Fatherhood Quote by William Ames

Ames is doing doctrinal carpentry: building a load-bearing distinction that keeps Christian orthodoxy from collapsing into either polytheism or a single-person God in three masks. "Relative property" is the giveaway. He is not describing the Son as a separate being with independent attributes; he is describing an identity defined by relation. The Son is Son only in reference to the Father, and that relational grammar is meant to do heavy metaphysical work.

"Begotten" functions as both assertion and firewall. It insists the Son comes from the Father, but not as a creature, not as a later product, not as a lesser copy. Ames leans on "so to proceed" to mark a procession that is eternal and internal to God, then locks it in with "participant of the same essence". That phrase is anti-Arian code: the Son is not similar, not adjacent, not promoted; he shares the same divine being. The payoff is "perfectly carry on the Father's nature" - a way of saying the Son is fully God without being the Father, an heir who is not an understudy.

The subtext is polemical and pastoral. As a Reformed scholastic writing in the post-Reformation pressure cooker, Ames is translating Nicene and Augustinian commitments into the era's preferred idiom: precise terms, careful negations, and definitions that can survive a disputation. The intent isn't poetic uplift; it's theological boundary-setting, a bid to make worship intellectually defensible. If believers pray to Christ, Ames wants them confident they're not committing idolatry, and if they confess one God, he wants them protected from reducing the gospel to divine ventriloquism.