Article September 21, 1912 Issue

"ETERNAL GENERATION."

REV. WILLIAM G. SCHOPPE.

Some phrases live through centuries, because of the vital truth they suggest. Such was the term, "Eternal generation of the Son," used first by Origen. The argument of this great and unique thinker was, in brief, that God communicates Himself to the Son, His light goes forth eternally; His fatherhood has been forever, and is not an accession to His being, in course of time. If God existed alone in solitary unity, without manifesting His divine nature through reflection, then He was not, from all eternity, God, that once He was imperfect; Love did not go forth; the light did not shine, and the righteousness and power of Deity lay idle and ineffective. If this be not true, then the Son must have been eternally generated. In this relation was established the character of eternal Love.

This thought of Origen was afterward used to prop and explain the doctrines of a personal trinity, under which form it is often wrought into modern sermons. It contains the germ of a vital truth which Christian Science explains and sets free from the limitation in which theology has confined it. The logic of this expression insists that man and the universe—the entire spiritual, real creation—must be included in the eternal generation. Christ, the Son, is the head. Paul declares that "by him all things consist;" otherwise there would have been "accessions to the being of God," which cannot be.

The real man is the son of God, the idea of infinite Mind, not a passing mortal dream-shadow. God's idea coexists with the Mind that forms it, and can no more cease than God can cease; thus faith in immortality is established on a sure foundation, and the futile attempt of ages to prove immortality by reasoning from a basis of mortality, is superseded. Mrs. Eddy recalls thought from its long confusion when she says, "Existence, separate from divinity, Science explains as impossible" (Science and Health, p. 522).

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