The present paper will evaluate "Subordinationism in the Godhead, A Re-emerging Heresy," a transcript of a lecture given by Gilbert Bilezikian at the National Conference of Christians for Biblical Equality at Wheaton College in August, 1993, and distributed by the same group. Dr. Bilezikian was assigned the title (p. 17).

According to the lecture, it was St. Augustine who provided "a definitive statement on the Trinity" in the fifth century (p. 2), putting an end to Subordinationist tendencies found in some earlier patristic writings (pp. 2-4). As Dr. Bilezikian sees the matter, the "historical Biblical trinitarian doctrine that has been defined in the creeds and defended by the church" was the affirmation that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are co-eternal, interdependent, and one in substance; their identity of essence, he stresses, precludes "any form of hierarchy, order or ranking" (p. 5) and establishes "the functional equality of the persons of the Trinity" (p. 9). All statements in scripture that seem to place the Son under the Father refer to the Son's temporary, incarnate state of humiliation, which he assumed voluntarily in order to redeem the world (pp. 6-9). The idea that the Son's obedience was appropriate to his position within the Divine Triad raises, in Dr. Bilezikian's view, the specter of "some coercion or obligation by reason of superior force or authority" (p. 6), by which he would have been "dragged to his death against his will--kicking and screaming" (p. 8), and entails projecting on heaven our "pathetic dysfunctional human hierarchies" (p. 20). It may be inferred that Dr. Bilezikian thinks any trinitarian doctrine that specifies an hierarchy, order, or ranking among the Divine Persons, to be a "pagan infiltration" into Christianity, a "weird procession of three divinities lined up by order of seniority" (p. 6), indeed, a form of Subordinationism.

With heavy heart Dr. Bilezikian warns that this ancient error is emerging afresh in the work of a few evangelical theologians who use it as an analogy for structured role-relationships between men and women. This "new teaching" is, for him, an "insidious" reformulation, "tampering with" the historic trinitarian dogma (pp. 9-10), and introducing into contemporary evangelicalism "the old Arian heresy of a stratified, or split-level, Trinity" (p. 15). Its advocates are "a few of the more strident zealots of male hierarchism" (p. 18), who, "because of their obsession with authoritarian structures" (p. 19) and their alarm at "the success of the egalitarian understanding of scripture" (p. 10), promote their view, he implies, "for agenda purposes" (p. 17), namely, "to legitimize a relationship of authority/subordination between men and women" (p. 10), or, more specifically, "in order to justify the subordination of women" (p. 14).

As proponents of novelty Dr. Bilezikian names, and offers criticisms of, Wayne Grudem, Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and co-editor of Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood,¹ and Robert Letham, pastor of Emmanuel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware.² Among many other things he faults Grudem for citing in support of the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father the "personal opinion" of Augustus H. Strong, whose theology textbook "contains several questionable teachings" (p. 13). Letham's theological method involves making inferences from the revelation of the economic Trinity to the ontological Trinity. This method Dr. Bilezikian calls "an almost clever magician's trick" (p. 12), an "amazing jump of logic" (p. 15).

Thus Dr. Bilezikian presents the trinitarianism he disagrees with as heretical in tenor, opportunistic in motive, held by a tiny minority of theologians, and wanting in cogent theological support. These charges are grave and should be examined with care.

SUBORDINATIONISM?

Standard reference works of theology define Subordinationism as the view that the Logos and the Holy Spirit "do not fully possess the divine essence (Homoousion)";³ "any christological position which subordinates the Son to the Father in such a way as to endanger his essential divinity";⁴ "teaching about the Godhead which regards either the Son as subordinate to the Father or the Holy Ghost as subordinate to both";⁵ "a view of Christ which maintains that he is not equal in substantial being with God the Father"⁶ (emphases mine). These definitions, focusing on the integrity of the Divine Essence as the point at issue, are in accord with the historic view, as represented by St. Gregory of Nyssa.

