Did God the Father create the Son? Those who affirm this hold to a doctrine called Arianism.
Essentially Arianism states that God the Father created the Son out of nothing. The Son was the First of Creation and from Him everything else was created. It was proposed early in the 4th century by the Alexandrian presbyter Arius. See CARM for a brief definition of the doctrine and its origins.
As an aside, Arianism is somewhat associated with Modalism. Nathan Busenitz provides the following definition in an article on Cripplegate:
Modalism is a “heretical view that denies the individual persons of the Trinity. [It] views biblical terminology of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as merely modes of existence or manifestations of the one God”
Though different, both Modalism and Arianism deny the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet this doctrine is essential to understanding how the Triune God has redeemed us. See our article The Doctrine of the Trinity.
The Banner of Truth notes that Arianism can still be found today among several groups:
The most prominent group today to hold an Arian view of Christ is that which goes by the name of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which holds to a sort of modified Arianism, but there are also pure Arians around. In particular, what is called the Messianic Jewish movement, and the related Hebrew Roots movement, are vulnerable to Arianism, and there are so-called Arian Messianic Jews who find the idea of Jesus as a lesser being than the Father an attractive one that allows them to distance themselves from historic Christianity, and move closer to Rabbinic Judaism. Arianism is very much alive today, and our examination of it is not merely some antiquarian exercise.
Both the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Hebrew Roots movements are very active at recruiting converts. For this reason we recommend The Banner of Truth’s article on Arianism as a way of familiarizing yourself with some of the issues:
The so-called great heresies are worthy of examination for a number of reasons, one of which is that they represent the main lines of attack against Biblical Christianity. With the exception of Gnosticism, which begins with the claim to secret knowledge apart from the Bible, they depend on a distortion of the Biblical witness. Modalism distorts the Biblical teaching on the Trinity by making the distinctions mere names and nothing more, masks that one person wears in different roles, giving priority to the texts that speak of the divine unity, but ignoring or downplaying those texts that speak of the reality of the divine persons. Working from a rationalistic basis, it said that Jesus was in some way the same person as the Father…keep reading
It is interesting to read and connect the following verses found Isaiah 41:4, 43:12-13, 44:6 and 48:12. There we are told that Yahweh is First and the Last; that He is Eternal; that there are no gods beside Yahweh, and that He made all things.
We find the following in Revelation 1:7-8.
BEHOLD, HE IS COMING WITH THE CLOUDS, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him; and all the tribes of the earth will mourn over Him. So it is to be. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
Alpha and Omega means First and the Last. Further on in verses 17-18 we read:
When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.
The same expression of Yahweh in Isaiah is used for Christ. Moreover it was Jesus who was dead and is now alive forevermore. All things were made through Jesus Christ who was, and is, eternal (Isaiah 43:13; John 1:1-3). See also our article Jehovah’s Witnesses & Jesus Christ.
There are two important things these verses reveal: the Son was not created by the Father and Jesus Christ is God.
Further reading:
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