The Bible in Arabic - part 7 - D.A. Carson on "Jesus the Son of God"

Last episode we saw how the controversy unfolded over translating Son of God and Father in reference to God in the Arabic speaking world and among other large Muslim groups. Now we want to focus on what biblical theology is at stake in the translation of divine familial terms. For this we get the privilege of listening to DA Carson talk about some of the content in his book titled Jesus the Son of God, a Christological title often overlooked, sometimes misunderstood and currently disputed, published in 2012 mainly to address the controversy. I'm Andrew Case and this is working for the Word. Now Dr. DA Carson hardly needs any introduction. Many of you already know he is a respected biblical scholar and author. He's a distinguished emeritus professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and president and co-founder of the Gospel Coalition. He's written or edited about 60 books and currently serves as president of the Evangelical Theological Society. According to his Wikipedia page Dr. Carson has been described as doing the most seminal New Testament work by contemporary evangelicals and as one of the last great renaissance men in evangelical biblical scholarship. He's written on a wide range of topics including New Testament, hermeneutics, biblical theology, the Greek New Testament and the use of the Old Testament in the New and more. So I hope you enjoy and learn something from this interview. Let's get started. Why is it important to believe that God is triune? Why should the average Christian meditate deeply on this truth and what difference does it make? The most obvious answer is that we should believe it because that is how God has disclosed himself in Scripture. It's not as if the church decided to foist a complex doctrine of the Trinity on texts that themselves don't support it. A Bible believing Christian is going to believe about God with a Bible says about God and I would argue as passionately as this possible that the Bible does teach a picture of God that is best described by the word triune or by the word Trinity. But then the truth of God as triune is deeply enmeshed in a lot of other specific details about God or about salvation, about sin, about the plan of redemption and so forth. If you read the Quhan, there are many texts that describe God as sovereign as the all-beneficent one and so on. Very, very few say that he is loving. Whereas the Bible insists that God is love so strongly does it put it and reiterates the love of God again and again and again. And it's grounded in the first instance in that God is complex in the solitary view of God as in Islam. There is no peer to love. And yet the Bible says that God loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and goes so far to use the intra-trenitarian love of God. And so the love of God expressed one person for another in the sacred Trinity as the model of Christian loving. Moreover, as I'm sure we'll discuss in further questions, God's plan of redemption deeply enmeshes the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. So the entire plan of redemption as set forth in Scripture would be shattered, rewritten, distorted if God were solitary one instead of complex one. And that gets us into fundamentals of basic, confessional evangelical Christianity. Thank you so much for that. It's very helpful. And this brings me to the next question is why you wrote a book specifically about the sonship of Jesus. Could you tell us a little bit what was the motivation for that? The motivation for writing that book was several fold first all the titles of Jesus deserve careful study. He's the king of Israel. He is the Messiah. He is the bright and morning star, the rose of Sharon. He is in various titles and various metaphors and so on. He is to be understood as he has disclosed himself by his names and his words and his descriptions. What does it mean to say that Jesus, for example, is the good shepherd and it's worth finding out historically what that means as it's worth finding out what son of man means and son of God means. So in that sense, I was merely focusing on one of many biblical titles for the Lord Jesus and it's always worth studying those. But at the time that I wrote the book and prepared them as lectures, there were some debates going on in the broader world of Christendom that I thought were overlooking some things, some things that were linguistic, some things that are theological. For example, one heard again and again, sometimes the Bible does refer to Jesus as the obedient servant of God. If he's the servant of God and he blatantly is, he clearly is, he unambiguously is. Why not use that title for Jesus rather than a title which will cause umberage in some circles and notably in the Muslim world? After all, in the Muslim world, when honest thinkers disagree with any view that makes Jesus the son of God at the popular level, their understanding of son of God is not what the Bible says in any case. To the Muslim on the street, the Trinity consists of the Father having sex with Mary to produce Jesus. The Holy Trinity is God, Mary and Jesus. They think it's bizarre. And so do I. But that's not what Christians think. It's not what the Bible says. Which means that there are ambiguities and uncertainties and misunderstandings and misapprehensions concerning the term son of God. So it's worth finding out what the Bible actually does say. If you want to advance belief in Jesus, the son of God, one must be aware of what the term means. And then when you start doing the work and look at all the uses of son of God, you discover that it has many, many, many distinctive uses. Sometimes it is merely the way referring to a biological, physical