Are Owen Strachan, Wayne Grudem, & Bruce Ware's Trinitarian Views Heretical? With Russell Fuller

Introduction and the Origin of the Trinitarian Controversy

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a special guest who's been on the podcast before with us, Dr. Russell Fuller. How you doing? I'm doing well, John.

Good to see you. Good to see you too. For those who don't know, Dr. Fuller taught for many years at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He's on the board for TruthScript. And if people want to find out more about your theology classroom, if they want to learn theology at a good seminary level, where can they go?

They can go to my website, RussellTFuller .com.

RussellTFuller .com. And let me tell you, a lot of people have told me who have taken your courses, Dr. Fuller, that they're enriching and a blessing. And they get this for just pennies on what they would have paid to go to seminary.

And so if you want to learn hermeneutics or hold a New Testament survey, or I don't know what you're offering this semester, but they can go there. Yes, absolutely. So, well, we have a big topic and I feel like I should, maybe we should both give our testimonies first on kind of how this came about.

Of course, you're more, I would say, connected in a close proximity to this whole issue, being a professor at Southern Seminary with Bruce Ware, who advocates the position we're going to be talking about, this eternal subordination position.

And then of course, Owen Strawn was a student of yours. I know for me, this has been something for a few years I've actually wanted to talk about. In fact, I've had on my browser queued up a debate with Bruce Ware and Owen, I don't think it was, I'm trying to remember who it was now.

Bruce Ware was one of the participants arguing for this Trinitarian position. And I think I got halfway through it and I never quite finished it. And I read some things and I had this plan of talking about it, but I felt like it was fraught with minefields.

It was such a big topic. I didn't want to get anything wrong. And I just kind of, other things were happening that were important that I thought needed my attention. But I knew that this was a bad argument to try to ground, for people who don't know, we're going to define our terms.

But what I saw in this doctrine, this Trinitarian doctrine was an attempt to ground the relationship of husbands and wives in the relationship that the father and the son primarily had in the Trinity.

And so this was a way of promoting a complementarian view. And instead of grounding in creation, which is really, I think what you see in scripture, the attempt is made to ground it in the Trinity. That it's just like the Trinity where there's no, women and men can be equal, but there's still this ordering.

And maybe some would say a hierarchy could be argued from that ordering, perhaps, which we'll get into. So that was my interest was just let's stop making really lame arguments for complementarianism.

Let's make better arguments and this isn't one of them. And it just got away from me until I was sitting with you and Stephen Wolf was there and a few other people, what, maybe three months, four months ago in Wisconsin.

And this topic came up of paternal subordination and you articulated, I think, the concerns very well. And so I reached out to you and said, would you be willing to do a podcast? And you got back to me right away and said you'd love to.

So that's how I'm approaching this. My concern is for Christians who are being given this view from people like Wayne Grudem or Bruce Ware or Owen Strawn. And I don't want them to make these bad arguments.

And I'm also concerned that this isn't an orthodox view of the Trinity. And so that's the heart I have on this topic. And what about you, Dr. Fuller? What put this on your radar?

The Classical Doctrine of the Trinity

Yeah, the first time, of course, like you said, I taught with Bruce Ware at Southern Seminary for 22 years. And again, I like Bruce very much, a very nice guy. We always got along very well. Owen Strawn was a student in one of my classes, so I've had contact with him as well.

But the first time that really caught my attention that was something different about Bruce's view of the Trinity is when he told me one time, he says, you know, we're not really supposed to pray to the son, but we're supposed to pray to the father.

And I thought, you know, that's, that's different because I thought, when he first said it, I didn't say anything to him. I mean, he's a theology professor. I'm an Old Testament professor. So I'm like, I better think about this again.

But again, as I look at scripture, I see passages like in 2 Thessalonians chapter two, I think around verse 17 and 18, where Paul is praying to the son and to the father, you see very clearly there. And so I was like, this is different.

And then I started hearing rumors. And then in 2016, the internet just sort of blew up over this topic, because there were many who were holding to, let's say, the traditional Trinitarian position. And they saw this as a real threat to Orthodox Christianity.

And so people like Mark Jones, for instance, and I think his name is Liam Goliger. These two gentlemen, in particular, were going against this new view of Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudemann. And again, I've heard it called different things, but I think the way they like it to be called is the eternal relations of authority and submission.

And they're talking about in the eternal relations, if you go back to the Trinity itself, there is within the Trinity, these relations, and these relations are, of course, that the father has authority and the son and the Holy Spirit, they have submission.

