November 5, 2021 Show with Phil Johnson on “A Critique of the Eternal Subordination of the Son Doctrine”

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I am really delighted to have back on the program my most interviewed guest since the inception of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, since 2005 when

I first launched, Phil Johnson who is the Executive Director of the Media Ministry of Dr.

John MacArthur, grace to you, and today we are going to be addressing something that is quite controversial.

We are going to be addressing a critique of the Eternal Subordination of the Son Doctrine, and how to respond to brethren who embrace it, and it is my honor and privilege and delight to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Phil Johnson.

Well, it is good to be back with you. Great, and it is not only a joy to interview you again, but it was great to see you face to face at the

G3 Conference, to hear you preach, and to interview you once again on site at the

G3 Conference in Atlanta. I considered it a great honor that you, upon greeting me when

I first arrived in Atlanta, the first thing you said is, ìYou are going to interview me ?î

I consider that a great honor that you brought it up before I did, and loved our interview, and then, not so long ago, even more recently, it was so great to hear you speak along with Richard D.

Phillips of Second Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina, at the

Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at their Reformation Conference on the theme ìThe

Providence of God .î It was really great not only to see and hear you preach again at that conference just last week, but also

I was thrilled to receive the request from Pastor Josh Miller of Grace Bible Fellowship Church to moderate the

Q &A session with you, Rick Phillips, and the audience. I just had a blast doing that.

The time went by too quickly. Already an hour had gone by, and I thought that it was only like ten minutes that had gone by.

I hope I didnít embarrass you in any way, Phil. No, not at all. That was a fun conference, actually.

The Q &A was one of the highlights. By the way, if anybody wants to get the audio for that conference,

I strongly advise you to do that. In particular, all of the sessions are excellent by both

Richard D. Phillips and Phil Johnson, but I was perhaps even most fascinated by Philís lectures both in the

Sunday school hour and during the final session of the conference

Sunday night on Cotton Mather. In particular, especially in the evening service,

Phil focused on separating fact from fiction regarding the Salem Witch Trials.

If you go to gracebfc .com, thatís grace b f c, which stands for Bible Fellowship Church, youíll be able to get those videos and audios.

You want to give, even though this is not our subject at hand, Phil, but you want to give a summary of Cotton Mather to whet the appetites of our listeners because heís such a misunderstood figure.

His flaws have been grossly exaggerated, including his role in the

Salem Witch Trials. Heís been totally slandered in that regard, but if you could give us a brief summary of that.

Yeah, history has not been kind to him. He did have flaws, and theyíre obvious if you read his diary, but they arenít the sort of character -destroying flaws that people want to portray him as, this sort of mean, witch -hunting, vindictive sort of person.

He was really quite a well -respected pastor with a pastoral heart, lots of compassion for people, and he lived at a time at the end of the medieval period and classical philosophy, and just before the dawn of the

Age of Enlightenment. He had one foot in both places.

He had some superstitious ideas, but he also was interested in the developments of science.

What a lot of people donít realize about him, because itís not as well -publicized, is that he was a key figure in introducing a smallpox vaccination into America.

He was one of the first to advocate and actually take the vaccine for smallpox in a day when those vaccines were more dangerous than smallpox vaccinations today, but he helped avert a major disaster when a smallpox epidemic hit

Boston, and he was encouraging people to be vaccinated. The irony of that is, just a generation later, a smallpox vaccination is what killed

Jonathan Edwards. So, yes, there are people, even today, who are pro and con vaccine.

Iím one of those who says, ìIt really ought to be a matter of personal conscience. You should be able to make your own choice whether you take the vaccination or not .î

I think Cotton Mather would have agreed with that, but anyway, I donít think he gets as much credit as he deserves for what a diligent and disciplined man he was, and at the same time, a really good pastor to his flock in a time when there was a lot of superstition, and it was a dangerous era.

I think heís one of the good guys of church history, though he did have, like all of us, flaws, some of them glaring flaws.

Well, Iím looking forward to having you back on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio to address Cotton Mather.

I was so fascinated by it, I immediately knew I wanted to interview you on that subject, and since itís a two -hour interview, you could even include some things that you may have not addressed in your lectures at Grace Bible Fellowship Church.

Yeah, that whole era of New England history absolutely fascinates me.

Cotton Mather was the third in three generations of Puritan pastors.

He was really, you might say, Americaís last Puritan, and his father was

Increase Mather. His grandfathers were John Cotton and Richard Mather, both of whom had made their reputations in England but were sort of chased out of England when the

Church of England issued the Act of Uniformity and required nonconformist pastors to vacate their pulpits, basically.

Was it John Cottonís defense of Congregationalism that converted

John Owen from Presbyterian ecclesiology? Yes, thatís right. Yeah, I think

I made that comment in the lecture the other day, that anyone who could change the mind of John Owen on a theological issue you know is an intellectual and biblical powerhouse, and that was

John Cotton. He was a very careful, meticulous theologian who is really perhaps single -handedly responsible for the fact that in colonial

America, New England, most of the churches were Congregational churches. Yeah, and itís such a tragedy when

I, it grieves my spirit so deeply whenever I see one of these old

Congregationalist churches that goes back to the 1700s, perhaps even 1600s, and now being occupied by the

United Church of Christ, one of the most apostate denominations in Protestantism, to think that the thundering voices of Puritans were echoing in the halls of those buildings and now you have sodomites and all kinds of folks donning the pulpits and preaching their heresies and blasphemies.

Right, and you know Iím not a Congregationalist, but I would have to say I donít think that level of apostasy is attributable to their view on church government.

