Theopedia

Subordination of Jesus

“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.”

— John 14:28 (ESV)

Definition

The subordination of Jesus refers to the scriptural statements in which the Son is sent by, obeys, and is subject to the Father: he does the Father’s will rather than his own (John 6:38), calls the Father “greater” than himself (John 14:28), and is called Christ’s own “head” (1 Cor. 11:3). Historic Christianity reads these as describing the Son’s office, his incarnate mission, and the order of the divine persons, not any inferiority of nature: Father, Son, and Spirit remain equally, fully God.1 This “functional” subordination is distinct from subordinationism, the ancient error holding the Son inferior in being.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession grounds the Son’s subjection in his voluntary acceptance of the mediatorial office, not in any deficiency of nature. The Son was “furnished to execute the office of mediator and surety; which office he took not upon himself, but was thereunto called by his Father; who also put all power and judgement in his hand, and gave him commandment to execute the same.”2 The confession states plainly that this submission was willing rather than compelled: “This office the Lord Jesus did most willingly undertake, which that he might discharge he was made under the law, and did perfectly fulfil it.”3 The same chapter opens by confessing the Son “very and eternal God, the brightness of the Father’s glory, of one substance and equal with him who made the world,”4 so the office he took up implies no inequality of nature between them in the confession’s own terms.

Biblical Basis

Scripture’s subjection language clusters around three kinds of statement. First, and most numerous, are texts describing the incarnate Son’s relation to the Father during his earthly mission: he came “not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38), could “do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing” (John 5:19), and taught “not mine, but his that sent me” (John 7:16). James Petigru Boyce, in a dedicated study of these texts, concluded that “almost all of them have reference to Christ as man; or as the Son in his relations to his human nature.”1

Second are texts that resist that reading and speak of the Son’s standing as a person rather than only his incarnate humanity: “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), and Paul’s statement that “when all things have been subjected unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subjected unto him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Boyce argued that even here, “we are only taught an inferiority of one person in the Trinity to another, as a person. Nothing indicates that it is of one of them as God, to another as God, or of the Godhead of one to the Godhead of another.”1 Augustus Hopkins Strong states the same conclusion for the same two texts: “we frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence.”5

Third, Paul calls the Father “the head of Christ” alongside “the head of every man is Christ” (1 Cor. 11:3), an order Boyce read as “a subordination of office or rank… [that] could exist between persons in all respects equal to each other, both in nature and relation,” just as the headship of Christ over every man implies no inferiority of a man’s soul to Christ’s.1 The Son’s incarnate obedience itself reaches its fullest statement in Philippians: he, “existing in the form of God,” emptied himself, “taking the form of a bond-servant,” and “became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8). Herman Bavinck ties this obedience to the whole of Christ’s earthly life rather than the cross alone: his humiliation “consisted in being and remaining obedient to God until death,” grounded not in any deficiency of his own but in “the unshakable covenant of redemption” agreed among the persons of the Godhead before the world began.6 (See Kenosis for the separate question of whether this self-emptying involved laying aside any divine attribute; historic doctrine answers no.)

Historical Development

The church’s care in predicating subjection language of Christ without dividing his person or diminishing his deity was fixed by the fifth-century controversy between Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, and Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria. Nestorius, drawing on the Antiochian school’s sharp distinction between Christ’s two natures, resisted calling Mary “Mother of God” (Theotokos), since she had given birth to the man Christ, not to God as such.7 Cyril opposed him, insisting on the perfect union of the two natures in the one person of the Son, so that what belongs to either nature may rightly be said of the one Christ; each patriarch anathematized the other, and Nestorius was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in AD 431.7 Louis Berkhof frames the dispute in the same terms: the Antiochian school risked “a Mediator consisting of two persons,” a man alongside God rather than one Christ who is truly both.8 The settlement that followed, refined at Chalcedon in AD 451, supplied later theologians the tools Boyce and Strong would use centuries later: a statement predicated of Christ as man, or of his office as mediator, says nothing about the divine nature he shares undivided with the Father.

Opposing Views

Two errors depart from this doctrine in opposite directions.

Ancient subordinationism collapsed the distinction this article states, treating the Son’s subjection as evidence that he is God only in a derived or lesser sense than the Father. Historic Christianity rejects this: the subjection texts describe the Son’s person, office, and incarnate mission, never his possession of the undivided divine essence.

A distinct, modern controversy asks whether the Son’s functional subjection is not merely economic (belonging to his office and incarnate mission) but an eternal, changeless relation of authority and submission built into the immanent Trinity itself, apart from and prior to the incarnation: a position variously called Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS), Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission (ERAS), or the Eternal Submission of the Son. Critics, including Kevin Giles, argue the position “is not biblical, but a new and dangerous idea, and historically guilty of the heresy” of Arianism.9 Proponents reply that role subordination without any essential inferiority is consistent with Nicene orthodoxy rather than a departure from it.10 Eternal generation of the Son covers this dispute and the case each side makes for it in full.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XV. Personal Relations in Trinity,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 136-155: “An examination of these, and all similar statements in the Scriptures, shows they are in no respect inconsistent with the perfect equality of the persons as to the divine nature.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 3. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 4. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 2. ↩

  5. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 343. ↩

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩

  7. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 23, “Person of Christ,” 378-390. ↩ ↩2

  8. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), Part Three, “Person and Work of Christ,” 291. ↩

  9. Kevin Giles, quoted in Keith Wesley Goad, “Contemporary Subordinationist and Equivalence Models: Tampering with the Trinity,” in “Trinitarian Grammars: A Comparison of Gregory of Nazianzus and Some Contemporary Models” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 263-274. ↩

  10. Kyle William Bagwell, “The Minority Position: One Absolute Divine Authority and the Three Relative Authorities of the Persons,” in “The Command from His Father: Begotten not Made, Submissive not Subservient, Assigned not Subjected” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2023), 72-110. ↩