In a Divine nature, as such, when once we have believed in it, we can recognize no distinctions suggested either by the Scripture teaching, or by our own common sense; distinctions, that is, that would divide that Divine and transcendent nature within itself by any degrees of intensity and remission, so as to be altered from itself by being more or less (On the Holy Spirit against Macedonius, p. 316; emphasis mine).⁷

The outstanding instances of Subordinationism in the history of dogma were Arianism, which made the Son a created being, and Pneumatomachianism, which did the same for the Holy Spirit.⁸ Some of the ante-Nicene fathers, such as Origen, perhaps under the influence of Neo-Platonism with its concept of levels of being, seem to have assigned to the Son a substance inferior to that of the Father (though they viewed him as co-eternal with the Father), or speculated that the generation of the Son was an act of the Father's will; these constructions also qualify as Subordinationist. Since the evangelical theologians whom Dr. Bilezikian has in mind reject these views and affirm that the Son is of the same being with the Father; since, moreover, no council has ever condemned the idea that the Person of the Son is subject to the Person of the Father, provided that their identity of essence be upheld; the accusation of Subordinationism in this case may be dismissed.

THE FATHERS OF TRINITARIANISM

There is general agreement among historians of dogma that Christian trinitarianism found its classic expression in the writings of St. Athansius (*373), building upon the work of St. Alexander, bishop of Alexandria (313-28), and developed in turn by the Cappadocian fathers, St. Basil the Great (*379), St. Gregory of Nazianzus (*390), and St. Gregory of Nyssa (*394).⁹ The doctrine was formulated in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, itself based on models from the councils named in its title, and officially ratified at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.¹⁰ It is to these sources that we turn to determine the shape of the doctrine of the Trinity. St. Augustine added some touches of his own and secured the doctrine in the West, but "the doctrine of the Cappadocian Fathers played a predominant role, especially that of Gregory of Nyssa, and affected the formulations of the magisterium more than did the psychological speculation of St. Augustine".¹¹

INTERPRETATION OF NEW TESTAMENT PASSAGES

The Greek fathers arrived at the doctrine of the Trinity by two routes: exegesis of scripture, and use of the rule that the divine economy is a mirror of the Divine Nature. Among verses of the Bible they commented on in their polemics with the Arians were 1 Cor 8:6; John 5:26; 14:28; and 1 Cor 15:28.

1 Cor 8:6 may stem from primitive Christian catechesis and has a confessional balance.

There is one God, the Father,
      from whom are all things, and we to him;

and one Lord, Jesus Christ,
      through whom are all things, and we through him.

In the context, these lines lay down a monotheistic antithesis to pagan polytheism, and so presuppose the identity of the Father and the Son at some undefined level, which the later church would call the ªv**ÿ, or being, of the Godhead.¹² Athanasius and the Cappadocians quoted from the verse often, and it supplied vocabulary for the Nicene Creed in several key places, as a comparison shows. According to the parallel clauses, the creation came "from" the Father "through" the Lord; the redeemed proceed "to" the Father "through" the Lord. Hence the Father is the ultimate author and goal of creation and redemption, while the Lord Jesus is the mediator of both, taking a penultimate role with respect to his Father, a role which obtains for all of his activity in the world, from the remotest beginning to the eschaton, and not just during the Incarnation.¹³ From this earliest form of the creed we can see that the Father and the Son are united in being, but ranked in function.

That the Son, as over against the Father, was the mediator of creation, was appreciated by the fathers who worked out the doctrine of the Trinity. Repeatedly Athanasius speaks of the Father's use of the Word as his organ for making the world (Orations against the Arians 2.24-26,29-30). "It is senseless folly," writes Gregory of Nyssa, "to conceive of a creation other than that which came into existence from the Father through the Son" (On the Holy Spirit aginst Macedonius p. 316; emphasis mine). And Basil spells out the priority of the Father even more boldly.

The fact that the Father creates through the Son neither constitutes the creation of the Father imperfect nor exhibits the active energy of the Son as feeble, but indicates the unity of the will; so the expression "though whom" contains a confession of an antecedent Cause, and is not adopted in objection to the efficient Cause (On the Spirit 21; emphasis mine).

Other New Testament passages underscore the sameness yet differentiation of the Father and the Son. "As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted to the Son also to have life in himself" (John 5:26). To have life in himself is to possess what western theologians would call aseity ("from-self-ness"), not so much an attribute, as the very nature of deity, in contrast to the whole creation that depends on God for existence. Both the Father and the Son are one self-plenishing spring of life, purely divine. But it was the Father who "granted" this to the Son. "The tense carries us back beyond time," writes Bishop Westcott; it is hard to imagine to what event in the incarnate life of the Son it could point.¹⁴

Thus was the passage understood by the fourth-century fathers. Quoting it, Athanasius commented, "The Son's Godhead is the Father's Godhead" (Orations against the Arians 3.36; emphasis mine); and elsewhere: "He uses the word `gave' in order to point to the Father who gave" (On Luke 10:22 4; emphasis mine). The latter sentence occurs in a paragraph where Athanasius is pressing home the essential unity of the Father and the Son.¹⁵ Cyril of Jerusalem (*386) makes explicit the time-frame: "He who was begotten is God ... begotten not in time, but before all ages" (Catechetical Lecture 11.13; emphasis mine).