It wasnít Congregationalism per se that led to that, but if you look at any of the mainline denominations really over the past 150 years, most of them have apostatized with incredible speed and itís interesting how quickly they go from being biblical and sound to where, you know, theyíre ordaining homosexuals and jumping on every culturally popular bandwagon.

Itís just the nature of apostasy that it represents a looming threat, and I think evangelicals today need to be much more aware of that than we are.

If you just think across the board, how many churches can you think of that have been around for more than a century and a half and are still biblically -minded, sound evangelical churches preaching the gospel, where the gospel is preached and the authority of Scripture is respected, there are some, but there arenít many.

Youíre right. And by the way, I think itíd be fair of me to mention that there is a

Congregational denomination. Theyíre known as the Four Cís, Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, and there are quite a number of Bible -believing

Christian pastors who were formerly in the United Church of Christ, the leftist apostate denomination, who left there and have brought their congregations into the

Four Cís. So I just thought Iíd mention that unless any Four Cís folk are listening and theyíre getting upset because they think

Iím broad -brushing all Congregationalists. And of course, Baptists very often have a

Congregational ecclesiology, but these

Four Cís churches, many of them even have adopted the Savoy Declaration, the great historic

Congregationalist document. But that is not our discussion today.

Our discussion today, as I mentioned at the outset, is a critique of the eternal subordination of the

Son doctrine and how to respond to brethren who embrace it. This is one of those programs that I feel somewhat apprehensive about, not because I shy away from letting the chips fall where they may when it comes to biblical truth, but I just happen to know, as you do,

I happen to have not only interviewed men on both sides of this debate on the

Trinity, but I have friends on both sides of the debate.

It seems that there are different categories of people when it comes to eternal subordination of the

Son. You have those that are vehemently opposed to it. You have those who wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embrace it.

You have those who are opposed to it but think this is an issue that brethren may differ on without causing division, without causing division causing any kind of disfellowshipping or anything to that degree.

And you have those who are opposed to it who think it is just rank heresy and that you should have no fellowship with folks that agree with it.

And you also even have folks on the eternal subordination of the

Son side who vilify all those with the traditional understanding of the

Trinity who as being egalitarian, meaning that they believe that women should be able to hold the same offices in the church as men because they would claim that it is because of a denial of complementarianism when it comes to gender roles that these folks deny a place in the complementarian understanding of the

Trinity where you can have subordination without a diminishment of equality.

But I've said a lot there. Why don't you define eternal subordination of the Son? What is this doctrine?

Yeah, by the way, I think this is an issue that the vast majority of evangelicals today need to study more carefully and look into more intently.

I think most people in churches and I would say perhaps even a majority of church leaders are simply confused by the issue.

They don't know how to sort it out or where to come down. And also you refer to it as eternal subordination of the

Son. I think most of the people who hold to the view would prefer the terminology eternal submission because subordinationism has always been regarded as outside the circle of orthodoxy.

In my view, that's a fine point to make.

I don't know that it really makes a difference whether you're talking about subordination or submission, but they seem to prefer the language submission, so I'll stick with that.

And there are really three acronyms by which it's known. Some would refer to it as ESS, meaning the eternal submission of the

Son. Some would say EFS, meaning eternal functional submission or subordination.

And then I think it's Owen Strand who perhaps invented the longest name for it.

He calls it ERAS, eternal relations of authority and submission. And I think we should quickly add that you and I both have the highest regards for Owen Strand.

I have interviewed him on this program several times. Yes, he's a friend. He was actually here.

I didn't see him, but when I got back from Pennsylvania he was here visiting the Master's Seminary, and he and I didn't connect this time other than by email, but I have to say he's a friend.

And as you said, I have friends on the opposite side of this issue from me. I don't hold to any of those views.

I think it opens the door to significant problems if you try to define the father -son relationship as one of authority and submission or authority and subordination.

And the view I would hold is mainstream Trinitarianism.

It's been really the standard Trinitarian view, I think, since the Council of Nicaea or before.

So this would be my concern. I think this idea of eternal submission of the

Son is a departure from what the Church has always held and confessed, and I'm always wary of novel theological tweaks, and particularly if there's a motive behind it that maybe

I don't think is necessary in this case, as you suggested. I think partly what drives this debate is, and in fact, the main voices who are promoting the eternal submission idea are all men who have valiantly defended

Complementarianism, the idea that there are, by God's design, different roles of authority and submission for men and women, both in marriage and in the

Church. I'm a Complementarian, so on that I'm in absolute agreement with them.

I think Scripture's clear. But I don't think Complementarianism needs a novel

Trinitarian tweak to defend it. I don't think that's a good way to defend

Complementarianism. So to summarize about eternal submission of the

Son, as you prefer to call it, because most of its advocates, according to you, prefer that.

Basically, they are in wholehearted agreement with Christians holding the traditional view of the

Trinity that all three members of the Godhead, all three persons of the

Godhead, are co -eternal and co -equal. They're not denying that at all.

But as far as the function of the

Son, since he did, everyone agrees on both sides of the debate over eternal submission of the

Son, that when Jesus Christ became incarnate and lived on this earth, he was in submission to the

Father. But those that believe in eternal submission of the Son believe it goes beyond merely his ministry on the planet earth.

They would make a distinction between ontological equality, unity, and functional submission.

So they're saying economically there is a hierarchy in the Trinity, but ontologically, meaning when you talk about the nature and the essence of their being, they are equal in every sense.

And so on that we agree that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are eternally equal, co -equal, co -essential.

Well, let's say co -eternal, co -essential. But they would make a distinction between their equality of essence and their inequality of function.

