The battle rumbles along: one side of the historic Reformed have announced that the complementarian–focused Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem have a faulty theory of the Trinity, and they have come back to announce they are fully orthodox. The issue here is the eternal subordination of the Son. Which they use, though in these newest statements they are not speaking into that issue, to prop up the subordination of women to men. Their distinctive emphasis on eternal subordination of the Son is connected to their complementarianism. They’re now trying to minimize this but the facts are otherwise… see both Trueman’s fuller response at the link and the final point made by Bird below.

Now to the principals: Bruce Ware, Wayne Grudem, and then responses from Carl Trueman and Mike Bird. All are reformed of one sort or another.

Bruce Ware:

God the Son, then, is both God and Son. As God, he is fully equal with God the Father, in that both Father and Son possess fully the identically same and eternal divine nature. As such, the equality between the Father and Son (and Spirit) could not be stronger – they are equal to each other with an equality of identity (i.e., each possesses fully the identically same divine nature). As Son, the Son is always the Son of the Father and is so eternally. As Son of the Father, he is under the authority of his Father and seeks in all he does to act as the Agent of the Father’s will, working and doing all that the Father has purposed and designed for his Son to accomplish. The eternal Son, God the Son, is both fully God and fully equal to the Father, while he is fully Son and eternally in a relationship of Agent of the Father, carrying out the work and implementing the will of the Father in full submission and obedience to all that the Father has planned. God and Son, i.e., fully God (in nature) and fully Son (in person)–this is who this Second Person of the Trinity is as Hebrews, John, and the New Testament declare.

Fourth, none of this glorious Trinitarian theology is being devised for the purpose of supporting a social agenda of human relations of equality and complementarity. I do believe there is intended correspondence, indeed. But that is a far cry from saying that we are “reformulating” the doctrine of the Trinity to serve our social purposes. God forbid! Let God be God, regardless of what implications may or may not follow! And may our sole aim be to know the true God through his self-revelation in Scripture–the one and only true God, who is God only as he is Father, Son, and Spirit.

Wayne Grudem:

I returned from vacation on Monday night, June 6, only to find that an article onMortification of Spin, a website of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, had accused me of presenting “a different God than that affirmed by the church through the ages and taught in Scripture.” I was surprised to read that I was “constructing a new deity,” that I was “reinventing the doctrine of God,” and that my view was “more like Islam than Christianity.”

In addition, I discovered that to hold my view of the Trinity is “to move into unorthodoxy” and “to verge on idolatry” and to advocate belief in “a different God.” The author recommended that holding my view of the Trinity should “certainly exclude” me and any who held my view “from holding office in the church of God.” Apparently those who had entrusted me to serve as a professor of Bible and theology for the last 39 years had made a dreadful mistake!… [The Berkhof, Strong, Hodge, Schaff notations fail to show he thought it was an “eternal” subordination of the Son. I read both speaking of the economical Trinity and incarnation. Why quote a summary of Calvin, not Calvin himself? What we need is the patristic Nicea era’s leading theologian speaking not only of subordination but of eternal subordination. As I read Grudem’s quotations, its seems to be found only in Frame, nor am I sure the Bromiley quotation speaks of eternal subordination.]

Carl Trueman:

[To Ware] Simply claiming the homoousion is not enough to make one a Nicene Trinitarian.  Were it so, history would make no sense.  After all, the term was adopted in 325 but it was another 56 years before Nicene Trinitarianism was finally defined.  The intervening years were largely spent battling over the nature of the relations.  One of the keys to the resolution of this problem was the concept of eternal generation.  Thus, I never denied that Professor Ware claims the homoousion, nor asserted that he is an Arian.  The point at issue is that of the nature of the relations.  In his writings, Professor Ware explicitly rejects the Nicene notion of eternal generation while asserting that of eternal functional submission.  That is in fact a very radical move to make, though not uncommon today.  Yet its popularity does not make it consistent with a Nicene position. In fact, rejection of eternal generation puts you definitively outside of Nicene Trinitarianism.  And that is what I was arguing.  And I cannot see how claiming the homoousion while altering your understanding of the relations does not leave your position vulnerable in the long term to one of the many problems which were debated and rejected between 325 and 381.

[To Grudem] To respond: I accuse no-one of rejecting the Nicene Creed of 325, as he states (at least in the version of the post available at 13:52 on Friday).  Nicene orthodoxy is actually defined at Constantinople in 381.  I simply state that those who get rid of eternal generation and speak of eternal submission are outside of the bounds set by 381 — which is the ecumenical standard of the church catholic, albeit in the West subject to the revision at Toledo.

