Eternal Subordination 
 of the Son 

You would not expect people to project political squabbles onto the heavenlies, but the notion of the eternal subordination or eternal submission of the Son travels just that circuit. When there arose a conflict in evangelical circles between Complementarianism and Egalitarianism, some people thought it would be helpful to portray Jesus as the eternally obedient Son. This, they thought, would make the point that women can be called to obey in marriage without being inherently lesser than men, because no one who credits the creeds of the church thinks that Jesus, the Son, is lesser than the Father:

Wayne Grudem

Wayne Grudem, a theologian who lives in Phoenix, Arizona and has written a Systematic Theology, postulated "ontological equality but economic subordination," on the fairly bizarre grounds that otherwise Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could not have been distinct from one another in eternity past:

"If we do not have economic subordination, then there is no inherent difference in the way the three persons relate to one another, and consequently we do not have the three distinct persons existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for all eternity. For example, if the Son is not eternally subordinate to the Father in role, then the Father is not eternally 'Father' and the Son is not eternally 'Son.' This would mean that the Trinity has not eternally existed." (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, 251).

In other words, if Mr. Grudem had not come to the rescue with eternal subordination, then prior to the incarnation, God would have to have been as the modalists imagine Him to be, undifferentiated as to person. Notice he is already equating paternity and filiation with authority and subordination. In fact, this author, who previously denied the eternal generation of the Son, seems to have accepted it contingent upon redefining it as eternal authority/submission.

He does also align the Father with the husband and the Son with the wife:

"The husband's role is parallel to that of God the Father and the 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." (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, 257).

This author seems to be the one who broke the ice on this teaching in the present day.

The Bible

What saith the scriptures? The notion that the Son obeys the Father is certainly not absent from scripture:

But what wills are in question here? Two divine wills, or a human and a divine will? That Jesus has two wills is called dyothelitism. It's what the orthodox teach; monothelitism is considered a heresy. Being both complete man and complete God, He has a human will and a divine will. Following the rubric, what was not assumed was not saved, how could the human will have been cleansed of its propensity to sin if Jesus never took on a human will? Not to say the two wills are discordant, but they are not identical in definition. God, as such, has one will.

Learning Experience

The letter to Hebrews explains that Christ learned obedience, from His experiences in the incarnation. "Though" He was a Son: not because He was a Son, but "though" He was a Son, in spite of His organic position in the household, He learned obedience:

If, as some people think, Christ had been obedient from eternity past, and indeed could not be otherwise, you would think He'd be a past master at obedience and would not need to learn any such skill at all. Yet the Bible says He learned obedience, at the time of the incarnation. What were the vehement cries? Perhaps like this:

Form of a Servant

Letting scripture exegete scripture, we discover that there's been ups and downs in the history of the Son. His history has not been a steady state, but rather a roller coaster ride, from the heights down to the depths, and then back up to the heights:

This is one way of looking at the matter of Jesus' obedience to the Father's will. He is not, by nature and birthright, a slave. And yet He became a slave; He took on our nature, servile and inferior as it is. To claim that He had no choice in the matter, or that this is just what He is, is distinctly unscriptural and unhelpful, because that's just not what the Bible says about it:

Gender Fluid

As it stands, this seems like a fairly minor misunderstanding.  It gets worse, though. Heresy does have a tendency to do that; it snowballs. Douglas Wilson, who leads Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, has an elaborate theory of gender relations. Gender is defined by function. It is not a given, not to this author, but rather is a description of the subject's behavior. Authority he equates to masculinity, submission to femininity. Uh-oh, combine our prior authors' concept of Jesus' eternal submission with this author's sexual politics, and you get this:

. . .the feminine Jesus. Back to the drawing board, right? No, that is not what heretics do. They double down. Douglas Wilson is committed to the idea that hierarchy is God's design for human society, that he retrojects it into God's own nature. The Trinity itself must become a hierarchy. The Bible narrative defeats his purposes; God liberates Israel from slavery in Egypt. He does not reinforce the hierarchical character of Egyptian society but upends it. So where is the hierarchy which this heresiarch believes is the fundamental pattern of human life? Got to be in God, otherwise you'll have to look for it in Babylon.