But as historic Trinitarianism says, no, there are three distinct persons, but in one eternal

God, so that each of the persons of the Trinity is fully divine with all of the attributes and prerogatives of God, which means by definition there cannot be subordination.

In fact, Nicene Trinitarianism has always held that God is three persons in one divine being with one divine will.

There is no difference between the will of the Father and the will of the Son. And the reason you hear

Jesus talking as if there is in certain places, for example, in John 5, he says,

I can do nothing on my own, but I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me.

And of course in Gethsemane he said, not my will, but thine. That's because when

Jesus took on humanity in his incarnation, he took on a new nature, and so he has a human will, and it's his human will that he is submitting to the divine will, the will of his

Father. But he and his Father were never eternally, there was no difference in the will of the

Father and the will of the Son. So the reason that some of the advocates, proponents of eternal submission of the

Son hurl the accusation at those who disagree with them that they are egalitarian is because it has always been the insistence of liberals and feminists that to believe in the submission of women in the church, whether it be wives submitting to husbands or even women submitting to male leadership in the church and never having the liberty to attain an office in the church where they are teaching and preaching to men, liberals and feminists have always said that makes women less than men.

It diminishes their very essence in being and makes men superior.

And those who are complementarian have said, oh no, different roles but equal before God.

So therefore the eternal submission of the Son folk say, well you guys are being inconsistent.

You're saying that you're complementarian when it comes to gender roles, but you're revealing your true hand here because you're saying that to believe that Christ is submissive means he's less and not co -equal with the

Father. Am I making sense here? Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of words there, but I would say it like this.

I would say it like this. You don't want to confuse the equality of essence with the inequalities of function, and that's true with men and women as well.

I mean, I'm a convinced complementarian, and I do not believe there's any inequality of value or dignity or importance or quality or even humanity between men and women.

We share the image of God. But in the marriage relationship there is definitely a difference in rank, in function, when it comes to leadership and responsibility.

And in my view, to imply that such a ranking like that eternally exists within the

Trinity is to blur what it is we're confessing when we say the persons of the

Trinity are of the same essence. They are the same substance. They are one. It is by definition an imbalance in the very essence of the

Godhead at a fundamental level to say that there is this eternal hierarchy there.

And we're going to our first break right now, if anybody wants to join us on the air with a question for Phil Johnson on his critique of the eternal subordination or submission of the

Son Doctrine, and also how we are to respond to brothers and sisters who embrace it.

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Grace to you. And we're addressing a critique of the eternal subordination of the

Son, also known as the eternal submission of the Son doctrine, and how to respond to brethren who embrace it.

If you have a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. The advocates, the proponents of eternal submission of the

Son, do they use as any support? Obviously, they would consider themselves to be biblical inerratists as we are, but do they also go to any historic figures for support?

Any ancient figures or early church figures, or even great men of God that all

Reformed folk love throughout the ages? They do.

I mean, there are certain, you know, ambiguous words that are used.

The discussion of the Trinity has always been fraught with problems. You have to be very precise.

It's not an easy doctrine to understand. It's not irrational, but it's easy to confuse.

And a lot of the debate between heresy and orthodoxy over the years has ultimately come down and focused on the doctrine of the

Trinity. It's not an easy one to understand. It's not something anybody should, you know, shoot from the hip on, or decide that, you know, it just needs to be thrown out or totally revised.

People do that all the time. But the problem with any kind of subordinationism or submission is, if you just look at the history of that, subordinationists have typically been veered towards cultism.

I mean, the classic kind of subordinationism would be Arianism, which is the same doctrine as the

Jehovah's Witnesses hold to, that Jesus is just under God, but not really

God. He's a created being or whatever, and to be clear, no one who is teaching this view of eternal functional subordination believes

Jesus is a created being. I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying the view itself tends to diminish the unity of the

Trinity, which is as important as it is to see the three persons in the Trinity. And once you make submission or subordination eternal,

I don't see how you can possibly divorce that from the essence of who the persons of the

Trinity are. If Christ is eternally submitted to His Father under Him in authority, then that pertains, it seems to me, to His essence.

And if He's eternally submitted to His Father, then what you're suggesting, and I don't see any way to avoid it, is that there is more than one will in the

Godhead. There have to be two wills in order for one to submit to the other, and as my friend

Mike Riccardi says, submission is the subjection of one will to another.

That's what it is by definition, and therefore it requires multiple faculties of the will.

Because will is a property of nature, not person, and therefore two wills ultimately implies two natures.

And so to deny that there is one nature in the Godhead is essentially to deny the

Trinity. So those are the kinds of problems that I think people who hold to this view need to be careful to untangle, and frankly

I'd like to see them all abandon this view. I don't think it's a necessary argument in favor of complementarianism, which is

I think why so many of them hold to it so firmly. So in your opinion, from what you have heard and read by advocates of eternal submission of the

Son, you think their view of gender roles is driving this? Yeah, I do.

I do. I mean, look at the main voices who have advocated this and like just defended it militantly.

It's Bruce Ware, Wayne Grudem, Owen Strayen, I think Denny Burke holds this view.

It goes hand in hand with their view on complementarianism.

Well, we do have a listener who has a question, happens to be somebody that I know.

I don't know if you know him as well, but he's been a dear friend of mine since the late 1980s.

Pastor Gary George of Sovereign Grace Chapel in Southbridge, Massachusetts.

And Gary asks, I have to bring up this question again. What changed

John MacArthur's view of Jesus's sonship? For years, John believed Jesus's sonship was temporal, that it was a new title relationship that he acquired at the point of his incarnation.

