The recent and ongoing discussion of how to translate “Son of God” in Muslim contexts prompts us to examine which direction analogies used in Scripture ought to run. Who is analogical of whom? Who provides the pattern for the other?
When we read in Romans 1:1 that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God at his resurrection, we are lead to ask in what way is Jesus (like) a son and in what way he is (like) a/the Son of God. But by asking these questions we are starting with our own pre-understanding and experience of what it means to be a son as used in our own ethnolinguistic community. Here arises the difficulty with translating “Son of God” in Muslim contexts as readers come to the text with a notion of what it means to be a son that contrasts sharply with the way the Bible speaks about sonship. God becomes analogical of man.
Linguist Rick Brown summarizes the difficulty:
In some languages and people groups, sonship terminology is used almost exclusively for direct biological relationships, i.e., it means the same as ‘offspring’ in English. In Classical Arabic, for example, the counterparts for ‘son’ and ‘father’ mean biological son and biological father. These terms were not used metaphorically for other interpersonal relationships, not even for a nephew…
The Arabic usage contrasts significantly with the situation in Hebrew and Aramaic (and Akkadian), where one could address his son, grandson, nephew, son-in-law, and neighbor’s son as bni/bri ‘my son’…
So it is not surprising that these Hebrew idioms were misunderstood by the Arabs in classical times, even by some Arab Christians, as referring to biological descent.1
Concerning sonship language in Muslim contexts then we see that the pattern for the analogy runs from human to divine; that is, the human ethnolinguistic view of sonship supplies the content for the divine, Scriptural way of speaking. God becomes analogical of man rather than man analogical of God.
Athanasius, however, questions this human-divine direction of analogy in writing against the Arians. He asks,
Why is it that, on hearing that God has a Son, they deny Him by the parallel of themselves; whereas, if they hear that He creates and makes, no longer do they object their human ideas? they ought in creation also to entertain the same, and to supply God with materials, and so deny Him to be Creator, till they end in grovelling with Manichees. But if the bare idea of God transcends such thoughts, and, on very first hearing, a man believes and knows that He is in being, not as we are, and yet in being as God, and creates not as man creates, but yet creates as God, it is plain that He begets also not as men beget, but begets as God. For God does not make man His pattern; but rather we men, for that God is properly, and alone truly Father of His Son, are also called fathers of our own children; for of Him ‘is every fatherhood in heaven and earth named.’2
While no language will comport exactly as Scripture does, Christians must bear in mind Athanasius’ grounding principle for analogical language: God does not make man his pattern. Unfortunately this is more easily said than applied.
- Rick Brown, Delicate Issues in Mission Part 1: Explaining the Biblical Term ‘Son(s) of God’ in Muslim Contexts, International Journal of Frontier Missions, 22:3 Fall 2005, 91. PDF ↩
- Athanasius, Select Works and Letters, in NPNF2, 4:320. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204.xxi.ii.i.vii.html ↩
