Equal in Power and Glory: Why the Son Cannot Be Eternally Subordinate

Every generation seems to rediscover an old heresy and dress it in fresh clothes. In our day, a view has been gaining ground in some evangelical circles that holds the Son eternally submits to the Father within the life of the Godhead. Its proponents call it ESS (eternal submission of the Son), ERAS (eternal roles of authority and submission), or EFS (eternal functional subordination). We’ve been told this has been a non-controversial view for centuries.

Has it really? If the Son eternally submits to the Father, does He share the same divine nature? Are there two wills within the ontological Trinity? These aren’t small questions; they reach into the very being of God. One narrow but uncomfortable question runs underneath all the others: how close does this view sit to Arianism?

Carl Trueman has put the stakes plainly:

“Any fair reading of Nicene Trinitarianism would show that the concepts of the unity of the divine operations and the assertion of one will in God make analogies of intratrinitarian relations to human notions of submission inappropriate, even as we must allow for distinction and order among the divine persons.”¹

Our Triune God

Scripture speaks with final authority on this question: Jesus Christ is God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). From eternity the Son is fully God, with no qualifications and no strings attached.

The Athanasian Creed declares that “the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.” The Reformed Confessions echo this. The Westminster Larger Catechism (Q. 9) says: “There be three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one true, eternal God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.”

Ramifications of Subordination in the Ontological Trinity

Jesus Christ is the Son of God because He is eternally begotten, not because He fulfilled a role on earth that qualified Him to be considered the Son. Some defenders of eternal subordination have described the Son as a “soldier under orders,” speaking of the ontological Trinity itself.²

Philippians 2:6-7 speaks of Jesus “taking the form of a servant” in the Incarnation, a redemptive role He assumed in time. The Son of God cannot “become” what He has been for eternity.

R. C. Sproul draws the classical distinction:

“When we talk about the ontological Trinity…we are referring to the Trinity in itself, without regard to God’s works of creation and redemption…When we speak of the economic Trinity…we are dealing with the activity of God and the roles of the three persons with regard to creation and redemption.”³

Bavinck writes The Son “is truly equal to the Father in essence and nature, although now in office and status lesser than the Father.”⁴ The “now” matters: the lesser stature is mediatorial, not eternal. Eternal subordination places these roles into the ontological Trinity itself.

These concerns are not speculative. One prominent ESS defender writes openly:

“We detect a marvelous unbroken Christological thread here, gleaming with otherworldly glory. The Son was sent by the Father, indicating the Father’s authority over the pre-incarnate Son; in his incarnation, he completed the Father’s will, obeying the Father and submitting to him; now, he sits at the Father’s right hand; in eternity, he will continue in this role…never taking the Father’s position of authority.”⁵

Notice the phrase “pre-incarnate Son.” That isn’t economic language. The economic Trinity begins at the Incarnation. That is what makes it economic (God’s arrangement of redemption in time). To speak of the Father’s authority over a pre-incarnate Son is to place authority and submission within the immanent life of God Himself, the line Nicene orthodoxy refuses to cross.

If one person of the Godhead is master and another servant, the Father and Son are not “equal in power and glory” (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 6). Calvin will not yield an inch: “To restrict the name ‘God’ to the Father, to the exclusion of the Son, is neither lawful nor right.”⁶

Letham’s closing line on eternal generation:

“It follows that eternal generation is emphatically opposed to subordination. The order — from the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit — is not hierarchical, nor is it patterned after human relationships. Rather, it is an order of equals, in the identity of the indivisible Trinity.”⁷

The Essence of Arianism

Bavinck is excellent at spotting Arian tendencies. He writes:

“The essence of Arianism is its denial of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father; in other words, its assertion that the Father alone and in an absolute sense is the one true God. It follows, of course, that the Son is a being of inferior rank; that he does not share in the divine nature. Arianism places the Son somewhere between God and the created universe.”⁸

While ESS and other forms of subordinationism are not identical to Arianism, I fear they are on an Arian trajectory. Carl Trueman shares the same concern, calling this new subordinationism “a position seriously out of step with the historic catholic faith and a likely staging post to Arianism.”⁹

When authority is made essential to the Father and submission essential to the Son, the logical conclusion is that the Son does not possess authority the way the Father does.

