For centuries, Christians have confessed that God exists as a tri-unity distinguished by the personal names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each name of a person in God expressed some implied relationship: so the Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten.
These relational properties (often called relations of origin) maintained the unity of the simple God, while distinguishing persons in God according to their biblical names: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But recently, some evangelicals have attempted to reconceive of the Trinity by introducing notions of authority and submission into the inner-life of God. The basic idea goes like this: Jesus obeyed the Father during his earthly life. And this obedience implies an eternal relationship in which the Son of God always obeyed the Father. So authority and submission explain how persons in God relate to one another.
[Read more…] about Can Christians Believe in the Eternal Submission of the Son? (a Review of Trinity Without Hierarchy Edited by Michael Bird and Scott Harrower)