§288Thus the revelation of creation is inseparable from the revelation and forging of the covenant of the one God with his People. Creation is revealed as the first step towards this covenant, the first and universal witness to God's all-powerful love.126 and so, the truth of creation is also expressed with growing vigour in the message of the prophets, the prayer of the psalms and…

56. For if, as they hold, the Essence of the Word being of created nature, therefore He says, 'The Lord created me,' being a creature, He was not created for us; but if He was not created for us, we are not created in Him; and, if not created in Him, we have Him not in ourselves but externally; as, for instance, as receiving instruction from Him as from a teacher. And it being …

13. Therefore let them tell us, from what teacher or by what tradition they derived these notions concerning the Saviour? We have read, they will say, in the Proverbs, 'The Lord created me a beginning of His ways unto His works ;' this Eusebius and his fellows used to insist on , and you write me word, that the present men also, though overthrown and confuted by an abundance of…

26. And that the Word of God is not a work or creature, but an offspring proper to the Father's essence and indivisible, as the great Council wrote, here you may see in the words of Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, who, while writing against the Sabellians, thus inveighs against those who dared to say so:— Next, I may reasonably turn to those who divide and cut to pieces and destroy …

Tertullian argues that the Son proceeds from the Father as a ray proceeds from the sun — distinct yet inseparable. The Word was with God before all things, and the Word was God. The Son is a second Person, not a second God, sharing the same divine substance as the Father.

Tertullian affirms that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, not made or created. The Psalmist declares "You are My Son; today I have begotten You." Proverbs testifies that Wisdom was brought forth before the hills. The Son's origin is from eternity, not from a point in time.

The Son was begotten of the Father before all ages — not in time, not by division of substance, but by an eternal and ineffable generation. Cyril appeals to Proverbs 8 and Micah 5 to demonstrate that the Son's origin is "from everlasting." He warns against both the Arian error (the Son is a creature) and the Sabellian error (the Father and Son are the same person).