If Nicaea 325 is the standard of Nicene Trinitarianism with which he and Bruce Ware are operating, then I understand why they think an appeal to the homoousion is sufficient.  But history and the church catholic say otherwise.  Eternal generation etc. etc. are also of critical importance, as Constantinople 381 indicates.

Mike Bird:

First, when I say “Homoianism” I refer to the view that was common in the 350s and 60s that stressed the subordination of the Son to the Father and declared that the Son is like the Father “according to the Scriptures,” that is, it emphasizes solely the economic subordination of the Son rather than utilizing ontological language and immanent relationships of equality. Read the Second Creed of Sirmium for an account of a Homoian Creed and R.P. Hanson’s The Search for the Christian God chap. 18 for more on Homoianism.

Second, the book by Bruce Ware and John Starke, One God in Three Persons sets out their understanding of this Complementarian view. Ware and Starke have both written to me privately to stress their acceptance of the term homoousion and their deliberate intent to avoid the language of “subordination,” both of which I affirm and applaud.  In fact, Ware prefers the term “eternal authority-submission relationship” over “eternal functional subordination,” though I’m not convinced it is that much of an improvement. Even so, to reiterate, they are definitely not Arians! For more, see Stephen Holmes’s review of Ware and Starke for some robust criticism and Fred Sanders’s review for a bit more sympathy.

Third, I remain concerned of two things: (a) That the notion of authority and/or hierarchy is still being applied by proponents to the Trinity which potentially makes the God-head a Tri-archy rather than a Tri-unity, and I don’t think this can be squared with a Nicene theology; and (b) The whole debate is motivated by gender issues and not solely by a careful appropriation of biblical materials and their reception among the Nicene Fathers.

Almighty and everlasting God,

you have given to us your servants grace,

by the confession of a true faith,

to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity,

and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity:

Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship,

and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory,

O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign,

one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

BCP

By Lucy Peppiatt:

Hierarchy & the Trinity

Seeing as the words aner and andros are fungible, I like the fact that the RSV editors have kept their options open. It’s like a little glimmer of hope. It’s interesting that they shied away from the idea that man in general is the head of woman, but were happy with the claim that Christ is the head of all men. If they have decided that aner should be translated as ‘husband’, they could equally have made the decision that andros that occurs just before that could also be ‘husband’ as well, except they didn’t. One has to wonder why when it creates more problems than it solves.

In Eph 5 Paul uses both terms for ‘man’ interchangeably to mean ‘husband’, as he does in 1 Cor 7, and as the only other instance that we have of him applying this term ‘head’ to men and Christ is in the context of marriage, it would make better sense in this context just to stick with that? So if we do that, where does that lead us?

If you’ve read my previous post on Eph 5, you’ll know that I think that Paul is using the concept of head and body to describe the function of a cornerstone in relation both to Christ and the church and husband and wife. The main connotations I took from that are the ideas of foundation, building up to maturity, the summing up of all things in harmony and unity, and the indissoluble union of head and body. In addition to that he refers to notions of self-sacrifice, renunciation, and leaving and cleaving on behalf of the husband. These are themes drawn from the analogy of the husband to Christ.

This pattern is transferable to the God/Christ relation relatively easily in that it is possible to see God in some sense as the foundation of Christ in that the Son emanates from the Father, is begotten of the Father, is exalted in and by the Father, but all the while being of one substance with the Father in an indissoluble union.

I think this basically works. However, we still have the problem of the fact that Paul has left wives as the kephale of no-one! By situating the husband as the ‘head’ and the wife as the ‘body’ has he done wives an eternal disservice, consigning all of us to a dependent and what seems like an intuitively ‘lesser’ position? You could see it like that, but I don’t think you have to, and I believe there is freedom not to, but first it helps to do some trinitarian theology before we answer the husband/wife question.

The question revolves around connotations of ‘lordship’ and ‘preeminence’ associated with the word kephale, which I said I would deal with, so now I will.

Everyone who studies kephale knows that it can mean ‘ruler’, ‘chief’ ‘one who is foremost’ and things like that. But does it here? However much theologians go on and on and on about the fact that it can’t possibly mean that in relation to God and Christ because they are one – Christ is God – people stubbornly continue to insist on the idea that Paul must have had some kind of hierarchical structure in mind. This idea is normally supported by the economic obedience of Jesus to the Father as the incarnate Son, which is fair enough, except that the Bible’s claim that the Son was obedient sit alongside claims that the Father and the Son are ‘one’, and that Son does what he does of his own accord. It is far from a simple picture. The hierarchical reading of kephale is further bolstered by the misconception that men and women fit neatly into a hierarchical structure too, where men are preeminent and women are derivative, and before we know it, ‘head’ means I’m the boss of you and you’re the boss of no one …

The problem is that there are just too many problems with positing an eternal hierarchy within the Godhead. The submission of Jesus as the incarnate Son is not there to tell us something about hierarchy and governance, but to tell us something about the full humanity of Christ, and his willingness to live a fully human life in order to save us. This was his task while on earth, implementing the divine will on earth as it is in heaven, in his humanity, in order to bring about the salvation of the human race. There are rich and complex issues around the two wills of Christ which I blogged on earlier, so do look them up, but in brief, the fact that Jesus had a human will as well as a divine will, is not an indication that he was a subordinate being to the Father.

