If the Father alone is unbegotten, then the Father is not fully equal to the Son and the Spirit
My thesis is that if the Father alone is unbegotten, then the Father has a unique ontological property that the Son and the Spirit lack. If that property is real and exclusive to Him, then the three persons are not fully equal in every relevant sense.
Classical Trinitarian theology says the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are co eternal, co equal, and of one essence. None is greater or lesser than another. At the same time, it says the Father alone is unbegotten, while the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father, or from the Father and the Son depending on tradition.
The usual response is that being unbegotten is merely a personal relation and not something that affects the divine essence. But this seems to create a problem.
If the Father alone possesses the property of being unbegotten, then He has something that no other divine person has. That makes His mode of existence unique. If that uniqueness has no real ontological significance, then it is hard to explain why it matters enough to distinguish the persons at all. If it does have ontological significance, then the Father possesses something the Son and Spirit do not, which seems incompatible with complete equality.
It seems like Trinitarians want the distinction to be real enough to distinguish the persons, but not real enough to imply any inequality. I do not see how both can be true at the same time.
If equality is taken seriously, then no divine person should possess an exclusive ontological privilege. That would seem to require the Father to be eternally begotten as well.
Some may object that this destroys the Father's identity. But why should eternal generation only work in one direction? If eternal begetting is not a temporal event and does not imply creation or causation, then there seems to be no logical contradiction in making it reciprocal. The Father could be eternally begotten of the Son, the Son eternally begotten of the Father, or each person could stand in an eternal relation of generation without any first source.
If that sounds impossible, I would argue it is no more mysterious than eternal generation itself. Once begetting is understood as an eternal, non temporal relation rather than a beginning in time, I do not see why it must remain one directional.
So my argument is simple. Either being unbegotten is a real and unique property, in which case the Father has an ontological distinction that the other persons lack, or it has no real significance, in which case it cannot meaningfully distinguish the persons. If Trinitarians want to preserve both meaningful distinction and complete equality, I think they need to explain why the Father cannot also be eternally begotten.
Thanks for reading. I haven't posted here in a while, so I figured I'd come back with something I've been thinking about. I'm interested to hear where you think my argument goes wrong, if it does.