So they have different roles. They have different relations with one another. And therefore, there is a real hierarchy of sorts. So if we get into this here, I'll sort.

Of, again, contrast the two different views. Well, it's important to note, I think, as you just did, that this was a controversy, maybe, what, seven or eight years ago. And it's somewhat died down, I suppose.

It's still kind of brought up. I see every once in a while, someone brings it up, but it's very rare. And it's like, I don't know if people forgot or what. This was a hot topic, though. I remember even in like 2017, I remember at Southeastern, there were students doing their dissertations on this topic.

So I think it is important. Even though we're downstream from some of the controversies over it, it's still around. The people who express this view are still expressing this view, as I understand it.

And there hasn't been, you could correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Fuller, any kind of denouncements or retractions or anything like that. This has been really, I mean, the people, Bruce Ware, Wayne Grudem, and Owen Strawn, in particular, haven't made any adjustments, as far as I know.

You know, over time, they have modified their position. I know Bruce has. Bruce has made modifications. Because I know on Southern's campus, a lot of the theology professors, they kept telling Bruce, hey, Bruce, we're concerned about this.

This is a problem. None of the other professors, to my knowledge at Southern, agrees with Bruce on this. And many of them, at least privately to me, spoke about real concern that this was something that was alarming to them.

And so, again, and even some of the professors in the church history department, again, expressed to me, let's say, very deep concerns, very serious concerns about this doctrine, and that it was not, you know, that it was really contrary to the doctrine of the Trinity as the church has known it for the last 1 ,500, 1 ,600 years.

So would it be fair to say there's been some tweaks, but not fundamental adjustments?

That's correct. That is right. There's been some tweaks made to it as the criticism has come in. There's been a lot of tweaking it. But at the same time, the essential assertion that in the Trinity itself, just considering the, like, let's say, the existence of the Trinity, there is an inherent authority that the Father has that the Son and the Holy Spirit does not have.

They're not equal in authority is what we have here. So we have really an inequality in the relationship. They're going to say that's just in their relationship, not in their being, but in their relationship.

They're not equal in authority.

The Classical Doctrine of the Trinity and Nicaea

You know, it just occurred to me, this is a totally new thought that maybe I shouldn't share, but I'm going to share it because it's interesting to me. But since this has been used so much to defend complementarianism, why can't you defend labor relationships with this?

Why can't you say, well, you know, slavery is okay because the Trinity or something, you know, it's kind of very, I don't know if anyone else has brought that up, but it just occurred to me that this is something that probably has a wider application than just trying to narrowly defend complementarian views.

But anyway, I should digress from that one since everyone's not mad. Let's talk about the Trinity itself because, you know, everyone who's watching this podcast, a lot of the people I should say that watch this podcast, they're in churches, they're Christians, they believe in the Bible.

They want to do what the Bible says. They want to be faithful to scripture. And their concern, of course, is that some of the institutions they funded, including even churches sometimes, have not been faithful, but they don't all have necessarily the theological background that someone like yourself has to understand these ideas.

And so I think it's helpful to walk through this. What is the Trinity? You don't see the word Trinity in scripture. So what are we talking about?

Yeah, the word Trinity has the idea of the triunity, the three in one. And again, this was the first great controversy in the church because here's what the Bible teaches. God is one. He's not two. He's not three, four.

No, God is one. Yet the Bible also teaches the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And so how do we put this together? How can God be one and yet God be, as it were, three? And so this was the, again, the first great controversy in the church.

And it took years. I mean, we're talking about 100 years or so for this argument really to work itself out. And also, we have to understand that these are not three different ways of God manifesting himself.

So God's manifesting himself one time as a Father. The next time he manifests himself as a Son. The next time as a Holy Spirit. No, these are not manifestations of God. These are actual, what we would call, persons in the Trinity.

And so the notion of the Trinity, again, is three persons in one divine being, one substance. And how do we distinguish? And this is the key part, I think, one of the key parts of this debate now. How do we distinguish the three persons in the Godhead?

And I think we should do it by what we call their personal properties. And what are the personal properties? The properties of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So this is normally the way it is said. The Father begets the Son.

The Son is begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son from all eternity. And it's very important that we say from all eternity because it's not as if the Father existed for a while, and then the Son was begotten later.

And then after a while, then the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son. No, all of this happened from all eternity past. In other words, there was never a time when the Son was not begotten. There was never a time when the Holy Spirit didn't proceed from the Father and the Son.

