Post on 20-Jan-2023
Eternal Subordination and Nicene OrthodoxyCurtis W. Freeman, Duke University Divinity School
Symposium on Evangelicals and the Early ChurchWheaton College20-21March 2014
For several decades now evangelical theologians have been
debating what has come to be known as the doctrine of “the
eternal subordination of the Son” (ESS). The case for ESS was
forcefully made by Wayne Grudem in the complementarian manifesto,
Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, in which he argued Christ
was “eternally equal to the Father in deity and essence, but
subordinate to the Father in authority.”1 The subordination of
Christ to the Father, Grudem explained, does not merely name an
economic condition in which the Son during his earthly existence
submitted to the will of the Father. Rather it denotes an eternal
reality that defines the essential nature of the personal
relations of the triune God. In Nicene language the Father is the
unbegotten source of all things, while the Son was “begotten
(gennethēnta) from the Father before all the ages” and is
“consubstantial (homooūsion) with the Father.”2 Grudem suggested
that the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son implies “a
relationship between the Father and the Son that eternally existed and
that will always exist—a relationship that includes a
subordination in role, but not in essence or being.” For “the
orthodox doctrine,” Grudem intoned, “has always been that there
is equality in essence and subordination in role.”3
This social account of the Trinity is not intended simply to
offer a deeper understanding of God, for Grudem argues that it
provides ontological grounding for complementarian gender
relations that reflect the hierarchical pattern in trinitarian
relations. He explains that though women and men as created in
the image of God are equal in personhood and importance, their
differentiated roles are asymmetrical and unequal: for just as
the Son was eternally subordinated to the Father, women are
divinely designed to be subordinated to men, especially in
1 Wayne Grudem, “The Meaning of Kephale (‘Head’): A Resonse to Recent Studies,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton: Crossway, 1991/2006), 540, fn 63.
2 The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, in Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds. Creeds and Confession of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 1:162-63.
3 Grudem, “The Meaning of Kephale,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, 457. Stephen D. Kovach and Peter R. Schemm similarly contend that “it cannot be legitimately denied that the eternal subordination of the Son isan orthodox doctrine and believed from the history of the early church to the present day,” in “A Defense of the Doctrine of the Eternal Subordination of the Son,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 42 no. 3 (1999): 464.
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marriage. ESS proponents contend that the trinitarian doctrine of
historic orthodoxy holds the Son to be “equal in being” but
“eternally subordinate in role,” thus naming an “eternal
functional hierarchy within the Trinity” which links “God’s
position and authority as God with the concept of masculinity over
femininity.”4 ESS proponents believe that the complementarian and
egalitarian divide is not merely a matter of hermeneutical
difference. They believe that the subordination of women is
ontologically established in the eternal relations of the Trinity
in which the Father rules and the Son obeys.
Had the ESS doctrine remained a disputed matter within the
intramural debate between evangelical complementarians and
egalitarians it most likely would have been an obscure footnote
in the recent revival of trinitarian theology. However, it has
surged in popularity and prominence since the publication in 1994
of Grudem’s Systematic Theology, which is surely one of the most
influential and widely used theology textbooks in the world with 4 Bruce A. Ware, “How Shall We Think about the Trinity?” in God Under Fire:
Modern Theology Reinvents God, ed. Douglas S. Huffman (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 269-77, author’s emphasis. Ware contends that “authority and obedience is rooted in the Trinity and that authority in some special way corresponds to masculinity,“How Shall We Think about the Trinity?” 270. He subsequently published a book on the subject, Father Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2005), see especially 72-85.
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sales approaching one half million copies and translations
projected soon to be in over a dozen languages. In a limited
sense this emphasis on the Trinity as central to Christian
theology is welcome news given that evangelicals have often been
so focused on Jesus as to appear to affirm a kind of functional
unitarianism of the second person.5 Yet given that Grudem’s
Systematic Theology rehearses his argument on ESS and
complementarianism it ensures a large number of evangelical
students for years to come will be introduced to this doctrine
with the understanding that it is a definitive account of
historic trinitarian orthodoxy.6
ESS and the Nicene Tradition5 The notion of a unitarianism of the second person is mentioned by G.
Ernest Wright, The Old Testament and Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 24;and H. Richard Niebuhr, “The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Unity of the Church,” Theology Today 3, no. 3 (1946): 371-84. Evangelicals have been aided inembracing the wider trinitarian renewal by the important introductions StanleyJ. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004); Roger E. Olson and Christopher A. Hall, The Trinity (GrandRapids: Eerdmans, 2002); Timothy George, ed. God the Holy Trinity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006); and George, ed. Evangelicals and Nicene Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011).
6 Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 454-60. Grudem declaims that “just as the Father has authority over the Son in the Trinity, so the husband has authority ove the wife in marriage. The husband’s role is parallel to that of God the Father andthe wife’s role is parallel to that of God the Son. Moreover, just as Father and Son are equal in deity and importance and personhood, so the husband and wife are equal in humanity and importance and personhood.” Grudem, Systematic Theology, 257.