son, much as we would use son today. But out of this comes an array of metaphorical uses that are quite distinctive part of the ancient Semitic mindset that are a bit different today. Donalists will come back to that question later too. But in the same way that mother in some contexts can can be used differently in different cultures. So son of son can be too. A few years ago in the Middle East, people were talking about the mother of all wars. Well, that's not a western way of talking. But one understood what was being meant. And it was not an abuse of the term. It's a particular metaphorical use of the term. So one wants to know what son means. And one discovers that it can be used metaphorically, descriptively, referentially in a variety of ways. And to gain a clear understanding of what is meant by Jesus is the son of God. And to think rightly about him, it's worth taking the time to understand how the expression is used in its many forms in Scripture. Thank you. That's perfect because that leads me into this next question about the different linguistic or semantic uses of the word son in Scripture as you highlight in your book. Could you walk us through some of those and maybe give a few examples? Let's begin with some uses where son of God is used in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. Whereas sometimes it's not translated that way because it is so bizarre to English ears. In Exodus 12, 5, one reads of son of one year that really means a year old male or a male a year old in Deuteronomy 25. One reads sons of the beating. It means people who deserve to be beaten or sons of might refers to a mighty person, a mighty man, a fighter son of a murder. That means not someone who is murdered, but a murderer son of a flame is almost always rendered in modern English translations as sparks son of a bow rendered arrow and so on and so on. Sons of affliction is talking about the oppressor the afflicted son of the morning sometimes rendered son of the dawn or something of that sort son of a wise man refers to wise counselors. So in these and many other expressions, the term "sun" is used in ways that are distinctive to Semitic languages and need to be explained one way or the other. If they're rendered literally, then they have to be explained in a footnote. And nothing is at stake if one explains them with an aside. But then there are different reference, ENTS. That is to say, sometimes the expression itself can be used as we've seen for non-personal objects like sparks or something abstract, like murder. But the expression, when it refers to human beings, can refer to human beings in a variety of way, for example. Forgetting the instances where "sun" of God is referring to Jesus in a distinctive way, in Luke 3, the genealogy of Jesus is traced all the way back to Adam the Son of God. Now, transparently, he's not the Son of God in exactly the same way that every other human being in the genealogy is said to be the Son of another human being. Adam is the Son of God in the sense that God generated him, making him in the image and likeness of God, created to reflect God's glory. But Adam is not the Son of God in the same sense that Adam's Son is the Son of a human being. He's passing on of DNA or the like. As early as Exodus 4.22, 23, the expression "Son of God" can refer to Israel collectively. Moses tells Pharaoh, "This is what the pe- what the Lord says. Israel is my firstborn Son, and I told you let my Son go, so he may worship me. So Son, used in the singular, is referring to Israel collectively as God's covenant people." And that expression shows up in a variety of ways again and again. The expression "Son of God" or "Sons of God" can refer to God's covenant people. As Deuteronomy 14 puts it, "Moses addresses the Israelites, you are the sons of the Lord, your God, a subset of this usage or better, a specific exemplification of it, "Sonship language can be applied to Christ's followers, to Christians, when in some way or another, they are imitating God." Jesus says in the Beatitudes, "Blessed are the peacemakers, where they shall be called the sons of God." Now that does not make them generically or genetically offspring of God. The reason this expression shows up is because God is the supreme peacemaker, and if we act to make peace, we are acting like God, and thus show ourselves to be sons of God, it's a functional usage of the term. The reason why this functional use is common in the Bible is because "Sonship in the homeliest sense, biological sonship, physical sonship, family sonship" has a different set of associations. I've sometimes in a crowd asked, "How many men, talking to the men first, how many men are doing vocationally at their current age, what their fathers did at the same age, and rarely is it as much as 5 percent, and then I've asked the same thing for women." In other words, in cultures before the industrial revolution, it was overwhelmingly likely that if your father was a baker, you became a baker. If your father was a cabinet maker, you became a cabinet maker. If your father was a farmer, you became a farmer. So you could be known as the son of the farmer or the farmer's son. Thus you are identified not so much chromosomeally or biologically or according to DNA or the son of God. So that someone who claims to be a son of God but is not acting like God is denying the claim. It's a functional thing in the first instance. Now behind that functional thing, as we'll see there is ontology, there is actual being, but will do that in due course. But that is why son of God language can operate in such functional ways. So similarly, the Davidic King is sometimes designated the son of God, just as in the Beatitudes, as we've seen, those who make peace are acting like God and are