We Believe in God the Father Almighty

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:08

   Kevin DeYoung

   I wrote the kids' book — The Biggest Story Bible Storybook — and Don Clark did amazing illustrations, and Crossway did a fantastic job with it. Then Crossway animated each of those chapters into videos. It's amazing. I tried not to be offended, because when I wrote the first, smaller version, The Biggest Story, they did an audio animated version and had me narrate it. Then, when they got to the 104-chapter version, they got Michael Reeves. So I sometimes have people meet me quite disappointed — ready for some elegant, articulate Brit — and then they get what you just heard. [1]

2. 01:04

   Kevin DeYoung

   Wonderful content we just heard, and I was taking notes. So thank you to Dr. Reeves for doing a wonderful opening, setting the context — and the good and bad for the rest of the speakers, he did everything. [2]

3. 01:45

   Kevin DeYoung

   So hopefully you have some more things to learn as we dive in now to the phrases that he so wonderfully introduced to us already. The first word of the Nicene Creed in Greek, pisteuomen, “we believe,” translated in English. In Latin, the first word, credimus. You can hear credo, that would be “I believe.” It's where we get the English word creed. A creed is something that the church is called upon to believe. One useful distinction, which I get from Donald Fairbairn, is to think of creeds as statements about the God in whom we believe, while confessions are statements — usually longer, more comprehensive — about what we believe. Now, it's a fine distinction. [3]

4. 02:41

   Kevin DeYoung

   You can't press it too far, but you may have the London Baptist Confession or the Westminster Confession. Then there are, of course, catechisms, which deal with question and answer. A creed is certainly in a similar category, but if confessions are more comprehensive, more about doctrinal heads of what we believe, a creed is a statement about the God in whom we believe. And we've already had that articulated: “We believe in God the Father Almighty.” Creeds and confessions are a response to the New Testament's command — and there are many commands like this — not to teach any different doctrine (1 Timothy 1:3), to follow good doctrine (1 Timothy 4:6), to keep a close watch on the teaching (1 Timothy 4:16).

5. 03:34

   Kevin DeYoung

   To teach the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ, teaching that accords with godliness (1 Timothy 6:3); to follow the pattern of sound words (2 Timothy 1:13); to hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught; to disprove bad theology, refute those who contradict it, from Titus 1:9. I trust that at a conference like this on the Nicene Creed, we are not among those who have earnestly but incorrectly said, “No creed but the Bible” — which is itself a very succinct creed. And if you are to have creeds, why not have — not an exaggeration — the most important creed ever written? Outside of the inspired, inerrant Scriptures, you can make a very good case that the Nicene Creed, what we are studying in these two days, is the most important document ever written.

6. 04:38

   Kevin DeYoung

   1,700 years later, now we are celebrating it, remembering it — and not just it, but the God that is expressed and taught in this document. I would be very surprised if anything that we are writing or saying or doing — our lives are important — but will be remembered 1,700 years from now. This creed is rightly remembered and recited. I gave a short talk on the Nicene Creed several months ago at a very large college-age conference, and there were maybe 500 people in the room. I won't do this here, but I think most of you, I hope, would raise your hands. I asked these 500 college students, “How many of you come from a church background where you are somewhat familiar with the Nicene Creed, where you would have said this even on infrequent occasion in your church?” And maybe it was the Presbyterian in me not ready to be shocked by the largely Baptist audience — and sorry, but it's true — I thought it might be half and half. Out of 500 students, I bet there were fewer than 20 who raised their hands who had a familiarity.

7. 05:58

   Kevin DeYoung

   Now, they're 18-to-25-year-olds. Maybe it just went by and they didn't know what it was when it happened. But think of how important it is in the New Testament that God's people believe the right things. Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” — implying that understanding Jesus' true identity was of paramount importance. The post-Pentecost disciples devoted themselves, we know, to the apostles' teaching, the first mark of the primitive church. Paul talked about the necessity of believing and confessing (Romans 10), passing on the gospel tradition he had received (1 Corinthians 15). And you've probably noticed before, the epistles are full of early creedal statements, whether they're from liturgies or hymns or doxologies, or even early written-down or orally passed creeds.

