Evangelical Uses of the Trinity as an Archetype for Gender (Part Three): Ontology and Function

This concept of the distinction of persons leads directly into another discussion that the Egalitarians bring up in regards to the (historical) orthodoxy of EFS: can one differentiate function and ontology in God?  The EFS argument is of course that they are not Arians because they do not subordinate the son ontologically, merely functionally.  However from a historical and theological perspective, this may not be as easy a distinction to maintain as the EFS proponents would want.  We can put an initial objection made very powerfully by Giles up front: “This conservative evangelical emphasis on divine differentiation,” predicated on an eternal gradation of authority, “has ontological implications.  The Son is the subordinated Son; he does not simply function subordinately or freely choose subordination for a period of time.  His subordination is eternal, and it defines his person.”[1]

This argument is powerful for a number of reasons, not least of which is drawing attention to the basic ambiguity that lay in the distinction “ontology” and “function” when the adjective “eternal” gets involved.  First, Giles’ argument seems to take the EFS Complementarian argument of person-constituting power relations very seriously, only to turn that supposition against itself.  This appears to be confronting an interesting decision-tree type dilemma.  If, as Grudem says, power/authority structure must be present to avoid modalism (something Letham affirms as well, as we have seen) then Giles’ accusation seems to have quite a bit of weight: the Son is the subordinate one.  There could not have been even a “logical” moment when a non-subordinate Son subordinated Himself willingly to the Father—because no such son could have existed per the logic that authoritarian or hierarchical structures must exist to define the relations themselves.  Thus contra the occasional EFS concession: this could not be a “free” or volitional genuflection of Son to the Father.  Any type of modal logic which could claim any “contrariwise” action of this logically-not-yet-eternally-functionally-subordinate son is rendered null at the outset.  The possibility of an “otherwise” is not even a logical possibility.  Ergo this subordination is what the Son is. Despite claims to the contrary, that this is a functional, not ontological, subordination, it is hard to see exactly what content that distinction can enumerate for Grudem, or any of the holders of EFS.

Two: the fuzziness of the line between ontological subordination, as opposed to eternal functional subordination, is unfortunately increased, and not decreased, if we look at how EFS is described by some of its proponents.  George Knight III, from whom many EFS proponents rely, especially as mediated through Grudem, himself wrote that the eternal subordination of the son has “certain ontological aspects.”[2]  Robert Doyle, ironically in a review of Giles book, writes: “The Father is a ‘real’ Father, and the Son is a ‘real’ Son.  Neither name is metaphorical…” and he says he cannot see, when describing these differences, how words “like ‘essence’, ‘being,’ ‘eternal nature,’” could be avoided.[3]  The 1999 synod of the Sydney Anglican Diocese, which accepted as an institution a form of EFS, writes “the obedience of the Son to the Father reflects the essence of the eternal relationship between them…[such subordination] arises from the very nature of his being as Son…”[4]  Or again, Norman Geisler also contributes to the fudging of the line: “All members of the trinity are equal, but they do not have the same roles…this functional subordination in the Godhead is not just temporal and economical: it is essential and eternal.”[5]  We must be charitable here, and perhaps “essential” is a sort of mimicking of Hebrew parallelism, merely repeating what is meant in “eternal.”  Obviously Geisler, and the others, do not want to affirm Arianism.  This does not seem to mitigate the charge though: if eternal and essential can overlap to this degree, what then of the distinction between function and ontology?  The strange slip of adjectives seems to at least reiterate that the real difference between eternal functional subordination and ontological subordination is not completely clear. 

Third, and finally, what we have again is a breaking of traditional Trinitarian categories.  While certainly a case can be made against the tradition in one way or another, EFS proponents say that they are in line with the tradition on the ontology/function distinction.  But this is not the case.  The Patristic historian Michel René Barnes for example, recently published a monograph length treatment and elaboration of the claim that all pro-Nicene theologians held that “the Father and the Son have the one power [because] they have one and the same nature.”[6]  Other recent Patristic scholars agree.[7]  A basic and powerful pro-Nicene argument for the co-equality of son and father is that they do the same things.  Act presupposes power; power presupposes capacity; capacity presupposes nature.[8] 

In fact it is often overlooked that the logic of Arianism, though famous for ontological subordinationism, actually came to the conclusions of ontological subordination based upon an emphasis on (what was read as) the Son’s diminutive functions.  Nor, it seems, can this relation between function and ontology be dismissed as a now antiquated theological device.  Works such as Richard Bauckham’s God Crucified call into question Biblical scholarship that relies on such functional/ontic distinctions to understand Christ and New Testament Christology; rather Jesus is God, and we know this because of the functions He performs.  There is only an aspectual or virtual distinction between function and power, not an actual one.[9]  This judgment is not at this juncture meant to decide the issue one way or another.  However it should be read as a challenge to adherents of ESF: if this distinction is valid, it should name something other than an empty set.  What, if anything, is the difference between eternal-functional and ontological subordination?  This is a question for future research.

