Eternal functional subordination of the Son

Eternal functional subordination of the Son is the position that the Son eternally submits to the Father’s authority, not only in his incarnate life but as a relation belonging to who the Son is as Son, while remaining fully equal to the Father in essence and glory. It is held by a number of contemporary evangelical theologians, but the confession’s own commitment to one undivided divine will precludes an eternal authority-submission relation among the persons. The persons are instead distinguished only by their relations of origin: the Father’s paternity, the Son’s eternal generation, and the Spirit’s procession.

Confessional Contrast

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession devotes its second chapter to God and the Holy Trinity, affirming one God subsisting in three persons, “of one substance, power, and eternity,” each possessing the whole divine essence undivided.¹ The Westminster Confession’s parallel chapter, on which the 1689’s own chapter is closely modeled, states the identical formula, the same commitment held across the broader Reformed confessional family, not a distinctively Baptist one.² Neither confession names an eternal ordering of authority and submission by that description, since the question arose in its present form only in recent decades. But their shared insistence on one undivided substance, power, and will leaves no room for a real authority-submission relation among the persons: a plurality of relative wills, however it is described, is exactly the kind of division this chapter’s language was written to exclude.³

Arguments

ERAS is not a position native to confessional Reformed Baptist theology; its proponents write from broader evangelicalism. What follows surveys the texts its proponents and their critics each appeal to. Jesus says “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing” (John 5:19) and that he came down from heaven “not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38). Paul writes that “the head of every man is Christ… and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3), and that at the consummation, “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 Cor. 15:28). The majority reading takes all of these as describing the economic mission of the incarnate Son alone, with nothing said about the Son’s eternal, immanent relation to the Father; ERAS proponents instead read them as describing an authority-submission relation true of the Son eternally, of which his incarnate obedience is one expression.⁴

Historical Development

Patristic background: redoublement

The distinction ERAS proponents draw between the Son’s absolute divine authority, which he possesses fully as God, and a relative authority he receives from the Father as Son, rests on the older patristic principle of redoublement: an attribute predicated of God in essence belongs to each person absolutely, while a personal property predicated relatively belongs to a person only in relation to the others.⁵ Augustine applied a version of this to the Father’s sending of the Son, writing that when Scripture says the Father “does the works” (John 14:10), the Son’s works “have their origin in the one from whom” he “has his very existence,” since “the Son… is born of him,” not because the Father possesses some power the Son lacks.⁶ Charles Hodge likewise distinguished a subordination “as to the mode of subsistence and operation” from any subordination of essence, arguing the two facts, full equality of nature and an order among the persons, “must be consistent,” comparable to the way one faculty of a single human soul can be subordinate to another without dividing the soul.⁷

Origins: the “Knight Hypothesis” and its rivals

Kevin Giles argues that no one held anything resembling ERAS before George W. Knight III’s 1977 book The New Testament Teaching on the Role Relationship of Men and Women, which paired “the eternal role subordination of the Son of God” with the subordination of women’s roles, arguing a person’s role can be subordinate without that person’s nature being so.⁸ ERAS proponents dispute the claim of a recent, sociologically motivated invention. H. Wayne House’s 2012 essay argues the relational subordination of the Son to the Father was “the orthodox doctrine of the early patristic church,” not a twentieth-century novelty,⁹ and proponents have pointed as well to J. I. Packer’s 1973 Knowing God, which states that “it is the nature of the second person of the Trinity to acknowledge the authority and submit to the good pleasure of the first,” and to Augustus H. Strong (1836-1921), as evidence the position predates Knight by decades.¹⁰

The modern controversy

Evangelical theologians including Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware argued from the 1990s onward, in Grudem’s Systematic Theology (1994) and Ware’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (2005), that the Son’s ordering under the Father includes not just origin but an eternal relation of authority and submission, drawing wide support in complementarian circles and equally wide opposition from theologians including D. Glenn Butner Jr., Kevin Giles, Scott Harrower, Stephen R. Holmes, Scott Swain, and Millard Erickson, who judged the position a departure from Nicene orthodoxy.¹¹ Grudem restated the case at length in a 2015 essay answering the position’s critics.¹² The dispute became public and heated in June 2016, when Liam Goligher and Carl Trueman charged that eternal submission compromised the Son’s full deity, drawing other scholars into the public exchange, including the patristics scholar Lewis Ayres.⁵ Some critics go further still: Bagwell himself notes that certain ORUA proponents render outright “heresy judgments” against ERAS, not merely a charge of departure from the tradition, while applying a more charitable reading to Reformation and patristic language that sounds similar on its face.¹³ Kevin Giles restated his case at book length the following year in The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity (2017), and a 2018 dissertation by Hongyi Yang argued ERAS is better described as “a development, not a departure” from the tradition than either side’s controversy-era framing suggests.¹⁴ Kyle Bagwell’s 2023 doctoral dissertation is the most recent extended scholarly defense of the position, naming it eternal relational authority and submission (ERAS) against what he calls the majority position of ordered relations with unstructured authority (ORUA).⁴

