The Equality and Subjection of the Son: An Introduction

The doctrine of the Trinity is what distinguishes the Christian God, the true God of the Bible, from that of generic theisms and conceptions even cruder among the pagans. Refuting anti-Trinitarian heresies and the more “peacetime” task of clarifying the mystery are not difficulties that went away after the early centuries of the church. The traditions of the Protestant Reformation also had to take up the charge.

In our own day the so-called Eternal Subordination of the Son (ESS hereafter) has caused no small controversy among Reformed theologians. The duty to reconcile Confession and Scripture is the same as ever. At the simplest level, we may recall Question 6 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “How many persons are there in the Godhead?” The answer is, “There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.” 1 John 5:7 and Matthew 28:20 are offered as proof texts. If we want to take more difficult texts into view—and the opponents of the doctrine certainly will, so that we ought to be ready—there is that passage in Paul, where he says, “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). What shall we do with this? It cannot be ignored or easily explained away.

This is the problem in a nutshell. We must reconcile the equality taught in our confessional statements and the subjection that is taught in a text like this. It will be quite insufficient to say, “Oh, but there are other texts that speak of equality, so that it is not as though we have the confession alone on one side and the Bible alone on the other.” That may be the popular way of looking at it. However, so long as there is a single verse of Scripture that seems to demonstrate a subjection of the Son to the Father, we need to have an account of it, so far as we are able. Such an explanation will need not only to show the flexibility with which the doctrine can handle both concepts, but it must rigorously deal exegetically with the passage. That will mean help from the commentaries, perhaps some reference to the Greek, and, as we shall see, an appreciation for the redemptive-historical arc in which Christ’s kingdom has two phases and one ultimate purpose. 

I will argue in the following pages that the subjection to the Father that is proper to Christ—whether in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 or beyond—refers to his humanity, through the God-glorifying design of his kingdom’s consummation. Yet even that is not the whole picture. As a corollary to this, it is proper to say this about the Son within a correct application of the communicatio idiomatum.

That case will proceed within the following structure: 1. Challenge: What the difficulties are. 2. Definition: What the confessional standards say. 3. Distinction: In what sense equal and in what sense proper? 4. Exegesis: Paul’s use of subjection resolved. 5. Polemics: Three objections against the resolution. 6. Practical: Experiential use of the resolution.   

Logical and Historical Challenges: What the Difficulties Are

In doctrinal controversy there is the surface disagreement and then there are usually a cluster of presuppositional differences that remain underneath that surface. Getting back under that surface to the presuppositions can often lead to a common field of understanding where otherwise the two sides would indefinitely be comparing apples and oranges. So it is when it comes to the objection that Trinitarian orthodoxy and texts like 1 Corinthians 15:28 contradict. That is, prima facie, they seem to contradict each other. However this is better called a paradox and not a contradiction, which really brings us to our first presuppositional matter. 

Lack of precision in logic has been a self-imposed thorn in the side for orthodox Trinitarians ever since the Enlightenment declared this doctrine “an offense to reason.” As with all things rationalistic, this assumed a very subjective redefinition of reason to “what presently makes sense to my reason.” The notion of “one God and three” or “one Person and three,” at the same time, in the mind of Enlightenment man, did not bother with the other half of the law of noncontradiction—in the same relation. The fact that Isaac Watts, who wrote his own textbook of logic, could not push past this surface thinking is one of the great mysteries in the history of theology [1].

I am not saying for a moment that the Trinity exhibits coherence in such a way as to chase away the realm of the mysterious, but rather that no aspect of its mystery renders the data which is revealed incoherent. We need to remember that the Deuteronomy 29:29 line is set between hidden things and revealed things, not incoherent non-things and perfectly sensible things. This is to misunderstand not only how logic relates to the doctrine, but perhaps even how the concept of mystery relates. Thus the Trinity is both logically consistent and infinitely mysterious. 

This is not the only challenge of course. There is also a historical objection. In this account, the doctrine of the Trinity was the ultimate example of Greek speculative categories imposing themselves on the otherwise simple text of the Bible.

Since the orthodox doctrine was defended both by the early church and by the Reformed tradition, we can note a double-barrelled version of the suspicion: Is our reconciliation of unity and subjection a case of Greek philosophizing, or Enlightenment systematizing? Or is it both? To get right to the point, we say that the orthodox doctrine was neither of these things. 