8. 07:01

   Kevin DeYoung

   For example: “There is one God and there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Or, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). God's people are charged according to the sacred truths about Christ. And in many places we see that the essence of the earliest Christian confession, in its simplest form, is “Jesus is Lord.” The importance of orthodoxy cannot be overstated. It's very easy to quickly want to say, “Well, yes, yes, but we also need orthopraxy.” Of course we do. And to warn, as we rightly heard, against dead orthodoxy — and I'm sure Mike would agree with this — we might even be better to say “dead people reciting orthodoxy.” The orthodoxy, such as it is, is the truth of God's Word. Amen.

9. 08:02

   Kevin DeYoung

   When you — any pastors here — when you do a prayer of illumination, perhaps before you preach the sermon, just a little thing: I try to make sure that I do not say, “Lord, help this Word come alive,” because that's not the problem. You're preaching to some dead people who need to come alive. This Word is living and active. This Word is alive. Spurgeon's famous line: you want to prove that it's a lion, open the cage and let it out. We don't have to pray that this comes to life. This is living. We have to pray that we have ears to hear and to receive it.

10. 08:37

    Kevin DeYoung

    We see, especially in those pastoral epistles — 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus — that the work of the pastor is to correct opponents with gentleness, to be able to give instruction in sound doctrine, to rebuke those who contradict it. That's what I hope — pastors here — what you are trained to do. This apostolic teaching, which must be passed on, that's what we are equipped to do. That's our lane. If you squander your authority as a pastor and an expert in God's Word thinking that you have to pontificate on every cultural and political matter under the sun, people will not listen to you on the things that you are called and charged by God Himself to announce — namely, this good news of salvation in Christ. Now, when we consider the ancient world, it is amazing that the Nicene Creed should have happened at all, that doctrine should have been so non-negotiable for the church — like the Jewish soil out of which it grew, Christianity believed, and has always believed, in the supreme importance of certain beliefs. Some of you may know that 2023 was the 100-year anniversary of J. Gresham Machen's famous book Christianity and Liberalism, which was a broadside against the modernists in the beginning part of the 20th century. He was writing to Presbyterians, but there were some among the Baptists as well.

11. 10:21

    Kevin DeYoung

    And as has often been said, the most important word in the title of that book is the word “and” — Christianity and Liberalism, not the same thing. This doctrinal indifferentism that Machen was railing against 100 years ago — easy to say, “Maybe that's somebody else” — but might it also grow and spread like a weed in some of our churches? To be a Christian is to affirm specific facts about history and the divinely inspired interpretation of those facts. Jesus died — historical fact. He rose again on the third day — fact. “For our sins” — theological interpretation. “According to the Scriptures” — that's how we learn it. Amen.

12. 11:15

    Kevin DeYoung

    From the very beginning, the Christian faith was irreducibly doctrinal. This was not the case with Roman religion. We can think of traditional Roman religion in the ancient world as expressed in a number of overlapping categories. Let me give you six — this will be fast. First and foremost, Roman religion was expressed as cultic ritual. The word “cultic” here doesn't mean a top-down, all-controlling cult, but is used in the more academic sense — a system of practices and rites associated with worship. If you were to look at what religion was in the Roman world, it was first and foremost not a doctrinal definition, not a creedal subscription, but sacrifices and priests and temples.

13. 12:09

    Kevin DeYoung

    The religion looks like superstition to us at times, because they wanted to do certain things that the gods would then look favorably upon. But that's how it worked, and there was a quid pro quo: you do certain things, you do the sacrifices, and you have children, and you have a harvest, and you have rain, and you have military victories. It was first and foremost about ritual observance. Second, Roman religion was mythical, not historical — meaning all of these Greco-Roman myths — maybe you're a homeschooler, and so you had to learn about classical history, and homeschoolers are experts in pagan mythology; go figure, it's just one of those things that happens. They told the stories as a way of understanding the way the world was. If you had said to a Roman, “Now tell me, did that really happen?” they'd say, “Well, that's not what's really important.” I don't think people walked around thinking that all of the stories they had learned had actual historical resonance.

14. 13:19

    Kevin DeYoung

    It simply wasn't the point. Roman religion, third, often involved ecstatic experiences. Now, that didn't appeal to everyone, just like experiences don't appeal to everyone today — there's a home for you in the Presbyterian Church, if that's you. But these experiences, often involving sounds and touch and movement and music and food and drink, and often sexual activity, were associated with religious observances in the ancient world. It was a profound experience, multisensory at times. Fourth, Roman religion could involve a variety of mystery religions. The word “mystery” here — not spooky, but think more like a club. Mystery religions often had initiation rites, shared meals, specific clothing, oracles that claimed to speak for the divine or speak about the future. They were secret societies, and they provided benefits and shared experiences to those who were members of the group, setting them apart from those outside.

