The "Christ" Quotes That Sound Trinitarian

Answer

This is the sentence raised more than any other. It is genuine, it is unabridged, and it says exactly what people quote:

In Christ is life, original, unborrowed, underived.

Read alone, it can be made to mean that Christ has His life from no one — that He is the uncaused Source, owing His existence to nothing and to no one. But that is precisely the meaning her own framework rules out. “Unborrowed, underived” is set against the way a creature holds life: a creature’s life is on loan, sustained moment by moment from outside itself, and can be taken away. Christ’s life is not like that. It is His own — inherent, indestructible, divine. As she herself explains the phrase in its fuller setting, the point is that no one can take this life from Him: “I lay it down of myself.”

So the statement establishes that Christ is no creature. What it does not do is erase the one relationship Scripture names at the very heart of His divine life — that the Father gave Him to have it:

For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself;

Hold the two together and the apparent tension dissolves. The Son’s life is in Himself — truly His own, not borrowed like a creature’s — and that very life was given Him by the Father. “Unborrowed, underived” answers the question “is His life His own?” (yes, fully); it was never written to answer the question “did His life come from the Father?” — to which she, and John, answer yes as well. A gift, once given, is genuinely the receiver’s own. That is the begotten Son: fully divine, and from the Father.

Answer

She does apply such language to Christ, and again we quote it in full. Of His pre-existence she wrote:

Christ is the pre-existent, self-existent Son of God…. In speaking of his pre-existence, Christ carries the mind back through dateless ages. He assures us that there never was a time when He was not in close fellowship with the eternal God.

Mark the words she actually uses. He is the self-existent Son of God — the title and the relationship stand in the same breath. The function of “self-existent” here is the same as “unborrowed” above: it lifts Christ entirely out of the class of created, dependent beings and places Him in the class of Deity. It is a statement about what kind of being He is, not a denial that He is the Son of a Father. The same is true of “I AM”: when Christ takes that name to Himself He is claiming the full divine identity — the very name of God — and that claim is exactly what the begotten-Son faith affirms. The pioneers never disputed His divinity; that was their whole point. What they denied was that His being God somehow cancels His being the Son.

Answer

She does call Him eternal, and she means it without reservation — but watch how she frames it. In the very passages where “eternal” appears, she also speaks of His being brought forth:

The Lord Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, existed from eternity, a distinct person, yet one with the Father…. “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way,” He declares…. “When there were no depths, I was brought forth….”

“From eternity” and “I was brought forth” sit in the same statement without contradiction, because the sense in which she calls Christ eternal is the sense Scripture allows: His existence reaches back beyond any point the mind can name — “there never was a time when He was not” in fellowship with the Father — so far back that to finite comprehension it is without beginning. That is the pioneer reading exactly. E. J. Waggoner put the same thought plainly:

It is not given to men to know when or how the Son was begotten; but we know that he was the Divine Word, not simply before He came to this earth to die, but even before the world was created…. We know that Christ “proceeded forth and came from God” (John 8:42), but it was so far back in the ages of eternity as to be far beyond the grasp of the mind of man.

“Eternal,” then, is not the creed’s “co-eternal with no source.” It is Scripture’s “from everlasting” (Micah 5:2) — a Son brought forth before time, whose origin is so far back it lies past the edge of human reckoning, yet who is genuinely the begotten of the Father.

Answer

Here too the words are hers and we keep them whole. Her clearest statement of His equality and oneness reads:

Christ, the Word, the only begotten of God, was one with the eternal Father — one in nature, in character, in purpose — the only being that could enter into all the counsels and purposes of God.

Notice that she defines her own terms. “One with the eternal Father” does not float as a bare metaphysical formula; she immediately tells us what she means by it — one in nature, in character, in purpose. That is unity of being and will, the oneness of a Father and a truly divine Son who share one nature — not the creed’s “one substance in three persons.” And the clause that carries the equality is the same clause that names the sonship: He is the only begotten of God. She holds full equality and real begotten-sonship in a single sentence, exactly as she does elsewhere:

God is the Father of Christ; Christ is the Son of God. To Christ has been given an exalted position. He has been made equal with the Father. All the counsels of God are opened to His Son.

Read closely, this is not the language of co-equal-from-eternity-with- no-source. The equality is something the Father gives — “He has been made equal with the Father” — to His Son. That is the whole begotten-Son picture in miniature: a real Father, a real Son, the Son fully and truly divine, His exaltation and equality received from the Father who is His source. “Equal with God” affirms His divinity; it was never meant to deny that the Father is the One who gave it.

Answer

Step back and one pattern runs through every statement. In each case the strong word — unborrowed, self-existent, eternal, equal, one with the Father — is doing the same job: it shuts the door on the idea that Christ is a creature. That is the error these lines were written to crush. None of them was written to teach the further idea — an uncaused, sourceless, co-equal Trinity — that critics now read back into them.

And the proof that this is her meaning is that she pairs the strong word with the begotten word in the same breath, again and again: the “self-existent” one is the “Son of God”; the “eternal” one is the one “brought forth”; the one “equal with the Father” is the “only begotten,” who has “been made equal.” A writer who had crossed over to the creed would not keep welding “self-existent” to “begotten” and “equal” to “given.” She does it constantly — which tells us she saw no conflict, because in her framework there is none. Full divinity and true sonship; His own life and the Father’s gift.

So the critics’ favorite quotes turn out to be the begotten-Son faith’s best friends. They are airtight against the only thing they were aimed at — the lie that the Son is a made thing. Hand them to a Trinitarian as a proof-text for aseity and they say less than is claimed; read them as she wrote them, they say something better: the Father has a Son who is true God, of true God, fully sharing the one divine life — which the Father gave Him to have in Himself.