Ontological vs Economic / Relational Subordinationism

[All4Christ]

Most of us know that ontological subordinationism is absolutely heretical from the orthodox perspective. However, it seems that economic/relational subordinationism, as well as the monarchy of the Father, is a more gray area. From your Traditional personal opinion, do you hold to economic/relational subordinationism? What is your position on the monarchy of the Father?

 

[ViaCrucis]

I think I generally prefer to think of the Son's relationship to the Father--as He acts in humility, obedience, etc--stemming less from a position of economic subordinatism and instead stemming instead from the reality of pure and perfect love of the Divine Nature. As I think we see, also, the Father's own selflessness as He pours Himself out to the Son--the Father gives Himself away to the Son, and the Son also gives Himself away to the Father. It is mutual and reciprocal. So that when Christ says, "The Father is greater than I" this stems from the Son's own eternal submissive, loving disposition to the Father; but we also see the Father doing the same, as the Father says to the Son, "Your throne O God is forever and ever".

At some level, I think perhaps some notion of relational subordinatism is accurate; but it must always be placed within the context of love, not power. Also, the monarchy of the Father should be asserted, as the Son and the Spirit have their eternal Deity and existence of and from the Father, not as "lessers" but as the Begotten and the Spirated respectively. God begets God, God breathes out God.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[hedrick]

I’ll comment on Calvin. My comments are based upon Stephen Edmondson, “Calvin’s Christology,” though it’s certainly consistent with what I’ve read of Calvin personally.

Edmondson argues that for Calvin, it is the entire person of Christ that is subordinate to the Father, and that this is essential to his office. He argues that this was true even before the Incarnation, as Scripture shows the Logos as mediator even in creation.

For Calvin, the key concept is actually mediator rather than subordination, though the one does imply the other. Obviously the subordination is economic. It is a gracious choice made jointly by Father and Son.

Edmondson considers this a break with the medieval Western tradition, which had tended (following Augustine) to see the mediatorial function as limited to the Incarnation, and focused on the humanity. In some versions of the theology it was explicitly limited to the human nature. Of course it was the humanity as united to the divinity, since mediation clearly requires both. But he still see Calvin’s position as a fairly significant break.

 

[hedrick]

My personal view (not surprisingly) agrees with Calvin’s. I see Trinitarian theology as resulting from reflection on the significance of the Incarnation. If Christ shows us God, what kind of God does he show us? He shows us a God that is not a pure monad, but one in which God experiences submission and obedience, and thus is able to communicate those to us. Thus like Calvin, I think economic subordination is essential to the existence of the Trinity. Without it, the Trinity makes no sense as a concept.

 

[Philip_B]

I have given this some thought. With three adult sons, I can tell you that the Adult Child is in no way subordinate or subject to the Father in either an ontological or economic/relational way. They are of the same substance and equal in every respect.

The thing that makes this all make sense in the Holy Trinity is Love. Love is the ultimate unity between the Parent and the Adult Child. In the Holy Trinity we understand Perfect Love. Creation, Redemption and Sanctification are all one purpose, Love.

To me the Monarchical Role of the Father, neither adds to the Father, nor subtracts from the Son or the Holy Spirit. There is a sense in which I think that sometimes people have envisaged the Father (Old Man) and the Son (Young Child) and have connected source with dependence, and have and an image of a power relationship, which it clearly is not.

Aristotelian Logic is not sufficient to adequately describe the Holy Trinity, which is as it should be, given that any notion of God I could fully encompass in my mind would be a less than adequate comprehension of God.

 

[Gxg (G²)]

Most of us know that ontological subordinationism is absolutely heretical from the orthodox perspective. However, it seems that economic/relational subordinationism, as well as the monarchy of the Father, is a more gray area. From your Traditional personal opinion, do you hold to economic/relational subordinationism? What is your position on the monarchy of the Father?

If I may offer..



