Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 29:1 (Spring 2025)
Article: One Lord Jesus Christ, The Only Begotten Son Of God
Author: Stephen J. Wellum

One Lord Jesus Christ, The Only Begotten Son Of God1

Stephen J. Wellum

Stephen J. Wellum is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and editor of Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and he is the author of numerous essays and articles and the co-author with Peter Gentry of Kingdom through Covenant, 2nd edition (Crossway, 2018) and God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2015); the co-editor of Progressive Covenantalism (B&H Academic, 2016); the author of God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (Crossway, 2016) and Christ Alone—The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior (Zondervan, 2017); the co-author of Christ from Beginning to End: How the Full Story of Scripture Reveals the Full Glory of Christ (Zondervan, 2018); and the author of The Person of Christ: An Introduction (Crossway, 2021), Systematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, vol. 1 (B&H Academic, 2024), and It is Finished (Union, 2025).

Introduction

In this article our focus is on the biblical basis for the Nicene Creed’s identification of our Lord Jesus Christ as the only begotten (monogenēs) Son of God, which means that he is the eternal Son of the Father who is truly God and not a created being. As the divine Son, he fully shares in the one, simple divine nature with the Father and the Spirit. This is why the Creed affirms that the Son is homoousios (of one nature), namely, that he wholly subsists in the identical nature with the Father and Spirit so that he, along with the Father and Spirit, is fully and equally God.

We cannot do an exhaustive survey of the biblical data teaching the truth of Christ’s deity. Instead, we will focus is on some key texts that summarize the NT witness to Christ and also teach significant truths that were foundational to the Church’s formulation of the Nicene Creed. It’s crucial to recognize the continuity between what Scripture teaches and what

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the Church confesses. The Jesus of the Bible is not different than the Jesus confessed in the Nicene Creed, although a different theological vocabulary is used to communicate the biblical teaching.

It’s also important to see that our Lord Jesus’s divine Sonship is unveiled across the Bible’s covenantal story. As Jesus’s eternal Sonship is revealed to us, he is first disclosed as the promised Messiah, David’s greater Son, who inaugurates God’s saving rule and reign. As the human son-king, he was first promised in Eden (