In what sense is Jesus God’s Son?

Q. What does it mean to say Jesus is the Son of God? In what sense is Jesus God’s Son? What does it mean to say Jesus is the Logos?

The Bible speaks of Jesus as God’s Son in two different senses.

The first is what I would call the minor sense. The title “Son of God” means “Messiah.” The phrase in this sense comes from Psalm 2, a royal enthronement psalm, in which a king of Israel, presumably David, says, “I will proclaim the Lord’s decree: He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.'”

Even after Israel was no longer a kingdom, this language of being God’s Son was applied to the expected Messiah, who would resume the royal house of David. In his sermon in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, Paul applied this language to Jesus. He said: “What God promised our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus. As it is written in the second Psalm: ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.'” So to say that Jesus is the Son of God means, for one thing, that he is the Messiah.

But there is also what I would call the major sense. In a way that is difficult for the human mind to appreciate fully, there is an organic relationship between Jesus (the second person of the Trinity) and the first person of the Trinity. Since that relationship can be well understood, according to the Bible, along the lines of the organic relationship between a child and a parent, the first person of the Trinity is called God the Father and Jesus is called God the Son.

However, there is an important difference here. An earthly parent has a child at a given time. Before that, the child does not exist. But in the case of Jesus, he has existed from all eternity, even though he is also in an organic relationship with the first person of the Trinity that can well be described with the language of a father-son relationship. That is why Christian theology speaks of Jesus being “eternally begotten” of the Father.

This brings us to the question about what it means to say that Jesus is the Logos. In his gospel, John uses the language of logos, a complex Greek term, to describe Jesus and his relationship to God the Father: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning.” The word logos could mean an inward thought, or speech that expressed an inward thought, or just speech. Therefore it was particularly well suited to describe the relationship between the second person of the Trinity and the first person of the Trinity, since in one sense they are separate persons (“just speech”), in another sense they are part of the same Godhead (“an inward thought”), and in yet another sense they have an interdependent relationship (“speech that expresses thought”).

This is admittedly complicated. The relationship of the persons of the Trinity (I haven’t even brought up the Holy Spirit yet!) is certainly a mystery beyond human comprehension. But I think the take-home message for us can be the reassuring conviction that at the essence of God is community and relationship in which individuality is nevertheless affirmed and flourishes. Making that the model for our own lives is enough of a welcome challenge that we do not need to try to sort out any other issues definitively.

But to summarize, the second thing we mean when we say that Jesus is the Son of God is that while he became fully human on earth, he is also fully God, eternally begotten of the Father.