The Lord Jesus says the following words in John 6:38: “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me.” Although the Him in this verse is not explicitly stated, it is clearly the Father. Similarly, in the garden of Gethsemane, He prayed: “Father…not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).
In the famous early hymn that Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippians, the apostle records that Christ became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” It is hard to understand how this obedience could be attributed to anyone else but the Father, who sent the Son for the express purpose of vicarious redemption. Finally, and perhaps most incredibly for Christians, Jesus says in John 14:28: “You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.” It would appear, on its face, that Jesus is making an absolute claim about His own submission––if not in fact His lower status––to God the Father.
The eternal functional subordination of the Son (EFS)
On the basis of these verses, and others, a certain view about the relationship of the Son to the Father has arisen in evangelical circles in recent decades. The idea that the Son is eternally functionally subordinate to the Father (while maintaining full equality within the Trinity) is a doctrine that became controversial and heavily debated in the evangelical blogosphere around 2016, and it continues on to this day (though it has died down somewhat). Tied into the debate is the whole complementarian-egalitarian discussion, with some complementarians arguing that marriage provides a kind of biblical analogy to the inner workings of the Trinity. That is to say, Scripture describes man and woman as being fully equal and made in the image of God, yet certain roles and levels of authority are assigned to each. The husband has a leadership role while the wife has a role of submission, even though both are equal in all respects.
One of the leading current evangelical advocates for this view is Bruce Ware, professor of theology at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. In his book, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Reference, he explains, “The Father is, in his position and authority, supreme among the Persons of the Godhead” (p. 46). The way this works out within the Trinity and Creation is as follows: “It is the Father, then, who is supreme in the Godhead—in the triune relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and supreme over all the very creation over which the Son reigns as its Lord” (pp. 50–51). As such, by virtue of his position and authority, “[t]he Father is supreme over all, and in particular, he is supreme within the Godhead as the highest in authority and the one deserving of ultimate praise” (ibid.).
Another leading voice for the eternal functional subordination view (hereafter, EFS) is respected systematic theologian Wayne Grudem, whose best-selling Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine has been perhaps the most popular and accessible evangelical textbook for over a generation now.
He states on page 250:
“The role of commanding, directing, and sending is appropriate to the position of the Father, after whom all human fatherhood is patterned (Eph. 3:14–15). And the role of obeying, going as the Father sends, and revealing God to us is appropriate to the role of the Son, who is also called the Word of God (cf. John 1:1–5, 14, 18; 17:4; Phil. 2:5–11). These roles could not have been reversed or the Father would have ceased to be the Father and the Son would have ceased to be the Son. And by analogy from that relationship, we may conclude that the role of the Holy Spirit is similarly one that was appropriate to the relationship he had with the Father and the Son before the world was created.”
Establishing trinitarian concepts
After having presented these quotations to you the reader (likely a former Seventh-day Adventist like me), I think a fairly natural response might be the sense that something is a little off here (even though you may not be able to quite put a finger on it). At the same time, the Scriptural citations I provided at the outset need to be fully understood and appreciated, it would seem. What does it mean exactly for the Son to submit to the Father?
To examine this idea we need a refresher on our trinitarian theology. Orthodox Christianity teaches that God is one (recall the famous Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4–9 that Jews throughout millennia have recited: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”). He is “without body, parts, or passions” as the Westminster Confession of Faith states. That is to say, he is an unidivided spirit (John 4:24), unchanging (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17), incorporeal (1 Timothy 1:17)––i.e., not composed of contingent, changing matter like created things are. Yet at the same time, the Bible distinguishes three persons who each are named as the one true God, act as God, and receive worship as the one true God: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. These three persons are not three different states or sides of a coin, as it were, but exist eternal and necessarily.
Whenever we discuss the Trinity and employ language to describe it, we ought to tread with great caution and reverence. This caution is true in the case of our usage of the word person. In modern parlance, the term “person” is used to denote an individual with a distinct center of consciousness. Yet that is not how we ought to conceive of the the three persons of the Trinity. The Adventist pioneers, in rejecting the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, did so on the very grounds that they viewed “God and his Son Jesus Christ” as having distinct personalities as James White infamously said: “Here we might mention the Trinity, which does away the personality of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ” (James White, Review & Herald, vol. 7, no. 11). James White therefore accused trinitarians of being “spiritualizers” who have “disposed of or denied the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (The Day Star, January 24, 1846).
When we examine church history and the origins of the theological word “person” we learn that the early church fathers in the West (who spoke Latin) adopted the term persona as the equivalent of the Eastern church’s Greek term hypostasis. What does the word hypostasis mean?
As the Greek fathers defined it, the term hypostasis denotes an individual instance of the one essence of God. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are each individual instantiations of the one, true, undivided God. As you might sense, language fails us as we struggle to describe God as He truly is. But a group of early church writers known as the Cappadocian fathers looked to Scripture and found a way of conceptualizing the three persons or hypostases of the one true God. This is how they explained it.
The primary way to distinguish Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is in terms of their relations. God the Father as Father is unbegotten, the Son as Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Spirit as Spirit eternally proceeds from both the Father and the Son (the medieval church later understood from Scripture that the Spirit not only proceeds from the Father, but also the Son). These relations should not be thought of as single occurrences in time or space, but rather eternal and permanent and necessary.