15. 14:28

    Kevin DeYoung

    Fifth — overlaid on all of this, in a slightly different strand — Roman religion was sometimes philosophical. Think of Stoicism as one prime example. The focus was less on metaphysics, that kind of philosophy, and more on how to live a self-controlled, noble, virtuous life. And sixth, finally, Roman religion was inevitably bound up with civic virtue. Almost any kind of religion could be tolerated in the Roman world as long as it didn't upset the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome — as long as it did not undermine the privileged position of the emperor. The Jews had carved out for themselves an exception, that they could offer prayers for the emperor, not offer prayers to the emperor. But the Roman world wasn't sure what to do with Christianity. When it was small and seemed to be just a sect of Judaism, it was okay. But then, in rolling fashion, for the first three centuries there would be intermittent — sometimes sporadic, sometimes intense — persecution, because of this very point.

16. 15:40

    Kevin DeYoung

    Rome was not hung up on what you said you believed about your god or your goddess. Just worship the emperor, be a good Roman citizen, and do your ritual practices so the army wins and Rome is blessed. Now, I've painted with a broad brush, of course, but it's important to note in these six overlapping categories — cultic ritual, mythical, ecstatic experience, mystery religion, philosophical bent, civic virtue — that doctrine is not terribly important in any of them. Yes, they believed things — don't hear me wrong that they didn't believe things; they believed things very deeply. But buttoning up your beliefs, carefully defining your beliefs, conceiving of your whole religion as irreducibly bound up with a certain way of saying something — the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon famously said about Nicaea that the whole empire was almost torn apart over a diphthong, whether the Son of God was homoousios or homoiousios.

17. 16:54

    Kevin DeYoung

    Now, it's a little anachronistic, because at the Council of Nicaea they weren't yet actually debating the homoiousios option — that would come in the intervening years. But he's saying, in a pithy way, how very particular they were. Is the Son of God of the same essence with the Father, or a like essence, or a similar essence, or maybe He's of the same works as the Father? This is how careful and particular the Christians wanted to be. And you offset that with Roman religion: do the ritual, pay homage to the gods and goddesses, don't rock the boat. Unfortunately, that does describe Christianity in too many places — do the rituals, pay homage to civic virtue, and don't rock the boat. Amen. Within some Christian traditions today, we see how doctrine is downplayed.

18. 17:56

    Kevin DeYoung

    Now, almost everybody's got a statement of faith somewhere. It's way up in the attic. It's way off in the back of the website — the website that looks like it was a terrorist, handwritten ransom note somewhere. You can dust it off and find it, and it's got some things written down. And if you're saying, “Hey, we need to get a statement of faith for our church,” my advice for you is: don't sit down and write a statement of faith for your church. Try to use something that some people have already done, because there are some good options out there. The “spiritual, not religious” folks — we've all heard that. Even in evangelical, Bible-believing churches, we can too often settle for vague generalities. [4]

19. 18:44

    Kevin DeYoung

    We can be impatient with technical terms, careful reasoning — again, to the teachers here, preachers, or it could be a women's Bible study leader. Yes — to people who have not learned these things, if you just start dropping in all over the place “Arius” and “unbegotten” and “paternity” and “filiation” and “procession” and “notions” and all of it, yeah, people's heads are going to be spinning and they're going to be bored. But people, believe me, they want to learn. And they can learn. And if you would slow down and teach them, they would be so excited — “I'm learning something.”

20. 19:27

    Kevin DeYoung

    “I can know something.” This doctrine of the Trinity, which just seemed like an impossible math problem my whole life — how 1+1+1=1 — now is the very center of my faith, and I'm getting it. Now, you don't ever get all of it, because it's about God. Even the great Francis Turretin said the two doctrines that were most beyond human comprehension were the one God in three persons and the one person of Christ in two natures. These have always been difficult. But I was just preaching last Sunday, doing a post-Easter kind of apologetics, talking about the resurrection, and I said, “Yes, there are elements of our Christian faith that are suprarational” — “supra” there meaning beyond or above. There are elements of our Christian faith that are suprarational, that we get to the end of the questions and we say, “I can't answer all of those questions, because I'm not God, and I do not have an exhaustive knowledge of God.”

