Trinity

Does 1 Corinthians 15:28 Teach the Son’s Eternal Subordination? Answer: No, It Teaches Our Spiritual Transformation in Christ

June 6, 2019 by wagraham 1 Comment

Note to readers: I consider this article to be a work in process. It represents my fresh and therefore incomplete view of 1 Corinthians 15. I offer them in this light and in this light only.

Does 1 Corinthians 15:28 teach that the Son eternally submits to the Father: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all”?

Some argue the case. Bruce Ware claims, “There is no question that this passage indicates the eternal future submission of the Son to the Father, in keeping with his submission to the Father both in the incarnation and in eternity past” (2005: 84). Wayne Grudem cites 1 Corinthians 15:28 to affirm the Son’s “subordinate” role (ST 249).

With the respect due these theologians, I disagree with their interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15. By tracing the Adam-Christ relationship in 1 Corinthians 15, the citation of Psalm 8 in 15:27, and the meaning of the final phrase “that God may all in all,” we discern another and better conclusion of the text’s meaning. 1 Corinthians 15:28 indicates that the Son redeems physical humanity and subjects all physical things to God, so that God may be all in all Spiritual creatures through his abiding Spirit.

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What Is The Glory That Jesus Gives Us in John 17? Answer: The Holy Spirit

June 5, 2019 by wagraham 9 Comments

In John 17, Jesus promises to share the Father’s glory (that he too possesses) with his disciples. He prays, “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:22).

What does this mean? And to complicate things, how does this fit with Isaiah 42:8 which reads, “my glory I give to no other”?

The answer requires paying close attention to the argument of John, the order of redemptive history, and reflecting theologically on the meaning of both. I argue that “glory” in John 17 means “Holy Spirit.”

To make this argument, I will outline, augment, and strengthen Gregory of Nyssa’s (335–395) argument for this position in his letter: “On ‘Then Also the Son Himself Will Be Subjected to the One Who Subjected All things to Him.’”

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Can Christians Affirm Multiple Wills in God?

June 2, 2019 by wagraham Leave a Comment

Jesus prayed in the Garden, “not my will be done but yours,” and elsewhere he says, “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.” Obviously, Christ has his own will, and the Father has his.

Nobody disagrees here. But the next step is crucial. Does Jesus mean that his divine will agrees with the Father’s divine will, or does Jesus mean that his human will concurs with the divine will of God?

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Can Christians Believe in the Eternal Submission of the Son? (a Review of Trinity Without Hierarchy Edited by Michael Bird and Scott Harrower)

June 1, 2019 by wagraham 1 Comment

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.

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ERAS Cannot Distinguish The Spirit from the Son And Father

May 23, 2019 by wagraham 2 Comments

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.

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How Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware Explain Eternal Relations of Submission and Authority in Their Own Words

May 22, 2019 by wagraham 1 Comment

In heated debates, the key positions sometimes get lost in the fray. And since the complementarian Trinity debate has once more entered centre stage due to recent publications, we could use a spotlight to illumine the key theological issues.

For that reason, I want to clarify the eternal relations of authority-submission (ERAS) or eternal functional subordination (EFS) position on the Trinity.

This article aims to define ERAS sympathetically by outlining the views of Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware by citing their own words.