How Can God Have a Son?

For most Muslims, the words “Son of God” sound like the worst thing a person could say about God. They seem to make God a man with a wife, or to set a second god beside the One. If that were what the Bible meant, Muslims would be right to reject it. This study shows what the Qur’an actually rejects, why we reject those same things, and what the Bible really means when it calls Jesus the Son of God.

The objection, in the Qur’an’s words

The Qur’an raises the question directly. (Quotations are from the Sahih International translation; words in square brackets are the translators’ additions.)

[He is] Originator of the heavens and the earth. How could He have a son when He does not have a companion [i.e., wife] and He created all things? And He is, of all things, Knowing.

Say, “He is Allāh, [who is] One, Allāh, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born, Nor is there to Him any equivalent.”

And speaking to Christians in particular:

O People of the Scripture, do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allāh except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allāh and His word which He directed to Mary and a soul [created at a command] from Him. So believe in Allāh and His messengers. And do not say, ‘Three’; desist – it is better for you. Indeed, Allāh is but one God. Exalted is He above having a son.

Notice the bracket in that verse. The Arabic simply calls Jesus rūḥun minhu, which Pickthall’s translation renders “a spirit from Him.” The words “[created at a command]” are the translators’ explanation, not part of the text. We will come back to what the Qur’an itself calls Jesus.

What the Qur’an rejects, we reject too

Read the Qur’an’s objections carefully, and you find that each one rejects a particular idea. We want to say plainly: we reject every one of them too.

• A “three” that includes Mary. The Qur’an pictures God asking Jesus, “did you say to the people, ‘Take me and my mother as deities besides Allāh?’” (Sura 5:116), and condemns those who say “Allāh is the third of three” (Sura 5:73). Mary is not God. No one should pray to her or worship her. We agree completely.
• A wife for God. The Qur’an says God “has not taken a wife or a son” (Sura 72:3) and asks how He could have a son without a companion (6:101). God has no wife. The Bible never says He does.
• Begetting like a man. “He neither begets nor is born” (Sura 112:3) rules out God producing offspring the way creatures do. So do we. The Son was not produced by any physical act.
• “Taking” a son. Sura 19:88 rejects those who say God “has taken [for Himself] a son,” as if He picked a creature and promoted him. The Bible does not teach that either. Jesus was not a man who was adopted into godhood.
• The “daughters of God.” The Arabs before Islam worshipped goddesses they called God’s daughters (Sura 16:57). That is idolatry, and the Bible condemns it as firmly as the Qur’an does.

One God, the Father

When a scribe asked Jesus which commandment was first, He did not invent a new creed. He quoted the creed of Moses, the same confession of one God that every Muslim honors:

And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:

In prayer, Jesus called His Father “the only true God” (John 17:3). And the apostle Paul put it in a single sentence:

But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.

One God: the Father. One Lord: His Son, through whom He made all things. That is not two gods side by side. It is one God and the Son Who comes from Him.

The Bible’s confession is one God, the Father, and His Son. Not three gods, not a family of gods, not God and a consort.

What “Son” means in the Bible

The Bible uses “son of God” in more than one way. Adam is called “the son of God” (Luke 3:38) because God made him directly. God called the nation of Israel “my son, even my firstborn” (Exodus 4:22), meaning His chosen and beloved people. No one has ever read these verses as meaning God had a wife.

But Jesus is called the Son in a way no one else is. He is the only begotten Son:

No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

Adam was made from dust. Israel was chosen from among the nations. Jesus came from God Himself. He said: “I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me” (John 8:42). And He existed before the world was made, for it was “by whom also he made the worlds” (Hebrews 1:2).

The New Testament calls Christ “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). Many Christians, from the early church on, have read the Wisdom who speaks in Proverbs 8 in that light. There Wisdom says, “When there were no depths, I was brought forth … Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth” (Proverbs 8:24–25). “Brought forth” is the language of birth, not of making. Micah likewise speaks of the coming Ruler “whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2), which the King James margin renders “the days of eternity.” We explore that verse in From the Days of Eternity.