Readers of Dan Brown will recall his 'hieros gamos,' sacred marriage. Yahweh, he imagined, had a female consort. But even this imaginative novelist never posited that it was a same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has decided that men can marry men. But in none of the 50 states can a father legally marry his own son; that's incest. This doorway should have been bricked over with cinderblocks; even the pagans don't go there.

Mighty God

If we go back to the beginning, to first principles, the word 'El,' sometimes used of God, "And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God [El]." (Genesis 14:18), seems to come out of a matrix of meaning 'strength, power, might.' In other words, God is He who excels in strength, power, might. Who has ever heard of an eternally subservient God? Submission is for man, power, might, and rule for God. If you approach a Muslim and say, 'we believe that God the Father is eternally in authority, whereas the Son is eternally submissive, could they disagree? They do not like to use the vocabulary of 'Father' and 'Son,' but they would agree in placing Jesus over on our side of the human/divine divide. Man submits, God rules.

Douglas Wilson is a great believer in the power of a pro forma disclaimer to make everything right. Readers of his Neoconfederate writings will recall that he vigorously supports the Confederacy; he goes so far as to say they were in the right about the legal and political issues surrounding that war. If you read Alexander Stephens' 'Cornerstone' speech, you discover that the Confederates were, not conservatives who thought they were retaining an existing form of government, but rather revolutionaries who fully realized they were bringing something new into the world. That new thing was white supremacy. This was the first government instituted among men that was based on the understanding that the Black race was inferior to the white; so said Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy. Realizing this, some people say Mr. Wilson must be a racist; thy else would he go out of his way to support such a government? This he vigorously denies; indeed, he even hollers that he is being slandered. Why? Because he will tell you, straight out, that he despises racism.

In this case, the pro forma disclaimer is to say that the quality being ascribed to the Son and not to the Father, namely obedience, pertains to the mode of subsistence of the Son. In his mind, you can say anything at all about one of the persons of the Trinity, and it will be OK, provided only you issue this disclaimer, that you are talking about that person's mode of subsistence, not essence. But this cannot be right. Take the predicate, 'is not God;' can the predicate 'is not God' be attached to the Son, while retaining Nicene orthodoxy? Of course not; if you say 'the Son is not God,' you are outside the faith.

There may be few evangelicals who would be so bold as to say outright that Jesus is not God. But you can say that effectually. Look at the attributes, 'is weak,' or 'is stupid.' If someone says, 'the Son is weak,' or 'the Son is stupid,' is he affirming or denying the deity of the Son? It seems that he is effectually denying it, because it is altogether alien to the divine nature to say that God is weak or God is stupid. These statements are wrong, perhaps even blasphemous.

So take 'eternally subservient.' Is this closer to 'is weak,' or is it closer to 'filiation,' a concept where we cannot perceive any obvious tie to the divine nature, but because it is ascribed to the Son in scripture, we talk about it? Certainly when you see a doxology, you expect to see references to power and authority: "You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created." (Revelation 4:11); "For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen." (Matthew 6:13). You do not expect to see, in such a context, 'follows instructions well.'

But is it possible that this is actually a divine attribute, only an unfamiliar one? Consider the case of 'begotten.' Jesus, we know, is the only-begotten Son. Some people, like Arius, reason from that to say, 'begotten must mean He had a beginning in time.' After all, all finite creatures which are begotten come into existence when they are begotten. But this cannot be true of God, because God is He who cannot not be. So we understand it to mean in this case 'eternal generation,' a reference to an everlasting relation, not otherwise familiar to us. But submission is very familiar to us, and it is not what God does. The best description of this new theology is Semi-Arianism, because God the Father is assigned a more complete set of divine attributes than is God the Son, including such perennial favorites as 'power' and 'might' and 'authority.' But does scripture insist on 'obedient,' as it does 'begotten'? In connection with the incarnation, following upon His divine condescension. That is how it is explained in scripture, not that His existence is obedience or that He was subservient in eternity past.