4
Proponents of ESS seldom engage early Christian writers to
show that such a hierarchical distinction attaining to the
eternal relations of Father and Son is actually present in Nicene
theology.7 Instead of entering into conversation with the
ecclesial history of interpretation they typically appeal to
their own personal reading of selected biblical texts, like the
phrase “God is the head of Christ” (1 Cor 11:3), which they argue
support their view of eternal subordination in the Trinity. They
maintain that their theological judgments based on these personal
interpretations of the Bible simply restate the doctrines of
historic Christian orthodoxy that the oneness of divine nature is
shared fully, simultaneously, and eternally by each member of the
Trinity. Yet, as Bruce Ware explains, although ESS affirms “an
eternal and immutable equality between the Father and the Son,”
it also posits “an eternal and immutable authority-submission
structure that marks the relationship of the Father and the
Son.”8 And it is precisely this authority-submission structure
that seems to be at odds with the ancient and ecumenical doctrine
of the Trinity. The question that remains, then, is whether ESS
is consistent with Nicene orthodoxy or whether it is a
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misappropriation (or perhaps a mal-appropriation) of Christian
tradition.
It would be misleading to suggest that the trinitarian
doctrine of God that developed in the fourth century was purely a
matter of extra-biblical philosophical speculation, for the ways
that Christians finally agreed to talk about the relation between
the God of Israel and the Word of God made flesh in Jesus the
Christ emerged as a result of an extended theological
conversation through the interpretation of Christian Scripture.
Because proponents claim that ESS is a “biblical doctrine” shared
by historic orthodoxy it would seem important to enter into a
sympathetic and sustained reading of Scripture with Christian
theologians who were engaged in the evolving formulation of the
Nicene doctrine of God. For example, Cyril of Alexandria
suggested that the notion of the Father’s headship in
1 Corinthians 11:3 entails the eternal generation of the Son,
explaining that the “Father is the head of the Son . . . for the
Father begat the Son very God.”9 Athanasius of Alexandria
similarly argued from the same biblical text that “the Father who
alone is unbegotten and ingenerate, hath generated inconceivably
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and incomprehensively to all: and that the Son hath been
generated before ages, and in no wise to be ingenerate himself
like the Father, but to have the Father who generated him as his
beginning: for the head of Christ is God.”10 As one reads
Scripture with the ancient Christian commentators it becomes
apparent that the Nicene doctrine of eternal generation, which
delineates the Father’s headship, lays stress on the equality of
Father and Son in that both share the same divine nature.
Moreover, by identifying the Father as the eternal source of all,
including the Word, it preserves the distinction between Father
and Son. Eternal generation was crucial in Nicene exegesis
because it holds together the paired convictions of the
consubstantiality and the distinction of the triune persons.
John Chrysostom pointed out that it was the Arians who
appealed to the notion of God’s headship in 1 Corinthians 11:3 as
warrant for their teaching of the inferiority of the Son. When he
explained that the head is of the same substance as the body, and
so “the Son is of the same substance (homooūsion) as the Father,”
his heretical interlocutors shifted to the subject to
subordination, contending that as the husband governs the wife,
7
so the Father governs Christ. Chrysostom responded that the logic
of their argument depends on similarity of the term “head” in all
clauses of the text. And if so, he explained, “the Son will be as
far removed from the Father as we are from him,” and “the woman
will be as far removed from [men] as [humanity] is from the Word
of God.” Chrysostom then offered a brief word of theological
caution on the use of analogy, which always implies both
similarity and dissimilarity. Had the Apostle Paul meant to speak
of rule and subjection as the Arians claimed, Chrysostom
continued, he would have used the example of a slave and master,
for unlike the slave the wife is “free” and “equal in honor.”
Freedom and equality, however, Chrysostom concluded, attain even
more so divine relations, because though the Son was obedient to
the Father, he was acting as God, “for as the obedience of the
7 Kovach and Schemm are the exception in that they engage pro-Nicene theologians of the fourth century, although they mistakenly connect eternal generation with eternal subordination, “A Defense of the Doctrine of the Eternal Subordination of the Son,” 464-70. The ten pages of direct quotes fromthe fathers without commentary or interaction by H. Wayne House hardly count as engaging the tradition, in “The Eternal Relational Subordination of the Sonto the Father in Patristic Thought,” in The New Evangelical Subordinationism? Perspectives on the Equality of God the Father and God the Son, ed. Dennis W. Jowers and H. Wayne House (Eugene, Or.: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 168-78.
8 Bruce Ware, “Equal in Essence, Distinct in Roles: Eternal Functional Authority and Submission Among the Essentially Equal Divine Persons of the Godhead,” in The New Evangelical Subordinationism?, 14.
9 Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 11.4, NPNF2 7:68.10 Athanasius, De Synodis, 2.26.2, NPNF2 4:463.
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Son to the Father is greater than we find in [humans] towards the
