John 16:12-16

¹² “I still have a lot to say to you, but you cannot bear it now. ¹³ Yet when the Spirit of Truth comes, he’ll guide you into all truth. He won’t speak on his own accord, but he’ll speak whatever he hears and will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine. That is why I said, ‘He will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ ¹⁶ In a little while you will no longer see me, then in a little while you will see me again.”

This passage in John 16 is mirrored by other Johannine passages about Jesus and the Father (8:28; 12:49–50; 14:10). Orthodox Christendom agrees that these passages are not denying the deity of Jesus or the Spirit. John 16 is not denying that the Spirit possesses the truth, but rather that truth does not originate with Him independent of the Father and Son. Here are two commentators clarifying this:
 

Just as Jesus never spoke or acted on his own initiative, but said and did exactly what the Father gave him to say and do (3:34–35; 5:19–20; 7:16–18; 8:26–29, 42–43; 12:47–50; 14:10), so also the Spirit speaks only what he hears—a point elucidated in vv. 14–15. As Jesus’ absolute but exhaustive obedience to his Father ensures that he is not to be taken as either a mere mortal or as a competing deity, but as the very revelation of God himself (cf. notes on 5:19–30), so also the Spirit, by this utter dependence, ensures the unity of God and of the revelation God graciously grants.

D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), 540.

 

Just as Jesus was in such intimate dependence on his Father that his words were to be considered God’s words, so the Spirit has a similar relationship, through which his revelation is also to be seen as deriving from the Father. As part of this revelation, the Spirit will declare to you the things that are to come. In the Jewish Scriptures one of the formulations used in connection with Yahweh’s predictions of the future, and distinguishing Yahweh from the gods of the nations, is ‘declaring the things to come’ (cf. e.g. Isa. 41:22–3; 44:7). Employing the formulation here underlines that the Spirit is the divine Spirit who comes from the Father. And just as Jesus has predicted the future, not least in this farewell discourse, so the Spirit will also continue this predictive activity, giving insight into the future the disciples will have to face and into the divine purposes for the world that have already become operative in Jesus.

Andrew T. Lincoln, The Gospel according to Saint John, Black’s New Testament Commentary (London: Continuum, 2005), 421.

This still leaves the question how or in what way the Spirit receives or hears truth in verse 13. The verse is supposed to favor Eternal Generation, according to some, because it is supposed that the Spirit must learn the truth (per the verbage) but cannot do so like a creature, and so must be in an eternal state of learning from the Father (and Son) outside creation. The Spirit is God because He does not experience enlightenment over the course of time, but He learns because He is given the truth from outside Himself by the Father.

However, can God who is omniscient really learn at all? This raises a question whether anthropomorphism occurs here in the text. What if Jesus is speaking anthropomorphically in John 16 here?

Most proponents of Eternal Generation stand in the classical theist tradition. Reading certain texts that attribute creaturely attributes, experiences, or deeds to God as anthropomorphism is a natural, expected, default approach on classical theist approaches to the Bible. For example, when God asks where His human creations are in Genesis 3 or repents in Genesis 6 or when He sees in Exodus 24 or when He’s described with countless physical terms and metaphors in the Psalms, the historic default interpretation of classical theists has been that these are anthropomorphisms, not characterizations that limit God’s essence to the categories involved when the same language is ordinarily used to discuss creatures. So the question is why this approach should not be taken with John 16.

If classical theism is true and texts that characterize God in a creaturely manner are to be treated as anthropomorphism by default, and Jesus is characterizing God like a creature when He says the Spirit learns (as if God were bereft of knowledge waiting to acquire it), then, prima facie, we should treat Jesus’ words as anthropomorphism. In this way, our Eternal Generation proponent friends are inconsistent. They maintain a hermeneutic that favors anthropomorphism, but abandon that hermeneutic approach when it ad hoc suits their pet doctrine.

Furthermore, there is an alternative to both the anthropomorphism and Eternal Generation interpretations. That is to say, before we consider this passage support for Eternal Generation, we should consider and rule out the following interpretation: mystery. Perhaps the fact the Spirit learns is true but mysterious in such a way that we do not or maybe even cannot articulate. Perhaps Jesus did not mean to say how the Trinitarian Members communicate information one to another, only that they do. In order for this passage to support Eternal Generation, proponents of that doctrine not only have to show why this passage is an exception to their own hermeneutic, but also show why what Jesus is saying is not just mystery about which we can say nothing more than to affirm our Lord’s words in obedience and faith.

To make matters more complicated for the Eternal Generation proponent, his own position requires a good deal of mysterian backing. It is incomprehensible (i.e. we are bereft of revealed categories by which to offer further metaphysical account) how the Spirit could eternally learn as Eternal Generation purports. For to learn ordinarily requires existing in a state of ignorance, or at least exist in a way that precedes possession of what is learned; and being timelessly omniscient, as the Spirit is, is in tension with the notion that there is anything for Him to learn in the first place! All this to say: why should we prefer a quiet mystery over one that noisily adds paradoxes? The Eternal Generation proponent better be prepared to show how necessary the paradox is, lest it be dismissed ad hoc contradiction.

Things get still more difficult for Thomists. For Thomist Eternal Generation proponents, the Spirit is technically not told the truth, but He is the telling of the truth. This is because the Spirit is a “subsistent relation” on Thomism. If quietness and modesty befit our approach to God’s incomprehensibility, then the Thomist has the greatest burden out of all to overcome in John 16.

Finally, there is still another alternative to consider. It has been defended by K. Scott Oliphint and Nathan Shannon as part of a covenant metaphysic, and to some extent, a similar idea appears in John Frame’s theology of Lordship. This idea uses the Incarnation as a way to account for many (if not most) cases of anthropomorphic passages as theophanies. Put another way, on this view, the economic Trinity is always and altogether theophany that follows the Chalcedonian logic invented, sanctioned, and made efficacious by the Incarnation. What this means for John 16 is that the Spirit’s learning or receiving can be the result of assuming a created mind, therefore, meaning that the Spirit learns in a perfected version the way the human mind learns.

What is most excellent about this last alternative is that, in contrast to Eternal Generation, it is not a competitor with anthropomorphic or mysterian interpretations. Someone who holds to this covenant metaphysic or to Frame’s two-existences theology can be open to preferring an anthropomorphic or mysterian reading of Christ’s words in John 16 without losing support for their position, and one can read the text as a theophany without throwing out anthropomorphic and mysterian readings of other passages. For those of us who recall Van Til’s notion of reasoning by implication (into a system of Christian thought), this makes the theophanous view strongest or most preferable.

In the end, we can say that John 16:12-16 does not favor Eternal Generation over other interpretations. Trinitarians can all agree on this passage teaching rich Trinitarian content without Eternal Generation. Trinitarians can all agree the Spirit is God and receives truth as Christ says without affirming Eternal Generation. A whole load of work has to be done showing why the text supports an Eternal Generation conclusion in general, and then also, how the text prefers that interpretation over against anthropomorphism, mysterianism, and theophany. When we look at the text, it seems much less concerned with a pet model of the Trinity than with the beautiful truth that the Spirit who is God and who knows the Father and Son as God will bring us the truth that saves.