This day I have begotten as quoted from Psalm 2 was understood by John as referencing

Jesus's conferred sonship, not pre -temporal as indicated in his commentaries on Galatians and Hebrews.

But he switched his view to Jesus's eternal sonship. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question.

And it does sort of relate to this. One of the reasons I think

John MacArthur early on denied the idea of eternal sonship is that there is, in the way we use the words father and son, there is an implied inequality or hierarchy between father and son, right?

So if that's eternal, then I think what John MacArthur was trying to avoid was some sort of eternal subordination of the son to the father.

And he keyed on that verse from Psalm 2 that's quoted in Hebrews as well,

Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee. And he said, look, it's this day I have begotten thee.

That takes place at a point in time. But as he studied it, and he took a lot of criticism for holding that view, because again, it's outside the normal circle of Orthodox theology.

And so John MacArthur's response was to go back and study the issue and restudy the doctrine of the

Trinity. And realizing that the idea of being a son, and particularly in a

Hebrew mind, in the biblical context, the idea of being a son to someone doesn't make you less than that person, it makes you equal to that person.

And in fact, that's explicitly stated in John 5, John 5 .18,

this is why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Jesus, because he was even calling God his own father, scripture says, making himself equal with God.

So they understood, the Hebrews understood that to be the son of someone is to say

I'm equal to him in authority and status and privilege and all of that.

So when Jesus referred to God as my father, the Jews would sometimes pray to God as our father, but for Jesus to say he is my father and declare that he had this unique relationship as the son of God was, in the minds of his hearers, correctly interpreted as a declaration of his own deity.

And I think when John MacArthur realized that you can't argue, on the one hand, that son of God is a title of deity, and on the other hand say that son of God is an incarnational title.

It can't be both. And so he opted for the view that it is a title of deity and therefore

Christ is the eternal son of God. There's more to it than that. He had to study the doctrine of eternal generation, which

I don't know if you want to get into that, but it's one of the most confusing and sometimes disputed doctrines of all theologies.

Spurgeon would refer to eternal generation every now and then and always say it's impossible to understand, because the word generation implies the beginning of something, right?

We generated this. It sort of implies that that's where it originated, and the word eternal means it had no origin.

It always existed, right? So how can Christ be eternally generated?

And the answer, I think, is that the term generation or begotten is the biblical term, the only begotten son of God.

It's the same problem with that. When you beget someone in the human realm, that's their conception.

That's where they have their start. But we say Christ is eternally begotten by the

Father. What does that mean? Well, I'm not capable of explaining it, and I don't know that anyone is, but that is an expression that Scripture uses that Christ is begotten of the

Father, and eternally begotten. Those words generation and begetting refer not to the origin of Christ, but to his equality with God.

He is of the same kind. He is of the same nature. He is of the same substance as God the

Father, eternally. So it doesn't speak of a point in time. And in fact, when

Psalm 2 says, This day have I begotten thee, that's not a reference to a point in time.

That is a reference to the eternal decree of God. It's an eternal reality. So you can tell just from that description how confusing these things can be, because it requires us to see beyond the normal way we use language, and understand that what

Scripture is presenting to us is an idea that has no parallel. It has no analogy in all of human experience, and therefore, human language is incapable of clearly describing what it entails.

But that's the whole nature of the Trinity. God is one, and yet he exists in three persons.

That's the whole nature of the Trinity. That is the defining doctrine of Christianity, really. That is the distinctive of our view of theology proper.

Well, thank you, Pastor Gary. Thanks for listening again to Iron Shelf and Zion Radio. Let me give Gary and Sovereign Grace Chapel of Southbridge, Massachusetts a plug.

Their website is sovereigngracema .org. We have

CJ from Lyndonhurst, Long Island, New York, who wants to know, how do those that advocate this teaching you are discussing, the eternal submission of the

Son, deal with Matthew 28, verse 18, which says,

And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

If Jesus is always to be in the submission to the Father, this does not seem to make sense.

Yeah, that's a good argument, too, but the question is, how do they respond to that?

And I'll give you one of their responses, sort of playing the devil's advocate here.

That'll make my friends angry. Call it a devil's advocate. But this is a view that I don't hold to.

But they would point you, then, to 1 Corinthians 15, 28, which talks about the culmination of all history.

When all things are subjected to Him, that being Christ, 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.

And they would suggest that that text specifically states that the

Son Himself will be subjected eternally, into eternity future, to the

Father. Well, thanks, C .J. Excellent question. Going back to a question that I asked you before the break,

I believe, on the extra -biblical support that is presented by those who are advocates or proponents of eternal submission of the

Son, you seem to be implying that there are quite a number of quotes and things, but you believe that they're all being taken out of context?

Did I understand that correctly? Or were there any strong advocates of this throughout history?

And I might even rephrase the question, when did this teaching begin in history, according to your knowledge of history?

Yeah, no, I think it's a fairly new flavor of subordinationism.

There's been subordinationism going all the way back to Arius again.

And different people have used language that implies a kind of subordination or hierarchy within the

Trinity. I think some of them carelessly, some of them deliberately, but as I said, normally that's related to some heresy or another.

So there aren't a lot of historical sources that are reliable that they could point to and say, well, they taught this same view.

And I don't have the quotes handy here, but there have been, let me see if I can find,

I was going to just repeat, I'm going to repeat my email address, chrisarnsen at gmail .com

if you have a question. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Go ahead. Yeah, okay,

I found this here, it's an article on the web by someone who says certain theologians like Lewis Burkhoff, Charles Hodge, Gerhardus Voss, those are all names that you and I would highly respect, all of them

Reformed conservative theologians. Certain theologians like Burkhoff, Hodge, and Voss have classified this order of subsistence as a kind of species or subordination, but this writer goes on to say, but B .B.

