the double relation of son and child. He is son because in him the person of the father is represented and reproduced; he is child because he is the yet immature product of both father and mother, and is, by reason of his incomplete development, like the mother, a member of the family subordinate to the father. These notions find an easy application in the “Childe” of God. The Man Christ is Son of the Eternal Father in as far as His Personal principle is a Person like unto the Father; He is Child of the Father by reason of the inferiority and impersonality of His human nature: He is a subordinate member of the Divine Family (filius familias). Instead, then, of two sonships in Christ, we have the double relation of Son and Child commingled in the “Boy” of the Father, and both resulting from the same Divine act to which the Man Christ owes His origin. The New Testament but seldom uses the appellation Παῖς τοῦ Θεοῦ; yet whenever the “Son” speaks of Himself as inferior to the Father, or as the object of the Father’s loving care, as also in many texts relating to His origin and final glory, the “Son” is considered as “Child.” At any rate these passages, thus understood, give an easy, harmonious, and beautiful sense, which is not brought out by the common interpretation, “that the Son of God is there considered as man or in the form of servant.” The “Childe of God” is “the First-born amongst many brethren” (Rom. 8:29), viz. God’s children by grace, of whom He is the Exemplar and the Head.

X. There is good reason to think that the meaning of the name “Lamb of God” is identical with that of παῖς (Boy) of God. St. John uses this appellation much in the same way as the Prophets use the term “Bud of God.” Its masculine form, ἀμνός, corresponds with παῖς, the boy; its neuter form, ἀμνίον, with παιδίον, the child. In sacred and even in profane language, the relations between shepherd and flock afford the standard illustrations of the filial or paternal relations between superiors and inferiors; kings and priests are “pastors” of flocks; the newly baptized infants are styled agni or agnelli (the little lambs) of God; God and Christ express their loving care and kindness to man by assuming the title of Shepherd, and mankind is then always represented as a flock of sheep and lambs. There is, then, the possibility that “Lamb of God” may be synonymous with Boy or Childe of God. That it really is so, is made probable by the following considerations. When the Baptist addressed Christ as Lamb of God, he used the Aramaic word Thaljoh (“young one”), which is applied to both lamb and child, and has been retained in the Syriac version of the Gospel. Now the words of the Baptist sound like an echo of the words of God the Father: “This is my beloved Son;” at all events, they have the same signification. Even granting that, in the words of John, Christ is pointed out as the perfect victim of the great redeeming sacrifice, it must still be conceded that the speaker bore in mind the intimate connection of Christ with God which made His sacrifice acceptable. Again, Christ is the Lamb of the Father, as we, the children by grace, are the lambs of Christ (John 10:14, 15). Isaias (16:1) calls the Lamb the Ruler of the earth; and in the Angelic Hymn (Gloria in excelsis) we read: “Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, who takest away the sins of the world,” etc., whence it appears that the notion of victim is not the only one conveyed by the term “Lamb,” but that it has also the sense of Lord and God.

Among the Fathers, Clement of Alexandria is the only one who draws attention to the connection between παῖς and ἀμνός as names of Christ (Pœdagog., l I. c. 5). Toletus (in Joan i.) first made use of the exposition of Clement, and after Toletus only a few others. See Cornelius à Lapide, in Apoc. 5:7.