To say, 'This empoyee always shows up to work on time, and follows instructions,' does not so much sound like the kind of  thing you would be hymning God for in a doxology, but rather the kind of thing you would say to a long-term employee at Wendy's. Are we talking about God at all? Why would you talk this way about God? Are we on track with the Athanasian creed's "not three almighties" if one or two are not only not almighty, but seem to lack independent agency? In what sense is one who can only follow instructions "almighty"? If it were not a cultural convention to assent to the Trinity, would someone who held views of this sort ever have said spontaneously that they believe Jesus to be God? If the Trinity is one alpha eternally attended and assisted by two betas, that is not the orthodox understanding at all. Or how is one who can only and ever obey equal to the one who commands?

And if they say, what difference can obedience/submission make, given that there is only one will in God, that is certainly true, but what then becomes of their analogy with the case of husband and wife, where there are two wills? That was the whole reason these do-it-yourselfers started tinkering with the Trinity in the first place. According to their reasoning, the Father is the husband and the Son is the wife. Hmm. In which of the 50 states is it legal for a man to marry his own son? What a distressingly weird analogy, if, as one hopes, it is ony meant as an analogy.

The Bible says, of God, that He does as He pleases: "But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased." (Psalm 115:3).

"Whatsoever the LORD pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and all deep places." (Psalm 135:6).

So: the Bible says that God does as He pleases, and the same Bible says that Jesus is God. There are theologies which assign to the Son a shorter list of divine attributes than are held by the Father; the Jehovah's Witnesses come to mind. If God does as He pleases, but Jesus' existence is endless submission, is Jesus even God, as Christians believe?

However one would categorize 'doing as one pleases,' without fear of external hindrance, as omnipotence, or aseity, it would seem to be an essential attribute of deity. Yet Mr. Wilson says Jesus does not have it. A Muslim will tell you, humanity submits. God is the one to whom submission is made. Where does eternal submission leave Jesus? Over on our side of the line, not God-side. But He must be God-side.

The 'patriarchs' of Moscow, Idaho are so entrenched in their misogyny that they do not want the husband to say to his wife, 'Would you please make me a sandwich.' No, he must say, 'Make me a sandwich.' (Women were put on earth to make sandwiches; so said Paul, who never saw a sandwich.) Courtesy is effeminate, you see. Yet they make the second person of the Trinity to be the wife, God the Father to be the husband. There is no suggestion of this anywhere in scripture. They despise women, whom they consign to perpetual servitude and obedience. Then they make Jesus, the mighty god, a woman. In their vocabulary: "...femininity is submission, obedience, gratitude, and responsiveness." (Douglas Wilson, For Glory and a Covering, pp. 41-44). And their Jesus is perpetually subservient, not by choice; it can't be otherwise. It gets weirder and weirder.

Who is Douglas Wilson? He came to prominence as the champion of the Neoconfederates, who think the wrong side won the Civil War. Slavery, you see, wasn't so bad after all; shame on you for thinking it was. From what I can gather, many of his own followers are balking at following him in this new, gender-bending direction:

Origin

The name for Douglas Wilson's new heresy is Semi-Arianism. But it's not new. It may well have been almost common in the earliest era of the church. Some of the early church authors seem to believe that God the Father is God in a fuller sense than is the Son, that He has a more complete set of the divine attributes. Protestants will generally say that the Trinity is a Biblical doctrine, given that all the components of this doctrine are found in scripture, which does not however contain any summary statement of the doctrine. Catholics,  atheists, and liberals, by contrast, may say that the doctrine was first enunciated at Nicaea and was a new thing. The historical fact that some pre-Nicene figures are a bid wobbly on the finer points of the doctrine may strike people of this tendency as substantiation for their view.