The same ESS writer puts the point in even more striking terms, speaking of the Son’s “humility — unbroken humility, from before the world stretching into all the ages to come.”¹⁰ The phrase “from before the world” is fatal: it reaches into eternity, before creation, within the immanent Trinity. If the Son’s submission reaches that far, it has lodged itself in the divine essence rather than the mediatorial office, crossing the Nicene line.

The “soldier under orders” image is not a throwaway phrase. Michael J. Ovey, late Principal of Oak Hill Theological College, develops it at length:

“The soldier is human, just as the general is human. They are of the same nature. Yet the soldier is a soldier under orders. His obedience to the general does not make him ‘less human’ than the general.”¹¹

But if this analogy is pressed, it collapses. A human soldier was not a soldier from eternity. He enlisted. “Soldier” is a provisional role he acquired at a moment in time; take away the uniform and rank and he’s still fully human, because being a soldier was never part of his humanity. That is what makes the analogy safe for humans. But when we say the Son is eternally a soldier under orders, the parallel dies: “under orders” is no longer a role He takes up as our Mediator but an attribute He possesses as God. And an attribute of the divine essence cannot be unequally distributed among the persons without dividing the Godhead itself.

Ovey, writing to rebut the charge of Arianism, openly grants what Nicene orthodoxy has always denied: “one has to say Father and Son have distinguishable wills because they are distinguishable persons.” And again: the Son’s love for the Father “at the level of persons includes on the Son’s part eternal obedience.”¹²

Set that Ovey statement beside Trueman’s claim that “the assertion of one will in God make[s] analogies of intratrinitarian relations to human notions of submission inappropriate,” and the two positions cannot both stand.

Distinguishable wills at the personal level and eternal obedience within the Godhead are the moves orthodox Trinitarianism refuses. Sproul leaves no room: “As they are the same in glory, the Father and the Son are also of one will.”¹³

Calvin saw this kind of move in his own day and had no patience for it:

“I wonder what these makers of new gods mean when, having confessed Christ as true God, they immediately exclude him from the deity of the Father. As if he could be true God and not be one God, and as if a divinity transfused were anything but a newfangled fiction!”¹⁴

Strip the Son of the Father’s authority and you have stripped Him of a divine attribute. The classical doctrine of divine simplicity will not allow this: God is not composed of parts, and His attributes are not parceled out among the persons. To possess the divine essence is to possess every divine attribute, authority included. How could the Son be God but not have the attributes of God?

The usual proof text for subordinationism (John 14:28) speaks of the incarnate Son in His mediatorial office. The eternal relations within the immanent Trinity are a different question. Calvin addressed John 14:28 head-on: Christ, he wrote, “does not attribute to himself merely a secondary deity so that he is inferior to the Father with respect to eternal essence.”¹⁵

Holding the Orthodox Line

These are serious concerns, and I want to extend a hand even as I voice them. ESS is not an obstinately Arian affirmation. It’s possible to be wrong without being a heretic (Acts 18:24-26).

What originally caused Arius to drift into heresy? Heresy never arrives fully formed. Bavinck observed that subordinationist tendencies were present in the early church long before Arius: “the subordination of the Son to the Father” being one of the elements “later rejected by the church.”¹⁶ The creeds were written as guardrails for exactly this reason.

But the deepest reason to refuse any whisper of eternal subordination in the Godhead is not just for the sake of orthodox polemics; it’s doxological. Bavinck says it best:

“The doctrine of the generation of the Son displays God as no abstract, fixed, monadic, solitary substance, but a plenitude of life. It is his nature to be generative and fruitful.”¹⁷

The eternal Son, equal with the Father in glory and majesty, is not a soldier under orders. He is the radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact imprint of His nature (Hebrews 1:3), eternally begotten (Psalm 2:7), eternally beloved, eternally one with the Father and the Spirit (John 17:24). To Him, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be glory both now and forever. Amen.

Footnotes