The question of whether Jesus is divine or a created being has never lacked for challengers. George Whitefield, writing in the eighteenth century, named the denial of Christ's full divinity a "fashionable and polite doctrine" of his age — describing those who "esteem him only as a created God" as Socinians who reduce the gospel to "a system of moral ethics." The scriptural argument against this begins with John 1:1-3: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." If all things were made through the Word and nothing was made without him, the Word itself cannot be among the things that were made. Thomas Grantham makes the inference explicit: the one described as creator "therefore himself was not created, and consequently he is Eternal." John Chrysostom, expositing John's prologue, observes that the Evangelist deliberately begins "from eternal subsistence" to lift readers above earthly and temporal categories, rebuking those who import human-generation analogies to argue for a starting-point of the Son. Gregory of Nyssa presses the argument from Hebrews 1 — the Son is "the brightness of glory" — and insists that "before" and "after" have no place in relation to him: since the brightness exists concurrently with the glory, the Son's existence cannot be posterior to the Father's. Ambrose similarly rejects analogies from bodily birth applied to the divine generation as absurd: if taken seriously they would imply the Father bore the Son in a bodily womb. Peter Lombard states plainly that "Christ was not created, which is what the perfidious Arians have failed to grasp" — allowing "creature" only when carefully specifying Christ's assumed humanity, never the eternal Word. Thomas Watson adds that in the Godhead there are "no degrees" and "one person is not God more than another." Whitefield's conclusion: "if Jesus Christ be not very God of very God, I would never preach the gospel of Christ again."
"What enormous shamelessness and irreverence! I speak to thee concerning God, and dost thou bring the earth into the argument, and men who are of the earth?" — Chrysostom rebukes those who use earthly analogies to argue for a temporal or creaturely origin of the Son, insisting that John's prologue deliberately begins "from eternal subsistence" to lift readers above all created categories.
"But with Him Who is 'the brightness of glory,' 'before' and 'after' have no place: for before the brightness, of course neither was there any glory, for concurrently with the existence of the glory there assuredly beams forth its brightness" — Gregory argues that the Son's eternal generation has no temporal sequence: to posit a moment before the Son is to posit a moment before the Father's own glory, which is incoherent.
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