Certainly Arius thought so; he cited many of these authors in support of his claims. But he did not do so fairly. Personally I don't think it is fair to accuse anyone of doctrinal non-conformity merely because they quote scripture. Some of these writers cite Proverbs 8:22, in the Septuagint, as "The Lord made me the beginning of his ways for his works," (Proverbs 8:22 Brenton Septuagint). But if they understand we are discussing God, they might well understand this cannot mean 'created,' in the sense of bringing something new into being; they would rather understand it to mean 'ordained' or 'established' (the Hebrew is 'possessed.') Yet some of these authors plainly do perceive the Trinity to be a ranked hierarchy. Where did this idea come from? The Bible clearly says, ". . .that all should honor the Son just as they honor the Father." (John 5:23). Equal honor implies equality. Why did they not see this? Where did any contrary idea come from?

My own personal theory is that this ranked, ordered trinity comes from Philo Judaeus, an unbelieving Jewish author of the period. If a new believer in Christ went into a bookstore in those days (and they did have bookstores, don't let anyone tell you they did not), and said, 'I just joined a new sect, Christianity, but I'm having a hard time following the theology. I don't understand the terminology. What is the logos? Who is the holy spirit?' The sympathetic book-seller would explain, 'I have just the thing. Philo Judaeus' voluminous writings contain the closest to a Jewish systematic theology that you will find in today's book market.' How does Philo understand Abraham's three visitors at Mamre? Maybe not like you would expect:

Maybe not what you were expecting.

“The things which are expressed by the voice are the signs of those things which are conceived in the mind alone; when, therefore, the soul is shone upon by God as if at noonday, and when it is wholly and entirely filled with that light which is appreciable only by the intellect, and by being wholly surrounded with its brilliancy is free from all shade or darkness, it then perceives a threefold image of one subject, one image of the living God, and others of the other two, as if they were shadows irradiated by it. And some such thing as this happens to those who dwell in that light which is perceptible by the outward senses, for whether people are standing still or in motion, there is often a double shadow falling from them.” (Philo Judaeus, On Abraham, A Treatise on the Life of the Wise Man  Made Perfect by Instruction, or, on the Unwritten Law, that is to say, on Abraham, Chapters XXIV-XXV).

The thing is, on his best day, Philo Judaeus is a Semi-Arian. On his worst day he's an Arian. He did understand that God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He did not understand these three are co-equal. Philo does seem to have been an influence on these authors; they sometimes use his terminology and his conceptual framework. This extraneous influence, I would expect, acted to depress Christian theology until they had the means and the numbers to enact their own systematic theology. It's scarcely Philo's fault; he wasn't even a Christian! The fair-minded reader would rather marvel at how much he did know, having nothing to go by but the Old Testament, rather than chide him for what he did not understand, having no acquaintance with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. And, no, he did not get it from Plato, because Plato was a pagan, not a trinitarian.

Some of these early church authors will understand a verse like John 14:28 as referring to the situation in eternity, arguing that the Father's dignity as origin makes Him greater than the Son. It is actually better not to follow them there. While not all the 'sender-sent' verses refer to the incarnation, most of them do, and those outside that paradigm, like "He sent His word and healed them," (Psalm 107:20), are probably more productively viewed as foreshadowings of the incarnation to come rather than as a stand-alone phenomenon.

Modern evangelical: 'Wouldn't it be great if we had in our hands a volume of systematic theology from the first century A.D.!' Um, we do. 'You don't mean Philo, do you? Not him! Anybody but him!' Why evangelicals are so prejudiced against Philo I couldn't say, but it is helpful to realize there were pressures acting upon the first generations of Christian writers, including probably a desire to conform their theology to what they would have thought was the best available Jewish theology of the day. If we do not read Philo, we will not be able to detect, and eliminate, his foreign and alien influence where it does occur. And Philo's Jewish theology was the best, only not quite good enough. Let's do better, and get rid of sacred marriage while we're at it; Philo at least is innocent of that atrocity.