Historians of the early church would say it first had to do with worship. Citing Irenaeus’ rebuke of the Gnostics to stop profaning the cup, by failing to worship Christ as the Son of God in it, Wilken concludes, “One reason Christian thinking was so resolutely trinitarian is that from the beginning the language of Christian worship was unequivocally tripartite” [2]. First, there was the celebration of the living and present Christ; second, there was a “trinitiarian shape” to the narrative and memorial words of the ceremony.

Although Wilken appears to overgeneralize the contrast between the early and modern church on this point, he explains that, “In contrast to modern theological writings in which the Bible is cited in support of theological ideas, and hence usually relegated to the footnotes, in the early church the words of the Bible were the linguistic skeleton for the exposition of ideas. Even in the writings of the most philosophical of early Christian thinkers their thoughts are expressed in the language of the Bible, seldom above it” [3].

Arguably it had first to do with the clear biblical language, and “the central question” of how to reconcile the many ways in which Jesus is called “God” with the fact that there is only one God. Not to mention that the same early church “understood that [Christ’s] whole deity was essential to the accomplishment of the salvation of fallen humanity” [4]. In viewing Irenaeus’ reply to the Gnostics, Sanders notes that his summary of the rule of faith was in the order of the Trinity, so that “the true meaning of the words of Scripture in their ‘proper order and connection,’” according to Ireneaus, “is their Trinitarian meaning” [5].

At any rate, the burden of proof is on the critic to demonstrate, whether it is the logical or the historical case. From the standpoint of how the early church began reflecting on the Trinity as theology, Wilken suggests, the place to begin is with the resurrection [6]. If it was natural to consider the Trinity in God raising Jesus from the dead, and so forth, then we must regard that happening from the start. Hilary emphasizes the whole economy of the Trinity as foundational, but the resurrection as “the defining event in the economy” [7].

On one reading of Scripture, the advocate of ESS would seem to have resources in other texts as well. In answering the Arians of his day, Gregory of Naziansus was challenged with the submission of Christ’s will to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane. They would work this verse in tandem with John 6:38 and 14:28, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” and, what amounts to a stronger version of the same, “the Father is greater than I.” Wilken gives us the key to the Cappadocian father’s resolution to these: “Gregory had little interest in what the text says about Christ as a human being; what occupied his attention is what it says (or does not say) about the relation between the divine Son to the Father” [8]. Gregory did not deny that the human will was distinct, but wanted to stress the impossibility of the Son somehow not knowing that the cup the Father would give to him was fixed in the decree. 

We could put it like this. Matthew 26:39 stresses not the act of bringing into oneness, but the fact of the eternal oneness in the first place. Now whatever one thinks of Gregory’s exegesis of that Gospel passage, it makes for at least one indispensable piece of the doctrine. Maximus the Confessor took the view more directly opposed to the monotheletists: “in the one who has two natures there are two wills and two energies that conform to each nature” [9], so that in Gethsemane, “acting in freedom, Christ submitted to the will of God by conforming his human will wholly to God’s will” [10].

Coming full circle back to mystery, there is an additional burden. It arises from what I call the “fallacy of exhaustivism.” Very often an objection to a doctrine, no less than to the truthfulness of a biblical passage, really amounts to nothing more than the vice of curiosity setting itself up as an epistemological tyrant.

Even if we clear the obstacle of logical coherence, that still does not guarantee that we would know what a Trinity is “like,” and especially so since God himself says, “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One” (Isa. 40:25). It is natural to want to know what a thing is like so much, that to be frustrated in that purpose is to be fooled into cynicism about having encountered anything. We need to keep in mind that what is revealed in Scripture sets the boundaries for its communicative purposes. It may not have been Paul’s purpose, let alone the Holy Spirit’s purpose, for the words of 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 to provoke in us the desire to know the manner of the Son’s subjection to the Father. I say that not to stifle the quest, but only that it be properly channeled to receive from Scripture itself the boundaries of our available answers.   