The members of the Trinity are distinct from one another in identity, but they are so perfectly unified that they indwell one another. And of course, when we see Christ tempted in the Garden in Luke 22 and him saying "Not my will , but your will be done" when he was wrestling to go forward and seeing his reliance on the Holy Spirit......The problem some state of how can God be one if there are three wills is precisely the mystery and problem of the Trinity: how can God be one if God is three persons? So the will question does not bother me It is impossible to tell where one stops and the other begins. There will always be debate about whether there's a hierarchal type of subordination in either the ontological or the economic Trinity - although I find it limiting to look at the Son's voluntary submission and see a temporal shift within the Trinity to an economic hierarchy. The Son's submission was a voluntary act consistent with the mutual submission of the economic Trinity - but as for the ontological Trinity, it is not logical to not see how that can consist of anything but mutuality, agreement, and unity.


Other places have spoken on this reality when it comes to having distinct wills and yet one complete unification of Will - all as it concerns being distinct persons in harmonious existence. For reference, the casual reader can investigate “Do Unitarians Understand the Trinity,”William Hasker, Orthodoxy, and the Social Trinity,” “William Hasker and Karen Kilby on the Social Trinity, and “Are Christians Polythiests?”

And Respectfully, I may get in trouble with some for stating this. But in studying Patristics, it seems difficult to avoid how we already have had it to be the case that people in the Early Church understood/supported (to varying degrees) the concept of Subordination. Against the modalists, then, the Cappadocian Fathers underscored the very real, ontological distinctions within the Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct hypostastes sharing equally one ousia. In fact, Subordinationism and the pre-Nicene Church Fathers were intimately tied together since the pre-Nicene Church Fathers were largely for subordinationism - with them clarifying the varying degrees of it. Thus, to speak against it universally is to speak against them and not be accurate....or understanding when it comes to the Trinity interacting with each other.

Ante-Nicene Subordinationism
It is generally conceded that the ante-Nicene Fathers were subordinationists. This is clearly evident in the writings of the second-century “Apologists.”…Irenaeus follows a similar path…The theological enterprise begun by the Apologists and Irenaeus was continued in the West by Hippolytus and Tertullian…The ante-Nicene Fathers did their best to explain how the one God could be a Trinity of three persons. It was the way they approached this dilemma that caused them insoluble problems and led them into subordinationism. They began with the premise that there was one God who was the Father, and then tried to explain how the Son and the Spirit could also be God. By the fourth century it was obvious that this approach could not produce an adequate theology of the Trinity. (Kevin Giles, The Trinity & Subordinationism, pp. 60-62.)
​

And from Tertullian, as a basic, from one his polemical works, Against Praxeas, we read that “before all things God was alone”, and the Word “proceeds forth from God”. The Word which is also called Wisdom was “created or formed” by God and is His “first-begotten”[20].:

I should not hesitate, indeed, to call the tree the son or offspring of the root, and the river of the fountain, and the ray of the sun; because every original source is a parent, and everything which issues from the origin is an offspring...I confess that I call God and His word–the Father and His Son–two...there must be two; and where there is a third, there must be three. Now the Spirit indeed is third from God and the Son; just as the fruit of the tree is third from the root, or as the stream out of the river is third from the fountain, or as the apex of the ray is third from the sun...Now, observe, my assertion is that the Father is one, and the Son one, and the Spirit one, and that They are distinct from Each other...Thus the Father is distinct from the Son, being greater than the Son...we...do indeed definitively declare that Two beings are God, the Father and the Son, and, with the addition of the Holy Spirit, even Three...​

One can also address Origen's Subordinationism - as well as several other Church fathers.

