Before Bethlehem: The Personally Preexistent Son

J. Neil Daniels 

The New Testament does not tiptoe around the question of whether the Son personally existed before the manger; it treats that reality as the deep grammar of the gospel. John’s prologue opens not with a birth narrative but with an ontological claim: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The preposition pros ton Theon (“with God”) signals not mere attribute or abstract divine reason but a relational orientation—face-to-face communion. Then John’s tempo quickens with verbs of agency: “All things came into being through him” (1:3). Creation is not merely coordinated “by” God with a conceptual Logos in the background; it is effected through a distinct hypostatic agent. When that same Logos “became flesh” (1:14), the grammar demands a subject already in existence who then assumes human nature. Incarnation is not the starting gun of the Son’s existence; it is the assumption of a new mode of being by one who already was.

Jesus’ own discourse in John corroborates this, and it does so in an unembarrassingly personal register. “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58) is not a bare pre-existence formula; it is a self-identification that fuses temporal priority (“before Abraham was”) with the stative, almost jarring, present egō eimi. You do not need a degree in linguistics to feel the shock; his hearers reached for stones because they understood this as a claim to share in the divine identity, not merely to be an idea in God’s mind. In John 17:5 the language tightens: “Glorify Me…with the glory which I had with You before the world was.” Now we have a first-person subject (“I”), a second-person addressee (“You”), a shared possession (“the glory which I had with You”), and a clear temporal horizon (“before the world was”). This is irreducibly interpersonal. An impersonal attribute cannot say “I had with You.” It is precisely this kind of language that strains and finally breaks any attempt to reduce Christ’s preexistence to mere foreknowledge or ideal predestination.

Paul’s Christology runs in the same groove. Philippians 2:6–7 describes Christ Jesus as the one “existing in the form of God” (en morphē theou hyparchōn) who “emptied himself” (heauton ekenōsen), taking the form of a servant. The participle hyparchōn portrays a prior, ongoing mode of existence; the aorist ekenōsen describes a decisive act. One who already subsists in the morphē theou then takes the morphē doulou. This is not a human person being elevated into divinity, but a divine person stooping into servanthood. Colossians 1 reinforces the picture: the Son is “before all things” and “in him all things hold together” (1:17). The “all things” here has already been exhaustively defined—heaven and earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities. To say the Son is “before” that totality and continuously sustains it is to ascribe to him a mode of being that cannot be squared with mere ideal existence in God’s decree. Ideal entities do not hold galaxies together.

One might object, of course, that this sounds perilously close to the personalized Wisdom figure of Proverbs 8 or Second Temple Jewish speculations about personified attributes. That is exactly the point at which the New Testament presses through metaphor into ontology. The wisdom and word language of Israel’s Scriptures is not discarded; it is intensified and specified. The Son is not simply “like” God’s wisdom; he becomes, in the church’s later dogmatic shorthand, “God from God, Light from Light.” Yet that is already latent in the texts. Hebrews 1, for example, speaks of the Son as “the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his hypostasis” (1:3), who “upholds all things by the word of his power.” The epistle then explicitly distinguishes the Son from the angels by appeal to an eternal filial relation—“You are my Son, today I have begotten You”—and by locating his existence on the Creator side of the Creator–creature distinction. Angels are servants within the house; the Son is the builder of the house.

What emerges, if we let this network of passages exert its full exegetical weight, is a coherent pattern: the New Testament writers speak as if there is a divine person who already is, who shares the glory, name, and prerogatives of Israel’s God, and who then, without ceasing to be who he eternally is, assumes our humanity. Personal preexistence is not an ornamental doctrine for speculative theologians; it is baked into the very syntax of the gospel. The Son can come, be sent, descend, empty himself, and be made poor for our sake only because there is a “He” who truly was “before” Bethlehem.