authors of their being, so also his liberty is greater.”11
Augustine twice discussed 1 Corinthians 11:3 in his De
Trinitate. The first instance occurs early in the opening book as
part of his account of the consubstantiality of the Father and
the Son, and serves as a tag line in a discussion of the
Philippian hymn in which he laid stress on the equality of Christ
with the Father (Philippians 2:6).12 The second occurrence of the
text is in book six which includes his answer to the question
whether the Father alone should be thought of as the “only true
God” (John 17:3) or whether this title applies to all three
persons of the Trinity.13 Citing this same Scripture, Origen
maintained that the Father only is “very God” (autotheos, God of
himself), but all beyond “the very God,” including the Son who is
“the first-born of all creation,” Origen continued, “is made God
by participation in his divinity.”14 Augustine argued to the
contrary that the designation the “only true God” does not attain
to the Father alone, but properly denotes the Father, Son, and
11 John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, 26.2-3, NPNF1 12:150.
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Spirit in trinitarian relation.15 It would seem to follow, then,
that “God” in the phrase “God is the head of Christ” (1 Cor 11:3)
also denotes all three members of the Trinity. But if this is so,
Augustine wondered how the Trinity can be the head of Christ,
since Christ himself is a member of the Trinity. His answer bears
serious reflection: “God” signifies all three persons of the
Trinity in their immanent relations but “Christ” refers to “the
Son alone” in his earthly and incarnate life.16
Here Augustine demonstrates (as do the other church
fathers) that the Scriptures must be read, not as discrete and
isolated pericopes, each with a single meaning awaiting discovery
simply by unpacking the grammatical and syntactical logic of the
words, but rather as constituting an interrelated set of
spiritual truths within an intratexual narrative including both
testaments that must be explored through multiple senses. Because
Scripture bears witness to the fullness of the truth and reality
of the life of God, the depth of its mystery can never be
hermeneutically exhausted. Moreover, Augustine’s distinction
between the immanent and economic relations in the Trinity is
subtle and significant. It helps to clarify what is too often
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confused by the proponents of ESS. While it is true that the
immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity are one in the same
God, they are not symmetrical.17 The church fathers were cautious
about applying economic descriptions of Christ in his
incarnation, which include both his humanity and divinity, into
accounts of the immanent relations of the Trinity.18
12 Augustine, De Trinitate, 1.12, NPNF1 3:23.13 Augustine, De Trinitate, 6.10, NPNF1 3:102.14 Origen, Commentarii in Evangelium Joannis, 2.2, ANF 10:21. Origen’s
interpretation reflects the Orthodox emphasis on the Father as the source of life and draws from the Orthodox theology of theosis in which through the Incarnation divinity is united with humanity thus enabling humanity to participate in divinity. E.g., Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 8.54, NPNF2 4: 65;Irenaeus Against Heresies, 5.preface, ANF, 1:526. Citing Christ’s words in John 17:3 that the Father is “the only true God” Origen maintained that the Father alone is God in a strict sense (autotheos) as ingenerate (agēnnetos). The deity of Christ as the Son of God was derivative. He is the “first-begotten of all creation” (Col 1:15), receiving his life and being from the Father, though he was begotten eternally and not created in time (Prov 8:22). Origen’s trinitarian theology ironically became the source of both the Nicene doctrine of eternal generation and the Arian stress on the Father alone as very God resulting in the ontological subordination of the Son. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1978), 128-30.
15 Augustine here is in agreement with Gregory of Nazianzus, who famously declaimed “when I say God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. For Godhood is neither diffused beyond these . . . nor yet is it bounded by a smaller compass than these.” Oration 38.8, NPNF2 7:347.
16 Sarah Coakley calls attention to the ambiguity of Augustine’s accountof women in which he wavers between their mental equality to men based on Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither male nor female.”) and their bodily subordination to men grounded in 1 Corinithians 11:7 (“Woman is the reflectionof man.”) in God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (New York: Cambridge, 2013), 291-92. Coakley suggests that Augustine draws “the fatal lines of subordination” between gender equality and difference as regards embodiedness when he concluded in De Trinitate 12.7 that the woman alone “is not the image of God,” but the man by himself alone “is the image of God as fully and completely as when the woman too is joined with him in one,” NPNF1 3:159.
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The clearest delineation of this principle of partitive
exegesis is made by Gregory of Nazianzus, when he explained,
What is lofty you are to apply to the Godhead, and to that Nature in Himwhich is superior to sufferings and incorporeal; but all that is lowly to the composite condition of Him who for your sakes made himself of no reputation and was Incarnate – yes, for it is no worse thing to say, wasmade Man, and afterwards was also exalted.19
According to this rule some things in Scripture that refer to
Christ pertain to his divine nature, and other things relate to
his human nature.20 Yet it is crucial to understand that both
parts are simply different ways of referring to the same Son of
God. Lofty statements relate to the Son in his divinity (in both
preexistent and incarnate states) while lowly statements refer to
the Son in his composite condition, that is, to Christ’s humanity
in the economy of salvation.21 Speaking of cooperative relations
and mutual submission between the persons of the Godhead, as ESS
17 Karl Rahner observed that “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity,” in his The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Continuum, 1974), 22.
18 Though the Council of Chalcedon in 451 settled the doctrinal formula of Christ as having two natures (divine and human) united in one person, the Christological debates continued. The Council of Constantinople in 681 finallysettled the matter that Christ had two wills (divine and human) corresponding to his two natures.
19 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.18, NPNF2 7:307.20 John Behr, The Nicene Faith: Formation of Christian Theology, Volume 2 (Crestwood,
N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s, 2004), 2:349.21 Christopher A. Beeley, The Unity of Christ: Continuity and Conflict in Patristic Tradition
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 189-190. Gregory concludes with a lengthy account of alternating ascriptions to Christ’s divinity and humanity, Oration 29.19-20, NPNF2 7:308-09.