called sons of God. So the Davidic King is to reign as God's representative, as God's ruling monarch under God. He's the son of God. When the Davidic heir actually came to the throne, he was decreed to be God's son. He entered into his rule and to his reign. That's found, for example, in Psalm 2. And that's what is meant in 2 Samuel 714. I will be his father and he will be my son. God says of the Davidi who comes to the throne in due course. Or over sometimes, sonship can be applied to believers eschatologically, that is to believers as they find themselves in the consummation. Now the major New Testament writers, it has to be said, find ways of distinguishing between such sonship and the unique sonship of Jesus. For example, in John's Gospel, Christians, Christ's followers are called Tatekna Tuthaehu, the children of God. But only Jesus is called Haukwios, the son of God. In Paul's writing, it's more common to use this slightly different distinction, but it's making the fundamental distinction between son of God applied to all human beings and son of God applied to Jesus. Their Paul speaks of Christians as sons of God, but in particular as adopted sons of God, Jesus is the son of God, but we are adopted sons of God. So the biblical writers have ways of making distinctions that are important for understanding who Jesus is. So that gives you at least some idea of the range. That's apart from the particular use of son of God as applied to Jesus. Donuts will come to that in due course. Thank you. Yeah, and that's so helpful. Most Christians, I think, would be very confused by a question like that. They haven't thought deeply about the different implications of son. I'm wondering if you could explain a little more. Why is Jesus the son of God as opposed to the brother of God or some other kind of relation? And would you mind helping us unpack, what does that imply further? What exactly is the Bible saying when it calls Jesus the son of God and take as much time as you need on this one? Let's begin by what the Bible means when it speaks of Jesus as the son of God. It includes in it the notion of the generation of Jesus. There is a remarkably difficult passage in John 5 where we are told as the Father has life in Himself. So He has granted the Son also to have life in Himself. Now when you speak of God as having life in Himself, you inevitably think of God being self-existent. No one gives Him life. God has life in Himself. And the text says that as the Father has life in Himself, so the Son has life in Himself. But the text is more complex. It actually says as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself. If He has granted the ability to have life in Himself, then it's not life in Himself. It's derived life, which is why Christians have thought about and meditated on and studied that verse in its context through the centuries. Augustine was the one that put it remarkably clearly. He says this is an eternal generation. That is, there is a sense in which the life of the Father generates the life of the Son. But it's not that this happened at a particular time. And before that, the Son didn't exist. That would mean that the text would read something like, as the Father has life in Himself. So He has granted life to the Son. That's not what it says. It's so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself. In other words, what He has granted is precisely that which shows He is truly God, self-derived, self-existent with life in Himself. That is why Christians have formulated these things as affirming the eternal generation of the Son. Now that still preserves the notion of sonship that you don't get in Brotherhood. There is no notion of the Father being the older brother and the Son being the younger brother. There is a notion that is bound up with the sonship of Jesus that gives us a picture into the ontology of God. That is how the Father and the Son relate to each other. Now there are many, many texts when it comes right down to it. That is one of the distinctions that is preserved. The father loves the son from all eternity. The father and the son each have life in himself from all eternity. But at the same time, the Bible dares to say that the father grants life in himself to the son. The only way of making sense of that without contradiction, it seems to me, is to affirm an eternal generation. It's not that the father granted the son at some point in the past, so many years BC, or something of that order, it's an eternal grant, it's an eternal generation. And something similar is found in different language in Hebrews 1, where we're told that the son is the radiance of the father's glory, or as somebody has put it, it's the shining of the shining. It's not something that is separate, act two. It's bound up with the glory itself, and a number of biblical passages regarding Christ and his identity are bound up in exactly that sort of way. Let me say one more. In John's Gospel, there are several passages that affirm Jesus' deity very strongly. For example, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, in the very first verse. For the end of the book, Thomas confesses, "My Lord and my God," in John 8. Jesus says, "Before Abraham was," who had died 2000 years earlier, "Before Abraham was, I am, not I was, but I am, using the very name of God." Now, Christians are all familiar with those kinds of texts that affirm the deity of the son. At the same time, the Gospel of John says things like, "The son can do nothing by himself. He does only what the father gives him to do." There is some kind of derivation. There is some kind of, "I don't like to use the term subordination, but functional obedience." So we read, for example, John 5.19, "Truly I tell you the son can do nothing by