21. 20:29

    Kevin DeYoung

    Only God has an exhaustive knowledge of Himself. So some of these doctrines — the Trinity being one of them — are suprarational. Not, however, irrational. We are not asking for contradictions. We are not asking for three-sided squares, or 2+2=5. We are using what God has given as a gift in the church to help us understand. And what could be more important than knowing what God is like? I think I heard this from Piper one time.

22. 21:06

    Kevin DeYoung

    If he doesn't like it, then I made it up, and if he likes it, then I got it from him. But he said something like, “If you're going to put down the mystery card with your doctrine, use that after you've read about 10 books and spent years thinking about this.” Otherwise, it's often just the shortcut of intellectual laziness. Amen. Certainly — how do you reconcile divine sovereignty and human responsibility? One God, three persons? There are things that are above our pay grade, that are mysteries. But too often it's just, “Well, mystery” — which is a way of saying, “I don't have to think.”

23. 21:48

    Kevin DeYoung

    “I don't have to learn anything. I don't have to try to understand what the greatest minds in the history of the world have given me, some categories.” If you want to learn systematic theology — and you do — it is in large part learning the terms. Once you can get a handle on the vocabulary, you can start to think. You have to know what the words mean. And so we want to be doctrinal, unapologetically doctrinal people. Never apologize for being doctrinal. Now, you can be unloving, you can be a jerk — apologize for that. Amen.

24. 22:28

    Kevin DeYoung

    But remember the letter to Ephesus in Revelation, when Jesus says, “I have this against you” — and He says, “I know you don't tolerate the deeds of the Nicolaitans.” He's saying, “You guys are really buttoned up doctrinally.” He doesn't say, “You're too much that way.” He says, “You're not enough with the love.” He doesn't denigrate what is good in order to correct what is bad. Amen. They're doctrinal, and we ought to be. And you should think of this not just in your formal statements and teaching, but in the entire way in which you worship.

25. 23:03

    Kevin DeYoung

    It should not be a strange juxtaposition that maybe you've got a great pastor and he's really into this stuff, and he's teaching all this stuff, and then the rest of the service seems a complete mismatch with someone who cares about doctrinal precision. One of the things I think about with our worship pastor, who's amazing and deeply theological — we need more pastors who understand something about music, and we need more music guys who understand a whole lot more about theology. We need both, and they need to talk to each other. We think, “What will the people in our church be learning just from the songs that we're singing?” The whole service is a teaching service. It's not that we get the emotion part and then we get the teaching part — it's all teaching, and the best teaching is going to stir up and move those affections. Would people be able to deduce from an ordinary service at your church that the God you are calling them to believe in is three-in-one — to show up in your prayers, in your liturgy, in the creeds that you say, in a benediction, in the songs that we sing? The early Christians were unapologetically doctrinal.

26. 24:23

    Kevin DeYoung

    In the second century, Irenaeus, the great champion for orthodoxy against the heresies of the Gnostics — Irenaeus combated the Gnostics, and what he said against Gnosticism matters, but maybe even more important is how he made his arguments against Gnosticism. He quoted from the Old Testament, and he quoted from many of the documents we now call the New Testament. In defending truth, he brought everything back to the past — what had been written and what had been handed down. He appealed to what he called a “rule of faith,” a deposit of apostolic doctrine that should be believed and not contradicted. He was articulating a Christian instinct that had been in the church from the beginning. And just to put Irenaeus in context — we can really separate sometimes, well, “We've got the Bible, and then church history starts,” and it's sort of a chasm in between.

27. 25:24

    Kevin DeYoung

    But Irenaeus says that he was taught by Polycarp. Polycarp says he was taught by John the Apostle himself. That's not a coincidence. That's not a big distance. Think about your mentor and the people you are mentoring — it's not a big distance. That's the distance between Irenaeus and the Apostle John.

28. 25:47

    Kevin DeYoung

    He notes three questions — well, this appears in the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus of Rome. Three questions were put to adults coming for baptism. Do you believe in God the Father Almighty? Second question: do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and was dead and buried, and rose again on the third day alive from among the dead, ascended into heaven, sat down at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead? Third question: do you believe in the Holy Spirit, and the holy church, and the resurrection of the body? Amen. This dates to probably the beginning of the 200s. Now, that should all sound very familiar — it sounds a lot like the Apostles' Creed, which grew out of these early liturgical formulas, these baptismal questions that they would ask converts in the church. That's the point. This doctrinal language has been around since the beginning.

