his only Son, our Lord

The Text

The clause binds two titles to the Jesus Christ just confessed: his only Son names his relation to the Father; our Lord names his relation to us. The first is the deepest doctrinal claim of the gospel — that the particular Galilean Jew named in the previous clause is the eternal Son of God. The second is the most consequential ethical claim — that he is therefore the rightful Lord of every life that confesses him.

Translation Notes

Filium eius unicum / monogenē. The Latin unicum and the Greek monogenē are translated in English as only (BCP, ICET, Roman Missal), only Son (most modern), or only-begotten (KJV, older liturgical forms). The shift between only and only-begotten is not a stylistic preference; it carries doctrinal weight.

The older translation, only-begotten, took the second half of mono-genē from gennaō (to beget) and read the word as “uniquely begotten.” This rendering carried, in a single English word, the Nicene confession that the Son is eternally generated from the Father — not created in time, not made, not merely adopted, but eternally begotten of the Father’s own being. The newer translation, one and only or simply only, takes the second half from genos (kind, sort) and reads the word as “unique, one-of-a-kind.” Recent lexical work has generally supported the genos etymology, which is why most modern translations have moved.

The doctrinal cost is real. Only-begotten did theological work that one and only does not do. The Apostles’ Creed’s unicum is the looser of the two Latin alternatives — the Nicene Creed uses the more precise unigenitum (“only-begotten”) in the corresponding place. The Apostles’ Creed’s brevity should not be mistaken for a weaker claim; the doctrine of eternal generation is what unicum presupposes, even where it does not say it as sharply as the Nicene.

Dominum nostrum / kyrion. Kyrios is the title of central importance. In the Septuagint — the Greek Bible the early church read — kyrios is the standard rendering of the divine name YHWH. Every time the OT speaks of the LORD, the Greek reads kyrios. To confess Jesus as kyrios is therefore to identify him with the God of Israel. Romans 10:9 — “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord [kyrion] and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” — is the earliest Christian creed in seed form, and the title it confesses is the divine title.

Kyrios was also a political title in the Roman world — the standard greeting for the emperor was Kyrios Kaisar, “Lord Caesar.” To say Kyrios Iēsous in a first-century Roman context was to refuse, in the same breath, the lordship of Caesar. Pliny the Younger’s famous letter to Trajan (c. 112 AD) reports that the Christians he interrogated sang hymns Christo quasi Deo — “to Christ as to a god” — and refused to invoke the imperial titles. The Lordship confession was, from the beginning, a politically dangerous one.

“His” and “our.” The two possessives bind the two titles. The Son is the Father’s only — there is no other Son in this sense. The Lord is our — confessed by the church, his by gift and his by right. The clause does not say “a Son” or “a Lord”; it says his and ours. The eternal relation and the confessed relation come together in a single line.

Historical Context

The clause encodes the deepest controversy of the early church: the Arian controversy of the fourth century, which produced the Nicene Creed (325) and the Constantinopolitan revision (381).

Arius (c. 256–336), a presbyter of Alexandria, taught that the Son was the highest of all creatures, created by the Father before time, exalted above the angels — but a creature nonetheless. His famous slogan, ēn pote hote ouk ēn — “there was a time when he was not” — was a denial that the Son was eternal in the same sense as the Father. Athanasius and the bishops who would become the Nicene party argued that this collapsed the gospel: if the Son is a creature, then in the incarnation a creature has been worshiped (which is idolatry), a creature has died for the sins of the world (which cannot save), and a creature is the one who reveals the Father (which means we have not seen the Father at all). The Council of Nicaea (325) confessed the Son as homoousios with the Father — of the same being — and the term gennēthenta ou poiēthenta (begotten, not made) entered the Nicene Creed to settle the eternal-generation question.

The Apostles’ Creed is older than this controversy in some forms and contemporary with it in others; its unicum / monogenē presupposes the answer Nicaea formalized. To pray his only Son in the Apostles’ Creed is to confess, with the church catholic, that Jesus is not a creature elevated to divine status but the eternal Son of the Father, of one being with the Father, through whom all things were made.