himself. He can do only what he sees his father doing." There is, "Whatever the father does, the son also does." There you have both axes, both polarities in one verse. If you said simply, "The son can do nothing by himself. He can do only what he sees his father doing." There would be derivation and nothing more. But then the text immediately goes on to say, "Because whatever the father does, the son also does." That is bound up with Jesus' deity. I have never created a universe, but whatever the father does, the son also does. The son is bound up with the father in the creation of all things, as the opening verses of John's Gospel says, "I don't have the power to raise people from the dead, but the son does in himself, of himself, not in some sort of prophetic gift, but in himself." Whatever the father does, the son also says. So if you have an animal that looks like a horse, runs like a horse, has all the attributes of a horse, you've got a horse. And likewise, if you have a being that has all the attributes of God and does what only God can do, you've got God. In other words, behind the functional equivalence is a presupposed ontology. And all of these things are bound up with a peculiar notion of sonship that is found in scripture as applied to the Lord Jesus. Sometimes sonship applied to the Lord Jesus is focusing on his appointment as Davidic King, because the ancient Davidic kings were called sons of God when they came to the throne. So Jesus enters into his regency, into his monarchy, and is sometimes called son of God on such grounds. But in passages like John V and Hebrews 1 and others, the sonship is bound up with something ontological. It's bound up with a very nature of God. The sonship choice portrays something of the awesome wonder of the eternal derivation, the eternal generation of the son, whereas it doesn't threaten his eternality, his omnipresence, his omnipotence, his unique oneness with the Father. I and the Father are one. He has seen the Father Jesus can say, "I can refer to God as my Father, but I cannot say the Father and I are one as Jesus can say it." His sonship is unique. That's beautiful, so helpful. It brings me to ask more about John V. Why you picked John V specifically in your book to deal with it length? You also deal with Hebrews 1. Would you mind explaining why these passages in particular are key to this discussion? Well, I've already given something of a hint of it with respect to John V. Let me draw your attention to a couple of details. There are numerous Sabbath conflicts between Jesus and Jewish leaders in the four gospels, and this passage in John V, 16 and following, comes out of a healing that Jesus does on the Sabbath in the preceding verses. Jesus, from their point of view, was breaking the Sabbath and therefore should be opposed. And in his defense, we're told, John V, 17, "My Father is always at His work to this very day, and I too am working." Now that reflects a debate that was going on in the first century amongst Jewish theologians. Does God keep the Sabbath? It was agreed that God observes the rest of the Decalogue, but does He keep the Sabbath? And some said, "Well, no. He has to be working on the Sabbath, otherwise the universe would fall apart." And others said, "No, no. He must keep the Sabbath because otherwise he's a law-breaker." And the debate went back and forth. And some said, "Perhaps we can get around it this way. The prohibitions of work were broken down into a number of categories." For example, on the Sabbath, you were allowed to carry something within the house, but you couldn't carry it from house to house. Or you could carry something but not raise it above your shoulders, the idea being that if it's raised above your shoulders and carried by your shoulder, it's heavy, and therefore it's work. And that's forbidden on the Sabbath. So somebody said, "If that's a good exposition of the prohibition of work for human beings, then there is a sense in which God still keeps the Sabbath. Because if He moves bits around in the universe, keeping the stars in their orbits and so on, He's still in His own household. It's not as if He's moving something from house to house. It's His universe." And He's bigger than all of them. It's not as if He has to give a mighty heave to lift up a particularly heavy planet like Jupiter. In this sense, God does keep the Sabbath and so on. So that was the background debate in Jewish circles. Jesus enters into it and turns the Sabbath conflict into a Christological conflict, a conflict about how you understand who Jesus is. His justification for doing what He does, his justification for healing on the Sabbath, is in verse 17. My Father is always at His work to this very day and I to him working. In other words, whatever vindication the Father has in working on Sabbath, but then not breaking the Sabbath law, Jesus has the same vindication. In other words, He is claiming to have the rights and prerogatives with respect to Sabbath activities of the Father Himself. And so we read verse 18. For this reason, they tried all the more to kill him. Not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God. Now, Jews could sometimes refer to God as the Heavenly Father in the first century, but they rightly perceive that Jesus is claiming more than some generic fatherhood of God to be applied to the Heavenly Father. Rather, it's that Jesus is claiming the peculiar prerogatives and rights of the Father. If the Father is not doing anything wrong when He works on the Sabbath, then likewise, Jesus is not doing anything wrong when He works on the Sabbath because He is identified with God. And so suddenly the whole debate has started off as a Sabbath controversy, has now become a controversy about who Jesus is, who the Christ is. So when they are so angry with Him for this reason, not only breaking the Sabbath, but making God his own Father in some distinctive way that enables Him to claim equality with God, Jesus gave them this answer, and that brings us to the verse I read earlier. Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing by Himself. You see, they were imagining that Jesus was making Himself equal with God as a parallel God. God number one and God number two, which means you've got polytheism, not monotheism. There's more than one God. There are two gods in that understanding. They find the notion presumptuous and idolatrous, and if that's what Jesus meant by claiming equality with God, they were right. But it's not what He was claiming. His notion of oneness with God is peculiar. The sun can do nothing by himself. There's the sense of dependence again, of functional subordination. He can do only what he sees his father doing, because whatever the father does the son also does, that's the remarkable bit. That is, he engages in activity that is co-extensive with the activity of his father, doing things that only God can do. Thus affirming his equality with God, his oneness with God. And so now you're right on the edge of the doctrine of the Trinity again. And then a lot of John 5, 18 unpacks this in one fashion or another, all the way down to verse 26, which I read a little earlier, as the father has life in himself. In Hebrews chapter 1, there are several quotations from the Old Testament. There are a bit too complex to unpack here. But the interesting thing is that Jesus is being defended as intrinsically superior to the angels. There is a long, long contrast drawn between the status of angels and the status of Jesus. In verse 5, "For to which of the angels did God ever say, 'You are my son, today I have become your father.' Now there is a sense in which the angels are on occasion called God's sons. For example, in Job chapter 1, the sons of God gather before the heavenly host. And it's quite clear that these are angels, some of them fall in angels, but they're still called sons of God. So in that sense, it's possible for angels to be called sons of God in some sense. But Jesus is called son of God in a unique sense. He is in this passage the son of God in that he's the Davidic King. And that's why this passage quotes both Psalm 2 and 2 Samuel 7, 14, both of which focus on the son of God as the Davidic King. Later Psalm 45 is quoted in verses 7 and 8. In speaking of the angels, he says, he makes his angels spirit, sent his servants flames of fire. But about the son, that is the son of God, he says, that is the author of Scripture says, God says, about the son, he says, 'Your throne, O God, will last forever and ever, a sceptre of justice will be the sceptre of your kingdom.' Now it would take too long to unpack that context in the Old Testament in Psalm 45. But what is quite clear is that the eternal God is depicted as addressing the son as God. And that is something that is never said by God in addressing angels or the like. So once again, the secret of good exegesis as to who Jesus is and how to understand the triumphant God is not just in the expression son of God by itself, but in the diversity of its usage, watching carefully how it is used in particular contexts, how it is quoted and picked up and applied to Jesus and so on. And that is one of the reasons why I chose Hebrews 1 and John 5 to focus on precisely because these texts are so rich with Christological truth. That is excellent and so helpful and definitely so rich. Thank you for walking us through that. Now as you mentioned, you published your book in the middle of a big heated debate in the world of Bible translation over how or whether to communicate Jesus's sonship in Muslim context. So now that some of the dust has settled on the debate and you've had more time to think about these things in retrospect, would you add anything to your comments on this controversy? I would not change anything I've said. I might reiterate some things and make some of them a little stronger. I would especially draw attention to the distinction between referent and meaning to speak of God, for example, as the guardian of the son or the guardian of Jesus is not wrong. And you can find text to support this identification. It is still talking about God. The referent is right. But the meaning of the term is a little bit mistaken. It's got a different notion. The one who is guarded is not necessarily the same thing as the one who is the son. So one needs to avoid the misunderstanding that sometimes comes with popular Muslim understandings of the Trinity. But one should not there for fail to use biblical expressions as the Bible itself uses them. One has to come to grips with what the Bible says in the Bible's own terms. One of the signs of Biblically faithful preaching, Biblically accurate preaching, Biblically reliable preaching is that it introduces the names and titles and words and vocabulary of the Bible itself to contemporary readers. That always involves some dislocation because expressions have changed with time because we bring our own false theology to texts and so on. So one cannot simply quote Bible verses and presuppose they're going to be understood instantly. That's one of the reasons why God has ordained teachers and preachers in the church. He hasn't just given us a Bible. He's given us Bible teachers. So one looks for Bible teachers who have studied hard and ideally in Greek and Hebrew and try to understand the terms as they were used in the first century and in the 10th century before Christ and at the time of Moses before that. One wants to use biblical terms as they are found in Scripture and then once you unpack them, then to incorporate