Light of Light
Hebrews 1:3 is clearly a good passage to appeal to for the deity of Christ. What may be less obvious is how it teaches a dimension of the eternal generation of the Son. The words that concern us are these:
“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.”
Here the inspired author calls him the “radiance of the glory of God.” RADIANCE here does not mean a light that is reflected, but that which radiates from, as the Nicene Creed puts it, “Light from [or of] Light.” This is a very crucial expression because we often struggle to get our minds wrapped around this idea of the divine Son being eternally begotten. But what this radiance—or Light from Light—is all about is somewhat like a sun which gives off its light, yet unlike a finite star in our universe, this Light does not dissipate or diffuse.1
‘Light of Light’ in Scripture and the Creed
We must remember here that we are dealing with analogical speech to begin with. Within the Godhead there is no separation of sequence or entropy between First and Second, since what is Two in what is proper to the Persons is One as regards essence, so that the divine Son is not ontologically caused. This radiance of Hebrews 1:3 is a radiance of divine glory. That makes this radiance every attribute of God. Article 10 of the Belgic Confession states,
“We believe that Jesus Christ, according to his divine nature, is the only begotten Son of God, begotten from eternity, not made nor created (for then he should be a creature), but co-essential and coeternal with the Father, the express image of his person, and the brightness of his glory, equal unto him in all things.”
This draws back on the language of the early church, which the Reformation confessions and catechisms typically did. The menacing heresy that made the Council of Nicaea so necessary in the fourth century was the error of Arius of Alexandria who said, “There was when he was not.” In other words, what Arianism taught was that the Son was “like-nature” (homoiousios) to God but not the “same-nature” (homoousios) as God. The same early church fathers who used the language of the eternal generation of the Son also used the language of Him being consubstantial with the Father. So here in Hebrews, the author does not merely use imagery of a radiance, but that this Son is “the exact imprint of his nature.” Ambrose argued from Isaiah 43:10 the impossibility of calling Jesus divine and yet inferior,
Before me, there was no other God, and there shall be none after me. Who is it that says this, the Father or the Son? If the Son, he says, Before me, there was no other God; if the Father, he says: After me, there shall be none. The one has none before him, the other none after him.2
Paul speaks of the divine essence of Jesus as “the fullness of deity” (Col. 2:9), and elsewhere that Christ “is God over all” (Rom. 9:5). Three other places make it abundantly clear that Jesus Christ is, together with the Father, the Creator of all things: John 1:3, 1 Corinthians 8:6, and Colossians 1:16-17. Here in Hebrews 1:3 this creative power of Christ extends from original creation to the constant maintenance of everything that is not God: “he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”
The Son as the ‘Image’ of the Father
Before explaining the meaning of the Son as the Image of the Father, let me bring in a few other verses that use similar language: “He is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). And we Christians are being made into a new man, or new woman: “being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:10; cf. Rom. 8:29). The word for IMAGE (εἰκών) is our source for the English word “icon.” But this can be misleading. What makes the Son an “image” in the eternal sense is not something that “makes” Him at all!
We are not talking about anything visible, nor are we even talking about anything that is fashioned as in having boundaries to its form. This Image fashions us, but He Himself is unfashioned. How then can He be an image? When we think of our own reflection in the mirror, for example, the two are not equal—our face and its reflection—but the face comes before the reflection.
Great Christian theologians like Augustine and Jonathan Edwards put a lot of thought into this idea of the Son as the Image of the Father. Incidentally, so too did Hilary of Portiers before Augustine, as well as Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas after him. In other words, this language of image and analogy has a significant pedigree in church history.
Augustine wound up his book on the subject with illustrations of the Trinity—mind, knowledge, love and memory, understanding, will—but, of course, if taken as analogies too close to the identity they would lead to Modalism.3 What he landed on was also retraced by Edwards in his “Unpublished Essay on the Trinity,”
“Therefore as God with perfect clearness, fullness and strength, understands Himself, views His own essence (in which there is no distinction of substance and act but which is wholly substance and wholly act), that idea which God hath of Himself is absolutely Himself. This representation of the Divine nature and essence is the Divine nature and essence again: so that by God's thinking of the Deity must certainly be generated. Hereby there is another person begotten, there is another Infinite Eternal Almighty and most holy and the same God, the very same Divine nature.”4
But lest we get the idea that these thinkers were just speculating, they offer Scripture that agrees with this view of divine radiance. Christ is the illuminated image of God in 2 Corinthians 4:4. He is called the word of God (Jn. 1:1) and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24). This divine imaging is a communion in the Trinity but it is the fountain of His communication to us.
“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (Jn. 1:18).
One practical reason this matters is that even though everything is some revelation of God, where Christ is we have the perfect revelation of God: the exact Image. All else that is called “image” is really an analogy. Each of them has some “same-ness” but the Word has “exact-ness.”
This helps us in our language that eternal generation is not like physical generation. Physical generation is the copy. A precise way of stating this comes to us from Hilary:
“The will of God gave to all creatures their substance: but perfect birth gave the Son a nature derived from a substance impassible and unborn. All things created are such as God willed them to be; but the Son, born of God subsists in the perfect likeness of God.”5
But why speak about such a radiance as a “birth” or “begetting” at all? In fact, the question betrays that the relevant category has not yet shifted. It is an eternal light. It is an eternal begetting. It never began. To such a person I want to say, “That thing that you are thinking, whatever it may be, is still comparing that which the analogy is in fact not comparing.” Why do you suppose that begetting begins in time? It is because in time, begetting does begin in time. But the whole point here is that this relation of origin, as the classical theologians called it, is not a temporal-sequential “event” at all. Nor does the Son’s relation to the Father imply eternal subordination (though the case for this requires a separate treatment). In the economy of analogies, the traffic only runs one way: from God to His effects.
It should not be too surprising to learn that earthly generation—that is, the normal biological way to beget children—is the faint analogy. This is what Edwards called “images of divine things,”6 and Bavinck called “vestiges of the Trinity.”7 What else do we think David meant in Psalm 19 when he said that,
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork … There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard” (vv. 1, 3).
Fathers and sons, light and life—these are what they are because of what they say about God. Not the other way around; not side-by-side. What degree of mystery is there in this idea of eternal generation? Infinite in degree. But whether it is necessarily so, and whether it is coherent—on those matters, the Scriptures have spoken.
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1. Augustine uses this same metaphor, only with light from a fire, in De Trinitate, bk 6, c1 n1.
2. Ambrose, De Fide, bk 1 c8 n55.
3. cf. Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2004), 196-97.
4. Jonathan Edwards, Unpublished Essay on the Trinity, 1.
5. Hilary, De Synod, PL 10, 520.
6. Edwards, Miscellanies, 635, 638.
7. cf. James P. Eglinton, Trinity and Organism: Towards a New Reading of Herman Bavinck’s Organic Motif (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 83