Warfield cautioned against assuming it to be a subordination. So I gather, although I haven't taken time to look this up, that you could find statements in Burkhoff, Hodge, and Voss that would sound like they're advocating a kind of subordination, eternal subordination between son and father.

I don't think any of them held to that view because they all affirmed confessions of faith that would have explicitly denied any kind of eternal inequality between the persons of the

Trinity. We have to go to our midway break right now, folks. It is the longer than normal break, as those of you who listen regularly know.

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ChrisArnson at gmail .com, I need a church in the subject line. We are now back with Phil Johnson, our guest today.

If you just tuned us in, our theme today is a critique of the Eternal Subordination of the

Son Doctrine, also known as the Eternal Submission of the Son Doctrine.

And there are other names, as Phil was listing some. Owen Strand has a very long one.

Being a brilliant brother in Christ, as Owen Strand is, I'm not surprised that he would give a much longer description.

But if you have a question of your own on this, our email address is

ChrisArnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. We have a listener in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, named

Christian. And Christian wants to know, why are you so upset about this teaching?

Some of the reasons you have already given involve a fear of what a belief in this eternal submission will lead to.

But all truths in the Bible can be abused and twisted and lead to serious error.

Even Calvinism, if misused, can lead to hyper -Calvinism, where people no longer evangelize.

Or people think that Calvinists are the only true Christians. Even the uniqueness and exclusiveness of the

Christian faith for salvation can lead to an abuse, where people begin to have bigoted notions and hateful attitudes towards those who are not

Christians. So anything can be twisted. Is there anything more substantial than a fear of becoming worse that you have in your arsenal?

Well, yeah, I mean, I mentioned it. I think what it does is confuse the issue of the divine unity, that the

Lord our God is one. That's Deuteronomy 6 .4. That's the foundation of biblical theism, that the

Lord our God is one. And the will of God is therefore indivisible. And this view really hits straight at the will of God and attempts to divide that which is indivisible.

And I have to be careful saying that. Actually, I'm not trying to sound like I'm fearful. I just think that boundaries need to be set around our doctrinal convictions.

Because he's right. Any doctrine you name can and has been abused. That's why we have careful doctrinal statements.

That's why we deal with doctrines like the

Trinity with meticulous care. And over the course of church history, you'll find the

Trinity in particular has been, and the doctrine of Christ, the hypostatic union, the person of Christ, his eternality, and all of those things have been attacked again and again and again by deviant doctrines.

And we ought to be especially wary of any doctrine that comes at a well -established article of Christian belief, one of the foundations of the whole

Christian belief system, and proposes some novel interpretation of it.

I think everybody ought to be wary of that. Not that we're fearful in the sense that we're, what would you call it, submissophobic, or whatever you want to call it.

It's not a phobia as much as it is a desire to defend that which is well -established and thoroughly biblical.

And the doctrine of the Trinity, as I said at the very beginning, is not an easy doctrine to understand.

It is an easy doctrine to twist or torment out of shape.

And sadly, it's one of those things that pretty much every dilettante believer thinks, well,

I can modify this so it'll make more sense or be more understandable or be easier to...

I think most of us have looked at this doctrine at some point in our Christian life and said, yeah,

I wish there was a way to explain it easier, to make it easier to grasp and understand. But as I said, there is nothing analogous in human experience to the doctrine of the

Trinity. There's nothing like it. You can't compare anything to it. And so you have to make very careful distinctions in what

Scripture tells us. And Scripture tells us definitively, dogmatically, that God is one, and also presents to us three persons in the

Godhead and treats them as distinct. So the question then is, what are their distinctives?

What makes them distinct? What distinguishes the Son from the Father and the

Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son? And it's actually surprisingly easy when you get down to it.

There really is one distinctive for each person of the Trinity. You wouldn't say, the Son is eternally begotten by the

Father. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Notice, those are different words.

You wouldn't say the Holy Spirit is begotten, because Scripture never uses language like that. It says

He proceeds from the Father. And we believe also the Son, you know, based on say a text like John 15, 26, where Jesus speaks of the

Helper, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth. So He's talking about the

Holy Spirit. He treats Him as a person, and He says He proceeds from the

Father. So He proceeds, the Son is begotten. What's the difference between those two things?

I don't know. I don't know how to explain it, except that that is what Scripture says.

And in the words of the Westminster Confession, or at least to paraphrase the Confession, the Father is neither begotten nor proceeding.

The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. The Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the

Father and the Son. So what's the difference between the eternal generation of the

Son? We call that filiation, filiation with an F, which speaks of sonship.

The procession of the Holy Spirit, we call that spiration, because it evokes the idea of breath.

The Spirit is the breath of God, like the breath of God. And so these distinctions describe relationships, but not a hierarchy.

It's relationships. And the proof that it's not a hierarchy, I would go back to John 5 again,

John 5, 18, where the Jews sought to kill Christ because He called God His Father and thereby made

Himself equal with God. And Scripture repeatedly speaks of Christ as eternally equal with God.

That's Philippians 2. He didn't consider equality with God a thing to be grasped or held onto.

So the subordination that we see, and also the two wills in Christ, pertain to His two natures as God and man.

He therefore has two wills, and it's the will of His humanity, it's the human will of Christ that voluntarily submits to the

Father, and therefore His submission, His subordination pertains to the Incarnation, to the redemptive plan of God, not to the eternal nature of the persons in the

Trinity. It's important. I don't know how else to say it. I'm not fearful of alternative views, but I'm determined to defend historic orthodoxy because I think it's right and it's important.