Understanding the will of Jesus Christ
With this background discussion, we can address the specific question of Jesus’ obedience to the Father. Another term that theologians use when describing the incarnation of the Son of God is the hypostatic union. What is meant by this concept is the idea that Jesus, in becoming man, did not surrender his deity, but rather added onto His intrinsic divine nature the nature of mankind. The implications of this singularity stretch our imagination. When he was a helpless baby in Mary’s arms, he was simultaneously upholding the universe. While it is true that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, it is equally true and important to affirm that Jesus the God-man raised Himself (an ability that he directly claimed for himself in John 10:18). One of the implications of this reality is that Jesus Christ had a fully human nature (body + spirit), but also a human will. Correspondingly, the Son retained his own divine nature and divine will.
The early church taught and believed that will was a property of the one true undivided God. Since God has a single nature, it follows from this that He has a single will. By contrast, professor Bruce Ware expresses a different understanding in a 2011 book review: “I agree that the Trinity is most clearly understood when the Persons of the Godhead are seen as distinct centers of consciousness and will. How one would understand the eternal relatedness within the Godhead if this were not the case certainly is difficult to conceive.”
So how should we adjudicate this issue from Scripture? One way of gaining insight here is looking at how Scripture describes and portrays Jesus. Consider, for example, the question of temptation. Scripture directly teaches that God by His very nature cannot be tempted by sin (James 1:13), yet at the same time, it states that our Lord Jesus was “tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). We know, of course, that Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, and we should therefore conclude that this temptation (never a sinful temptation, it must be noted) was exerted upon the human will of Christ.
Another example is the curious statement in Matthew 24:36: “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” If we want to avoid the serious problem of denying the Son omniscience (something that God necessarily possesses!) we must similarily conclude that Jesus had both a human will and a divine will. When speaking in this way, Jesus was speaking from His human nature, and not His divine nature.
When we then turn to the question of Christ’s obedient will to the Father, we must likewise always bear in mind the distinction between the human will of Christ and His divine will. The church father Gregory of Nazianzus expressed this quite profoundly: “In his character of the Word he was neither obedient nor disobedient…But, in the character of the form of a servant, he condescends to his fellow servants, nay, to his servants, and takes upon himself a strange form” (Oration 28.6). Gregory of Nazianzus’ use of the theological term “Word” of course is a reference to John 1. We are talking about God here, who cannot be properly said to be obedient to anyone or anything! Isn’t it amazing that John 1:1 evokes Genesis 1:1 but stunningly begins with “In the beginning was the Word…” It doesn’t say, “In the beginning was the Father”, but rather places the Son there.
Jesus’ human obedience to His Father is critical for us as believers. Just as his death was a death according to His humanity and on our behalf, so also His lived-out obedience to the Father was an obedience according to His humanity and on our behalf. The perfect obedient death and perfect and obedient life of the man Jesus Christ are credited to us who believe in Jesus Christ. For this reason, Jesus had to become human in order to live the life that we could not and die the death that we deserved. At the very same time, the one who is saving us is very “God of God,” as the Nicene creed puts it. In Isaiah 43:11, the LORD boldly proclaims: “I, I am the LORD, and besides me there is no savior.” Because of this, when 1 Corinthians 15:28 describes the subjection of the Son to God “that God may be all in all” it is extremely important to distinguish which nature Paul is referring to. When at the beginning of the verse, Paul states that “all things are subjected to Him” (namely the Son), he is clearly referring to the historical result of the incarnation. As God, there was never any need to anything to be subjected to the Son––He has always been sovereign over creation. Rather, in due time, all things will finally be subjected to the faithful second Adam, Jesus Christ, our representative…so that God may be all in all.
By contrast, Bruce Ware seems to introduce fairly significant distinctions between the Father and the Son. According to him, “The Father, then, is the one who has designed and willed and purposed everything in all of creation” (p. 53). Nevertheless, the Father “chooses to do his work in many cases through the Son and through the Spirit rather than unilaterally” (p. 55). It seems, then, that the Son’s participation in Creation is almost optional.
We ought to pause and think very carefully as former Adventists here, since we came from a church which presented a Jesus who had been “exalted” by God the Father (provoking jealousy in Lucifer). Let me be completely clear: I do not believe that either Bruce Ware or Wayne Grudem have an anti-trinitarian agenda, and much of their work has been of great benefit to the evangelical church. Nevertheless, it seems that some of the implications of their theology could have potentially troubling consequences if not examined critically.
Lessons for former Seventh-day Adventists
The Seventh-day Adventist church was founded as a Restorationist movement. Its leaders professed to “get back” to the early apostolic church and side-step church history. While it claimed to do so, in fact its doctrines were anything but apostolic. As Christians we need to test all things by Scripture, yet also understand that we are part of a long line of men and women whom God has raised to edify the church. Theology was not born with us, and we would be wise to listen to the voice of Christians in centuries past, who studied the Word of God in earnest. No church creed is infallible, and no teacher of Scripture is without error, yet we should not thereby imitate the mistake of the Seventh-day Adventist pioneers, who boasted that they had no creed but the Bible and then proceeded to fall straight into heresy (in direct contradiction to Scripture).
At the very heart of biblical trinitarianism is the vital need to rightly understand who Jesus Christ is. Scripture portrays Him as God in the flesh (Colossians 2:9), one with the Father (John 10:30), yet fully and completely human, with a human nature and a human will (1 John 4:2). Jesus created the universe, and yet he ate broiled fish with His disciples. Jesus has always been, and yet Jesus truly died. Jesus was raised by the Father, and yet He raised Himself. And for us there is only one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ (1 Timothy 2:5). The eternal Son took on flesh and was completely obedient to God in both life and death. In so doing, he secured our redemption and is now ever interceding on our behalf in heaven.
To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen! (1 Timothy 1:17).
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