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proponents do, confuses these theological categories and
mistakenly ascribes the human will of Christ’s submission in his
earthly life into the immanent relations of the Trinity. As
Augustine explains, it is important to note that in his earthly
life, Christ as human was subject to the head, namely the Word of
the one eternal and triune God which was made flesh in Jesus the
Christ.22
Some biblical texts, when taken in a straightforward and
apparent sense, seem to suggest a kind of subordination of the
Son, for example, Jesus’ statement that “the Father is greater
than I” (John 14:28). Arian readers, who were inclined more
toward biblical literalism, found support for their view of the
ontological subordination of the Son.23 Whereas Athanasius
explained the Son’s admission that the Father is greater to be an
economic condition of the incarnate Word, the Cappadocians
understood it as a description of the eternal relation between
the Father and the Son. The Father is greater as the cause of the
Son. Yet, as Gregory of Nazianzus argued, though the Father is
the cause of the Son, it does not follow, as Eunomius argued that
22 Augustine, De Trinitate, 6.10, NPNF1 3:102.
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because the Father is the “cause by nature” that the Father is
“greater by nature.”24 The superiority belongs to the cause,
Gregory continued, but the equality belongs to the nature.25 At
this point the analogy in ESS between the submission of the Son
to the Father and the submission of wives to their husbands
breaks down. Men are not the cause of women, as the Father is the
cause of the Son, and thus the superiority of masculinity over
femininity based on the trinitarian analogy seems to rest on
tenuous theological grounds. Like Chrysostom’s interlocutors, the
proponents of ESS operate with an exuberant notion of analogy
that presupposes too much similarity and too little dissimilarity
in the analogy between husband-wife and Father-Son relations.
Complementarians are already convinced that the role of
women is subordinate to men. It is surely tempting to construe
trinitarian relations to fit their social view, but this would be
a mistake. There are many problems with such theological
approaches that draw parallels between the divine life and human
relations, even from analogies given in Scripture. The most
obvious is a tendency to claim too much. Though human relations
surely image God, the inner life of the triune God is unique and
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exists under conditions that are disanalogous to human existence
and which always elude the intellectual grasp of theologians,
despite the fact that the minds and hearts of those who think
about the Trinity are drawn to share in the divine life through
their reflections.26 Miroslav Volf cautions that in a strict
sense “there can be no correspondence to the interiority of the
divine persons at a human level.” Unlike the triune persons,
“another human self cannot be internal to my own self as [a]
subject of action,” because “human persons are always external to
one another as subjects.”27 Any appeal to trinitarian doctrine as a
support for social agendas (conservative or liberal) demands to
23 Arianism was based on a “biblical theology.” The early Arians moved from the exegesis of Scripture to the conclusion that Christ, even though preexistent, was a creature. In line with the Antiochene School of his teacherLucian of Antioch, Arius followed a literal interpretation of key christological and trinitarian texts which he took to imply a doctrine of ontological subordinationism. For example, “The Lord created me” (Prov 8:22) and “firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15). Moreover, the early Arians regarded passages from the Gospels (chiefly the Synoptics) and Epistles (viz.,2 Cor 2:9 and Phil 2:5-11) that emphasized the suffering and creaturely existence of Jesus to mean that he could not share equality with God. T. E. Pollard explains that “the Arians fell into error . . . because they were too literal in their interpretation of selected texts isolated from their context and interpreted, not in the light of the whole teaching of the Bible, but in the light of their own extra-biblical presuppositions,” in “The Exegesis of Scripture and the Arian Controversy,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 41, no. 2 (1959): 417. See Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh, Early Arianism—A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 2-4; and Manlio Simonetti, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church: An Historical Introduction to Patristic Exegesis, trans. John Hughes (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 122-24.
24 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.15, NPNF2 7:306.25 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.7, NPNF2 7:312.
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be challenged. This cautionary word on drawing parallels between
human and divine relations seems well advised. Human relations do
not imitate divine relations. Human relations can only
participate in the divine life.
ESS and the Eternal Generation of the Son
The claim that ESS is simply a restatement of Nicene
orthodoxy is further complicated by the fact that the theologians
who invented ESS also reject the Nicene doctrine of the eternal
generation of the Son, regarding it to be “highly speculative and
not grounded in biblical teaching.”28 Although the notion that
the Son was eternally generated from the Father is not explicitly
taught in any single biblical text, it emerged as the consensus
fidelium through a sustained reflection on the whole of Scripture
as the story of the God of Israel who became incarnate in Jesus
the Christ.29 The early heresies were not simply driven by
26 Lewis Ayres, “‘As we Are One’: Thinking into the Mystery,” Theology Conference, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (September 20, 2013), 14. https://www.academia.edu/4908427/Trinity_Paper_from_conference_at_Southern_Baptist_Sept_2013
27 Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 210-211. See also Volf, “‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program:’ The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” Modern Theology 14 no. 3 (1998): 403-23.