So we do have an order in the sense of the Father begets the Son, and the Father and the Son, the Spirit proceeds from them. There is an order there. But again, it's an order of their sort of, we have a subsistence of, you know, three persons in the Godhead.

So it's giving us the subsistence. But that's not meaning that, okay, the Father is superior to the Son, and the Son is superior to the Holy Spirit or something like this. No, they're equal in the sense that they're all God.

They're all equally God. The fullness of the Godhead dwells in each one. Not as Ed Litton, when he ran for the president of Southern Baptist, if you looked at his church website, the Father was a third God, the Son was a third God, and the Holy Spirit was a third God.

No, no. I forgot about that. You're right. No, that's not the Trinity. And so it's very important that we understand what we're talking about here. So again, they're one divine being or one divine essence.

Okay. Very important. Therefore, they're one in glory. They're one in power. They're one in majesty. And this is very important. They're one in will. There's one Trinitarian will. If you have three wills, and again, Bruce Ware will say this as well.

If you have three wills, then you have three gods, really. Okay. Not just three persons in the Trinity. You have three gods. So it's important that in the Trinity, there is one will. Okay. That's very important.

Because again, they're one person. Again, there's none before or after. There's none greater or lesser. Again, they're co-equal and they're co-eternal. And so this is the doctrine of the Trinity.

Now, is this doctrine that you just articulated from, are we talking since Nicaea? This has been the understanding. How long has this been the view? Yeah. Nicaea was a great victory for,.

I believe his name was Alexander. He was an archbishop and also for a young man named Athanasius. They got a important victory at the Council of Nicaea. That's like 325, but sort of the final victory.

Because again, you might win one victory, but usually you're going to have to battle this over and over again. It's like social justice. You might get a victory in social justice today, but let me tell you, you're going to need another one for tomorrow, next week, next month.

It's the way it works. So it's going to take a while, even for something like social justice to be completely slain. Or really what's going to happen is until the next thing comes along and takes the place of social justice.

But really, social justice will just come back in another form. That's what we're really talking. But then later on around 381 AD, we're talking, at the Council of Constantinople was considered the final victory, but there were still a few tweaking of the Trinity to come, but not really.

From that point on, really all the essentials were there. And really the doctrine has not been fundamentally or essentially changed in like 1 ,500 to 1 ,600 years. This new way of looking at the Trinity would be a fundamental shift in how we understand the Trinity.

I mean, the Apostles' Creed is pretty much every, not just Protestants, obviously Catholics, Protestants of every stripe, even Eastern Orthodox, I would think would hold to that.

Oh, yes, they would. Yes. And they would hold to Nicene as well. They would hold to that one. And even to Constantinople, I believe they would all hold to that as well.

Yeah, right. And maybe that's what I said, Apostles' Creed. Yeah, the Nicene Creed.

Now, later on, there's something called the Athanasius Creed that comes in the 500s. And there, it's according to what version of it, because remember, the Eastern Orthodox Church does not believe in the, in other words, the Holy Spirit only proceeds from the Father, not from the Father and the Son.

That's Eastern Orthodoxy. But in the West, whether we're talking the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church, we've always said, no, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. So if you look at the Athanasius Creed, you'll see two versions of that.

The Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission

Interesting. Okay. So with that background in mind, let's continue on with the competing view. As you said, you call it a competing view. So you have the traditional view of the Trinity and the eternal relations of authority and submission challenges this.

Right. First of all, what I think the people who are holding to this view of this, I'll just call it, I'll shorten it up, say the eternal relations view. Okay. They would say, listen, everything I've just said, we agree.

We agree with everything that I, the things I said earlier. But then they would say, but wait a minute, we can also distinguish the personal properties of the three persons in the Trinity, not only by, you know, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, like I said, or again, the Father begets the Son, the Son's begotten of the Father and so forth.

They would say, there's another way that we distinguish them as well. And that is in their eternal relations and in the eternal relationship among the Trinity. We're talking about the Trinity in itself.

They have relations between one another, and we can distinguish the members of the Trinity, or at least one from the other two, which is kind of strange. You would expect you would be able to distinguish all three, but in a way, one is distinguished by authority.

That's the Father. The other two are really not distinguished. They are really sort of, they're really undifferentiated here, but yet they have something called subordination or submission. They're submitting to the authority of the Father.