Likewise most church fathers saw a difference between two Persons of the immanent Trinity in the saying, "The Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). Their Arian opponents had used the verse to prove the Son's essential subordination to God. Against this faulty exegesis a few (Cyril of Alexandria, Augustine, Ambrose) insisted that the Son was speaking of his manhood; but the Greek Nicenes, almost to a man, drew out of the verse the generation of the Son in eternity past.¹⁶

We must guard for the Unbegotten Father His proper dignity, affirming that He has no author of His Being; and we must assign the fitting honour to the Son, according to him the generation from the Father without beginning... holding that the being unbegotten is the sole property of the Father, seeing that the Saviour Himself said, "My Father is greater than I" (Alexander of Alexandria Ep. to Alex. acc. to Theod. H. E. 1.4, p. 19; quoted Westcott, St. John, 192; emphasis mine).

The Son says not, "My Father is better than I," lest we should conceive him to be foreign to his nature, but "greater," not indeed in greatness nor in time, but because of his generation from the Father himself (Athanasius Orations against the Arians 1.58; emphasis mine).

Since the Son's origin is from the Father, in this respect the Father is greater, as cause and origin. Wherefore also the Lord said thus, "My Father is greater than I," clearly inasmuch as He is Father. Yea, what else does the word Father signify unless the being cause and origin of that which is begotten of Him (Basil Against Eunomius 1.25; quoted Westcott, St. John, 193)?

Superior greatness belongs to the cause , equality to the nature.... To say that [the Father] is greater than [the Son] conceived as man is certainly true, but no great thing to say. For what marvel is it if God is greater than man (Gregory of Nazianzus Oration 30.7; quoted Westcott, St. John, 193)?

If any one say that the Father is greater in so far as He is the cause (ÿ**áª*) of the Son, we will not gainsay this. But this, however, does not make the Son to be of a different essence (Chrysostom Hom. 70 ad loc.; quoted Westcott, St. John, 194).¹⁷

The priority of the Father is not only ontological, according to this interpretation, but also a matter of honor. As Basil has it, "The words express rather the honour given by the Son to the Father than any depreciation by the speaker... The comparison lies between beings of one substance, not between those of different substances" (Against Eunomius; emphasis mine).¹⁸ Such an exegesis lives on among modern critical interpretations of John 14:28.¹⁹

A problematic verse was 1 Cor 15:28, "The Son himself will be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all." In context, the Son's subjection will come about when he delivers the kingdom to the Father, after destroying every enemy (v. 24). The messianic reign of Christ, from Ascension to Parousia, embodies the royal ideology of Judah, wherein the anointed human king accomplishes the rule of Yahweh over the world on Yahweh's behalf. So that God might assume direct rule at the very end, however, the Son must yield the supreme office; the Son's role thereafter is not specified. The purpose clause ("that God may be all in all") orients the subjection of the Son to the final state.²⁰ Overall the verse outlines an economic subordination of the Son to the Father reaching into eternity future.²¹

While several interpretations of 1 Cor 15:28 were current in the patristic period, the one that accords best with modern exegesis is that of Cyril of Jerusalem.

For He shall be subjected, not because He shall then begin to do the Father's will (for from eternity He "doth" always "those things that please him [John 8:29]) but because, then as before, He obeys the Father, yielding, not a forced obedience, but a self-chosen accordance; for He is not a servant, that He should be subjected by force, but a Son, that He should comply of His free choice and natural love (Catechetical Lecture 15.30; emphasis mine).

