My copy of the translation of books 1-3 of the Controversies of the Christian Faith by Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), a Jesuit cardinal as well as a saint and doctor of the Catholic church arrived today and I hope to get through it this weekend. It covers issues such as the canon, sola scriptura, and even Christology, so I am really looking forward to reading it. While flicking through my copy, I noticed that Bellarmine engaged with the claim that Luke 1:35 does not allow for the divinity and/or personal pre-existence of Jesus, an argument even modern Socinians (e.g., Anthony Buzzard) forward in their writings, so here is Bellarmine’s interaction with the Socinian appeal to such a verse in his day:
The Transylvanian ministers in book 2, chapter 7 and Blandrata in Disputation 6 of Albana responded that Christ is true and proper Son of God, because he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and they prove it thus: or in Luke 1:35 it is said: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.
But we reject that: for also Adam, Eve, all the angels, were not generated from the seed of man, but they are the immediate works of God. How, therefore, is the Son said to be only begotten? Secondly, if Christ is the Son of God, because he was conceived in the womb of the Virgin by the action of the Holy spirit, therefore he can be said to be the Son of the Holy Spirit, but the Scripture nowhere says tis, in fact just the opposite; John 15:26, and elsewhere, says that the Spirit proceeds from the Son. Thirdly, this is not to be the natural and true Son; for God did not generate Christ in the womb of the Virgin from his own substance, but only from the substance of the Virgin. Hence, Heb. 7:3 says that Christ is without father and without mother, that is, without a father on earth, and without a mother in heaven, as all the Greek and Latin Fathers have explained it.
To that verse in Luke 1:35 I say with Ambrose in Sermon 5 on Ps. 119, with Gregory in book 18, chapter 12 on Morality, with Bede and Bernard in their comments on this passage, that the power of the Most High is the Word of God, which descended into the womb of the Virgin, and there took on flesh; and therefore the Son of Mary is called the Son of the Most High. But it could also be said that the conception by the Holy Spirit is a sign, not a cause, of why Christ is called the Son of God. For it was fitting that, if the Son of God wanted to become a son of man, he should be born only of a Virgin; and if a Virgin is to give birth, she should give birth only to God, as St. Bernard rightly says in Sermon 2 on “Missus est.”
Furthermore, there is Jacob Paleologus, who was one of the main doctors of the new Samosatenians; finally in Rome, as we said above, he was converted to the true faith. Not only did he completely reject our argument, but he also turned it back against us with the reasoning; No true Son of God can be the true God; but Christ is the true Son of God, therefore he is not the true God. And he claimed that this syllogism (as I often heard from him) is a true demonstration; and he did not even when I told him that the main proposition of the syllogism is so false that the contrary is true. For, just as a true son of man is a true man, as a true son of a lion is a true lion, and in all other cases there is the same result, so also it is necessary that the true Son of God is the true God. (Robert Bellarmine, Controversies of the Christian Faith [trans. Kenneth Baker; Keep the Faith, Inc., 2016], 305-6)
