There is no text in the Bible that clearly requires or rejects eternal submission, and those who support eternal submission of the Son are not easily categorized as pro-Nicene or as Arian. What is the best path forward?

In my new book, The Son Who Learned Obedience, I present a case against the position known as the Eternal Submission of the Son (EFS). EFS argues that the Son is eternally characterized in his person by a functional subordination and/or a relation of submission and obedience to the Father. In other words, the Son, by virtue of being the Son, is eternally submissive to the Father, whose personal role is to command. Those who support the eternal submission of the Son typically use the claimed eternal hierarchical relationship between the Father and Son as a basis for wives’ submission to their husbands.

My book argues that the theology of eternal submission is deeply problematic because it represents a deviation from historical orthodox views of the Trinity, and when the doctrine of the Trinity is shifted, classical accounts of atonement, Christology, and the doctrine of God are also jeopardized. Needless to say, this argument takes a book to develop and cannot be reduced to a series of blog posts. For this reason, I intend to highlight in a two-part series certain basic points that can elevate the level of debate concerning this contested doctrine. I will begin with a first post on theological method and the eternal submission debate. A second post on the need to connect Trinitarian debates with other doctrines will follow.

In this first post, I will argue that this complex debate about the Trinity cannot easily be resolved through proof texts from Scripture and from Christian tradition. When I argue this, I do not intend to minimize the authority of either source for Christian theology. I affirm that the Bible alone is the infallible and inspired verbal revelation of God, the only sure source in theology. While tradition is certainly fallible, I nevertheless affirm that it is a valuable test of the truthfulness of a given biblical interpretation. If we read the Bible and uncover an interpretation with no historical precedent, we should be quite wary, as we wonder why God would chose to help us see a new meaning in a text that his Spirit-led (yet fallible) church has read for millennia. A more likely explanation than new insight is misinterpretation. Thus, I do not intend to downplay the role of Scripture or tradition. Rather, I argue that a proper respect for both sources of theology requires a higher quality hermeneutic than has often been used in the debates over the eternal submission of the Son.

Literal and Theological Readings of Scripture in the Eternal Submission Debate

When using Scripture to consider the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son, no simple appeal to a passage or series of passages in the Bible can resolve the debate with certainty. This follows from sound exegetical principles, which I deploy in my work, but which I would like to summarize in greater detail here. When seeking the literal meaning of a text, several principles can guide our interpretation:

1) We must attend to grammatical and lexical aids to determine the denotation of the passage

2) We must consider the context of a verse in terms of narrative, argument, and the author’s theology to establish the author’s intent

3) we must pay attention to canonical and historical parallels to provide context whereby we might better grasp a passage’s meaning.

There are certainly other principles, but these suffice to illustrate the exegetical shortcomings in many pro- eternal submission arguments. When considering lexical meaning, context within a passage, and canonical and historical parallels, there is no single passage of Scripture whose literal meaning must be taken to imply the eternal submission of the Son.[1]

I would like to illustrate the role of exegesis in the debate with reference to a common argument deployed by Wayne Grudem, namely, that since the Father sends the Son, and never the inverse, there is an eternal relation of command and submission between the two.[2] There is a seeming plausibility to this argument on first reading it, but we must dig into the text to determine if there is any ultimate validity to it.

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