To sum up: The goal of these observations is neither to suggest that patristic exegesis of the cruxes before us was uniform, nor that ancient comments were beyond the need for refinement. The point is, that the very theologians who forged the Homoousios formula were also led by their understanding of scripture to confess in various ways that the Son qua Son honors the Father, and that this honor obtains both before and after the Incarnation, both at creation and in the eschaton--indeed that it is integral to the timeless relation of the two Persons. Critical study of the New Testament in the twentieth century has uncovered a broad exegetical basis for conclusions akin to these.²²

THEOLOGICAL METHOD: FROM THE ECONOMIC TRINITY TO THE IMMANENT TRINITY

In their understanding of scripture, the fathers were guided by an assumption that the way God has revealed himself in history points to what he is in eternity. Beginning in the fourth century, sacred science was divided into two halves, the study of the divine "economy" and of speculative "theology" proper. Scholasticism insisted that the "processions" ad intra of the Persons of the Trinity can only be known by their "missions" ad extra. As a leading Catholic theologian of the twentieth century puts it, "It is through the `economy', and only through it, that we have access to `theology.'"²³ Eastern Orthodoxy agrees: "We experience God as three-in-one, and we believe that this threefold differentiation in God's outward action reflects a threefold differentiation in his inner life."²⁴ This has been the view of the whole catholic tradition in theology, including St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nazianzus and the other Cappadocian Fathers, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and many others.²⁵ It is this tradition, and no less, that Dr. Bilezikian characterizes when he speaks of magical tricks, "this amazing jump of logic".

When we apply this centuries-old and universally accepted theological method to the New Testament witness that the Father sent the Son into the world etc., in which the roles of the Father and of the Son are never reversed, the result is trinitarianism of the sort found in the following examples.

Basil the Great: The Son is second in order to the Father, because He is from Him, and in dignity, because the Father is the "origin" and cause of His Being.... Why is it necessary, if the Spirit exists as the third in order, for him to be third also in nature (Against Eunomius 3.1; emphasis mine)?

Gregory of Nazianzus: Now, the name of that which has no beginning is the Father, and of the Beginning the Son, and of that which is with the Beginning, the Holy Ghost, and the three have one nature--God. And the union is the Father from Whom and to Whom the order of Persons runs its course, not so as to be confounded, but so as to be possessed, without distinction of time, of will, or of power (Oration 42.15; emphasis mine).

Gregory of Nyssa: He who perceives the Father, and perceives Him by Himself, has at the same time mental perception of the Son; and he who receives the Son does not divide Him from the Spirit, but in consecution so far as order is concerned, in conjunction so far as the nature is concerned , expresses the faith commingled in himself in the three together (On the difference of essence and hypostasis 4; among the letters of Basil, no. 38; emphasis mine).

The third flame is caused by that of the first being transmitted to the middle, and then kindling the end torch (On the Holy Spirit against Macedonius p. 317).

The Father is always the Father, and in Him the Son, and with the Son the Holy Spirit (On the Holy Spirit against Macedonius p. 319; emphasis mine).

The fountain of power is the Father, and the power of the Father is the Son, and the spirit of that power is the Holy Spirit ... beginning from the Father, advancing through the Son, and completed in the Holy Spirit.... Except for the distinction of order and Person, no variation in any point is to be apprehended; but we assert that while [the Holy Spirit's] place is counted third in mere sequence after the Father and Son, third in the order of the transmission, in all other respects we acknowledge His inseparable union with them (On the Holy Spirit against Macedonius p. 320; emphasis mine).

Cyril of Jerusalem: And the Father indeed gives to the Son; and the Son shares with the Holy Ghost [citing Matt 11:27; John 16:13-14].... The Father through the Son, with the Holy Ghost, is the giver of all grace (Catechetical Lecture 16.24).

An eminent Anglican scholar describes the patristic view in these words.

It is clearly Gregory's doctrine that the Son acts as an agent, no doubt in subordination to the Father Who is the fountainhead of the Trinity, in the production of the Spirit. After him the regular teaching of the Eastern Church is that the procession of the Holy Spirit is "out of the Father through the Son.²⁶

This feature of the thought of the Cappadocians and their followers is all the more remarkable when we consider that the heresy in the forefront of their concerns was Arianism. In their heated situation, they had every reason to major upon the sole essence of the Godhead which resides wholly in each of the three Persons, at the expense of emphasis on the properties of the several Persons. Yet the fathers of the fourth century also wished to steer clear of Sabellianism, and were constrained by the data of scripture and of salvation-history to recognize distinctions not only of Person, but also of order, and of honor, among the triune Persons, insofar as they have mutual relations not defined simply by their common essence.

CATHOLICITY AS A CRITERION OF TRUTH

In the light of this historico-theological background we can appreciate the full significance of the finely nuanced words of the Nicene Creed.