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misguided philosophical speculation, but were grounded in
profound misreadings of Scripture. For example, when the third
century Monarchians, Noetus and Praxeas, appealed to Jesus’
declaration, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), as warrant
for their view that the Father and the Son are identical,
Hippolytus and Tertullian argued convincingly that the narrative
of the Fourth Gospel identifies the Father and Son as two
distinct persons sharing in the same power and essence.30 And
when in the fourth century, Arius and Eunomius quoted Jesus’
statement that “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) as
suggesting the ontological inferiority of the Son, Athanasius
showed the superiority of the Father to be consistent with the
Fourth Gospel’s emphasis on the distinction within unity of
Father and Son, and the Cappadocians went further by explaining
that because the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, the Son
is distinct from and yet equal with the Father.31
Athanasius refuted the Arians by showing “their doctrine is
alien to the divine oracles.”32 He argued that when the
Scriptures identify Christ with the divine names of the God of
Israel like Word, Wisdom, Power, Light, and Life, it shows that
17
the preexistent Christ shares the divine nature, and he
consistently appealed to the Fourth Gospel to affirm the
essential identity of Father and Son without losing sight of the
distinction between them.33 The doctrine of the eternal
generation of the Son that found expression in the Niceno-
Constantinopolitan creed became one of the central principles of
the pro-Nicene theology in the fourth century because it held
together the two fundamental convictions that Jesus Christ is
both consubstantial with and distinct from the Father.34
Moreover, the eternal generation of the Son was formulated
precisely to counter the interpretation of the relationship
between Father and Son in hierarchical terms as claimed by the
Arians, who held that Christ the Son as the offspring of the
Father was subordinate to the Father. The Nicene doctrine of
eternal generation corrected and qualified the Arian employment
of the biblical expression of Christ the Word as “the only Son”
(monogenēs) of the Father (John 1:18), from which they inferred
that Christ as “firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15) was a
creature (Prov 8:22) and subordinate to the Father. As Athanasius
explained, “the Word is from the Father, and the only offspring
18
(gēnnema) proper to him and natural.” But he asked, “For whence
may one conceive the Son to be, who is the Wisdom and the Word,
in whom all things came to be, but from God himself?35 Here
Athanasius saw monogenēs as naming not only the Son’s uniqueness,
30 Hippolytus, Contra Noetus, 7, ANF 5:226; and Tertullian, Contra Praxeas, 22, ANF 3:618.
28 Ware, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 162. Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears, Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 27-28; and John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), 491. Grudem is vague on eternal generation, suggesting that it “has never been defined very clearly, other than to say that it has to do with the relationship between the Father and the Son, and that in some sense the Father has eternally had a primacy in that relationship,” Systematic Theology, 244. Ironically, some evangelical theologians opposing ESS also reject the Son’s eternal generation. For example, Millard Erickson, contends “that there are noreferences to the Father begetting the Son or the Father (and the Son) sendingthe Spirit that cannot be understood in terms of the temporal role assumed by the second and third persons of the Trinity respectively.” He further states that “to speak of one of the persons as unoriginate and the others as either eternally begotten or proceeding from the Father is to introduce an element ofcausation or origination that must ultimately involve some type of subordination among them,” in God in Three Persons, 309; and Millard J. Erickson, Who’s Tampering with the Trinity?: An Assessment of the Subordination Debate (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2009), 179–84. Keith E. Johnson makes a strong case for eternal generation with specific reference to evangelicals who reject it as “unbiblical,” in “Augustine, Eternal Generation, and Evangelical Trinitarianism,” Trinity Journal, 32 no. 2 (2011): 141-163.
29 Scott Rushing shows how Athanasius deploys John 1:14 as a summary of all Scripture in his “John 1:14 and the Sense of Scripture as a Hermeneutical Principle in Athanasius’s Orationes Contra Arianos I and II,” https://www.academia.edu/6359719/John_1_14_and_the_Sense_of_Scripture_as_a_Hermeneutical_Principle_in_Athanasiuss_Contra_Arianoshttps://www.academia.edu/6359719/John_1_14_and_the_Sense_of_Scripture_as_a_Hermeneutical_Principle_in_Athanasiuss_Contra_Arianos.
31 Athanasius, Orationes Contra Arianos, 3.16, NPNF2 4:403; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.7, NPNF2 7:312. For a fuller treatment of the importance of the biblical interpretation (particularly of the Fourth Gospel) in the early trinitarian controversies, see Pollard, Johannine Christology and the Early Church (London: Cambridge, 1970), 3-22; and Pollard, “The Exegesis of John X.
19
but by describing the Son as “in the bosom of the Father” it
suggested that he was eternally begotten of the Father.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this keystone
principle of Nicene theology was derived from references in
Scripture to the Son as monogenēs with the sense of “only
begotten.”36 Eternal generation gained consensus in emerging
Nicene theology of the fourth century as a kind of hermeneutical
principle that was crucial for holding together the
consubstantiality and the differentiation of the Father and the
Son in the narrative of Scripture. For example, Augustine drew on
this principle when he asked what it means in the Gospel of John
that the Father who “has life in himself . . . has granted the
Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). Augustine began
his answer by emphasizing the dissimilarity between human life,
which is mutable and contingent, and divine life, which is
immutable and has no other source of being. But unlike humanity
or any other creature, the Son has “life in himself” that is the
same as the Father. Yet Father and the Son share the divine life
in different ways. The Father possesses this divine life
30 in the Early Trinitarian Controversies,” New Testament Studies, 3, no. 4 (1957): 334-49.
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inherently “in himself,” whereas the Son’s possession of divine
life is as the gift of the Father. The life of the Son and the
Father are in one sense identical, but in another sense
different. What can it mean, he asked, that the Father has given
to the Son to have life in himself except that the Son has life
by being begotten of the Father and the Father has life without
being begotten. For he concluded, “Before all time, he is co-
eternal with the Father. For the Father has never been without
the Son; but the Father is eternal, therefore also the Son co-
eternal.”37
By the end of the fourth century the doctrine of the eternal
generation of the Son became hermeneutical shorthand enabling
readers to hold together both the personal distinction and the
ontological union of Father and Son. Contemporary evangelicals
who ignore the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis that led
to the formulation of the eternal generation of the Son and
instead build a theology based on a plain sense reading of the 32 Athanasius, Orationes Contra Arianos, 1.10, NPNF2 4:312.33 Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian
Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 112; and Pollard, Johannine Christology and the Early Church, 184-245.