them into your theology and to your understanding, your thinking, even if that stands over against the dominant usage of the contemporary culture. So I would probably spend a little more time on that fact that biblical faithfulness is more than simply affirming the truthfulness of Scripture. It's learning to use biblical expressions the way the Bible uses them without ducking them because they are abused here and there. Yeah. Now as far as specific choices that have been made to circumvent say in Son of God in different translations. We have to know what you think about a translation that's chosen to say, "Son that comes from God," which is allowed by the WEA's decision instead of simply Son of God. The problem is not that it is wrong. It's that in the contemporary debate, it has great potential for being misleading. Son that comes from God could be applied both to Christ and to Andrew Case. Son of God as used by the biblical writers to refer to Jesus can't be applied to Andrew Case. There are, as we've already seen in this discussion, built in notions of sonship that are more complex noting functional subordination derivation while there is still preserved perfect equality in this sort of thing. All of those things are driven to you to understand if you use Son of God language. It has to be unpacked, guarded by God, or something of that order protected by God. It has no mystery to it. It's got no complexity. It's got no wrestling with John V or Hebrews 1. It's reductionistic. It's not so much wrong, theologically, in and of itself. But it is thin. It's not as rich as the biblical categories that have to be unpacked and understood. So to find an expression that is not offensive is an admirable goal. To find an expression that loses the depth and the crystallological confessionalism and the mystery, the challenge to understanding that Son of God has, is a kind of semantic betrayal. It's a betrayal of all the meaning that is there in the text. I know that it's difficult to get all this across in an address, in an evangelistic talk or the orgallike. But that surely has got to be the goal, especially when one is publishing translations of Holy Rit, one wants to preserve all that Holy Rit has, all of Scripture actually has. However difficult it is to choose expressions and explanatory footnotes that preserve the truth. Yeah. And if you would comment also, there is an Arabic version called the true meaning, where they translate Son of God as spiritual Son. It's not Son that comes from God but spiritual Son. And in John 5/18 it says, these leaders intended to kill him, not only because he had violated their law regarding the Sabbath, but also because he had made God his intimate guardian, thus equating himself with God. Now you've already commented a little bit on guardian, but yeah, could you share some thoughts on these decisions, especially spiritual Son? Well both spiritual Son and guardian say something different from what Son of God means in the context in which the passage is actually located. It removes any offense that is in the text. from the Muslim mind and that's an attractive option. The problem is it doesn't replace what is a misunderstanding, namely that the Trinity is made up of the of God, Mary, and Jesus. It doesn't replace that with the truth. It uses language that is so reductionistic, that it's saying something that is not true that it is not forced you to think and to reckon with the uniqueness of the sunship of the Lord Jesus. And thus leads people astray to avoid one error at the expense of adopting another error is not a wise choice. At the end of the day, you want to convey the truth as fully as you can, even though it may take a little longer for it to be absorbed into a culture that doesn't have categories readily to hand for it. Yeah, that is very helpful. You have mentioned footnotes. And I wanted to ask if a translation were forced for some reason to avoid translating Sun of God directly and use some kind of circumlocution, what would a paratexual footnote need to say in your opinion to give the reader a full understanding of what they're missing out on in the translation itself? It depends for whom the translation is being prepared. If it's quick and easy, you simply say more literally what is there in the paratex. But if you're trying to produce something equivalent to a study Bible or the like, then you don't want to say it at every instance of Sun of God, but somewhere include a place where there are extended notes, a glossary at the back of the book or the like, which actually unpack some of the things we've talked about in this podcast. That's one of the reasons why there are teachers in the church. A Bible with notes is really another teacher in the church. You could obviously put in quite a lot. It's taken what, 40 minutes for this podcast, and that could be boiled down to 10 minutes no doubt. But I don't see how you'd get across the notion of the eternal Sun, the triune God. And I still haven't talked yet about how the Bible speaks of the spirit in relation to the Father and the Son too. You're not going to get across the whole doctrine of the Trinity in a two sentence paratex. But you want to say something that's true, that's faithful to what the Bible says about that. And then it might be worth providing references for the serious reader to go and look up elsewhere and with biblical exposition. And for some people reading the book, Jesus the Son of God. So sometimes those footnotes are very brief and offer just a brief paratex, but there's nothing wrong with offering references to additional teaching help. And there you make choices largely on the basis of who your intended readers are. What you don't do, however, is dilute the text, diminish the text, make the