“Begotten from the Father Before All Ages”: Finding a Place for the Nicene Theology of Time after Bulgakov and Behr

Despite their expressed commitment to conciliar theology, the modern Orthodox theologians, Sergius Bulgakov and John Behr both call into question the coherence of the credal confession that the Son of God was begotten before the ages. Specifically, these two theologians reject as nonsensical the suggestion that anything existed “before” time or even, in Bulgakov’s case, to describe creation as having a beginning (Behr 2019, 19ff., 248; Bulgakov 2002, 29).  Yet this distinction between “before” and “after” is one of the pillars of the distinction between the begetting of the Son and His making of creatures, a distinction that is championed by Athanasius, enshrined in the Nicene creed, and endorsed by Behr and Bulgakov. This paper explores the precise nature of the incoherence of the Nicene “before.” Is this incoherence a sign of the crudeness of Nicene theology or an unavoidable feature of any theological language that seeks to describe the paradox of a creation in time by an eternal God?