34 Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (New York: Oxford, 2004), 236-40.
35 Athanasius, De Decretis, 5.21, NPNF2 4:164.
21
Bible alone leave themselves and their communities open to new
opportunities for departures from the wisdom of Nicene exegesis.
Without the eternal generation of the Son as a guard and guide
for interpretation, biblical references to the deity of Christ
are too easily collapsed into new forms of Monarchianism in which
the distinction of Father and Son is not retained. And without
the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son as a
hermeneutical lens, scriptural descriptions of the personhood of
Christ are easily rendered into yet another iteration of Arianism
in which the full deity of Christ is lost.
But the refusal to engage the exegetical tradition of Nicene
theology in a sustained fashion suggests a deeper hermeneutical
issue at the heart of ESS shared more widely with other
evangelicals. Namely, it is formulated on the basis of a kind of
biblicism that confuses sola scriptura with nuda scriptura in which, as
36 John 1:14 describes the Word incarnate as the “only son from the Father” (monogenēs parā patrōs). The King James Version mistranslated monogenēs as “only begotten.” The etymological derivation of monogenēs, however, is gēnes, not gennāo, and thus its meaning is “one and only,” or “unique,” but not“only begotten.” A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., ed. William Arndt and revised Frederick William Danker (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. monogenēs, 658.
37 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 19.13, NPNF1 7:127-28. I am indebted to Keith Johnson who pointed me to Augustine’s exegesis of John 5:26,“Augustine, Eternal Generation, and Evangelical Trinitarianism,” 147-48.
22
Kevin Vanhoozer has noted, “each biblical interpreter sees what
is right in his or her own eyes.”38 This appeal to a private
interpretation of the Bible without engaging the historic
Christian tradition is strikingly reminiscent of the Arian appeal
to a selectively literalistic and private sense of Scripture.39
One lesson from reading the Scriptures with the fathers is that
although Scripture is sufficient in supplying the basis for a
Christian understanding of God, theological reflection limited
only to the words of Scripture is insufficient and will leave
important questions unresolved.40 As Nicene exegesis
demonstrates, hermeneutics for early Christians entailed more
than a matter of applying simple rules of grammar and syntax to
acquire a fixed and set meaning. To grasp the sense of Scripture
required more than attending to the words of a single text. It
demanded apprehending the scope (skopos) of the biblical message
which was summarized in the rule of faith.41 And to apprehend
this scope necessitated approaching the Scriptures with openness
to more than the literal sense, which followed the hermeneutical
trajectory of the New Testament writers themselves.42
23
Through this hermeneutical strategy Nicene Christians
learned to understand the whole Bible as of the story of the
triune God. It demanded listening to the words of Scripture both
as a deposit of apostolic memory of the Word made flesh in Jesus
Christ, and as participation in the community of living memory of
the crucified and risen Lord who by the Spirit continued to be
known in and through Word and sacrament. By ignoring the
interrelation between canon and creed the proponents of ESS
expose their mistaken assumption that the consensus fidelium of
orthodoxy was arrived at by individual interpreters appealing to
the Bible alone in isolation from its ecclesial context. Because
the canon of Scripture and the creeds of the church developed
together, neither can be properly grasped without reference to
the other.43 They are co-inherent. The rule of faith enabled the
early church to conceive of the two Testaments as one canon, and
the creeds summarized the trinitarian pattern of Christian
Scripture.44 The ancient ecumenical creeds are, to borrow a
phrase from Yves Congar, “monuments of tradition” that bear
witness to how Christians in earlier times read the Scriptures,
24
and thus invite contemporary believers to read them in
participation with the living tradition of the church.45
Just as Arianism was a theology built on a certain kind of
biblical literalism severed from the tradition, it is not
38 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 154. Vanhoozer playfully describes this mistake as “solo scritura.” Timothy George similarly critiques the mistake of thinking that sola scriptura means nuda scriptura or scriptura solitaria, in “An Evangelical Reflection on Scripture and Tradition,” Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, 9, no. 2 (2000): 206. Proponents of ESS arenot alone in this biblicism. Evangelical theologian Gilbert Bilezikan charged proponents of ESS with violating the Nicene and Chalcedonian orthodoxy, but hemakes his case on the grounds of the same hermeneutical biblicism as his opponents, in “Hermeneutical Bungee-Jumping: Subordination in the Godhead,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 40, no. 1 (1997):57-68.
39 Athanasius, Orationes Contra Arianos, 1.37, NPNF2 4:327.40 R. P. C. Hanson has shown the importance of the interpretation of
Scripture in the determination of Nicene orthodoxy in The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), 824-49.