A final point on function and ontology needs to be raised as well.  ESF’s concept of functional subordination seems to imply a distinction of wills between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Son must submit His will to the Father (and presumably by extension the Holy Spirit must do likewise).  This is again a break from the tradition.  And this is mentioned not for the sake of being a traditionalist stalwart.  It has systematic consequences.  It was consistently argued throughout the tradition, from the Patristic theologians up through Reformation theology, that the three have one will.  Why is this important?  It reinforces monotheistic unity: the only distinctions of the three are the relative relations of origin.  All other attributes are equally and identically shared.  This means, by logical extension that Will, as an attribute, is a function of God’s communal-yet-single substance, not the hypostasis.  Predicating “Will” to the hypostasis substantially differentiates them—i.e. it causes tritheism by allowing a substantial, and not merely relative, difference to differentiate the persons. 

Indeed the entire (and somewhat univocal) picture of a command-obedience structure does not do justice to a truly theological envisioning of God.  Take Augustine’s explanation for example: “the father and son have one will and are indivisible in their working…[Then] in what manner did the father send his son?...did he give an order?...Whichever way it was done, it was certainly done by word.  But God’s Word is his son.  So when the father sent him by word, what happened was he was sent by his father and his word.  Hence it is by the father and the son that the son was sent, because the son is the father’s word.”[10]  According to Augustine’s logic (and the pro-Nicene’s logic generally) there can be no univocal and discrete command-obedience structure in the Godhead without degenerating into polytheism.  This, again, is not merely a theological obscurantism invading the clear text of scripture. It arguably makes more sense of such statements as John 10:18: “No one takes [my life from me], I lay it down of my own accord.”  While simultaneously accounting for seemingly contrary statements like John 5:19: “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by Himself, He can only do what He sees His Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son does also.”  Nor is it, in Letham’s words, the result of the “feminization of God,”[11] unless one were so daring (and anachronistic) to level that accusation at Augustine himself.

               If Jesus has the authority to give himself; and yet also in giving himself does nothing he does not see His father do—this has to mean theologically that in having the authority to give himself, Christ gives himself as He sees the Father give himself.  And this refracts again, into the fact that if the Father gives himself to the son so that the son can give himself as he sees the father give, that no discrete, univocal command structure could possibly intervene as a hermeneutic reconciling these divergent passages without fragmenting God’s being. Christ’s obedience, so vaunted by the EFS party, is itself nothing other than the obedience and self-giving of the Father reflected in the Son.  For Christ can do nothing that he has not seen the Father do. Augustine brilliantly allows us to see that these two apparently contrary texts are actually the working of a single monotheistic-trinitarian logic.  EFS, by denying this route, thus seems to veer towards “social trinitarianism”[12] at best, tritheism at worst.

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[1] Giles, Jesus and the Father, 210.

[2] Knight, New Testament Teaching, 56.

[3] Robert Doyle, “Are We Heretics? A Review of The Trinity and Subordinationism by Kevin Giles,” The Briefing (April, 2004): 11-19. 

[4] As quoted in Giles, Jesus and the Father, 25.

[5] Geisler, Systematic Theology, vol.2: 290-291.

[6] Michel René Barnes, The Power of God: DunamiV in Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology (Washington D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2001), 13.

[7] C.f. Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. 273-302; Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), who makes this an essential heuristic category to differentiate pro-Nicenes and their “subordinationist” opponents.

[8] At this point of course the EFS proponent could retort: we believe the Son is equal ontologically to the Father and hence does have the capacity to act as the Father does.  Yet as we saw above when one follows the logic of the authority-constituted character of personhood and relation, this is precisely not the case.  The Son does not have such capacity given the EFS presuppositions themselves.  There is not even the possibility of a logically counterfactual “moment” in which such a plenipotential son “submits” to the Father; and a fortiori there is no possibility that the Son could at any moment “after” this submission then reassert omnipotence.  Nor is the EFS position the same as to assert the traditional doctrine of taxis as we will see momentarily.  The possible rebuttal: no, we simply mean that the son as omnipotent is always exercising omnipotence as the Son of the Father.  Yet the truth of this does not amount to a confirmation of the EFS claim.

[9] Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2008), esp. 1-60.

[10] St. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991), II.ii.9 (103).

[11] Letham, Holy Trinity, 392.

[12] Obviously “social trinitarianism’ itself has been positively taken up by many proponents so this in itself is not an irrational position.  For a fairly exhaustive overview see: Thomas H. McCall, Whose Trinity, Which Monotheism?: Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2010), 11-56.;  For what its worth many theologians have rallied against it, and insofar as EFS is Socially Trinitarian, it may fall under the weight of general critiques.  C.f.: Sarah Coakley, “’Persons’ in the ‘Social Doctrine,’ of the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytic Discussions,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium eds. Stephen Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 123-145; Brian Leftow, “Anti-Social Trinitarianism,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, 203-251; Mark Husbands, “The Trinity is Not Our Social Program: Volf, Gregory of Nyssa, and Barth,” in Trinitarian Theology for the Church: Scripture, Community, Worship eds. Daniel Treier and Jacob K. Lauber (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 120-142; Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems With the Social Doctrine of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81 (2000): 432-445.