This is what allows ESS/EFS/ERAS proponents to say things like, “Within the being of God, you have both equality and authority” and that authority and submission have “always existed in the eternal nature of God Himself”, and yet still adamantly agree with the Ligonier Statement that there is no subordination in the ontological Trinity (quotes from Biblical Foundations For Manhood And Womanhood, pp. 51-52).

To those for whom ESS (Eternal Subordination of the Son) or EFS (Eternal Functional Subordination) or ERAS (Eternal Relation of Authority and Submission) or (is that all of them?) does not ring a bell, the following may not be all that interesting.  Though debated off and on for at least the last 20 years or so, the popular claim that the Son of God is equal to the Father yet subject to His authority in all eternity, has over the Summer of 2016 come under intense scrutiny; and rightly so.  Confessionally Reformed Christians and scholars from many quarters have demonstrated this teaching to plainly run afoul of Nicene Orthodoxy with the potential to shipwreck some of the very pillars of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine.

So I was (momentarily) delighted when Ligionier Ministries updated their Statement on Christology to include an addition to “Affirmations and Denials” Article 2 (in bold below):

We affirm that in the unity of the Godhead the eternally begotten Son is consubstantial (homoousios), coequal, and coeternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

We deny that the Son is merely like God (homoiousios) or that He was simply adopted by the Father as His Son. We deny the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father in the ontological Trinity.

My delight quickly evaporated, however, when my very next thought was, “So does Wayne Grudem!”, the popularizer-in-chief of ESS/EFS/ERAS.  He and most all proponents of the teaching also deny that the subordination or submission to authority is according to the Trinity as ontologically conceived.  They point out consistently that such a position would constitute classic, literal, Arianism—to which we must agree.

The problem is that the Trinity economically conceived (as opposed to ontologically) has been defined any number of ways historically, from simply introducing three-ness into the Monarchia (Tertullian and Hippolytus) to always and only meaning Christ in His flesh (Martyr, Origen, and the Pro-Nicenes). Currently the most common definition would be something in the middle like, “the Father, Son, and Spirit as revealed in their ordered works toward creation and in redemption”, i.e., the ad extra functionings of the Persons.

Unfortunately, there is no end to the definitional liberality of those who would tamper with the Trinity, and so we have an even more curious definition of “economic” used by ESS/EFS/ERAS proponents. Look, for example, at how Grudem defines “economic” in his Systematic Theology, Ch. 14:

The “economy of the Trinity” means the different ways the three persons act as they relate to the world and (as we shall see in the next section) to each other for all eternity.

And further,

This truth about the Trinity has sometimes been summarized in the phrase “ontological equality but economic subordination,” where the word ontological means “being.” (See section D.1, above, where economy was explained to refer to different activities or roles.) Another way of expressing this more simply would be to say “equal in being but subordinate in role.” Both parts of this phrase are necessary to a true doctrine of the Trinity: If we do not have ontological equality, not all the persons are fully God. But if we do not have economic subordination, […]there is no inherent difference in the way the three persons relate to one another, and consequently we do not have the three distinct persons existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for all eternity.

Read More