inquire, nor could our minds grasp it if we were told. The prophet Micah tells us all that we can know about it in these words, “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall He come forth unto Me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from the days of eternity.” Micah 5:2, margin. There was a time when Christ proceeded forth and came from God, from the bosom of the Father (John 8:42; 1:18), but that time was so far back in the days of eternity that to finite comprehension it is practically without beginning. ibid., pp. 21-22 (1890)
He possesses immortality in His own right and can confer immortality upon others. Life inheres in Him, so that it cannot be taken from Him, but having voluntarily laid it down, He can take it again. ibid., p. 22 (1890)
Let no one, therefore, who honors Christ at all, give Him less honor than He gives the Father, for this would be to dishonor the Father by just so much, but let all, with the angels in heaven, worship the Son, having no fear that they are worshiping and serving the creature instead of the Creator. ibid., p. 24 (1890)
Waggoner is attempting an unnecessary balancing act, holding onto what he thinks is a biblical idea of God the Father giving birth to God the Son, while simultaneously advancing in his thinking to affirm the complete divinity of Christ. He is inching forward, but he’s stuck on the word “begotten.” Therefore, he misunderstands the Sonship of Christ. It is painful to watch him struggle. Right outside of his peripheral vision is the answer to the problem he is attempting to solve. All he has to do is look backward from the New Testament into the Old, but he never does. Nor did any of the Advent pioneers before him. They all got stuck on the word “begotten,” and so felt obligated to invest the word with a metaphysical meaning that Scripture never probes.
Failing to grasp the larger biblical narrative of the covenantal sonship lineage, Waggoner trips all over himself with embarrassing contradictions. We are not to understand, he insists, that “the Son existed as soon as the Father,” because, of course, “the Father was . . . before the Son,” in as much as there is an obvious chronology of existence in a Father-Son relationship.
But then, sensing that it makes no real sense for there to be a created God, Waggoner has to insist that “begotten” must mean something mysteriously different than the word “created,” although he can’t make sense of the notion. And why can’t he make sense of it? Well, because to not exist and then to be made to exist, whether you call the causal event “begetting” or “creating,” are one and the same thing conceptually. On some level, he knows this. So he has to pull an idea out of thin air—and it is very thin air, indeed. He says that the “time” at which God gave birth to Christ “was so far back in the days of eternity that to finite comprehension it is practically without beginning.” In laymen’s terms, that’s what is called, philosophical gobbledygook. It is basically an exercise in saying nothing meaningful while attempting to sound like you are offering an intelligent explanation. But it is not harmless philosophical gobbledygook. To hold the idea that a God can be made to exist after having not existed, is, as we will soon see, the precursor to the deification of human beings, known as pantheism. Waggoner is suggesting that deity is a quality of being that can be brought into existence, and that this is what God did with Christ. God gave birth to a previously non-existent God, according to Waggoner. Not surprisingly, then, pantheism, or at least panentheism, is exactly where Dr. Waggoner ended up.
There is no biblical warrant for Waggoner’s claim that the one we know as Christ had an ancient point of beginning. Even the few passages of Scripture he uses to support the idea do not say what he tries to make them say. He is clearly coming to the Bible with an idea and then throwing a few verses at the idea for support.
His key text, of course, is John 3:16, in which Jesus is called God’s “only begotten Son.” But as we have seen, the word “begotten” has a clear meaning within the scope of the Old Testament narrative, which reaches its fulfillment in Christ. He is the only begotten Son of God in the covenant sense, not in the ontological sense. He is the Son of God in the lineage of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Israel, David, and Solomon. Along with all the other early Adventist scholars, Waggoner overlooks this biblical material. None of them ever mention, let alone reckon with, the sonship narrative of the Old Testament. It simply never figures into their interpretations. It is as if they are trying to open a locked door without the provided key, which is in their hand while they are kicking the door with their feet.
Next, Waggoner employs Colossians 1:19. But he uses the text to convey something it does not say. Christ “is of the substance of the Father,” Waggoner explains, “so that in his very nature he is God; and since this is so ‘it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell.’ Col. 1:19.”
Waggoner thinks this text is saying that the Father was pleased to fill Christ with the fullness of divinity sometime way back in eternity past, the idea being that the divinity of Christ was either conferred upon Him or actualized in Him by the Father, but not innate to Him. The text, however, is talking about the post-incarnate Christ being filled with all the fullness of God as a human being, in the same sense that all mankind was originally meant to be filled with the fullness of God’s indwelling presence. How do we know this is what Paul means? Well, because he explicitly tells us so in Colossians 2:
For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power. Verses 9-10
Young’s Literal Translation offers an even clearer rendering:
In him doth tabernacle all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and ye are in him made full, who is the head of all principality and authority.
The point Paul is making is that Christ, as the new prototypical human, was full of God’s indwelling presence, so that we, too, may be “made full” of God through Christ. Paul is not telling us that Christ was made divine by an act of the Father. If that were Paul’s point, we would be obligated to believe that we, too, are made divine by the Father. Clearly, this is not what the passage is saying.
Lastly, Waggoner employs Micah 5:2 in an effort to prove that Christ was at some point brought into existence by God the Father. But Micah 5:2 is a prophecy regarding the incarnation of Christ, not His ontological origins. Micah is not telling us about the “goings forth” of Christ from non-existence to existence, but from the realm of eternity past into our world via His incarnation.
Waggoner builds an entire doctrine of a lesser God being brought into existence by a “greater” God, while none of the Scriptures he marshals to support the idea say anything of the sort. It is a teaching void of biblical backing. This highlights the danger entailed in proof-texting our way to the formulation of doctrinal teachings. Waggoner sees the word “begotten” and simply assumes that the word refers to the ancient origins of Jesus. Therefore, he feels obligated to believe that Christ, in some manner, must have been brought into existence by God and, therefore, is not God in the “greater” sense that the Father is God. He sees the phrase “in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,” and leaps to the conclusion that this means the Father somehow made Jesus divine, conferred godhood upon Him, or put deity into Him by some kind of mysterious act. He sees the term “goings forth” in reference to Christ and extrapolates the massive notion of God bringing forth (causing to exist) a lesser God. All the while, none of those verses of Scripture mean any of that. To discover what they do mean, one needs to read the immediate context of each text, as well as the larger narrative context of the whole Bible.
But we shouldn’t be too hard on Waggoner. He simply brought to his reading of Scripture an idea he had been taught by the Advent pioneers. So he saw what he was told he would see. He had a blind spot. Waggoner, like the Advent pioneers, was high centered, wheels spinning, on the word “begotten.” But now we know the biblical meaning of the New Testament term, “only begotten Son.” There is simply no reason to continue applying ontological and chronological interpretations
