Theopedia

Subordinationism

Definition

Subordinationism is the view, held by several Christian writers before the doctrine of the Trinity reached its settled form, that God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are not merely distinct from God the Father but inferior to him in nature and being: the Father alone possesses deity in the full sense, while the Son and Spirit share in it only derivatively.1 Historic Christianity rejects this, confessing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons sharing one undivided divine essence, differing only in how each relates to the others, not in rank or nature.2

Historical Origin

Subordinationist language appears among several teachers of the second and third centuries who wrote before the church had fixed precise vocabulary for the Trinity. Bavinck traces it directly:

“Subordinationists insist that the Father alone is God (ὁ θεος); the Son is God (θεος) derivatively, received his nature from the Father by communication. This was the view of Tertullian, Clement, Origen, Eusebius of Nicomedia, who gave the Son a place ‘outside of the Father’ and called him ‘like the Father in essence’ (ὁμοιουσιος).”1

This ante-Nicene tendency supplied part of the theological climate from which Arius’s own more extreme position grew in the early fourth century, though Arius went further than his predecessors by denying the Son had existed eternally at all.1 The controversy Arius provoked led to the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and its confession of the Son as “of one substance (homoousion) with the Father,” a formula chosen specifically to exclude subordinationist readings of the Son’s deity.3

Core Tenets

Across its ante-Nicene and later forms, subordinationism holds that the Father alone is God in the unqualified sense, while the Son and Spirit are God only in a derived sense, receiving their nature from the Father by communication rather than possessing it identically and eternally in themselves.1 Bavinck traces the same underlying commitment recurring after Nicaea under different names: the Remonstrant theologians of the seventeenth century, and, in England after the Reformation, the poet and controversialist John Milton, who held that the Son and Spirit were created by the Father’s free will before the world and were called “God” only by virtue of office, “like the judges and magistrates in the Old Testament.”1 The claim behind each form is the same: the persons of the Trinity are held to differ in being, not merely in how they relate to one another.

Confessional and Biblical Response

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the doctrine Nicaea defended: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided,” with the Father “of none,” the Son “eternally begotten of the Father,” and the Spirit “eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.”2 Scripture gives the Son the same titles, works, and worship as the Father rather than a derived or lesser share of deity: “the Word was God” (John 1:1), he “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3), and “all things were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16), so that he cannot be numbered among the things a superior being brought into existence. The Spirit likewise is addressed as fully God rather than a subordinate power: Peter tells Ananias that lying to the Holy Spirit is lying “not to man but to God” (Acts 5:3-4). Against a derived deity for Son or Spirit, Bavinck argues that terms like homoousios, though absent from Scripture’s own wording, were necessary “to draw warranted inferences” from the text and mark the boundary within which faithful reading of Scripture must proceed.1

Modern Forms

The word “subordinationism” also surfaces in a live, internal evangelical debate distinct from the ancient controversy: whether the Son is eternally, changelessly submissive in role or function to the Father’s authority without any difference in essence, a position associated with Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware and variously labeled Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS), Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission (ERAS), or the Eternal Submission of the Son (ESS).4 Critics of this position, including Kevin Giles, have applied the term directly to it, arguing the doctrine of the Son’s eternal subordination “is not biblical, but a new and dangerous idea, and historically guilty of the heresy” of Arianism.5 Proponents reject that characterization: a dissertation defending the position argues that “ERAS proponents deny the [opposing] premise[] that the Son’s submissiveness means he lacks divine freedom,” treating role subordination without any essential inferiority as consistent with Nicene orthodoxy rather than a departure from it.6 Eternal generation of the Son covers this dispute and the case each side makes for it in full.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩ ↩2

  3. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 112-128. ↩

  4. D. Glenn Butner Jr., Trinitarian Dogmatics: Exploring the Grammar of the Christian Doctrine of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022), 223, quoted in Samantha Ming Sum Cheng, “Contemporary Challenges to, and Defense of, the Eternal Procession of the Holy Spirit,” in “Retrieving Eternal Procession: A Dogmatic Western Account of the Holy Spirit’s Relation to the Father and the Son in the Triune God’s Divine Life” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2025), 256-327: “A common evangelical theology of the Trinity that argues that the Son eternally submits to the Father, being subordinate in role or function but not in ontology or being.” ↩

  5. 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. ↩

  6. 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. ↩