So this is a, again, a major shift here. We're going from their personal properties to really the role or the function or the relationship they have with one another. There's a relationship of authority and submission between the two.

And that's the first difference.

The advantage here, of course, is that then you can say wives submit to your husbands, and it's not tyrannical because this happens in the Trinity. Jesus submitted to his Father. That's what they're trying to do, right?

Right. Now they'll tell you, they'll tell you, no, wait a minute. We didn't create this in order to to talk about, you know, husband and wife relationships. However, what is true though, is they came up with this view in the heat of the battle for what was going on at the time, which was a big controversy between egalitarianism and complementarianism.

And to Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware's credit, they were leading the charge on this. I think they were doing a great job until they wanted to use, until they said, hey, wait a minute, we've discovered now that the Trinity is also important in this.

And they brought the Trinity. I think anytime you bring the Trinity into, let's say, creaturely relations and try to compare the Trinity to something in the created world, we're going to be in great danger of creating Trinitarian errors.

And I think that's what they've done. And again, you know, if you look at the time when this happened in this great debate, and by the way, I got to tell you this, John, I was at the Evangelical Theological Society.

And when they came out with this view, the people who were pushing for egalitarianism, that, you know, men and women are equal in every way in the home, in the church, they can be pastors, all this stuff, you know, it's just feminism.

And when Bruce and them came out with this, they were delighted because now they knew they had the higher ground, where they can say, hey, look, they even have to, you know, hurt the Trinity to get their position.

So I even went to hear some of their lectures. I'm like, oh, no, what are they going to say? They got up and they were sitting there teaching Orthodox Trinitarianism in Pound. So they were able to shift from their error to the error of Bruce and Wayne on their.

So I mean, I see what you're saying is the more egalitarian minded people were able to use this.

Against. Oh, they gave him a hammer. Yeah, they were just and really, I mean, all the good or let's say most of the good that Bruce and Wayne did, they really lost some a lot of this through their their using the Trinity.

And again, they would say, no, no, no, we found this and then we noticed that. But it really does look like these things happened at the same time and the heat of one battle. So even the Trinity's on our side on this, look at this.

And let me ask you,.

Let me ask you something, because I know that Christians listening to this, I'm sure some of them have the question that's in their minds right now. You know, what about when Jesus says things like, you know, I do what my father tells me to do, or when he says things like, just as my father and I are one, I want you and he's onto his disciples to be one.

I mean, doesn't it seem like he's taking, obviously not using the word Trinity, it's not in the scripture, but he's taking this relationship, at least that he has with the father. And he is bringing it into a human paradigm kind of what would you say to push back like that?

Yeah, I mean, you know,.

If Jesus uses it, that's one thing. If he wants to use a comparison between him and his father, we've got to be very careful about making, Jesus knows the Trinity. The Trinity is, we don't fully comprehend it.

It's not fully comprehended by us. So we must be careful. And again, he was making an analogy about the unity between him and the disciples. But I would still say, again, we must be careful about it to make.

So he wasn't, maybe the distinction is he was not trying to say that there is a subordination of some kind that you should have among yourselves because my father and I have that subordination. He's more talking about the unity of purpose they have.

Well, remember John, also he's talking, here's some of the difficulties of this discussion. Sometimes when Jesus speaks, he's referring to himself as, of course, he is the God man. And sometimes he really has in mind, as it were, his human nature, sometimes his divine nature.

As divine, he's equal with the father. As a human being, he's inferior to the father. So we have to keep those kinds of things in mind as well. Now with this view, and I'll get to it in a minute, but maybe I'll go ahead and say it now, since we've sort of touched on it.

This new view, they sort of, that distinction, they rarely bring that distinction in. They almost eliminate that distinction. So anytime the son is speaking, he's speaking as the second person of the Trinity, as opposed to the God man.

And so that's why, you know, when Jesus says, you know, no man knows the day or the hour of the second coming, not even the son knows. Now, how do we understand this? Is this the second person of the Trinity speaking?

If it is, then obviously the second person of the Trinity does not know what the first person of the Trinity knows. This is a real problem. We have to see that as referring to the humanity of Christ. Jesus as a human being did not know the day or the hour.

And that's a mystery to us. How can Jesus, who is God in the flesh, he is a hundred percent God, a hundred percent man, but one person, you know, how, how can he say that? Well, it's, it has to refer to his human, or when the Bible talks about Jesus growing in wisdom and in stature, we understand the stature, it's clearly his human body, but at the same time, he's growing enough.