You mentioned the filioque clause, and to your knowledge,

I don't know how much you know about Eastern Orthodoxy, but they reject the creedal formula of the

Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. Has that led to any aberrancy in their understanding of the

Trinity? I know that I personally believe it's an apostate church. I don't believe it as a true gospel.

It even has a false understanding of the nature of man. They believe that, just as Pelagius did, that babies are born without any stain of sin.

I'm not an expert enough in Eastern Orthodoxy to really answer that question, but people who know more than I do would say yes.

The rejection of the filioque clause, the Father and the

Son, that the Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son, the Eastern Orthodox Church rejects that idea and says the

Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father. There are people who know more, maybe are better theologians than I, who would say yes,

Protestant theologians who would say yes, that has led to serious error in Eastern Orthodoxy.

And in fact, I think it was last week while you and I were together in Pennsylvania...

Yeah, somebody asked about Eastern Orthodoxy from the... Yes, and I think Rick Phillips, either in a private conversation or maybe in your

Q &A, dealt with that question, and he felt definitively that that opens the door to, that has opened the door to a number of anomalies among the

Eastern Orthodox. But I'm not really equipped to explain that. Now before too much time elapses,

I think that we should reaffirm that in spite of any strong disagreement with our brothers who are advocates and proponents of the eternal submission of the

Son, we are not, simply because of that one area, denying them as brothers, we don't believe they should be excommunicated...

No, and in fact there are people out there clamoring for that. I don't have a lot of patience for that sort of hair -trigger excommunication.

And I think a lot of the militancy on that, or some of the militancy on that, has been motivated by people who are egalitarians, and they just would like to shut up these complementarians who hold to eternal functional subordination or whatever.

But, you know, I think there needs to be more discussion about this and open debate.

As I said, I hope those who teach and hold this view would move away from it. But I don't think that's going to happen overnight or instantly, and I don't expect them to change their views just because someone calls them heretics.

I see a significant difference between serious error and damnable heresy.

There are damnable heresies where, like, if you hold this truth or deny that truth, you're not even to be regarded as a

Christian. If someone denies the deity of Christ, he's not a true Christian. If someone denies the doctrine of justification by faith, he's not a true

Christian. Both Galatians 1 and the second epistle of John make those things clear.

They draw a very clear line and say there is important, essential, fundamental truth that if you deny it, you are not to be received as a brother in Christ.

And Paul says, even if I came to you with a different gospel, you shouldn't, you know, let me be condemned, basically.

So there are errors that are serious enough to condemn you. I'm not convinced at this point that this is that.

I really don't believe it is. I think all of the men who hold to eternal functional subordination have tried to defend the idea of the unity of the

Godhead and the equality of the persons of the Trinity. I just think their view is at odds with that, and until they see how that logically is the case,

I don't expect them to change their views. I appreciate the fact that they are willing to defend what they've taught, and presumably their willingness to debate also means that they are willing to look at the other side and listen to the arguments against them.

But I think there's a dialogue that needs to take place, and it is taking place. There have been some really strong voices who have addressed this.

On the other side, on the side of historic Trinitarianism, you have Liam Gallagher, who is a pastor at 10th

Presbyterian in Philadelphia, who has written some fascinating stuff on it.

Carl Truman has addressed it. Mark Jones has addressed it. My colleague Mike Riccardi has written some really good articles that I would recommend for some of you lay listeners who just want to understand this in the simplest way, without a lot of technical language.

I think Mike Riccardi's articles on this are superb. He wrote them, as I recall, on the

Cripplegate blog.

But if you just do a search for eternal functional subordination, and Mike Riccardi, that's

R -I -C -C -A -R -D -I, it should come up on Google. You'll find he's written at least three articles on this.

And it's interesting, as you follow his train of thought, when Mike first began to address this, he was ambivalent.

It wasn't an issue he had studied. He said, you know, here's what both sides are saying. He just sought to understand and correctly represent both sides.

And over a year's time as he studied this, he became more and more convinced that the historic

Trinitarian view is the correct one. And his argument is interesting. Do you want me to go through it, or are we up on a break?

You've got at least eight minutes for a break, so go ahead. Yeah, he basically says, look, the will of a person pertains to his nature, not his person.

So if you say there are multiple wills in God, you're saying there are multiple natures in God.

If God is one in nature, then the Godhead can have only one consistent will.

It can't be in conflict with itself, and it can't be divided or divisible or portioned out to the various persons.

The will pertains to his nature, not the person's. And the proof of that is that Christ has two natures, but he is one person.

And he has a human will and a divine will. And Riccardi says at the end of his three articles, basically,

I'm summarizing because I don't have it in front of me, but he basically says if you reject this and buy into eternal submission, then you either have to conclude that the will pertains to the person, not the nature, and then you've got problems with the

Trinity, or you have to conclude that there are multiple wills in God, and then you've got serious problems with the

Trinity. So any way you cut it, you're going to run into trouble. And I agree with his conclusion there, that if God is one nature, one substance, one deity, then his will is indivisible, even though he exists in three persons.

They have one consistent will, so that the will of the Father is the will of the Spirit and the will of the

Son. And when Jesus says, not my will but thine, he's speaking there of his human will, which obviously was filled with trepidation about what he would face on the cross, and so he prays as any real human would,

Lord let this cup pass from me. But then he says, not my will but thine. So he's submitting his human will to the divine will.