29. 26:49

    Kevin DeYoung

    From the earliest days of the church, converts being baptized were required to make a confession of faith, and this involved a confessional formula that was explicitly and deeply Trinitarian. The Nicene Creed — and that's why I'm emphasizing this point here — starts with those words that are easy to skip: “We believe.” And I want you to understand how, from the very beginning, this was something different from the religious options around them — to say that as Christians we are bound together by something that we believe. Jaroslav Pelikan, a great historian, observed that one of the most persistent features of all Christian creeds and confessions — a feature so obvious it's easy to overlook — is the utter seriousness with which they treat the issues of Christian doctrine as, quite literally, a matter of life and death, both here in time and hereafter in eternity. It is not enough to exhort people to live like Jesus. Amen. You are not discipling people as the early church would have discipled people if you're just telling them how to live the Jesus way. You must tell them these things. [5] [6]

30. 28:07

    Kevin DeYoung

    The Christian faith is certainly more than a doctrine to be believed, but we must never think it is something other than a doctrine to be believed. So, with the time remaining in this session, let's say a few things about this first line: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the Maker” — or “the Creator” — “of heaven and earth.” As you know, the longest section in the creed is about the Son, followed — in the 381 version — by a significant section about the Holy Spirit. The shortest section, only one sentence — I think they just said, “Well, let's give that to the pastor; let's not give him any of the real tricky stuff” — is about the Father. Now, it's true, the historical reality is that there were fewer controversies surrounding the person of the Father. No one denied that the Father was God.

31. 29:07

    Kevin DeYoung

    But it would be a mistake to think there was nothing important to confess about the Father. We must actually know how to properly articulate our doctrine of God the Father, or the rest of the doctrine of the Trinity will not come into place and be biblical. Here's what I want to do: just quickly note four things about God, and then we will finish by thinking about paternity in particular. So, note four things in this first sentence about God in the creed. Number one: there is only one God — not many gods, not rival gods, not gods and goddesses. One God. That's what the Israelites believed, what very few people in the Roman world other than the Jews believed — one God. Two: He is the Father. Now, this is what we want to double down on in just a few minutes and talk about the paternity — what that means as the personal property of the Father.

32. 30:06

    Kevin DeYoung

    So He is the Father. I trust you understand God is not a biological male; He does not have a body. But it is important to recognize that God has revealed Himself using exclusively masculine names and titles. Now, there are, on occasion, metaphors and analogies — He is as gentle as a nursing mother, or wants to gather like a hen her chicks. These are ways to speak about certain characteristics of God. But the names and the titles are uniformly masculine: He is King, not Queen; Husband, not Wife; Father, not Mother.

33. 30:48

    Kevin DeYoung

    He is Father because He has created all things, and those who trust in Him are His children. And He is Father — and we'll come back to this, most importantly — because Jesus Christ is His Son. One God, He's Father. Third, we note in this first line: He is Almighty — God the Father Almighty. When I was working with my kids to memorize — I'd like to say I memorized the Nicene Creed, but we just chickened out and did the Apostles' Creed. We get to “God the Father Almighty,” that's what they remember — just to remember He's Almighty.

34. 31:26

    Kevin DeYoung

    The Greek word pantokrator, meaning “ruler of all” or “Almighty.” Interestingly, nine of the ten uses of pantokrator in the New Testament are found in Revelation, and this is important — the term is applied to God the Father and to God the Son, implying that both persons are equally divine. You can see the many occasions of that, nine different times in the book of Revelation. So we are right to say, first of all, “God the Father Almighty,” but just note that that important appellation is given many times to God the Son as well. And then, fourth thing to note: He is Creator. Everything except God exists because God willed it into existence. God alone exists independently.

35. 32:19

    Kevin DeYoung

    That is His attribute of aseity — from Himself, of Himself. He is the only being who exists in and of Himself, dependent on no one and on nothing. He is the Maker of heaven and earth, all things visible and invisible. God the Father is mentioned six times in the creed: in relation to the Son, in relation to the Spirit, and here in relation to creation. The first act of the Trinity in time is appropriated to the Father. Now, if you know your Bible, you know it is not exclusively the province of the Father, but it is rightly appropriated to Him. Irenaeus, again, famously said that the Word and the Spirit were like the two hands of God the Father in creation.

