The Trinitarian Vision of Jonathan Edwards and David Coffey By S ...

The Father as the Unbegotten

Unbegottenness is the chief characteristic of the Father. The Father is God, who begets and from whom the Son and Spirit proceed, but who is not from another.⁴⁸ Augustine described the Father as the “source of all godhead, or if you prefer it, of all deity.”⁴⁹ However, unbegottenness does not confer either temporal priority or ontological superiority to the Father relative to the Son and the Holy Spirit. God, as Trinity, is the eternal relationships of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.⁵⁰ The Father is only the Father by virtue of eternally begetting the Son. Because of the unbegotten nature of the Father, Augustine had little to say in respect to his subsistence.

The Generation of the Son as the Word of God

The Son corresponds to the generation of a mental word by the understanding. As noted previously, a word is a replication by an act of thought of something contained in the memory and/or is the immediate object of the mind’s perception. Augustine distinguished between a word that is represented in the understanding and one that is derived from and spoken in language. The former refers to the inner mental word and is distinct from the spoken word. A spoken word is not properly a word, but is an external sign of an inner mental word. His point is that a mental word—one that is formed by the understanding—corresponds exactly to the knowledge contained in the memory.⁵¹ Furthermore, the generation of the Son as Word does not correspond to a human mind remembering one item contained within the memory; rather, it is similar to a human mind recalling its being or essence. This nuance is important because the Son is identical in being with the Father. Consequently, when the Father generates the Son as Word, the Word matches the Father identically. The common nature shared between the Father and the Son accentuates the primary limitation of the human mind’s ability to image the Son as Word. In the human mind, the production of a mental word is not identical with the essence of the mind, but it is a modification of or in the mind. A word in a human mind, even if it is a representation of the mind itself, is still a word in the mind. However, because God is