Getting caught with their pants down

Seven years ago when i was exploring other Christian traditions and reading heavily in the early fathers (and all the leading monographs), I came to the conclusion that if you don’t make Triadology (or its correlate Christology) central, you risk getting your whole theological method wrong.

A number of Conference Calvinists said, “Nuh-uh.”

Well, here we are today.  My thoughts on the current fighting on the Trinity regarding complementarianism:

1. CMBW (or complementarian advocates on the Trinity) say you shouldn’t exalt the Fathers over the Bible.  Well, it’s not the simple.  As Torrance pointed out, once you terms like Ὁμοουσιον become enshrined in Christian discourse, you can’t go backwards. Ὁμοουσιον safeguards the ontological structure and identity of of the essence.  If you jettison this doctrine, you risk jettisoning everything that goes with it.
2. As it stands, the complementarians/EFS guys are wrong.   But they aren’t 100% wrong.  It is wrong of them to read roles and functions into the eternal being of God.  You end up with Arianism.  Since God’s being is simple and identical among the Persons, it just doesn’t work.  If the Son’s being is eternally subordinate and the Father’s isn’t, then by definition they don’t have the same Being.
3. But they have noticed something.  There is a difference of taxis in the Trinity.  That’s what the Fathers call “monarchia.”
4. Neither side has really come to grips with that.
5. I suspect one of the reasons is that the Evangelical world only has two categories for the Trinity: Ontological and Economical.  The Fathers had a third category:  The Person.
6. But the real reason is we just don’t talk about the Trinity, and if we do we don’t let the full import of Athanasius’s ontology change how we do everything.   For one, it’s hard.  Athanasius’s most important work is Contra Arianos.  It isn’t On the Incarnation.  And the former work is quite demanding.  You won’t get invited to TGC conferences speaking on an Athanasian metaphysics.

 

Person and Nature in Gospel Coalition

This is a thought experiment based on reading a report on the Gospel Coalition‘s use of Trinitarian theology to undergird a certain view of husband-wife relations and authority.  For starters, let’s say that egalitarianism or complementarianism is true or false based on the respective merits of the case.

As I understand it, the Gospel Coalition-type guys (Ware, Grudem, maybe Piper) say that the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father.  But equal in essence.  This means women are subordinate to men yet still fully human.

While one likes to make fun of the Gospel Coalition, and I probably will, they aren’t entirely off–well, yes they are but they almost made a very good argument.  So here is where they run into problems:

“Eternal” denotes relation, which is a category of essence. Therefore, to say that the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father as a relation is to say that the Son is essentially subordinate to the Father, which is a no-go.  But of course, they want to say that the Son and Father are equal in essence–their complementarianism demands it.

They need a more robust hypostatic theology.  Person and Nature aren’t the same thing, as St John of Damascus said.  Therefore, the hypostasis of the Son can derive from the monarchia of the Father without a dimunition of essence.  (Note I didn’t say subordinate to, just because that has bad connotations).

Of course, if pressed these guys will say they believe in the hypostases as the three persons of the Trinity.  Maybe so, but they don’t let this correct insight help the rest of their theology from going off the rails.