Son of God

In the Hebrew scriptures the phrase is used in several senses and none of them makes the bearer divine. The oracle to David promises that the king successor will be a son to God and God a father to him, and the enthronement psalm has God say to the king that he is his son, begotten today, which is coronation language. Israel as a people is called God firstborn son in the demand made to Pharaoh. Heavenly beings appear as sons of God in Job and elsewhere. In each case the relation is one of appointment, election or membership of a class, not of shared nature.

That range matters for reading the New Testament, because a first century hearer would not have taken the title as an automatic claim to divinity. The opening of Romans preserves what many scholars regard as an older formula, describing Jesus as descended from David according to the flesh and appointed Son of God in power by the resurrection, which reads as appointment rather than eternal status. The gospels use the title at the baptism, the transfiguration and the crucifixion, at moments of disclosure.

Whether the earliest usage is functional, saying what Jesus does and what office he holds, or ontological, saying what he is, is one of the standing questions in New Testament scholarship, and the answer given tends to determine how the rest of the development is read. What is not in doubt is that by the second century the churches were using the title in the stronger sense.

The fourth century settled what the churches would mean by the word. The Nicene formula says begotten, not made, and of one substance with the Father, and the theologians who defended it developed the idea of eternal generation: the Son is begotten in a way that has no beginning and no before, as light is generated by a source without the source ever having been dark. The point of the doctrine is to hold sonship and full divinity together, which the ordinary sense of begetting cannot do.

The Quran rejects the title in explicit terms. The short chapter on sincerity states that God does not beget and is not begotten and that there is none like him; another passage says that it is not for God to take a son, and that when he decrees a thing he only says be. The rejection is placed among the gravest errors, because associating anything with God is the one thing the Quran presents as unforgivable if unrepented.

The two positions are not reconciled by a distinction, and the atlas does not offer one. It is worth recording accurately what each is denying and affirming: Christian theology denies that the generation is physical or temporal and affirms it as eternal and within the one God, while the Quranic denial addresses the taking of a son as a claim about God nature and about human beings ascribing partners to him. Interfaith discussion has explored whether the two are speaking past each other, and no agreement has emerged.