Asymmetry

Is the Son dependent on the Father?  Yes; the Father begets the Son, so the Son is Son only because the Father has begotten Him.  This is an eternal begetting, and so the Son always was.  But the Son’s always-existing depends on the Father.

Is the Father dependent upon the Son?  Yes; the Father is not Father except as He has a Son.  The Father’s always-existing as Father depends on the eternal existence of the Son.

The dependence goes both ways.  But the dependence is not symmetrical, identical.  At least we can say that the Son depends “filially” on the Father, and the Father “paternally” on the Son.  That’s not saying much, though.   We might also say that the Son’s dependence on the Father is the dependence of begottenness; the Son does not “beget” the Father, except in the highly attenuated sense that all relations of dependence are relations of “begetting.”  The Father doesn’t depend on the Son as one begetting Him but depends on the Son for His status as Father and depends on the Son as the One who does His will so fully that He is the living will of the Father and depends on the Son as His Image, his radiance, and exact representation of His glory.

Put in the Spirit.  Then what?

The Father begets the Son in the Spirit; the Father speaks the eternal Word through the breath of the Spirit; the Father gives the Spirit to the Son as the Son’s eternal and eternally complete inheritance.  The Son gives the Spirit to the Father as well, but as the return gift, the inheritance “enhanced”; the Word spoken by the Father in the Spirit speaks back to the Father; the Son begotten in the Spirit of love loves the Father with the Love that is the Spirit.  Surely there are better ways to say this, but the general point is again the asymmetry of the relations: The Father and Son share the Spirit, but they do not “hold” or “give” the Spirit identically, symmetrically.

We can probably start this all over again beginning with the Spirit.  As the One by whom the Father begets the Son, the Spirit gives Fatherhood to the Father and Sonship to the Son, so that the Father and Son are both dependent on the Spirit, but asymmetrically.  The Spirit is the One by whom the Father speaks His Word, and so the Spirit gives the Father articulation and the Word beauty and rhetorical power.  The Spirit is the Love  by which the Father loves the Son, so that the Spirit is the One who makes the Father a loving Father and the Son a beloved Son.  Or, starting from the other end, the Spirit is the Love that the Son returns to the Father, and so is it through the Spirit that the Son is the loving Son and the Father the beloved Father.

We could run through all the same moves with the mutual glorification of Father and Son.  The Father glorifies the Son, and the Son glorifies the Father; both glorify in and through the Spirit who is the Glory of each and both.  Yet, the Father doesn’t glorify the Son in the same way the Son glorifies the Father.  It is appropriate to say that the Son eternally glorifies the Father by worshiping the Father; that cannot be reversed.  The Father glorifies the Son differently, not by bowing to the Son but by exalting the Son.

Several final reflections: First, it is the failure to reckon with the asymmetry of the relations that has sent certain forms of social Trinitarianism down a blind alley.  The Trinity is not a modern egalitarian democracy.  The Persons are indeed equal, but asymmetrically so.  Second, and this is equally important, more traditional Trinitarian theologies need the help that social Trinitarianism provides.  At its best, social Trinitarianism has been a plea to take the Personhood of the Persons seriously; it has been a plea for a Scriptural exposition of the ontological life of the Trinity in which the Persons converse together as they do in the gospel story.  Third, the response to Trinity-as-democracy should not be the implicit subordinationism that has infected some traditional Trinitarianism; we don’t need to resort to a unilateral hierarchical Trinity, paternal monarchianism or paternal causality, to avoid the problems of social Trinitarianism.  An asymmetrical account of Triune life takes the pleas of social Trinitarianism seriously, and can get at all the dynamism and personal interactivity that social Trinitarianism wants, without threatening to collapse into tritheism.

Finally, this perhaps leads to another axiom: Don’t smooth the rough edges.