That's his human mind.

That's his human nature growing. There were certain non-communicable attributes.

Certain non-communicable, that's correct.

He, uh, forewent or, or, you know, I'm trying to come up with the best language to keep within the bounds of orthodoxy here.

That's right. And remember the Bible will sometimes talk about, you know, um, it'll talk about God and then God purchased the church with his blood and you're going, wait a minute, God, blood. So what the scriptures do is a lot of times they'll talk about one nature of the person of the son, but apply it to the whole person.

Right. So sometimes it'll talk about the divinity of Christ, but yet it's also relating, you know, in other words, it's revealing to the whole person. And then sometimes it'll say something about the humanity of Christ, but again, it's related to the whole person.

So that's why you can get something like, uh, again, almost like God has blood in certain passages, you know, like, wait a minute. Um, so.

The Son's Submission, Christology, and the One Divine Will

All right. So the submission, it's interesting though, because what you're talking about here, I think does have, um, these are the passages that they'll go to. Jesus submits to the father. So what do you do with that?

And what you're saying, it sounds to me was that, well, of course he does, but, but the submission is in his human, uh, nature and the mission that he had as a human being on this earth, increasing in wisdom and stature as he grew was, uh, to be about his father's business.

And that's much different than saying there is an ontological another $400 ,000 word, uh, difference between the son and the father that they're ontologically there, that difference doesn't exist there.

Yeah. When we say ontological,.

We're talking about in the very being of God, the very being of the Trinity. That's right. Now, also we'll say this in the, we talk about the Trinity in its being, but we also talk about the Trinity in its works.

When the Trinity reveals itself in working out the one divine Trinitarian plan for the, you know, uh, for, for, you know, creation providence, and especially the doctrine of redemption, there's this one divine Trinitarian plan.

Now, as that plan is executed by the father and the son and the Holy spirit, there is something that people call a relative subordination. In other words, it's not, it's a subordination relative to their roles in redemption or in the works of creation and providence.

So as the Trinity reveals itself to us, there is a relative subordination where the father sends the son and things of this nature. But again, that does not go back to the Trinity in itself. It's not a real subordination in the Trinity where again, the son is somehow inferior to the father, but as the working out of the plan of God by the father and the son and Holy spirit, they have roles.

You know, I don't know what else to call it. They have roles that they are functioning as, or, or if you want a more fancy terminology, they have modes of operations. That sounds better than roles. They have manner of operations so that the father is sending the son and the Holy spirit.

Okay. So there is a relative subordination, meaning there's not an essential subordination in the Trinity itself, but in its working out of its one divine will, there's a relative subordination in the manner of the operations of the Trinity.

If that's not, you know, ontologically a subordination, would, I mean, would the word ordering fit there better that there's an ordering in the Trinity?

There's an ordering in the Trinity that is true. Again, when you say the father, the son, and the Holy spirit, there's a certain order there. And again, when you say the father begets the son and the son, the father and the son, this Holy spirit proceeds from the father and the son.

There is an order, but this is not an order of, let's say, superiority. They're still equal in power and glory in every way. But again, there is sort of a, in the mode of their, or the manner of their subsistence as father, son, and Holy spirit, there is an order.

But again, don't, we don't want to look at this as a hierarchy of, we have God 1A and then the son is 1B and not in that sense, you know. But again, when you ground it in authority and submission, there you've got a problem.

And another, see, here's what's a problem with that too. It all, it really makes the notion of different wills in the Trinity. So if the father expresses his will through authority, the son and the Holy spirit must present their own wills by submission.

This implies multiple wills in the Trinity. And even Bruce Ware says, no, no, that you can't have this. It's inescapable. Yeah. Let's hit the pause.

Just for a moment, because this is a lot for some people to take in. And I think it's good to, for those who are still listening, maybe some of you might've tuned out. Maybe you're sleeping, some of you, I don't know.

Cause this is some very good for theology classroom or not. Well, it's important stuff. I think people are curious. It's dense and somewhat abstract. So you have to put on your thinking cap. So let's just kind of put a cap on this and then we'll get into the, you know, here's what Bruce Ware says.

Here's what he's actually written or said, or his students say, or whatever. And Owen Strachan and whoever else. So the view that you're arguing for that we both believe is that ontologically at a base level, fundamentally, the Trinity, this is a Godhead with one will.