41 Athanasius stated that “the scope and character of Holy Scripture” isthat Christ “was ever God, and is the Son, being the Father’s Word and Radiance and Wisdom; and that afterwards for us he took flesh of a Virgin, Mary Bearer of God, and was made man,” Orationes Contra Arianos, 3.29, NPNF2 4:409. The scope of Scripture is summarized in the regula fidei, which he described as the “tradition, teaching, and faith of the catholic church from the beginning, which the Lord gave, the Apostles preached, and the fathers kept.” For Athanasius the rule was a summary of Christ’s teaching and the Apostles’ preaching which from very early times was used in the instruction ofcatechumens and based on the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19. As a foundational summary of the church’s faith and teaching, the rule of faith also served as a regulative principle (kānon) for the interpretation of Scripture. Athanasius, Ad Serapium, 1.28, in The Letters of Saint Athanasius Concerning theHoly Spirit, trans. C. R. B. Shapland (London: Epworth Press, 1951), 133-36. See Pollard, “The Exegesis of Scripture and the Arian Controversy,” 418-425; Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed., 40; and D. H. Williams, Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005),93. For a description of how to think about applying the rule of faith in contemporary hermeneutics, see Prosper S. Grech, “The ‘Regula fidei’ as Hermeneutical Principle Yesterday and Today,” The Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Jože Krašovec (Sheffield, Eng.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 589-604;
25
surprising that by following a path of hermeneutical biblicism
the proponents of ESS have reached conclusions that are at odds
with Nicene orthodoxy. Indeed, it seems that when biblicism
operates free from the received wisdom of the church’s historic
tradition there is a propensity to result in some form of
unitarianism. The history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
nonconformity is replete with examples from Faustus Socinus to
John Biddle to Matthew Caffyn of literalistic biblicism leading
to rejections of the Trinity.46 To put it simply, without the arc
of the Christian story outlined in the ancient ecumenical creeds
as a hermeneutical guide, it is doubtful that an understanding
Scripture as the unfolding narrative of the triune God can be
sustained for long.
Nathan MacDonald, “Israel and the Old Testament Story in Irenaeus’s Presentation of the Rule of Faith,” Journal of Theological Interpretation, 3, no. 2 (2009): 281-298; Leonard G. Finn, “Reflections on the Rule of Faith,” in The Bible as Christian Scripture: The Work of Brevard S. Childs, ed. Christopher R. Seitz, Kent H.Richards, and others (Atlanta: SBL, 2013), 221-42; Seitz, The Character of Christian Scripture: The Significance of a Two-Testament Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 191-203.
42 Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2 vols., trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 2:1-39; Karlfried Froehlich, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 1-29; and David C. Steinmetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” in Memory and Mission: Theological Reflections on the Christian Past (Nashville: Abingdon, 1988), 143-63.
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ESS and the Divine Will
This deviation from Nicene orthodoxy in ESS is even more
pronounced when its defenders infer from the supposed notions of
the Son’s eternal submission and obedience to the Father that the
Son has a will separate and distinct from the Father. By
ascribing a division of wills into the Godhead, ESS stands in
direct contradiction with the most basic conviction of patristic
thought that “discerned in God only one will and one ‘energy’
(principle of action).”47 This line of thinking not only posited
a single will within the Godhead rather than multiple wills
according to each person, but also for a unified sense of divine
action arising from the oneness of energy. Gregory of Nazianzus
argued from this conviction that
There is One God, for the Godhead is One, and all that proceedeth from him is referred to One, though we believe inThree Persons. For one is not more and another less God; nor43 Robert W. Jenson, Canon and Creed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
2010), 11-18.44 Jenson, Canon and Creed, 27-50.45 Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1964/2004), 129-55.46 Curtis W. Freeman, Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists (Waco, Tex.:
Baylor University Press, 2014), chapter 4; and Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 16-68; and H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 1-24 and 163-217.
47 George Leonard Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1956), 256.
27
is One before and another after; nor are They divided in will or parted in power; . . . but the Godhead is, to speak concisely, undivided in separate Persons.48
Gregory of Nyssa similarly observed that to affirm that both the
Father and the Son are God means there is “no difference either
of nature or of operation” in the Godhead. And because the divine
nature is apprehended by every conception as undivided, he
concludes, “we properly declare the Godhead to be one, and God to
be one, and employ in the singular all other names which express
Divine attributes.”49 Proponents of ESS seem to believe that by
arguing that in the Trinity there are three persons with three
separate and distinct wills, they are simply proposing an
evangelical version of social trinitarianism. They are instead
introducing a form of the tritheism that Nicene orthodoxy long
ago laid to rest.
ESS deviates from Nicene orthodoxy on the basis of its
simple biblicist hermeneutic, but what makes this hermeneutic
intelligible in the first place is an individualistic
understanding of personhood that is then ascribed to the
relations between members of the Godhead. The most important and
48 Gregory of Nazianzus, The Fifth Theological Oration, 14, NPNF2, 7:322.49 Gregory of Nyssa, On ‘Not Three Gods,’ Letter to Ablabius, NPNF2, 5:336.
28
lasting contribution of the Cappadocian theology may have been
the identification of hypostasis, a term which already was
understood as conveying the being (ousia) of God, with person
(prosopon). Cappadocian theology was based on the belief that the
being of the one God is present in each person of the Godhead,
which exists, not as three discrete individuals, but as persons
in communion.50 With respect to the underlying psychology of
Gregory of Nyssa, “the attribution of a capacity to will is not
derived from existence as individual(s), or from the existence of
individuals in relation,” but rather that the cause of the
existence of the will “is wholly unrelated to the reality of
individual existence.”51 However, when Gregory applies
psychological language to the Trinity it is typically with
reference to the Godhead as one person. And when Gregory does
50 John Zizioulas, Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 36-41. For a critique of Zizioulas see Lucian Turcescu, “‘Person’ Versus ‘Individual,’ and Other ModernMisreadings of Gregory of Nyssa,” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 527-39, especially 536-37. Turcescu criticizes Zizioulas for using the Cappadocian trinitarian theology to combat modern individualism. He argues that “the Cappadocian Fathers were not aware of the dangers of individualism and perhapsthat is why they did not make many efforts to distinguish between person and individual.” However, Turcescu in no way suggests that modern individualism should be read back into the Cappadocian theology of the Trinity.