That's what Gethsemane is all about. Well, make sure you say hello to Mike for me.

I have interviewed him in the past and would love to have him back on the program. He's a good man. Does this debate, to your knowledge, well, first of all, you mentioned that those who are advocating eternal functional subordination or submission are involving in debate.

Are you talking about actual formal debates, moderated debates, or are you just saying that they are communicating?

Yeah, I'm saying they've written articles answering their critics and their critics have written articles to them.

Honestly, I think, personally, I think written debate is the best way to deal with theological differences.

I'm not huge for public verbal debates.

They are too short. They tend to be more like a sport than a real thinking exercise.

Maybe that's why I love them so much. Well, they're fun. I don't deny that. I don't deny that.

Well, I think they also have been helpful. In fact, I even just recently learned of more converts from Rome to evangelical

Christianity as a result of the debate. I'm not suggesting that they're not helpful.

I think they are helpful for people. But I still think the best way to deal with a really complex theological debate is to do it in writing.

And it'll take several backs and back and forths, and hopefully evangelicals will come to a clear consensus.

That more or less happened with, say, the Lordship debate back in the 1980s.

And even though that debate is now resurfacing again in a slightly different form, that, to me, was a classic example of how theological debate ought to be conducted.

It was meticulous in writing and thorough, and more discussion than you could possibly do in a two - or three -hour verbal debate.

And that's what this issue is going to ultimately need.

So I'm glad that there is a lot being written about it, and both sides are answering the other side.

And I think it's a healthy debate. Also, this is not the first time that solid evangelicals, people who understand the gospel and have a basic, essential understanding of God and a relationship with Him, have needed to tweak their understanding of the doctrine of the

Trinity. You mentioned John MacArthur's earlier view on the eternal sonship issue. Yeah, I passed that. And how

Gary George mentioned that. Yeah, how that changed. Perhaps my experience with that, when there were similarly hostile people who wanted to burn

John MacArthur at the stake over that. In fact, there are fundamentalists who still rehash that.

Yeah, well, that's the nature of fundamentalism. You can't let go of a good argument. Nobody ever wins.

So I just think these things take a bit more patient discussion.

In fact, I just had some interaction, I think just last week or maybe the week before, with some people on this issue who were essentially suggesting that we ought to be able to settle this on Twitter.

You know, let's write these guys off as damnable heretics. We don't need a whole lot of discussion.

The character limit on Twitter should be sufficient to do it. It's not that kind of an issue.

Now, what is it about this issue that, in your opinion and mine, although you are forming an opinion with a lot more knowledge than I am, but I agree with you that this is not an issue to separate fellowship over.

And it's not an issue to declare somebody as dangerous and heretical. But why is that?

What has the eternal subordination or submission advocates maintained about the

Trinity that keeps them in a safe area, even though you disagree with them?

Well, it may be as simple as this. I think they're inconsistent with themselves in that they want to argue that the persons of the

Trinity are eternally co -equal, co -eternal, co -essential.

They share the same substance. They are of the same substance. They are one.

And yet, what they say about authority and submission really doesn't fit that paradigm.

So it's kind of self -contradictory in my view. And you can't abide that contradiction.

One way or the other, it's going to yield and it will either go towards more serious error or come back to full orthodoxy.

Well, we have to go to our final break. It's going to be a lot briefer than the other ones. If you have a question, send it in immediately because we're rapidly running out of time.

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

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Thanks for helping to keep Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio on the air. Welcome back.

And Phil, we have a couple more questions for you. We have

David in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I think, if I'm not mistaken, David may be a first -time questioner.

He says, does Jesus still maintain a human will that would have to be submissive to the will of God which he possesses?

In other words, is that human will now totally one will with the

God? These kind of, I think, misworded things. Is that human will now totally one will, the

God will, which he always had? Yeah, I would say it's, because he's glorified, he's in a glorified form, his will is perfectly united with the will of God.

And I also think that would be the case with us when we are glorified. There won't be any conflict between our wills and the will of God in heaven.

That's one of the ways we will actually share in and express the glory of God.

That's partly speculation, but I think that's what Paul has in mind, actually, in 1

Corinthians 15, in that verse I read. I think it was 1 Corinthians 15, 28, that ends, that God may be all in all.

A great comment, a series of comments on that verse you'll find in John Gill's commentary on the

New Testament. Thank you, David. If indeed you are a first -time questioner, you've won a new

American Standard Bible. So please give us your full mailing address in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so that Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

can ship that out to you. I want to make sure that you have the books that you want to recommend before I go to my next questioner, but I understand that you do have some books.

Yeah, I think it's important to study this issue, as I said from the beginning. It's not an easy one.

It's not something you should shoot from the hip on. You really ought to read the history of the debate.

So I have three books to recommend. One is a simplified translation of a lot of the ancient works on Trinitarianism, compiled by William G.

Rush. Rush spelled R -U -S -C -H. The book is just called The Trinitarian Controversy.

And most germane to this subject would be a lengthy chapter he has translating

Athanasius's Orations Against the Arians. Some of that would apply to this issue.

Also, I recommend a book by a mutual friend of yours and mine, James White, The Forgotten Trinity, which is, again, written for laypeople, serious -minded laypeople, but it's there.

And then my all -time favorite book on Trinitarianism is by Edward Henry Bickersteth.

B -I -C -K -E -R -S -T -E -T -H. Bickersteth on the Trinity is a classic, and I love the way it's printed and laid out.

He puts every scripture reference that he makes, any allusion to scripture, any quotation of scripture, he puts the verse reference in the margins.