text say something that it doesn't really say. That makes sense. Now, just a quick question here, maybe it's not a quick question, but what do you think the biblical difference is or isn't between child of God and son of God? In many contexts, there is no difference in referent that is in what the text is referring to, what the expression is referring to. But nevertheless, child of God in English is without reference to the male, female gender is the offspring of God, but without reference to Son of God. Whereas the Son of God language is particularly bound up with notions of functional identity. The farmer's son is a farmer. Jesus is sometimes called the carpenter's son, not the carpenter's child, carpenter's child wouldn't be wrong ontologically. The referentiality is still there. But in the first century, it's the son who follows the father to become a carpenter. Until eventually, in one passage in the Gospels in Mark 6, Jesus is himself called a carpenter, presumably by the time that expression is used of Jesus, the apparent father Joseph has died in Jesus for a period of time exercised as father's trade. So he was not under the carpenter's son, he eventually became the carpenter until he abandoned the trade to engage in his public ministry. So all of those kinds of categories are are bound up with sonship that are not theoretically or ideologically bound up with child. Even if you use child of God, it's an expression that has to be explained. As son of God has to be explained, in which case, why not use the categories that biblical text does use and then explain them in the way that Bible itself does explain them? Thank you. And one of the questions that I would love to have your pastoral advice on is just how to approach this debate as believers. You know, there's that temptation always within Christian debates about these very important topics to demonize the other side. And so I'm wondering if you could give us any pastoral advice. How should we, what posture should we take in dealing with all of this no matter what side we're coming from and what opinion we hold on this? Speak the truth in love. That's what Paul exhorts his readers to follow and we need to do the same. Having said that, you sometimes have to give extra weight to certain people. I would give more weight to the opinion of well-informed mature former Muslims who have become Christians and have been Christians for quite a long time, rather than to someone who's a missionary from the West thinking in terms of strategic whimsomeness without much theological training or without much experience of living in the culture of transition and change. I could give lots of examples where, for example, when Christians meet together in world councils of one sort or another, exactly how do evangelicals categorize or think about, let's say Catholicism. Some in India want to work with Catholics in that context precisely because over against Hinduism, there is so much more in common and on the ground they have met many fine Catholics with living faith and so on. Whereas if you talk to evangelicals in a place like Rome where Catholicism is the majority cultural constraint and where on the street Catholicism is much closer to the Catholic catechism which is so blatantly unfaithful, biblically, in my view, when it comes to something like justification or the role of Mary or the like. Then when the world conference comes together and these various evangelicals have their say in the formulation of what should be believed and not believed, I would give more authority to those who are living in the context of articulated Catholicism than those who are meeting it as an aside or as a group of co-validurants in a particular cultural isolation context or the like. So I would say something similar in these discussions about Muslim expressions. I would give a great deal of very careful credence to those who have been Muslims, have been converted, have lived for quite a long time and watched the church in their area grow often under forms of persecution and so on. I would give more credence to them than to those who are coming in as mission experts from the outside. Thank you for that wisdom. There are some Bible translation organizations who would rather see this controversy buried the whole history of it and the debate. As you may know, there is one involved in this controversy who was involved who has a standing order to their, all of their members that they are not allowed to engage in any public discourse on divine familial terms in translation. Do you think that this is the Christian response to controversy in this arena, or do you think it should be something that we should be talking about openly and in love and allowed to speak to and learn from each other? There are some topics of conversation where agreed silence on all sides may be a good thing, but something that is as fundamental as this, the nature of God, who Jesus is, how He is addressed in our prayers and our thought and our thinking, strategies of evangelism and so on. Then mandating silence, it seems to me, is a short term good for a long term evil. I predict with profound regret that I think this policy is going to come back to bite them. I don't know how long it's going to take, but it will. I want to reiterate my gratitude to Dr. Carson for taking the time. time out of his busy schedule to contribute to this humble podcast. You'll find the link to his book on the Son of God in the description. There's a lot more in it that he didn't have time to mention, and it's not too long or expensive, so definitely check it out. Working for the Word is a podcast where we believe the Bible is a unified, God-breathed, God-centered, hope-giving book, sweeter than honey, and pointing to Jesus. [Music]