We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made....(emphasis mine)

Embedded among clear asseverations of the Son's perfect deity (God, Light, true God, Homoousios with the Father), are phrases that affirm just as clearly the unilateral communication of the divine essence from the Father to the Son, which is the ground for the Son's mediatorial role in the creative act. As the Nicene Creed is the one ecclesiastical document that can plausibly claim ecumenical standing, recognized in the West and in the East alike from A.D. 451 onwards, it is in precisely this form that the doctrine of the Trinity has been received by all traditions of the church.

It remains only to note its impact on those theologians whose work has been most seminal. St. Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor" of Roman Catholicism, decided, "As the Father is not from another, in no way is it fitting for Him to be sent; but this can only belong to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, to Whom it belongs to be from another" (Summa theological Q. 43 Art. 4).²⁷ Eastern Orthodoxy has always harked back directly to the primitive liturgies with their rich prayers to the Father through the Son, and to its own celebrated Greek fathers. To quote a leading exponent of the Christian mind of the East: "From all eternity God himself, as Son, in filial obedience and love renders back to God the Father the being which the Father by paternal self-giving eternally generates in him."²⁸ Finally John Calvin, the systematic theologian of the Reformation, had this to say.

It is not fitting to suppress the distinction that we observe to be expressed in scripture. It is this: to the Father is attributed the beginning of activity, and the fountain and wellspring of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and the ordered disposition of all things; but to the Spirit is assigned the power and efficacy of that activity. Indeed, although the eternity of the Father is also the eternity of the Son and the Spirit, since God could never exist apart from his wisdom and power, and we must not seek in eternity a "before" or an "after", nevertheless the observance of an order is not meaningless or superfluous, when the Father is thought of as first, then from him the Son, and finally from both the Spirit (Calvin Institutes 1.13.18; emphasis mine).²⁹

This, then, is what Dr. Bilezikian calls the "personal opinion" of Augustus Strong, found in his Systematic Theology under the subtitle "Generation and procession consistent with equality".³⁰ Strong himself, of course, cites authorities (Pearson, Hooker, Whiton, Shedd, Edwards, E. G. Robinson, Weiss, Treffrey, Princeton Essays, Watson, Bibliotheca Sacra, Dick) for his idea of "an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father," not least the dictum non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis ("it is said, not about essence, but about ministries").³¹ Similar testimonies could be multiplied ad taedium.

St. Augustine it was who, standing on the shoulders of older catholic heresiologists, laid down the rule, securus judicat orbis terrarum ("the circle of lands judges secure"), meaning that "the deliberate judgement, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede."³² With respect to the relations among the triune Persons, the standard of orthodoxy has been set for many centuries.

CONCLUSION

Not a single one of Dr. Bilezikian's charges can stand. The trinitarian doctrine he impugns as heretical, is in fact that of historic orthodoxy. To accuse his fellow evangelicals of introducing it de novo, merely to bolster their patriarchal program, is unworthy. That only a few individual theologians subscribe to it, is patently false. His own rationalistic premise that unity of essence necessarily implies parity of station and function runs contrary to scripture as understood in all the major theological traditions.

Arguably the charges could be reversed. Let Dr. Bilezikian demonstrate that any one of the church fathers, or of the Doctors of the church catholic, held his form of trinitarianism--let him bring forth from their writings, sentence by sentence, explicit and emphatic denials of an order among the Persons of the Godhead, considered as to their Personhood, as distinct from their common being. In shape and language his doctrine of the Trinity corresponds exactly to the feminist egalitarianism of which Dr. Bilezikian is a well-known champion. Let him point to massive wings of the church universal in which his view has long been accepted and taught. Who, except the Christians for Biblical Equality and feminists of like ilk, has been persuaded of his method, his axioms, his interpretations of relevant biblical texts?

Back in 1990 Robert Letham concluded his "Theological Comment" with the warning, "One fails to see how evangelical feminism as such can consistently or for long preserve the historic Christian doctrine of the Trinity."³³ The Trinity, we recall, is "the central dogma of Christian theology."³⁴ A fateful step was taken in 1993, when Gilbert Bilezikian gave his lecture at Wheaton College, and the organization Christians for Biblical Equality began to lend the weight of its name and apparatus to publish the transcript. Whether their charge of heresy, aimed at others, will rebound on their own heads, is a matter for the Church as a whole to judge, and not an individual reviewer. The facts adduced in the present paper may help the faithful toward an informed verdict.