For other places of discussion, one can go here to

• Holy Trinity - Orthodoxy
• The Importance of the Monarchy of the Father according to John Zizioulas - Orthodoxy
  
• What if God were to post a selfie: one "self" or three "selves"? - Orthodoxy

I think we really have to do a good job understanding the early Church (especially when it comes to the Jewish world as the church was) when it comes to the issue of Subordination in how it played out. This is part of why Jewish believers were able to accept that Christ himself was the Messiah when seeing him in submission to the Father (Subordination) - although there were extremes of this and this is something the Early Church had to address at several points. This has shared before in-depth for the casual reader when discussing the nature of the Lord and the fathers:

Some of what Nestorius noted seemed to be in line with the ideology expressed in the Early Church that LIFE ITSELF could never die....as it concerns God being unable to ever be defeated. Hence, for Nestorius, his ideology led him to advocate plainly that Christ was God and Christ could die - but when it came to God the Father and the rest of the Trinity, they could never be extinguished.


Some of this gets into the territory that others have often brought up in Church history when wondering what it means for the Lord to die - with others noting that it was impossible for the devil to defeat the Lord. I Corinthians 15 notes this in detail when it came to death being defeated because of the work of the Lord - as the Author of Life can never be destroyed (John 11)...he can no more be defeated/perish than God can stop being eternal since his very nature will not allow for it. So in a very real sense, it can be noted rather easily that God himself can die (in the person of Christ) even though God himself did not die as it concerns the rest of the Holy Trinity.

The dualistic dynamic with language makes a world of difference - as two natures existed in one person with Jesus, as seen in 2 Cor 5:19 when it notes “that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” and Phil.2:8 notes “Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” Additionally, we see in John 10:18 where Jesus said “no one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of myself.” And yet even though Jesus was God and in communion with the Father, Jesus in committing his spirit to the Lord (as seen when He cried out once more to His Father saying, “Into Your hands I commit My Spirit” and then breathed His last and died) was obviously aware that His Father did not die on the Cross - the Father, who has always existed and NEVER died, was the one Christ (also God) turned to.

William Lane Craig noted this when having to address the issue. In his words:

Christ could not die with respect to his divine nature but he could die with respect to his human nature. What is human death? It is the separation of the soul from the body when the body ceases to be a living organism. The soul survives the body and will someday be re-united with it in a resurrected form. That's what happened to Christ. His soul was separated from his body and his body ceased to be alive. He became temporarily a disembodied person. On the third day God raised him from the dead in a transformed body.

In short, yes, we can say that God died on the cross because the person who underwent death was a divine person. So Wesley was all right in asking, "How can it be, that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?" But to say that God died on the cross is misleading in the same way that it is misleading to say that Christ died on the cross in relation to his human nature, but not in relation to his divine nature.​

Jesus was God - and it was more than possible for God to die, as evidenced in Christ. Nonetheless, God the Father was not the one who died on the Cross even as Christ was fully God/Fully man - and yet the paradox doesn't have to be resolved. We can have the concept of truth in tension - knowing that Jesus really cannot be defeated. For Rev.1:18 says of Jesus “I am He who lives and was dead, and behold I Am alive forever more.”...with this mentioned again in Rev.4:8-9 when it says he is the one “who was and is and is to come.


As another noted best, "Was Nestorius promoting the heretical idea that two distinct persons resided in Jesus? It is hard to say because of the political and ecclesiastical rivalries that involved him in the church. Also, his ambiguous language was easily misunderstood among the many heresies swirling about (e.g. adoptionism, docetism, Apollonarianism, etc.) Nestorius was viewed as not fully appreciating the unity of Christ’s person. The West resolved the debate of the two-natures at the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD).......It should be acknowledged that Chalcedon did not entirely remove the mystery of the paradox that exists in the person of Christ. At best, the Chalcedonian Creed states what the “two natures in one person” does not mean"

With Nestorius in what he emphasized when saying Jesus (as God) could die but God the Father (as well as God the Holy Spirit) could not, it really is reflective on several levels with what the early Church noted when it came to Jewish believers (in the first century beforethe councils) had battles as it concerns the concept of the Divine Council - and the reality of the Two Powers in Heaven idea that helped many Jews come to faith in Christ and developa Christological Monotheism since they could understand that the rabbis always taught that God had a lesser power to Him (regent) who was God as well and they co-ruled. Many are not aware of the relationships between rabbinic Judaism, Merkabah mysticism, and early Christianity - as it was the case that "Two powers in heaven" was a very early category of heresy and one of the basic categories by which the rabbis perceived the new phenomenon of Christianity...yet they did not understand the reality of what Christianity advocated on the role of the Messiah nor did they know the history of what the rabbis before them had already said in agreement with the Messiah being Divine.