51 Michel René Barnes, “Divine Unity and the Divided Self: Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology in its Psychological Context,” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 482. The entire issue, edited by Sarah Coakley, is devoted to Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa.
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occasionally apply psychological language to the three divine
persons, there is no indication that their interaction is
analogous to the interaction between three distinct human agents,
but rather as one principle of action.52 The basic premise of ESS
that the Father rules and the Son obeys presupposes an account of
personhood which is individualistic so the will of each divine
person is taken to mean that there are three individual wills and
that the three divine persons act as three distinct agents. This
is not the trinitarian theology of Nicene orthodoxy.
The fact that the ESS is largely untested by the wider
ecumenical and academic audience is reason enough to forestall
its acceptance as a legitimate reading of Nicene theology, but
the initial evaluations are not promising. It is clear enough
that ESS is not simply a restatement of the historic Nicene
doctrine, but rather a very new doctrine based on a very modern
interpretation of the Bible and correlating with very established
social agenda. It is not part of the received wisdom of the
Christian tradition. It is a proposal of contemporary speculation
52 Lewis Ayres, “On Not Three People: The Fundamental Themes of Gregory of Nyssa’s Theology as Seen in To Ablabius: On Not Three Gods,” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 447.
30
that has yet to be approved by any except a very small and
unrepresentative group of evangelical theologians. One of the
major concerns about ESS is the distinction between functional
and ontological subordination. While it is true that the
incarnate Son in his earthly life was submissive to the Father,
the suggestion that this subordination extends to his eternal
exalted state suggests deep confusion about the immanent and
economic relations of the Trinity.53 Some critics have gone so
far as to argue that ESS is simply a new version of Arianism.54
It would not be the first time that a new doctrine was simply
another form of an old heresy. The verdict is still out, but the
53 Grudem argues that the Son and Spirit are “subordinate in their roles,” and that “these differences in role are not temporary but will last forever,” Grudem, Systematic Theology, 249. The notion that the relational patternspresent in the economy of salvation reflect the eternal and immanent relationsof the Trinity is profoundly mistaken. Karl Rahner famously observed that “the‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the‘economic’ Trinity,” in The Trinity, 22. However, theological language about the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity functions differently. Human relationships per se cannot imitate the immanent Trinity, although they can participate in the relations of the divine persons. To speak of cooperative relations and mutual submission among the persons of the Godhead, as ESS proponents and opponents do, seems to be a confusion of these theological categories.
54 Kevin Giles, Jesus and The Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 17-54; and Giles, The Trinity & Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God & the Contemporary Gender Debate (Downers Grove, Ill.:InterVarsity, 2002), 76-85. See also Bilezikan, “Hermeneutical Bungee-Jumping:Subordination in the Godhead;” and Phillip Cary, “The New Subordinationism: Reading Inequality Into the Trinity,” in Jowers and House, The New Evangelical Subordinationism?, 1-12.
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indications suggest that ESS is not consistent with the historic
and ecumenical consensus of the received tradition, and until
otherwise demonstrated it should be regarded as an unproven
supposition.55
The path for evangelicals seeking to retrieve the historic
trinitarian faith lies in a deep and sustained engagement with
the first five centuries of Christianity.56 This retrieval is
complicated by the fact that though evangelicals typically read
the Bible through a hermeneutical lens inherited from orthodoxy,
they also regard as unnecessary the post-apostolic tradition in
which these orthodox doctrines were worked out. One way of
correcting this lack of historical consciousness is by
emphasizing that the resurgence of trinitarian theology in the
twentieth century with its emphasis on the social relations of
55 For a balanced assessment of this issue of Nicene orthodoxy and ESS, see Keith E. Johnson, “Trinitarian Agency and the Eternal Subordination of theSon: An Augustinian Perspective,” in The New Evangelical Subordinationism?, 108-32. Agroup of evangelical theologians, including Aída Besançon Spencer, Mimi Haddad, Royce Gruenler, Kevin Giles, I. Howard Marshall, Alan Myatt, Millard Erickson, Steven Tracy, Alvera Mickelsen, Stanley Gundry, and Catherine Clark Kroeger have issued a document which warns that ESS ends up in tritheism, in “An Evangelical Statement on the Trinity,” accessed December 3, 2011, http://www.trinitystatement.com/wp-content/files/Trinity%20Statement%20Spencer.pdf.
56 D. H. Williams Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Williams, The Free Church and the Early Church: Bridging the Historical and Theological Divide (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
32
the three divine persons has its roots in both the biblical
narrative and patristic reflections.57 Will evangelicals listen
to the voices of ressourcement that reconnect them with the
trinitarian faith and practice of the historic church, or will
they pursue a way forward based on novel and eccentric
interpretations of the Bible? The time has come to decide.
57 Stephen R. Holmes, The Holy Trinity: Understanding God’s Life (Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2011).
33