The Dominum nostrum clause was less doctrinally controverted in the patristic period — the Lordship of Christ was nearly universal early Christian confession — but politically explosive. The Roman state could tolerate many gods; it could not tolerate a confession that the Lord Jesus, executed by a Roman governor, was the true Kyrios and that Caesar was not. The early martyrologies (Polycarp, the martyrs of Lyon, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas) make the Lordship confession the precise point of the rupture: Christianus sum, “I am a Christian,” meant Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians; the Cappadocians (Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa)

The Nicene-era patristic reading is the load-bearing one for this clause. Athanasius’s Orations defend the eternal generation of the Son at sustained length; Gregory of Nazianzus’s Theological Orations III–V give the Cappadocian articulation of the same doctrine. The settled reading: the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, not made; homoousios with the Father (of the same being); the Lord of all creation precisely because he is the eternal Son through whom all creation came into being.

Strengths

• Anchors the gospel’s saving claim — that the One who died for us is God himself — in a coherent doctrinal framework
• Refuses the Arian collapse and every subsequent variant of it
• Connects christology to soteriology: only the eternal Son can save us, and he can save us only because he is also truly human

Weaknesses

• Demands theological vocabulary (homoousios, hypostasis, eternal generation) that few congregations will be asked to master
• The patristic anti-Arian polemic, where it shaded into political prosecution, has a complicated historical legacy

Scholastic

Tradition: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 27–43 (on the Trinity); III, qq. 1–26 (on the incarnation)

Aquinas systematizes the patristic doctrine into a comprehensive trinitarian and christological framework. The Son’s procession from the Father is the eternal act of intellectual generation (the Father’s perfect self-knowledge eternally produces the Son who is that knowledge); the Son’s mission to the world is the temporal expression of this eternal procession. The Lordship of Christ is grounded in his being both true God (and so the rightful sovereign of all creation) and true man (and so the head of redeemed humanity).

Strengths

• The most thoroughly worked-out treatment of the Son’s relation to the Father in the Western tradition
• Holds eternal sonship and incarnate Lordship together with rare precision

Weaknesses

• Requires Aristotelian and Augustinian frameworks that many contemporary readers must work to inhabit
• The treatment of divine generation in terms of intellect-and-will is illuminating but can feel scholastic in the pejorative sense to modern ears

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Smalcald Articles, Part I; Formula of Concord (1577)

The Reformation Lutheran tradition treats the divine sonship and Lordship of Christ with a strong incarnational emphasis: the eternal Son became flesh and remains, in his glorified humanity, accessible to faith in the means of grace (Word and Sacrament). The Formula of Concord’s discussion of the communicatio idiomatum — the communication of properties between Christ’s divine and human natures — works out the implications for the Lord’s Supper, where the body and blood of the Lord (truly God and truly man) are present.

Strengths

• Keeps the eternal sonship of Christ tied to his real, ongoing accessibility to the believer
• Refuses the modern temptation to make Christology a separately abstract subject

Weaknesses

• The communicatio idiomatum discussion, taken on its own, can feel like inside-baseball
• Strong on Christ-for-us; sometimes less developed on Christ as Lord over the structures of the world

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.13–14; Heidelberg Catechism Q.33–34

Calvin distinguishes carefully between sons of God by adoption (believers) and the Son of God by nature (Jesus Christ). The Heidelberg Catechism Q.33 puts the distinction pastorally: “Why is he called God’s only-begotten Son, since we also are children of God? Because Christ alone is the eternal, natural Son of God; we, however, are children of God by adoption, through grace, for his sake.” The Lordship Q.34 follows: “Why do you call him ‘our Lord’? Because, not with silver or gold, but with his precious blood, he has redeemed and purchased us, body and soul, from sin and from all the power of the devil, to be his very own.” This is one of the great catechetical formulations in the tradition.

Strengths

• Holds the eternal Sonship and the redemptive Lordship together pastorally
• The “very own” of Q.34 is one of the most consoling sentences in confessional theology

Weaknesses

• The adoption / natural-Son distinction, while precise, can underweight what adoption includes — and the Wesleyan tradition presses harder on the believer’s real participation in the Son’s relation to the Father
• The forensic-redemption framework, taken alone, can underemphasize the cosmic-Lordship dimension

Modern — Costly Grace

Tradition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship; Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom

The 20th-century retrieval of Lordship as ethical-political claim is one of the most significant developments in modern christology. Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship (1937) — written and lived under the Third Reich — articulates the irreducible cost of confessing Jesus is Lord: cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves; costly grace is the grace that follows the Lord wherever he goes, including to the cross. Hauerwas, in The Peaceable Kingdom and elsewhere, has extended Bonhoeffer’s insight: the church is the community formed by Christ’s Lordship, and its primary politics is not the politics of the nation-state but the politics of being the body of the Lord in the world.