36. 33:11

    Kevin DeYoung

    And you see that at the very beginning: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and the Spirit hovered over the deep. So there's the Spirit. Now, where's the Word? Well, He spoke, and it was so — it came into being. There, in the Genesis account, are the Word and the Spirit, God the Father's two hands, as it were, in creating all things visible and invisible, ex nihilo, out of nothing. There is also an important anti-Gnostic apologetic here, because in asserting “God the Father Almighty” is the Creator, it means that the Father has no need for emanations or aeons — these were the views of the varieties of Gnostic heresies.

37. 34:05

    Kevin DeYoung

    No demiurge, no demigod. He doesn't need Dwayne Johnson trying to sing a song as some kind of demigod, some kind of in-between being from God and His creation. He needs nothing outside of Himself. He is not at all like the Gnostic conception of God. He needs no intermediaries. Amen. There are ultimately two ontological realities: God, and everything else — visible and invisible — that is not God. So there's a lot that is being set in place here — seems very obvious, but it's set in place to give us a Christian way of viewing the world, and to set us on a Christian understanding of the Trinity.

38. 34:57

    Kevin DeYoung

    He's Creator. He's Almighty. He is one. He is Father. Amen. So let's think some more, in our last minutes here, about the fatherhood — and in particular, this word “paternity.” Now, we hear that and think in one context — “who's your daddy,” you have to take a paternity test. That's the way we know the word “paternity.”

39. 35:24

    Kevin DeYoung

    But I'm thinking here of what distinguishes the three persons of the Trinity. What can you say about the Father that you cannot say about the Son? What can you say about the Son that you cannot say about the Spirit? And the Spirit that you cannot say about the Father? Those are the personal properties — meaning, what is proper to each person. In saying homoousia, we're saying what is essential, what belongs to each person; they share the same essence — consubstantial, the Son with the Father. But in saying paternity, filiation, spiration — these have been the ways of distinguishing those persons. Now, they sound like complicated words, but they're not. And when you understand them, you'll see they're basically restating what you've already said in “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Amen.

40. 36:25

    Kevin DeYoung

    What can you say about the Father that you can't say about the Son? Well, you can say He's a Father. What can you say about the Son? He's a Son. So the personal property of the Father is His paternity, His fatherhood; about the Son, His filiation — that He is a Son from the Father; and the Holy Spirit, that He is spirated, breathed out, proceeding from the Father and the Son. So let's get our thinking caps on and noodle this a little bit more. We speak of the Father as the source of creation and, in a way, as the source of the Son. But, as Michael put so well in the first talk, there is a world — an eternal world — of difference in how we understand that language of “source.” Calvin's Catechism of Geneva, 1545, speaks of the Father as, quote, “the beginning and origin and the first cause of all things.” But note carefully: in the Creed, God the Father is the Maker of heaven and earth.

41. 37:29

    Kevin DeYoung

    He is the Begetter of the Son. You beget children; you make cakes, as we heard. This begetting is eternal — it never began. According to some theologians, it never ends but is constant and everlasting. So it's eternal; it had no beginning. Because when Arius said “there is a time when He was not” — you could even translate what Arius said as “there was when He was not” — Arius might have been willing to say, “All right, let's even put this before time, let's put this somehow out of time” — but there was something, some “it,” when —

42. 38:07

    Kevin DeYoung

    that the Son did not exist. Eternal begetting, eternal generation, will not allow us to make that mistake. So this begetting, this fathering — that's another word — the fathering of the Son is eternal. But note this too: it is a personal begetting. The Irish Articles — and this was one of the documents used initially in putting together the Westminster Confession of Faith, which you then copied and changed a few things and got the London Baptist Confession; you're welcome, I know you improved it, you fixed some things — the Irish Articles, 1615, says this: the essence of the Father — this is important — the essence of the Father does not beget the essence of the Son. [7]

43. 39:00

    Kevin DeYoung

    The person of the Father begets the person of the Son, by communicating His whole essence to the person begotten from eternity. So you hear that language — it is a personal begetting. It is not the “Godness” generating “Godness,” the essence. Essence doesn't exist as a general thing you can just go — this is really important when you come to Christology, and you talk about how the Logos puts on, assumes, a human nature. That human nature only ever existed in person — in the person, the hypostatic union of the Son.