The majority position: no eternal authority structure

On this view, the only eternal, immanent-Trinity ordering among the divine persons is their relations of origin, not any additional authority-submission relationship.¹⁵ Every biblical text describing the Son’s obedience is read as describing the incarnate Son’s economic mission rather than his eternal life as Son: Matthew Y. Emerson and Luke Stamps write that “it is a category error to speak about ‘obedience’ and ‘submission’ when it comes to the immanent life of the Trinity.”¹⁵ Proponents such as Lewis Ayres ground this in divine incomprehensibility and the creator-creature distinction: because “God’s existence does not fit in the categories that characterize the created order,” authority and submission, categories drawn from creaturely relations, cannot be imported into the immanent Trinity without dividing what Scripture and the creeds present as one undivided divine will and operation.⁵ Katherine Sonderegger presses the same point against any model, ERAS included, that speaks of the persons as distinct centers of desire or command: God is “Three Perfect Totalities that manifest the Whole God,” she writes, “and in just this way, They are One. The Lord God is One Acting Subject, not Three.”¹⁶

The minority position: eternal relational authority and submission

ERAS proponents agree the divine essence, will, and authority are one, undivided, and fully shared by Father, Son, and Spirit. Where they differ is in holding that this absolute authority coheres with an additional, internal ordering that holds only in the persons’ relation to one another, not to creation.¹⁷ Bruce Ware writes that the Son’s obedience in the incarnation, “I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me” (John 8:28), reflects “the eternal relationship that has always been true with his Father,” not something taken on only at the incarnation.¹⁸ Wayne Grudem frames the position as “ontological equality but economic subordination”: the Son is fully God, equal to the Father in every attribute, but eternally subordinate in role, since without some real distinction beyond origin, he argues, “the Father is not eternally ‘Father’ and the Son is not eternally ‘Son.’”¹¹ James P. Boyce had already drawn a related distinction in the nineteenth century, describing “a subordination of office or rank” between the persons, distinct from any subordination of nature, corresponding to “the relations of the persons” themselves.¹⁹ Proponents including John Frame, Grudem, Michael Ovey, and Ware apply the same redoublement logic their opponents use, in reverse: since the Father, in eternal generation, communicates the full divine essence and absolute authority to the Son, the Son possesses that authority completely and equally, while also, by virtue of who he eternally is as Son, receiving it from the Father in a way the Father does not receive it from the Son.¹⁷

Objections and Responses

The divided-will objection

The sharpest objection is that ERAS divides what classical Trinitarian doctrine requires to stay one: the single, undivided divine will and operation. D. Glenn Butner Jr. argues that operations are “fundamentally indicative of what a nature is,” so that agents sharing one nature must share one operation; since ERAS makes the Father’s commanding and the Son’s submitting two distinct operations, and adds those to the one divine will the persons already share by nature, it in effect posits three relative wills alongside the one absolute will, “four wills in God.”³ Stephen R. Holmes presses the same point from divine simplicity: “diversity of function requires diversity of act,” and “to hold to any form of functional differentiation, whether subordinationist or some other kind, within a single divine act” is incompatible with the pro-Nicene insistence that the persons are known only by their relations of origin, not by any further predicate that would divide the one divine will, energy, and action.²⁰

ERAS proponents answer on the same patristic terms rather than conceding the point. They affirm that the Trinity’s external, creation-directed works are strictly indivisible (opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa), but argue that the persons’ works toward one another belong to a different category: “the persons’ internal operations in the economy” are “divisible works proper to the persons,” in the same way the Father’s begetting and the Son’s being begotten are really distinct without dividing the one divine essence: the model, Bagwell writes, “better sustains personal distinctions” this way “while also” maintaining “the divine unity by appropriating to the persons their common ad extra activity.”²¹

