Begotten of the Father Alone?

NICENE CREED

who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified

The Nicene Creed goes way beyond the Apostles’ Creed in describing the faith in the Holy Spirit. The creed goes on in this to distinguish the person of the Spirit from the church as the Bride of Christ (Rev.22:17). The Spirit and the Bride are not the same in person, but the Spirit does worship through the Bride as the bodily instrument of God’s love for His own glory. Therefore, the Spirit gives no honor to Himself apart from the glory and honor of the Son working the will of God in those who believe (Phil.2:12-13; Jn.15:26; 16:14; 17:22-26; 1Pet.1:22-25; Rev.19:7-10).

The Holy Spirit has the authority to demand worship (Acts. 13:2). He sets apart vessels to Himself for service. But again, He is distinguished from the office of any and every grace of Christ’s gift to the church (Acts 15:28). He is the gift that sanctifies the grace as the help to the office of the church’s call. He is also sovereign over the graces, which demands our fear and reverence as an alternate form of worship besides service (Acts 16:6-7; Lk.11:13). The Holy Spirit requires our faith and trust the same as the Father and the Son demand our faith and trust (Acts. 19:2), and, therefore, it requires our attention and adoration to learn of Him. The Holy Spirit requires submission for us to possess the joy of the gift of salvation in our assurance (Acts 7:51; 19:6; 1Pet.3:19-22), through which He has fellowship with (Rom.14:17), bringing us into His own submission to the divine will (Phil.2:12-13; 2Cor.3:17-18), making us partakers of the divine nature (2Pet.1:3-4).

When Jesus speaks of the Spirit proceeding from the throne of His resurrection (Jn.14:16-17, 26), He doesn’t mean from His relationship with the Father from before the foundation of the world, which is a mystery of itself in the fellowship of the Godhead, but that the Spirit proceeds from Christ’s earthly work in and above the creation itself in His resurrection into His eternal glory for the victory on our behalf as the creation to enter into the same glory that He generated by the Spirit of His soul (Jn.15:26; Acts 2:33; Lk.24:49; 1Cor.15:45). Therefore, this is not speaking of the eternal relation from before the foundation of the world but as it requires His relation (in us) as the creation (Matt.5:48; 21:16; Jn.17:23; Heb.7:8; 10:14; 11:40; 12:23), for unto “us” the Child was born (Isa.9:6).

Yes, Christ was restored to the glory which was His from before the foundation of the world, but Christ returns with even greater glory than what was His from before the foundation of the world (Jn.17:4-5), for He returns with the victory that the Father has sent Him into the World to perform in the body of flesh and blood (2Cor.4:17). But even that work could not be done apart from the work of the Spirit conceiving that body which the Father had prepared for His soul (Heb.10:5, 10), to suffer that death in the separation of the soul from the body and that soul kept by the Spirit for the day of His bodily resurrection (Heb.4:12; James 2:26; Jude 24; Rom.8:11).

Therefore, the Holy Spirit is worthy of the same manner of worship as the Son in His earthly work to bring about our salvation, for Jesus is not “begotten” of the Father only because the Spirit was equally at work in the begetting of the Child’s conception (Matt.1:20). This was not considered by the Athanasian authors of line 22 of the Athanasian Creed when it states: He was begotten of the Father alone. Now, whether the authors intended to mean as the only begotten of the Father or not, I don’t know, but it is not stated that way.

Secondly, it is nowhere stated that way in Scripture, for it is always stated as the only begotten of God; however, the presumption always assumes God to be the Father exclusively, but if the Holy Spirit is equally God, would that presumption always be right? So again, the Holy Spirit is worthy of worship for the generation of the Son of God in human form as a Child and His growth into the Son of Man as much as the Father was at work in Providence to bring all things into the divine schedule of His will sealing us by the Spirit’s work of regeneration (Lk.1:35; 2:27; Jn.5:17; Matt.4:1; 26:39; Eph.1:3-6, 11-14).

Kattenbusch observed long ago that the ceremony of “rendering the creed,” the chief occasion for a declaratory profession of faith and so conspicuous a feature in later African and Roman usage, had apparently no place in his accounts of the administration of the sacrament. Several times he employs the metaphor of a soldier of the imperial army taking his military oath. There must have been a close parallelism between the procedures involved, and since the soldier’s oath was generally rehearsed in his hearing while he simply indicated his assent, the obvious deduction is that much the same must have happened at baptism. There is a well-known sentence in his treatise De spectaculis which points to the same conclusion: “When we entered the water and affirmed the Christian faith in answer to the words prescribed by its law (in legis suae verba profitemur), we testified with our lips that we had renounced the devil, his pomp and his angels.”

 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, Third Edition. (London; New York: Continuum, 2006), 44–45.