Theopedia

Malcolm Yarnell

Overview

Malcolm B. Yarnell III (born 1962) is a Southern Baptist systematic theologian and Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.1 He is best known for defending “eternal relational authority and submission” (ERAS), the position that the Son is eternally submissive to the Father within the Trinity, and for his historical research into the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers among the English Reformers and their heirs.23

Life and Ministry

Yarnell earned a ThM at Duke Divinity School in 1996, writing on the continental development of the priesthood of all believers during the Reformation, and a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2000, writing on the same doctrine’s development in England during the late medieval and Reformation periods.1 The Oxford dissertation was later published as Royal Priesthood in the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2013).1 He has served as associate dean of the School of Theology at Southwestern and as vice president for academic affairs and academic dean at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary before returning to Southwestern.1 He currently directs Southwestern’s Center for Theological Research and Oxford Study Program and serves as managing editor of the Southwestern Journal of Theology and of BaptistTheology.org.1 Yarnell also serves as teaching pastor of Lakeside Baptist Church in Granbury, Texas, and as a member of the Baptist World Alliance’s Commission on Baptist Doctrine and Christian Unity.1

Theological Contribution

Yarnell has been one of the named defenders of ERAS in the early twenty-first-century evangelical debate over eternal relations within the Trinity, alongside theologians such as Bruce Ware.4 In a response to ERAS’s critics, Yarnell stated the position’s account of the Father-Son relation plainly: “Authority … proceeds from the Father to the Son.”5 Kyle Bagwell’s dissertation on the debate takes this statement as representative of the ERAS account of the pro-Nicene tradition, in which the Father’s authority and the Son’s submission are internal relations within the Godhead rather than external commands directed at the Son from outside.2

Yarnell’s other major contribution is historical. His Oxford research and a later occasional paper trace how English Baptists and other dissenters argued for the priesthood of all believers between 1688 and 1789.3 In that paper, Yarnell credited John Gill with “intellectual independence” in his theological method, while judging Gill’s own treatment of universal priesthood “somewhat negatively.”3

Historical Significance

Kyle Bagwell’s dissertation devotes three chapters to answering the ERAS position Yarnell and Ware have defended, rather than setting it aside.2 The debate both theologians took part in is bound up with a wider evangelical argument over complementarianism and gender roles: some ERAS proponents draw an analogy between the Son’s submission to the Father and a wife’s submission to her husband, a connection reflected in the titles of works on both sides of the debate, including Hongyi Yang’s dissertation on “the doctrine of the Trinity and gender roles” and Kevin Giles’s The Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporary Gender Debate.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. “Malcolm B. Yarnell III,” faculty biography, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, https://swbts.edu/staff/malcolm-b-yarnell-iii/. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Bagwell, “The Command from His Father,” 189. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Jonathan Elliot Swan, “‘The Fountain of Life’: John Gill’s Doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), 199, citing Malcolm B. Yarnell III, John Locke’s “Letters of Gold”: Universal Priesthood and the English Dissenting Theologians, 1688-1789, Centre for Baptist History and Heritage Studies Occasional Papers 15 (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2017), 27, 31. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Kyle William Bagwell, “The Command from His Father: Begotten not Made, Submissive not Subservient, Assigned not Subjected” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2023), 2. ↩

  5. Malcolm B. Yarnell III, “Response to Ware, Emerson, and Stamps,” in Trinitarian Theology: Theological Models and Doctrinal Application, ed. Keith Whitfield (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2019), 153, quoted in Bagwell, “The Command from His Father,” 189. ↩

  6. 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); Kevin Giles, The Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporary Gender Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002); both discussed throughout Bagwell, “The Command from His Father.” ↩