44. 39:49

    Kevin DeYoung

    It wasn't that the divine Son of God said, “I'm going to come down and just open up the closet, and I've got a cat nature — don't want that; I've got a dog nature, fun, but I've got a human nature — let's put this on.” And He comes down and He's got the human nature on, like there's just a generic human nature out there. Nor do we want to think that there was a human that was then infused with the divine — that there's a guy, Jesus, and, “Yep, let's make him divine.” The Son of God, the eternal Son of God, assumes to Himself a human nature, and that nature is only made personal in union with the divine Son of God. So similarly, we do not want to think that there is some divine nature that then begets another divine nature.

45. 40:42

    Kevin DeYoung

    There is a Father who begets a Son. And this begetting language, as we have already been reflecting on, is important, because one of the dangers — and this is what many of the Cappadocian Fathers, some of the most important theologians between 325 and 381, initially had some trouble with — some of the homoousia language, and they came around to it. But one of the dangers, one of the things they didn't want, is that homoousia, “same essence,” could sound like — if you've got a lump of Play-Doh, don't eat it, smells good, don't eat it — but you've got a lump of Play-Doh and you cut it in half: same essence, same stuff, the exact same stuff, same essence. And they didn't want an example of “same essence” that lent to that kind of physicality. So there was initially some nervousness, even after Nicaea, and they came around to understand: well, we need this to guard not just the similarity, but the identical Godness of the Son to the Father.

46. 41:51

    Kevin DeYoung

    But we want to be careful — and that's why the language of “paternity” is important. It's not taking something — you know, if you cut off my arm, that is the same essence of Kevin. Now, not for long, but it is. But that's not how you get the Son from the Father. So there is an order — you'll probably hear this word in these two days, the Greek word taxis, “an order.” The Son is begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

47. 42:29

    Kevin DeYoung

    The Spirit shines a light on the Son, that we might worship the Son, and in turn bring glory to the Father. There is an order. It would not make sense for a Son to send the Father. It would not make sense for the Spirit to breathe out the Son. So we speak of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That order is irreversible. So here's where we have to be very careful with our language. Can you speak of a subordination of the Son? I wouldn't recommend it, but you can, in this limited sense.

48. 43:09

    Kevin DeYoung

    Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — the Father begets the Son, and the Spirit is breathed out from the Father, proceeds from the Father and the Son. That's an order. Amen. And so you order Father, Son — the Son is ordered under the Father; that's a sub-order. And that's the language that some people use, and they simply mean that sub-ordering — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — not that the Spirit was going to send the Father into the world to become incarnate. There's an order that is irreversible.

49. 43:40

    Kevin DeYoung

    What we don't want to understand with sub-ordering is to think of the distinguishing characteristics of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as some roles of authority and submission, or subordination — certainly not ontological subordination, meaning a different kind of being, and people know not to say that. But we don't want to think of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as distinguished along those lines. This has been a debate in the last ten years, and a lot of helpful work has been done on it, and people are much clearer than they were. The problem was not in saying that the incarnate Son obeys the Father — He certainly does. The problem was not in insisting on a kind of sub-ordering — that's true. The problem was in emphasizing authority and submission in a way that did not allow for one will of the triune God.

50. 44:38

    Kevin DeYoung

    Will is a property of essence — so, one essence, one will, one property of nature. Christ has two wills, because there are two natures. So when you have, eternally, a relationship of authority, submission, obedience, it's hard to conceive of that except with multiple wills. Christ, in His incarnate state, can say, “Not my will, but yours, be done.” So that was one problem. The other was in positing that the three persons were distinguished by their roles — something they did — rather than, historically, the language of paternity, filiation, spiration — those are their personal properties. That's what you can say about one that you cannot say about the other.

51. 45:26

    Kevin DeYoung

    This language of the Father is absolutely crucial. And Mike has already brought this out very powerfully in the big book that Matthew Barrett edited — I say “Matthew Barrett, big book” just to be redundant, but there is a very fine chapter in there. John Baptist Ku points out that Athanasius and Basil worked to move away from the term “unbegotten” and toward the name “Father.” This is just underscoring what you heard in the first session. Because — now, it's not inaccurate to say that the Father is unbegotten; the Son is begotten. [8]

52. 46:08

    Kevin DeYoung

    The Father — He is not begotten. But if we begin with the idea of unbegottenness, it becomes difficult to conceive of the Unbegotten One communicating the whole divine essence by means of unbegottenness. And so those church fathers were saying, “No, no, no” — the Arians liked that word “unbegotten.” You have to say: it's not that it's incorrect in its place, but if that's what we call the first person of the Trinity, and we don't distinguish among the persons in relation to the other persons — because “unbegotten,” by itself, doesn't need any other person in order to be unbegotten. But if you understand “unbegotten” as a familial term — that is, unbegotten because He is Father and not Son — we don't want to conceive of “inascibility,” not being from anyone, as belonging to the divine essence itself, or otherwise the Son and the Spirit cannot be divine as the Father is divine. Aquinas says the Father is not more similar to the Son than He is similar to Himself. The Son is everything the Father is, except He is a Son and not the Father.