One Jewish scholar who did an amazing job on the issue is Daniel Boyarin, who wrote Two Powers in Heaven; Or the Making of Heresy as well as the book entitled Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (as well as The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John and the work "The Jewish Gospels" where he noted at multiple points where the concept of the Messiah was always rooted in Jewish thought and echoed by what the rabbis said....and for Jews, the two powers are one and a person does not worship one without the other and even Second Temple literature is replete with forms of bitheism, including the philonic logos and the Ezekiel traditions of an Angel of God in the image of a man appearing on the throne. ).


Additionally, Dr. Michael Heisner (of LOGOS Bible Software) did an excellent job covering the issue in his presentation entitled The Naked Bible » Two Powers in Heaven ....more here in The Divine Council and Jewish Binitarianism - YouTube or the following:

Dr. Michael Heiser: The Jewish Trinity - YouTube

Michael Heiser - Two Powers of the Godhead - May 4, 2013 - YouTube

Holy Trinity - Dr. Michael Heiser - YouTube​

All of that is again said to bring home the point that Nestorius was very much in line with the Jewish Binatarianism concept - although others are free to debate it.

That said, As said best by one of the fathers:

Yes, let no one be lost, but let us all abide in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, being in full accord and of one mind armed with the shield of faith, loins girded about with truth, acknowledging one war alone, that against the Devil and his minions, fearing not those who can kill the body but cannot take the soul, but fearing the Lord of both soul and body; guarding the truth that we have received from our fathers, reverencing Father and Son and Holy Spirit; knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit, in which names we have been baptized, in which we believe, and under which we have been enlisted, dividing them before combining them and combining them before dividing them, and not regarding the three as a single individual (for they are not without individual reality nor do they comprise a single reality, as though our treasure lay in names and not in actual fact), but rather believing the three to be a single entity. For they are a single entity not in individual reality but in divinity, a unity worshipped in Trinity and a Trinity summed up into unity, venerable as one whole, as one whole royal, sharing the same throne, sharing the same glory, above space, above time, uncreated, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscribed, its internal ordering known only to itself, but for us equally the object of reverence and adoration, and alone taking possession of the Holy of Holies and excluding all of creation, part by the first veil, and part by the second. The first veil separates the heavenly and angelic realms from the Godhead, and the second, our world from that of the heavens.

St Gregory of Nazianzus​

 

[Erik Nelson]

saint Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, described the the Word and Spirit as the "two hands" of God (= the Father), with which He interacts with creation

• The One True God = the Father = YHWH
• Trinity = one God the Father + His two fully divine eternal transcendent hands sharing His Godhood = Elohim

such a description is fully Monotheistic, and fully Trinitarian, cogently describing both YHWH God the Father and the triune Elohim

 

[Daniel Marsh]

This is an topic I do not know a lot about. This thread is very interesting, thanks to all who are teaching in this thread. So, far the submitting by the Son makes the most sense to me. As you may know, today in the USA, one joins the military, therefore submitting to others is a choice.
That is the picture, I have in mind.

Philippians 2 New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised Catholic Edition (NRSVACE)
Imitating Christ’s Humility
2 If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, 2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5 Let the same mind be in you that was[a] in Christ Jesus,

6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Shining as Lights in the World
12 Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; 13 for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

 

[Daniel Marsh]

Sirach 24:9 Wycliffe Bible (WYC)
9 I was (en)gendered from the beginning and before worlds, and I shall not fail unto the world coming; [From the beginning and before worlds I am formed, and unto the world to come I shall not cease to be;]