So when the Bible says “Son,” it means this: the Son came forth from the Father’s own being, before anything was created. He was not made like a creature, and not produced through a wife. Because He came from God, He shares the nature of the One He came from, the way any son shares his father’s nature. The Father gave Him “to have life in himself” (John 5:26). How this took place is beyond us. That it took place is what the Scripture says.

Jesus is not God’s son by a wife, by adoption, or by creation. He is the only begotten Son, Who came forth from the Father before the world began.

“His word”

Here the Qur’an offers a bridge. It gives Jesus a title it gives no other prophet: God’s word.

[And mention] when the angels said, “O Mary, indeed Allāh gives you good tidings of a word from Him, whose name will be the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary …”

Moses was not called God’s word. Abraham was not. Muhammad was not. Only Jesus. And a word comes from the one who speaks it. It is not a second speaker, and it is not made out of something else. It goes out from the speaker and carries his mind and meaning. The Gospel of John begins in exactly this way:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

Like every picture, this one has limits. The Son is a living Person, not a sound in the air. But the Qur’an and the Gospel agree on the starting point: Jesus is the Word that came from God. The Bible goes on to tell us Who that Word is: “the only begotten of the Father.”

A birth without a father

Muslims already believe that Jesus was born of a virgin. The Qur’an records Mary’s question and the answer:

She said, “My Lord, how will I have a child when no man has touched me?” [The angel] said, “Such is Allāh; He creates what He wills. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.”

The Bible tells the same event, and ties it to the title “Son of God”:

And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

Notice how. Not by any union, but by “the power of the Highest.” The Bible’s Son of God came into the world by a miracle that Muslims already accept. From the beginning, “Son of God” never meant what the Qur’an fears it means. (The Bible teaches that the Son lived with the Father long before Bethlehem. The virgin birth is how He entered the human family, not when He began.)

Is honoring the Son shirk?

Shirk means associating a partner with God: setting up a rival beside Him. Does honoring the Son do that? Listen to how the Son Himself speaks of the Father:

… for my Father is greater than I.

He said the Father knew the hour of the end and He did not (Mark 13:32). He said His very life was given Him by the Father (John 5:26). And at the end of all things, “then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The Son never takes the Father’s place. He is not a rival. He is the Son.

Why then do Christians honor Him? Because the Father commands it:

That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.

The Father Himself says of His Son, “let all the angels of God worship him” (Hebrews 1:6), and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, “to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11). Honor given to the Son at the Father’s command is honor to the Father. It is not taken from Him. For more on this, see Who Do We Truly Worship?

The Qur’an itself contains a striking line on this question:

Say, [O Muḥammad], “If the Most Merciful had a son, then I would be the first of [his] worshippers.”

Muslims read this verse as an argument that God has no son. But notice what it grants: if God did have a Son, honoring Him would not be shirk. It would be right. The real question, then, is not whether honoring the Son dishonors God. It is whether God has a Son. That is what the Bible says He has.

The Son is not a partner set up against God. He is the Son God sent, Who honors the Father and leads us to Him.

And the Holy Spirit?

Muslims often ask about the third name in the Christian creeds. The Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit as God’s own presence and power, not as a third god. The same Spirit is called both “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” in one verse (Romans 8:9). And Jesus promised that when the Spirit comes to dwell in a believer, “my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:23). Through the Spirit, the Father and the Son Themselves come near. The Qur’an says, “do not say, ‘Three.’” We do not say three gods either. For the full study, see The Godhead.

Why it matters: God as Father

If God has a Son, then God is a Father. That changes everything about how we know Him. Jesus taught His followers to pray, “Our Father which art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). After He rose, He said, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17). Through the Son, the one true God becomes our Father too.

And it tells us what kind of love He has. Abraham was asked to give “thine only son” (Genesis 22:2), and God spared him. God did not spare His own:

In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.

A God with no Son could command. A God Who gave His only begotten Son has shown His heart. If you are a Muslim reading this, you already guard the oneness of God with great love. Keep guarding it. The Bible does too. We ask you only to consider the Son the one God sent, and to read about Him for yourself. If you wonder whether the Gospels can be trusted, see Was the Bible Corrupted? and for His death and rising, see Did Jesus Die on the Cross?

One God, the Father. One Lord, His only begotten Son. Through the Son, the one true God becomes our Father.

Further reading