53. 47:32

    Kevin DeYoung

    The Son is everything the Father is, except He's a Son and not the Father. God is Father because He has a Son. The Son is a Son because He has a Father. That much should be obvious. The way in which the Son relates to the Father is by begetting. The Father generates the Son. The Son is from the substance of the Father — that's how the Creed of Nicaea puts it.

54. 48:00

    Kevin DeYoung

    One thing we can say about the Father that we cannot say about the Son is that this Father is not the Son. And what we say about the Son that we cannot say about the Father is that He is begotten of the Father. Arius taught, “Not always Father, not always Son” — the Son was not always. And so, if you don't have a Son who is eternal, then you don't have a Father who is eternal — you have a God who became a Father. Or, to put it more elegantly: the relations of paternity and filiation are simultaneous. You have paternity and filiation, not at a moment in time, but eternally — which means, from this very first line in the creed, as soon as we confess, “We believe in God the Father,” our hearts ought to leap with joy and anticipation.

55. 49:01

    Kevin DeYoung

    “Father — all right, tell me about His Son,” which is what the bulk of the creed, of course, is about. When the Spirit draws us to the Son, and we are moved to worship the Son to the glory of God the Father, we are entering into the divine life of the Trinity. I want you to just think here — and this really is the closing, not a preacher trick to buy fifteen more minutes, but really the closing. I know we've got some Presbyterians, probably a lot of Baptists, and some of my best friends are Baptists — it sounds like a support group, but it's true. So we may disagree about who are proper subjects for baptism, but we all agree on the indispensable nature of baptism.

56. 49:53

    Kevin DeYoung

    And I'm sure that we don't think about it enough. Amen. Two sacraments — one active, one passive, which is why one happens once and one happens in renewal, frequently. Even the act of eating, of discerning the body, is an action taking place in the renewal of the Lord's Supper. And then passive — whether you understand that to be a passive infant who is part of the covenant by virtue of Christian parents, or upon profession of faith — yet there is a passivity there. You're named. Amen. You are named Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

57. 50:50

    Kevin DeYoung

    If you are a Christian, if you are a baptized Christian, then you are named with this triune name. What could be more important than what we are talking about here — to know your family name? What you are called. When you gave your kid a name, it's a big deal. All the things the government makes us do, all the paperwork — but we can still just name our kids whatever we want. I have a friend in Germany who says that in Germany they give you a list of approved names. Yeah, go figure. If we want to name our kids dumb names, that's what it means to be an American, I say.

58. 51:36

    Kevin DeYoung

    “Don't tread on me, DeYoung.” That's what I'm going to say. You know, when I sometimes say, sort of cheeky, to my kids — my kids are runners, because the DeYoungs are built to run away from people, not into people. And I'll say — you know, my middle schooler has her state track meet on Saturday, and she's a good little runner, and she works so hard — I'll sometimes say, with an exaggerated kind of dad speech, I've said to her before: “Now, I want you to remember three things. I love you. Jesus loves you. And you're a DeYoung.” [9]

59. 52:19

    Kevin DeYoung

    You might say the third one isn't so important, but it's my half-serious, half-funny way of saying: now, when you go out there with that name, you remember who you are. We've got long legs, slow-twitch muscles, long legs. And I want you to acquit yourself in a certain way. I want you to remember your name. You're baptized. You bear the triune name. Somebody sprinkled you, somebody immersed you, somebody — a minister — said, “I baptize you in the name of our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

60. 53:03

    Kevin DeYoung

    Amen. It's not only His name, it's our family name, and so we worship. Let's pray. Father in heaven, thank You for Your great and precious promises. Thank You for the truths that we have here to study and to remember and to celebrate. And we trust that we are not exalting any man or man-made document, but that in worshipping we might worship the God-man; we are thankful, amen, for what You have preserved through the centuries in Your frail, imperfect church, that we might confess this one God in three persons.

61. 53:40

    Kevin DeYoung

    Give us ears to hear, and help these truths to change us, and may we delight in them. In Jesus' name, amen.