Strengths

• Recovers the kyrios of the New Testament against the depoliticized Christ of pietism
• Names what discipleship actually costs in a way the previous half-century of pulpit work had often softened

Weaknesses

• The strongest forms of this reading risk reducing the church’s Lordship-confession to its ethics, losing the trinitarian-ontological depth that supports the ethics
• Hauerwas’s strong communitarianism is generative but has been criticized for underplaying the church’s responsibility to public life

Liberation

Tradition: Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator; James Cone, God of the Oppressed; Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation

Liberation theology reads the Lordship of Christ through the same lens as the Lordship of the Hebrew Bible’s God: the kyrios who frees Israel from Pharaoh is the kyrios who frees the world from every imperial overlord. To confess Jesus is Lord is, in this reading, to take a stand with the crucified poor whom Jesus identified with and to refuse the legitimacy of every system that crucifies them again.

Strengths

• Reactivates the political register of kyrios that the early martyrs took for granted and the modern church has often forgotten
• Holds christology and ethics together as the New Testament does

Weaknesses

• The political reading, pressed alone, can lose the eschatological reservation — the full Lordship of Christ is not yet visible, and the church confesses against contrary evidence
• Some liberation christologies have been criticized for underweighting the cosmic-redemptive dimension of kyrios in favor of the immediate political register

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s treatment of the Son’s divinity and Lordship is one of the steadiest and most carefully articulated of his doctrinal positions. He was a strong Nicene — the divinity of the Son was, for Wesley, the rock on which the gospel stands. His Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749) confesses the Son as “of one substance, power, and eternity with the Father” — Nicene language, not negotiable.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the adoption doctrine he builds on this foundation. Wesley reads Romans 8 — “you have received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry, Abba, Father” — as the New Testament’s central claim about the relation between Christ’s natural Sonship and the believer’s adopted sonship. Christ is the eternal Son by nature; we become sons (and daughters) of the Father in Christ by adoption through grace. The witness of the Spirit — which Wesley placed at the doctrinal center of Methodist experience — is the Spirit’s testimony to the believer that they are now a child of God, sharing in Christ’s relation to the Father.

The Lordship dimension is treated, in Wesley’s prose, with practical-pastoral urgency rather than political-theoretical depth. His sermon “The Way to the Kingdom” (Sermon 7, 1746) lays out the basic claim: to confess Christ as Lord is to surrender the kingdom of the believer’s own life — to be ruled by him in body and soul, not in some interior religious chamber only. Wesley’s later sermons against slavery and against the abuse of wealth (e.g., “The Danger of Riches,” Sermon 87, 1788) draw out the political implications without (yet) the systematic framework that Bonhoeffer and the 20th century would develop.

The practical Wesleyan posture: confess Christ as eternal Son and present Lord together, and let neither slip without the other.

Hymnody

The Wesleyan hymnody on the Son’s eternal generation and Lordship is some of the most theologically dense in English.

“Hark! the herald angels sing” (Charles, 1739) — the standard English Christmas carol — is a sustained Nicene meditation: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; / Hail, the incarnate Deity, / Pleased as man with man to dwell, / Jesus, our Emmanuel!” The doctrine is exact: the eternal Son (“Godhead… incarnate Deity”) in human flesh.

“Hail, thou once despised Jesus” (John Bakewell, 1757, revised by Madan and others) — adopted into the Wesleyan hymnic stream — names the paradox of the Lordship: “Hail, thou once despised Jesus! / Hail, thou Galilean King!” The once-despised has been confessed as King.

“Lo, he comes with clouds descending” (Charles, 1758) — the great Wesleyan Advent hymn — names the eschatological Lordship: “Every eye shall now behold him, / Robed in dreadful majesty… / Yet thou here in mercy reign.” The Lordship is now confessed in the church’s worship; it will be then universally manifest at the return.