Any hint of subordination in the Godhead, or the idea that the Son was/is ‘lesser’ than the Father was comprehensively challenged in the 4th Century when Arianism (the name of this heresy) was eventually ruled out, as affirmed in the Creeds. I understand though how the idea that the Son is somehow below the Father has a certain comfortableness about it, even if it’s wrong. Colin Gunton rightly notes that heresies are easier for us to believe because they resolve the tensions that we find it difficult to live with.

I wonder whether Arianism also legitimates the positing of an eternal creation hierarchy or inequality between men and women, which is certainly not depicted in Genesis. The two ideas seem to be two sides of the same coin. One endorses the other, as we well know, but both are fundamentally un-Christian ways of thinking. This is why many recent scholars have moved to the idea of kephale as ‘source’, although that also may not be quite precise enough.

Anyway, my point is, that for the sake of staying with orthodoxy when it comes to God, let’s rule out kephale as ‘ruler’ because God does not ‘rule over’ Christ and let’s not adopt lordship as a concept within the Trinity, because the Father is not the Lord of the Son. This means really that preeminence is also out, but let’s take the idea of a ‘first principle’ because I think there are still traces of that in kephale, and it kind of helps. Chrysostom was also ditched hierarchy and stuck with ‘first principle’ so there might be something in this.

In trinitarian theology, there is a way of speaking of the Father that sounds as if he is ‘first’. He is the arche; he is ‘unbegotten’. In Paul’s language, you could say he doesn’t have a ‘head’. Similarly, there is a way of speaking of the Son that sounds as if he is second. He is the Son; he is ‘begotten’. And here we have Paul claiming that he has a ‘head’. To confuse you though, this language of unbegotten and begotten applied to Father and Son was never meant to imply in any way that the Father is logically, chronologically, or ontologically ‘first’. He can’t be. The Son is not lesser, but equal to the Father, as is the Spirit, and all three coexist eternally. The Son is not of a different essence, but of the same substance (as with the Spirit). He and the Father are one. There is no logical, chronological, or ontological separation of the three as they are always one. There is only distinction of the persons in the Godhead between the Father, Son, and Spirit. There’s the tension … but don’t be tempted to resolve it.

In the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2, Adam is the human creature in whom man and woman exist and from whom the husband and the wife are created. This occurs at the point when the woman is differentiated from the man, by emanating from him, taken from his side. She is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone, and the writer of Genesis says that it is for this reason, that the husband must leave his family and be united to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. The second creation story contains the ‘marriage story’ in which the woman emanates from the man in an act of differentiation, and then the man willingly rejoins her in an act of indissoluble union, which has become how Christians describe marriage. Husband and wife become ‘one flesh’.

In Ephesians, Paul uses this picture of marriage to describe the mystery of Christ’s relation to the church, employing the concept of ‘kephale’ as an illustration. In 1 Corinthians 11, he employs the same concept to describe the mystery of the nature of the Godhead in relation to God and Christ. Husbands and wives, then, occupy a unique position in creation symbolizing this dynamic of emanation and union, or even re-union?

In all these three pairings, God/Christ, Christ/husband, husband/wife, first principle is both there and not there. It is there in the stories of origin, but never with logical, chronological, or ontological connotations of precedence or preeminence or superiority. Furthermore, in the purposes and economy of God, it is finally eclipsed by the mystery of union. In other words, kephale is a concept that potentially contains the idea of a first principle from which arises harmony, unity, and union. Crucially, however, Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians is that there is only one ultimate kephale. God will be all in all. He is the kephale above all things, and all will be summed up and built up in the perfecting of the created order in him.

Thus, cornerstone is the most fitting metaphor for this.

I know this doesn’t yet deal with the fundamentally unequal positions spelled out in Eph 5 and 1 Cor 11:3. The wife is still the kephale of no one. I’ll address that next.

Almighty and everlasting God,

You have given to us your servants grace,

By the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity,

And in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity:

Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship,

And bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father;

Who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign,

One God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

BCP

Almighty and everlasting God,

you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity:

Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father;

who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.