And just to flip through it and see the number of biblical references there, if you want a biblical understanding of the doctrine of the

Trinity that is historically orthodox and really detailed enough,

I think, to give you a really sound grounding in the doctrine of the Trinity. Edward Henry Bickersteth, the book is just titled

The Trinity. And I have to take advantage of this opportunity to boast,

Phil, but James White dedicated The Forgotten Trinity to yours truly.

Good choice. That was quite an honor. Bruce in Center Reach, New York, in fact, since I happen to know

Bruce and I know that he is a fine pastor, and I always like to promote biblically sound, theologically faithful pastors.

He is Pastor Bruce Bennett of Word of Truth Church, and they are in Center Reach, New York.

And I'm sorry, they have a new location, it's in Medford, New York. And Pastor Bruce asks,

If Jesus' pre -incarnate will was not eternally subordinated to the

Father, then in what sense can we say he was son? Well, again, the idea of son, biblically, is not a term of subordination, or it doesn't make him less than the

Father, it makes him equal to the Father. And what it stresses is that he is of the same essence as the

Father, not that he is like a junior image of the

Father or something. We think of son in human terms, and you have to understand that that is not, that isn't how the

Jews thought of it, it isn't even how I think the Romans thought of it. If you were the son of the emperor, you had as much clout as he did.

And when Jesus called himself son of God, they took up stones to stone him, because they realized he was making himself equal with God.

So you have to do away with this notion that son of God is a term that somehow diminishes

Jesus' stature. It actually elevates him to absolute equality with God.

Well, thanks, Bruce. And the website, for those of you who are listening who live in Medford or plan to visit there, the website for Word of Truth Church in Medford, Long Island, New York is wotchurch .com,

W -O -T standing for Word of Truth, church .com, wotchurch .com. We have

Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, are there any connections with the eternal subordination issue, with the impassibility issue that has been dividing very closely linked brethren in Christ, especially in the

Reformed Baptist circles? I don't think so.

I mean, I don't think there's any necessary connection. I think you can believe in eternal submission, functional submission, and not necessarily question divine impassibility.

I would have to say, though, that both of these doctrines, he's right, that is also under attack today, and both of those doctrines deal with things that are difficult to understand that sadly haven't been focused on or taught among evangelicals for, you know, a hundred years or so.

A lot of evangelicals have forgotten that these are important tenets of our classic confessions of faith, and to deny the impassibility of God, in my view, is just as dangerous as anything you could do to tweak the

Trinity. It's a bad error, the denial of the impassibility of God, and yet it's a fairly common one.

And some of the men who, well, just take Wayne Grudem, for example. Wayne Grudem, who believes in eternal functional subordination, also would deny divine impassibility.

He deals with it only in a footnote in his systematic theology, and is pretty dismissive of the idea of divine impassibility.

Hmm. And, of course, there are some who are not completely confessional on the issue, that would not say they deny the impassibility of God.

They just believe that they have a different interpretation of it. Yeah, but I think they're obscuring the reality with the language.

The book I recommend on that is anything by James Dolval, D -O -L -E -V -A -L.

Or All That Is In God. Yes, and God Without Parts.

Oh, okay. Those are his other books. So he has two books, and some videotaped lectures on the subject.

Dolval is perhaps my favorite voice when it comes to defending classic theism against all of the novelties that have come along from the process theology and all that.

Now, I failed to scroll down far enough with David's question.

David from Albuquerque, New Mexico. What about Piper's God Has Two Wills? Is this something that shows

God can have more than one will and not be a problem? No, it's different.

What Piper's dealing with is slightly different there. Piper, I don't think he's, well, it's been a while since I read that article.

I think the article is titled with a question, Are There Two Wills in God? As I recall, that's how it's titled.

And that article is on the line. It's also online. It's also a chapter in one of the,

I forget which book, a two -volume set on the grace of God or the bondage of the will, perhaps.

I forget. But Piper's dealing with the distinction between God's preceptive will and his decretive will, or some call it the secret will, the revealed will.

You know, I would say there is a legitimate distinction between God's decretive will, which is what he himself determines to do, and his preceptive will, which constitutes the commands he gives to us, his will with regard to what we will do.

Right. Like with his adultery, it was a part of his decretive will when David's wife...

Yes, but in his preceptive will, he says, Thou shalt not commit adultery. And when David commits adultery,

Scripture especially says, specifically says, the thing which David did displeased the Lord.

So people will say, I'm a Calvinist, you are too. We would say the decretive will of God cannot be frustrated.

God's will cannot be, you know, unfulfilled. His decretive will, his preceptive will, we disobey sadly frequently.

That's what sin is all about. So there's that distinction. I prefer not to speak of that as two wills.

They're not two different wills. They're two different directions that the will of God points.

One is to what he will do, and he will do whatever he wills to do. The other is what he commands us to do, and we don't always do that.

Yeah, and the language, which I don't know how Arminians get around it, in 2

Samuel 12, when we have God speaking through Nathan the prophet, telling

David that his wife is going to lie with his neighbor, and God repeats through Nathan, I will do this.

I will do this. So there you have something being decretively declared that would happen, but of course it was a damnable sin that was occurring.

Right. But anybody wanting to find out more about grace to you, go to gty .org.

Any other websites or URLs that you care to share? Yeah, that's a good start.

That's the ministry I work for, grace to you, gty .org. You'll find 3 ,500 sermons by John MacArthur and a ton of free stuff.

Great. And don't forget, folks, we do plan on having Phil back. I don't know exactly when, but Phil, if you could hang on,

I'd like to schedule you for the Cotton Mather interview. All right. I want to thank everybody who listened today, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater