The Sonship of Christ by Dudley Marvin Canright

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Nov 1, 1877

The Sonship of Christ.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

(Continued.)

TAKE the conversion of the great apostle. After he was stricken down on his way to Damascus, and was thoroughly converted to the gospel, he began immediately to preach Christ. What was the burden of that preaching? Was it that this Jesus was a mighty man, a great prophet sent from God, or a holy angel sent from heaven? No, something different from all that. “And straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God.” Acts 9: 20. Here it is again stated—Jesus Christ, the Son of God. How significant are all these declarations on these important occasions! Indeed, John holds this doctrine to be so important that he predicates eternal life upon it. “Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.” 1 John 4: 15. And further he says that the only man who will overcome the world is the one who confesses this doctrine. 1 John 5: 5.

A doctrine which is thus plainly taught by angels, by the Father from heaven, by Christ himself, by the devils even, by John the Baptist, by men at their baptism, and by all the apostles on every occasion, must be a doctrine of solemn importance. Notice that none of them ever announced Jesus as the very and eternal God, or as one of the trinity, but simply and always as “the Son of God.” Observe the following facts:

1. Jesus is said to be the Son of God. This cannot possibly mean in the accommodated sense in which angels and all holy men are said to be the sons of God; for if this was so, the title as applied to Christ would mean nothing in particular more than that he was a good and righteous man the same as Abraham, Moses and the prophets. But that he meant more than this by it is evident from the way that the Jews received this claim. They themselves claimed to be the sons of God. But now hear what they said to Christ’s claim: “But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.” John 5: 17, 18. Here it is manifest that they understood him to mean that God was his Father, indeed and truly, thus making himself equal with God, that is, actually partaking of the substance and nature of the eternal God.

In the common translation of John 5: 18, we read, “But said also that God was his Father.” Dr. Macknight says it ought to be, “his proper Father.” Dr. Hopkins says, “his own proper Father.” Dr. Campbell translates the whole verse thus: “For this reason the Jews were the more intent to kill him because he had not only broken the Sabbath but by calling God his proper Father, had equalled himself with God.” This is manifestly what Christ meant, and what the Jews understood him to claim.

Again at his trial, when he confessed himself to be the Son of God, the Jews claimed that he had spoken blasphemy by making himself the Son of God. “The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” John 19: 7. If he had claimed to be the Son of God in no higher sense than all God’s people

claim to be, they would never have thought of preferring the charge of blasphemy against him.

All these facts go to show overwhelmingly that the New Testament sets forth Jesus as the Son of God in the natural and proper sense of the term, that is in the same sense as I am the son of my father, begotten of his own substance and person.

2. Jesus is declared to be the first born. “Who is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature.” Col. 1: 15.

3. Jesus is declared to be the first begotten. “And again, when he bringeth in the first begotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him.” Heb. 1: 6.

4. He is declared to be the only begotten Son of God. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3: 16. See also 1 John 5.

5. Jesus is said to be God’s own Son. “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” Rom. 8: 32.

“But, as has been already abundantly implied, the Word is also the Son. As applied to our Lord, the title ‘Son of God’ is protected by epithets which sustain and define its unique significance. In the synoptic gospels, Christ is termed the ‘well-beloved Son.’ In St. Paul he is God’s ‘own’ Son. In St. John he is the only begotten Son, or simply the only begotten. This last epithet surely means, not merely that God has no other such Son, but that his only begotten Son is, in virtue of this Sonship, a partaker of that incommunicable and unperishable essence, which is sundered from all created life by an impassable chasm.” Liddon’s Bampton Lectures, Lecture 5, p. 233.

6. Jesus is called his only Son. Mark 12: 6.

7. Jesus Christ is called the Son of God one hundred and thirty-one times.

8. God is called his Father one hundred and ninety-one times in the New Testament. With all this mass of testimony bearing upon this point we shall consider it a settled fact that Jesus is the Son of God.

