What does it mean that Jesus was begotten?
Psalm 2:7 and the Jehovah's Witnesses
I will tell of the decree: The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.
Psalm 2:7
"Look," said my Jehovah's Witnesses friends, "the Bible says that Jesus is the only-begotten Son of God. How can you say that he is eternally part of a trinity if he was begotten by the Father? What kind of sense does it make to say that a son is the same age as his father? That's why the biblical teaching is that God's Son is the first and greatest of his creatures, the one through whom he made everything else that exists."
This is the point where my explanation of the deity of Christ from Hebrews 1 got derailed because verse 5 cites Psalm 2:7.
For to which of the angels did God ever say, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”?
Hebrews 1:5
I unintentionally walked right into one of their favorite proof-texts, and the explanation that I was able to give at the time was not as clear or as convincing as I would have liked. Here's the explanation I would offer today:
An analogy
The first thing we need to make clear with our Jehovah's Witnesses friends, is that neither one of us is taking the word beget literally (they might think that they are). The literal sense of begetting is a biological act that involves the cooperation of two parents. Nobody believes that that is what the Bible is talking about in Psalm 2:7. The idea of the Father begetting the Son can only be understood as an analogy, so the question that needs to be asked is: What does the analogy mean?
Option 1 - Origin
This is the way Jehovah's Witnesses understand the analogy of begetting. When someone is begotten, they come to exist, and so when the Bible says that the Father begat the Son, it means he created the Son. This seems to line up with Luke 3:38 where Adam is called the son of God, and we know that Adam was created by God.
There is a problem though, and the problem is that there is a world of difference between the actions of begetting and creating, and the language is simply not interchangeable. I have begotten children, but that does not make me their creator. And God is the Creator of the asteroids, but he did not beget them. The fact that Adam is called the son of God is not simply a reference to the fact that God created him, but more significantly to the fact that he created him in his image. Notice that in Genesis 5:3 it says, "When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth." Seth, in Adam's image, is Adam's son, and Adam in God's image, is God's son.
The fact that, unlike asteroids, Adam is God's son because he was made in God's image pushes us toward a different way to understand the analogy of begetting.
Option 2 - Nature
"Like father, like son," we say, and I would quite surprised if every language ever spoken didn't have a similar expression. One of the most fundamental things about sons is that they resemble their fathers. So if I tell you that Freddy is the son of a goldfish, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Freddy is himself a goldfish, and Titus, being the son of a man, is also a man (or will be, one day...). It is a rule that sons have the same essential nature as their fathers. And so if Jesus is the Son of God, what does that make him?
More generally, the Bible uses sonship language as a way of saying that someone shares certain characteristics with their "father". For example, in Matthew 5:45, those who are "sons of God" are those who love their enemies, just as God loves his enemies.1
As for Jesus, he is not simply a son of God, but the only-begotten Son of God. Others may share certain characteristics with God, but he represents the Father perfectly because he fully shares the same divine nature as his Father.2 That's why John says:
No one has ever seen God. The only-begotten God who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.
John 1:18
Option 3 - Kingship
There's another essential aspect of the title "son of God" in the biblical revelation, which is that it's a title for the kings of Judah descended from David. God says to David, speaking of his sons: "I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son" (2 Sam 7:143). This is the promise that stands behind the statement of the king in Psalm 2: "I will tell of the decree: The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you."
But when was "today"? When was the Son begotten by the Father? For the Jehovah's Witnesses, the answer is that it happened at the beginning of creation when the Father created the Son. That's not however the way the apostle Paul interpreted this text. Speaking to the synagogue in Antioch of Psidia, he said:
And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm, "You are my Son, today I have begotten you."
Acts 13:32-334
For the king in Psalm 2, the moment of begetting was the moment when he was established as king,5 which happened for Jesus (according to his humanity!) when he was resurrected and ascended into heaven.6 His fathers received the title of "son of God" when they were enthroned in Jerusalem, and the same title was bestowed on him when he was enthroned in heaven.7
Conclusion
Following Paul's interpretation then, Psalm 2:7 has nothing to do with the supposed creation of the Son of God, but of his triumph over death and enthronement in heaven. The sonship language used for Jesus also refers to the fact that he is the perfect revelation of the Father because he shares the same nature. Far from demonstrating that Jesus is an exalted creature, the title of Only-Begotten Son is one of the many ways the Bible teaches us that Jesus Christ is himself fully God, the second person of the Holy Trinity.
Postscript - What about eternal begetting?
An extremely ancient Christian interpretation of Psalm 2:7 is that “today” is the eternity of God, and that the verse refers to the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father. This interpretation has the approval of centuries of Christian theology, and it may well be another layer of meaning to this text. The idea of eternal begetting goes back to the question of what distinguishes the three persons of the Trinity in eternity-past, and if the Bible answers that question at all, the distinction between the Father and the Son is that the Father is the eternal begetter of the Son. Personally I find it a bit speculative, but even if correct, it only adds to what I said above. John Frame has a point when he says, “To be honest, I don’t think that the phrase eternal generation takes us any farther than the name Son. Jesus is the eternal Son.”8
Cf. Jn 8:44, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires,”
and 12:36, “While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”
Cf. Heb 1.3, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power,”
Col 1:15, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (the last phrase is also abused by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but that’s a subject for a different blog post),
and Jn 14:7-9, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”
Cf. Heb 1:5, “For to which of the angels did God ever say, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”? Or again, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son”?
Cf. Rm 1.4, “…declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead…”
Cf. the previous verse, Ps 2:6, “As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.”
Cf. Dn 7:13-14, “I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”
Cf. Ps 110:1, “The LORD says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool,’”
and Mt 26:64, “Jesus said to him, ‘You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.’”
Frame, John M. Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An Introduction to Systematic Theology. P&R Publishing, 2006, p. 38.