The other extreme is a false location of mystery in Trinitarian reflection. Some may shun any Trinitarian reflection on the ground that the express words are not given. Here I am not speaking of the anti-Trinitarian who demands the word itself on the inspired page, but rather the orthodox Christian who, armed with the same impulse, would reduce any appeal to logical implication to “metaphysical speculation.” Sanders is very helpful here in distinguishing between “cognitive mysteriousness” and the redemptive historical concept of mysterion expression by Paul in places like Ephesians 1:9, 3:4 and 9. The doctrine of the Trinity belongs to the latter category.

Thus it is not that reason cannot understand precisely what God has revealed in Scripture, once he has revealed it, but that it only pleased him to do so in the economy of grace and that over time. Sanders adds that, “Cognitive mysteriousness is an aspect of God’s incomprehensibility, not his triunity” [11]. Apart from revelation, we could not have figured out the Trinity; but given revelation, we cannot say that it makes no sense. With that clarification on what the difficulties are and are not, we are ready to begin wrestling through how Trinitarian unity and subjection are brought together in the Confessional standards. 

Unity and Subjection in the Standards

Let us remember that the Standards cite the relevant biblical texts. This might be easy to forget when we use the contrasting language of Scripture versus the Confessions. Where the Westminster Confession of Faith (II.3), says, “In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost,” the proof texts cited are Matthew 3:16-17; 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14; 1 John 5:7 for the unity; John 1:14 and 18 for the Son being of the Father, yet the Father being of none; and then finally, John 15:26 and Galatians 4:6 for the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son. Now although there are ramifications for the economic Trinity in the distinctions made here, we should note that the statement itself does not go beyond the eternal relations. 

In addition to extensive use of Scripture, another point of contact for the confessional standards is how they draw back on classical Trinitarianism. Hyde observes that, “when we as Reformed churches make this [Trinitarian] confession we express our catholicity with Christ’s church in all times and places” [12]. The whole doctrine of God rediscovered in the Reformed confessions and catechisms has formed much of the renaissance in classical theology proper in recent years, and one of the most obvious features about the language is the bridge that it forms between the early church fathers, the medieval scholastics, and the Reformed. 

We see this first with the priority given to the unity of essence.

Contrary to the criticism of Augustinian Trinitarianism, the essence was given primacy to in order to establish what is common and not to marginalize what is proper. Augustine conceived of the indivisibility of substance and three persons in terms of divine simplicity: “For God it is not one thing be, another to be a person, but it is absolutely the same thing” [13].

So the essence has a priority of order, not because it is separable or more foundational, but as Mastricht says, “although the divine essence is equal to the three persons taken together, yet it is broader than each of them” [14]. We must not picture-think here. This “broadness” is a logical distinction between what is equal and what is proper, and not a real distinction between actual separable entities.

But no less than a classical conception of the Triunity, the Reformed documents show equal sophistication in terms of coherence with what is proper to the Persons. Support from the rest of the Westminster and Three Forms of Unity will show this. In spite of its noted brevity in other areas, the Belgic Confession has much to say about the Trinity. Article 8 defines the doctrine, Article 9 shows the manner of its demonstration, and Articles 10 and 11, in complete Nicaean fashion, apply this same truth to the particulars of the Son and the Holy Spirit. The distinction between essence and person is crystal clear: “one single essence, in which are three persons, really, truly, and eternally distinct according to their incommunicable properties” (Art. 8). Heidelberg Catechism Question 25 asks, “Since there is but one God, why do you speak of three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?” The answer is this: “Because that is how God revealed himself in his Word: these three distinct persons are one, true, eternal God.” Article 9 of the Belgic ends with the words that puts its stamp on the catholic doctrine: “Therefore, in this point, we do willingly receive the three creeds, namely, that of the Apostles, of Nicaea, and of Athanasius: likewise that, which, conformable thereunto, is agreed upon by the ancient fathers.”

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1. cf. Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 42.

2. Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 27

3. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 43.

4. Douglas Kelly, Systematic Theology: Volume One (Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2008), 449.

5. Sanders, The Triune God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 82.

6. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 85.

7. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 90.

8. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 123.

9. Maximus the Confessor, quoted in Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 129.

10. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 128.

11. Sanders, The Triune God, 42.

12. Daniel Hyde, With Heart and Mouth: An Exposition of the Belgic Confession (Grandville, MI: Reformed Fellowship Inc., 2008), 112.

13. Augustine, On the Trinity, VII.6.11.

14. Mastricht, TPT, II:503.