Butner rejects the analogy this reply depends on: “submission is an act of the will,” he writes, “but the faculty of will is not relational” the way a relation of origin is.²²

A methodological objection

Fred Sanders argues that resting the entire distinction between Father and Son on a relationship of authority, rather than on eternal generation, asks that relationship to bear theological weight it was not traditionally built to carry, not, in his own assessment, a heresy, but “not the right way to do things.”²³ Kevin J. Vanhoozer has compared ERAS’s rise to evangelicalism’s earlier embrace of open theism, warning that “evangelical theology has shown itself to be soft at the very point on which the gospel depends.”²⁴ Bagwell responds that the comparison fails on its own terms: open theism denies a divine attribute Scripture and the tradition affirm without exception, that God cannot change his mind (Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; James 1:17), while no version of ERAS denies that the Son is truly begotten of the Father: the two positions differ in kind, not merely in degree of departure from tradition.²⁴

The mislabeling objection

ERAS proponents including John Starke object that ORUA critics sometimes mischaracterize the position as a form of semi-Arianism.⁴ No council has issued a formal ruling against ERAS the way the church ruled against Arianism, but that absence of a ruling settles only a procedural question. It says nothing about the substantive one Butner and Holmes raise: whether an eternal authority-submission relation can be held at all without multiplying the divine will beyond the one pro-Nicene doctrine requires, the same question that leads some ORUA proponents to render heresy judgments of their own against the position.¹³

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” text as reproduced by The Reformed Reader. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” text as reproduced by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. ↩
Bagwell, “The Majority Position,” in “The Command from His Father,” 52. ↩ ↩²
Kyle William Bagwell, “Introduction,” in “The Command from His Father: Begotten not Made, Submissive not Subservient, Assigned not Subjected” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2023), 1-2. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bagwell, “The Majority Position,” in “The Command from His Father,” 41-42. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bagwell, “Conclusion,” in “The Command from His Father,” 218. ↩
Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1857), 63. ↩
Bagwell, “Introduction,” in “The Command from His Father,” 9, quoting Kevin Giles, The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), 8, and citing George W. Knight III, The New Testament Teaching on the Role Relationship of Men and Women (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977), 33. ↩
H. Wayne House, “The Eternal Relational Subordination of the Son to 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, 2012), 108-32. ↩
Bagwell, “Introduction,” in “The Command from His Father,” 10-11, quoting J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973). ↩
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 249, 251. ↩ ↩²
Wayne Grudem, “Doctrinal Deviations in Evangelical-Feminist Arguments about the Trinity,” in One God in Three Persons: Unity of Essence, Distinction of Persons, Implications for Life, ed. Bruce A. Ware and John Starke (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 21. ↩
Bagwell, “The Theological Case for ERAS,” in “The Command from His Father,” 194-95. ↩ ↩²
Hongyi Yang, A Development, Not a Departure: The Lacunae in the Debate of the Doctrine of the Trinity and Gender Roles, Reformed Academic Dissertations (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2018). ↩
Bagwell, “The Majority Position: One Absolute Divine Authority with No Relative Authority Distinctions,” in “The Command from His Father,” 40. ↩ ↩²
Bagwell, “The Majority Position,” in “The Command from His Father,” 52-53, quoting Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2020), 565. ↩
Bagwell, “The Minority Position: One Absolute Divine Authority and the Three Relative Authorities of the Persons,” in “The Command from His Father,” 91-92. ↩ ↩²
Bruce A. Ware, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 79. ↩
James P. Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology (Louisville, KY: Charles T. Dearing, 1887), chap. 15. ↩
Bagwell, “The Majority Position,” in “The Command from His Father,” 62-63. ↩
Bagwell, “The Theological Case for ERAS: A Model of Trinitarian Relations Consistent with the Traditional Principle of Redoublement,” in “The Command from His Father,” 187-88. ↩
Bagwell, “The Majority Position,” in “The Command from His Father,” 62-63, quoting D. Glenn Butner Jr., The Son Who Learned Obedience: A Theological Case against the Eternal Submission of the Son (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018), 139. ↩
Fred Sanders, remarks in “The Trinity and Gender: The Recent Debate Among Evangelicals,” panel discussion, December 10, 2012. ↩
Bagwell, “Conclusion,” in “The Command from His Father,” 217. ↩ ↩²