The 1780 Collection’s sections on “The Pleasantness and Happiness of Religion” and “For Believers Rejoicing” return repeatedly to the Lordship: not the abstract Lordship of metaphysics but the Lordship of one who is ours — our Lord.

A note on “Crown him with many crowns” (Matthew Bridges, 1851; revised by Godfrey Thring, 1874): not a Wesley hymn, but the dominant English-language hymn on the Lordship of Christ in the 19th and 20th centuries, and one regularly sung in Methodist congregations. “Crown him the Lord of life, / Who triumphed o’er the grave… / Crown him the Lord of years, / The Potentate of time.”

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Psalm 2 is the OT scripture the New Testament most often quotes when it confesses Jesus as the Son. “You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your heritage.” The line is read at the baptism of Jesus, where the heavens open and the Father names him; it is read at the resurrection in Acts 13, where Paul preaches Christ raised; it is read in Hebrews 1, where the Son is set above the angels. The eternal Sonship is the foundation, and the inheritance of the nations — the Lordship — follows from it.

What does it mean to call Jesus Lord? In the first century, it meant the rejection of every other lord. To say Kyrios Iēsous was to say not Kyrios Kaisar. Pliny’s Christians sang hymns to Christ “as to a god” and refused the imperial cult; many of them died for the refusal. The Lordship of Christ was a confession that ran the believer into direct conflict with the structures of power.

In our context, the conflict is rarely as legible. The lords of the present age are not named on coins and do not demand sacrifice in the temple. They demand it in subtler ways: through the assumption that the economy is sovereign, through the conviction that the nation is final, through the quiet idolatries of comfort and image. To confess Jesus as Lord is, here as everywhere, to refuse every rival lord. The refusal does not always look dramatic. Often it looks like attention — the willingness to be ruled by him in small decisions, in time, in money, in speech, in how one treats those whom the world has decided do not matter.

Søren Kierkegaard names the cost in one of his sharpest passages. The Lord whom we confess says, “Come here to me, all you who labor and are burdened.” Human sympathy, Kierkegaard notes, will gladly do something for those who labor and are burdened — feed them, clothe them, even visit them — but “to invite them to come to one, that cannot be done; then one’s entire household and way of life would have to be altered.” The Lordship of Christ requires not a contribution but a reorganization. Not an addition to the budget but a household rebuilt around the Lord who comes.

The pastoral honesty the clause asks for is this: to say our Lord is to confess a claim on one’s whole life. The Methodist Confession of Faith puts the doctrinal substance directly — Jesus is “truly God and truly man, in whom the divine and human natures are perfectly and inseparably united… the eternal Word made flesh, the only begotten Son of the Father” — and the practical implication is the one 1 John makes in the bluntest possible terms: whoever says, “I know him,” and does not keep his commandments, is a liar. To pray his only Son, our Lord and remain unchanged is to pray something we have not yet said.

What the pastor can also say: mercy precedes the call. Christ does not require us to clean ourselves up first. He calls us as we are — “come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” — and the transformation happens in the following, not before it. The Lordship is not the threat that hangs over discipleship but the promise that makes it possible. We do not become his by performance; we become his by surrender. And in the surrender, we discover that the Lord we now confess is also the one who has been seeking us all along.

Further Reading

• Athanasius, On the Incarnation; Orations Against the Arians
• The Nicene Creed (325) and the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381)
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Orations III–V
• Augustine, De Trinitate — the Western trinitarian synthesis
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 27–43 (the Trinity); III, qq. 1–26 (the incarnation)
• Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles, Part I; Formula of Concord (1577), Article VIII (on the person of Christ)
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.13–14
• Heidelberg Catechism Q. 33–34
• John Wesley, A Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749)
• John Wesley, Sermon 7, “The Way to the Kingdom” (1746)
• John Wesley, Sermon 87, “The Danger of Riches” (1788)
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Romans 8 (adoption); Philippians 2:11
• Charles Wesley, “Hark! the herald angels sing” (1739); “Lo, he comes with clouds descending” (1758)
• A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)
• The United Methodist Church, The Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren Church (1962), Article II, on Jesus Christ
• Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity (1850) — on “Come here to me” and the offense of the Lord’s invitation
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937)
• Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame, 1983)
• Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator (Orbis, 1993)
• James Cone, God of the Oppressed (Seabury, 1975)