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Dr. Strachan here (and elsewhere) may be subtweeting Craig Carter, who has written on God not being “relational.” Dr. Strachan names the God of the Bible as both “personal and relational.” In the regular sense of relational, that is true.
For further context, here are a set of tweets by Dr. Strachan that prompted this short article.
[Read more…] about Is God Relational? On the Intra-Baptist Debates regarding the TrinityIn 2016 Evangelicals debated about the best way to affirm that God is one and yet Father and Son. The old answer is: the Father begets the Son eternally; the Son is eternally begotten. Beget and begotten are old words to describe how fathers generate children. A mother births them; a father begets.
In recent years, evangelicals attempted to find a new way to talk about Father and Son. They said that the Father relates to the Son because he has paternal authority; the Son relates to the Father in a mode of submission. Authority and submission distinguish Father and Son.
For the most part, people found the new approach insufficient. It implied eternal inferiority of the Son, implied two wills, and inserted the human life of Jesus where he obeyed the Father into God. It unintentionally implied a creaturely characteristic in God since Jesus’s creaturely obedience to the Father gets imported into how God is eternally!
Recently, however, a theologian reaffirmed that the Father eternally has authority over the eternally submissive Son. Interestingly, the theologian cited Augustine and Hilary of Poitiers as proponents of his position. [Read more…] about Eternal Submission? Not Arianism, but still Wrong
A number of years ago theologians debated the nature of the trinity. Some held that the Son relates to the Father by submitting to him eternally, and the Father relates to the Son by eternally having authority over the Son.
Fair enough. Some Bible passages talk about the Son doing the will of the Father. But then why wouldn’t they? Jesus, the man Jesus Christ, always obeys the will of the Father according to his humanity since he came to live and die for our sake!
On the other hand, Christians also affirm the divinity of Christ, the Word of God. And so believers have understood Christ’s obedience to the Father according to his humanity, while confessing his equality according to his divinity. In the language of Paul in Philippians 2, Jesus took on the form of servant and became obedient to the point of death. Yet before becoming a servant, he enjoyed equality with God as a divine Person.
If equal, then the Father and Son share the same nature and thus the same power, activity, will and so on. After all, we confess that God is one.
However, in trying to work out how the one God is three persons, some evangelicals proposed that the Son eternally submits to the Father who eternally has authority over the Son. By these relations, the Father and Son might be eternally distinguished. And, some also claim, this relation of authority and submission explains why wives submit to husbands since marriage reflects the Trinity. [Read more…] about The Trinity Debate: Eternal Submission and the Spectre of Arianism
Christians speak of the Son as being “the only begotten Son” (John 3:16) from all time to give words to how they can confess the oneness of God and say: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” (Rev 5:13).
If God sired the Son from all time, then the Son’s filial relationship to the Father has always described their relationship. It was an eternal begetting or an eternal generation.
Recently a number of Christians have either denied eternal generation, supplanted it, or at the very least have redefined it. The new paradigm takes the name Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission (ERAS).
At least two major obstacles stand before ERAS. First, how can one God eternally obey the one God? That implies two wills. But God is one and so has one will. So he cannot obey his own will.
Second, and what I want to focus on here, ERAS does not articulate how the Spirit can be distinguished from the Father and Son. In short, it cannot explain our worship or liturgical practice of baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
[Read more…] about ERAS Cannot Distinguish The Spirit from the Son And Father