Now as the son inherits the nature, attributes, and the dignity of his father, so Christ being the Son of the infinite God, must himself also be divine and infinite. He is so by his very nature, derived from his Father. He is not divine simply in the accommodated sense in which angels and holy men are; but is divine in his very origin, nature and being.

And here we must notice the absurd doctrine taught by the so-called orthodox creeds. They assert that Christ is the eternal Son of God; that is, that he is just as eternal and as old as the Father. As Dr. Adam Clarke says, this is eternal nonsense. The very idea of father necessarily supposes priority of existence. A son as old as his father! It seems as though that to state this was enough to refute it. The father as young as his son! This is the height of absurdity. There is no such doctrine taught in the Bible.

Again, they teach that the Father and Son are both one being, both the same, only in different offices, as the same man could be both a lawyer and a doctor at the same time. While officiating in one capacity he is a doctor, while in the other he is a lawyer. So the Father and the Son only mean different offices or relations of the same being, and there is truly only one being all the time. But this contradicts common sense and all the teachings of the Bible.

Every reader of the Bible must be conscious of the fact that it everywhere sets forth Jesus as a distinct person, a separate being from the Father. I venture the assertion that no Christian, I care not what his creed is, ever prays to God without conceiving of the Father and Son as two separate and distinct beings. I appeal to the reader if in all your prayers, you do not by faith behold the Son standing as a mediator between you and the Father, the Son an individual just as distinct from the Father as you are from your father? You see the Father upon his throne, you see the Son standing as a high priest before him; and this conception is true and well founded, because it is everywhere taught in the Bible.

Our trinitarian brethren have to maintain the absurd hypothesis that one is three and three are one. For more than a thousand years they have philosophized, and dogmatized, and split hairs, to maintain this absurd and contradictory theory; and they have never yet succeeded satisfactorily to themselves or to their disciples. It is painful to witness their desperate efforts to bolster up this great error. Says the creeds, “The Son which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting from the Father, the very and eternal God, and of

one substance with the Father, took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed virgin, of her substance and truly suffered, was crucified, died and buried.” Art. 2.

Reader, is this the truth? Was the very and eternal God born of a woman? Look at that little babe nursing at the breast of Mary. Was that the Almighty God? Was there no other God at that time in the universe except the babe? See Jesus expiring upon the cross. Is God, the source of all life and the author of the universe, is he dying? Christ died, and was dead three days. Was the eternal God dead? Was the universe without a God for three days? Strange that men ever conceived such notions. No, this is not the truth. God the Father was in heaven all the time, sitting upon his throne. It was the Son of God, who was born, who suffered, and died, and was buried. How many times Jesus prayed to his Father, not once nor twice, but frequently. It is said he lifted up his eyes unto heaven, and prayed to God. Was this all deception? Was he simply praying to himself? Was it his humanity praying to his divinity, his body praying to his soul? So it is asserted, but without proof; indeed, directly in the face of common sense and overwhelming proof against it. But how simple and plain it is when we understand that the Father was in heaven, that Christ his Son was upon the earth, and that it is the Son who prays to his Father! This is reasonable; that is what it says, and what we believe. To get out of this difficulty, the fable of the two natures in Christ has been invented, not a hint of which can be found in the Bible. It is never said that as man he did this, and as God he did that; that his humanity did this, and his divinity said that. Well might Paul ask, “Was Christ divided?” No; our Christ is a whole Christ.

“But what will our brethren do with the very man part of our Saviour, the mediator part? Will they worship it? No; that is a creature, that is human. Thus they divide the Saviour and label the parts,—this is divine, and that human; this God, and that man. This may be worshiped, but not that. Now I worship a whole Saviour. He is one undivided Saviour to me. I want none of this cutting and carving. I want no dissector to pass his knife through my Saviour severing him part from part and telling me which is divine and which human, which God and which human, which I may worship and which I may not. I am sure if we get to heaven we shall find an undivided Saviour there.” So says a spirited writer, and so we say.

D. M. CANRIGHT.

(To be continued.)