Okay. And they're co-equal, co-eternal persons in the Godhead. There's an ordering in the Godhead, but there is not a hierarchy in the Godhead such that the father is superior or his will is superior and forces itself upon the others or anything like that.

That's what we want to stay away from. So we believe in this ontological union of one will in the Godhead, not even a union. That's not even a good way to put it. There is a one will. There's one divine being or essence.

And part of that is the will. The will is not in the persons. The will is in the essence. And therefore they have one will, not three wills. Three wills would mean we have three gods. That.

Would be tri-theism. And that's what we cannot have. We don't want to go into poly-theism here.

And if you think about Judaism and Islam, that's exactly what they say about us, that we believe in a tri-theism really. We believe in multiple gods and we say, no, no, no. We believe what the Bible teaches.

God is one. But if one God, and again, now what Bruce will say is, well, I agree with what you just said, John. When it comes to the divine being, there's pure equality, but in their relations, there's an ordering of authority and submission.

And then he'll say, but those are, that's not, he'll say, that's not an attribute because you see, if you say an attribute, then you're saying it's an essential part or an attribute of something that essentially defines something.

So if you say red barn, you are essentially distinguishing that barn from other barns because it's red. Okay. So you're giving an essential distinction. When we talk about the attributes of God, they're essential, defining characteristics of God.

Okay. And you can't have like the father having more of one attribute than another. Now he'll say, now, wait a minute, authority and submission are not attributes, they're relations, but no, I believe authority is part of the power of God.

It's even part of the truth of God. And so I think authority is really connected to many of the, and perhaps all of the attributes of God. And it's clearly also part of the glory of God as well. You see his authority.

And so for the son to have, or the Holy Spirit to have less authority, really authority is just a subset or it's something included in the attributes of God. So in my opinion, these things go to the very, again, being of God.

He wants to separate authority from the being of God. That's just, that's in a relationship. That's all it is. It's a relational thing, but I think that's wrong. I think that's seriously wrong.

Yeah. So are we going to get into a conversation about irreducible complexity or are we going to say that? All right. So you had given me some notes on this. One of the things you said is that Bruce Ware's view fails to distinguish between the Trinity in itself and the Trinity in its works.

Trinity in itself is perfectly, there is perfect equality. Same is true with Trinity in its works. So it's interesting because this reminds me a little bit in some ways of the debate over women pastors, I suppose, where people want, soft complementarians want to make this distinction, right?

They want to say, no, there's a role here. And then there's a function over here. And these are two different things. And that, and I think we have said that, no, no, no, you can't separate these things.

You know, these are, and that's, I think, something similar to what you're saying here on a different topic, obviously, but that we should not separate.

These things. That's right. We don't want to separate the being of God with the relation of the persons within the being of God. We don't want to separate those so that you can have a equality in the being, but an inequality in the relationship between them.

You see, I think this is.

Something that is, again, misguided. Okay. Well, let's, should I read your conclusion before we move on just to really drive this home? Because you put it in. Yeah, it's one little paragraph here. This is your view.

The eternal relations of authority and submission is a dangerous departure from biblical orthodoxy. It undermines the unity of the Godhead by asserting multiple wills in the Trinity, which is tri-theism, three gods.

It further undermines the unity of the Godhead by making the relations of the Trinity unequal. This creates a functional and relational subordination in the very nature of the Trinity, which is dangerously close to a form of Arianism.

Now that is a serious charge to say that this is close to Arianism, because of course, Arianism has been condemned throughout most of church history, officially. And it's recognized today in cults like the Jehovah's Witness cult, right?

So when you start saying, well, it's kind of like Arianism, I mean, that's like saying it's kind of like Islam. It's like saying it's kind of like, you know, some pagan religion out there.

That's right. It has, again, when you say that there is an inequality in the Trinity, now again, they're going to say, no, we're not saying that. They're equal in being, but yet their relations are unequal.

And so they have a functional, a relational subordination that is really imminent in the Trinity. I mean, it's in the Trinity by its very nature. And that's why I say you're getting close to some type of form of Arianism here.

And again, in Arianism, now, if you look at, you know, classical Arianism, they would say that, again, the father and the son are not of the same being, okay? They claim they are of the same, they are the same being in the sense of they're of one divine substance.

However, in their relations in their being, or, you know, they want to almost separate these things, they're not. And so again, this is creeping towards an Arian either, again, I would call like functional Arianism here, or relational Arianism, because in their relations, it is Arian, there's a superiority and there's an inferiority.