Making and Begetting

Today's Reading

Read John 1:14: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."

Then read Colossians 1:15: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation."

Reflection

Lewis opens Book IV — "Beyond Personality" — by drawing a distinction that the early church considered absolutely essential: the difference between making and begetting.

"We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself."

A man begets a child — a new human being. A man makes a statue — a work of art, but not a human being. A bird begets an egg that becomes a bird. A bird makes a nest, which is not a bird.

"What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man."

This is the distinction the Nicene Creed hammers home: Christ is "begotten, not made." He is not a creature — however exalted — that God produced. He is the Son of God in the fullest sense: He shares the Father's nature. He is God from God, light from light, true God from true God.

Why does this matter? Because if Christ were merely a created being — a kind of super-angel — then His death on the cross would be the death of a creature, not the self-giving of God. The Incarnation loses its force. The atonement loses its power. The whole Christian story depends on the claim that in Jesus, we are dealing not with God's best product but with God Himself.

John 1:14 uses the language of glory: "glory as of the only Son from the Father." The Greek word translated "only" (monogenes) carries the sense of "one of a kind" — unique, in a class by itself. Colossians calls Christ "the image of the invisible God" — not a copy or a reflection, but the very presentation of God in visible form.

Going Deeper

Lewis uses this distinction to set up the central question of Book IV: if Christ is the eternally begotten Son — God's own life expressed as a Person — then what does it mean for us to become "children of God"? We are not begotten by nature; we are created. But the extraordinary claim of Christianity is that created beings can, through Christ, be drawn into the life of the begotten Son — adopted into a family to which they do not naturally belong.

This is the great exchange at the heart of the gospel: the Son of God became a son of man so that sons of men might become sons of God.