begetting

In my gift-ontology, begetting is the more vivid term for generation and emphasizes personal origin rather than manufacture. Begetting is used to signal that the Son’s origin is internal, personal, and proper, not a production of something other. It must be disciplined against creaturely biological imagery and against temporality. Begetting does not imply that the Father is prior in time, and it does not imply a lesser divinity in the Son. It is a relation of origin under the simplicity constraint: communication of the whole divine life without composition, with incommunicable personal fromness preserved.