The Son Who Submits

One verse, two opposite readings, and what is at stake in the difference.

Paul says that at the end, "when all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him, so that God may be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28).

For some of the most influential evangelical theologians of the last generation, that verse opens a window onto the eternal life of God: the Son is, and always has been, under the Father's authority. For the early church, the same verse meant nearly the reverse. It was their favorite proof that the Son is fully the Father's equal, and their favorite proof that God will, in the end, save everyone.

Both cannot be right. I once held the modern reading and have been slowly drawn out of it. Here is why:

The claim, and its three names

Subordinationism: Everyone agrees the old heresy is off the table. In classical subordinationism, the Son is lesser in being than the Father, and is exactly what the council at Nicaea condemned. The modern proposal insists it is something else. It has worn three different names in a single generation, which is itself telling.

It began as ESS, the Eternal Subordination of the Son. It tightened into EFS, Eternal Functional Subordination: equal in essence, eternally subordinate in role and authority. It softened again into ERAS, Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission, dropping the word "subordination" (too close to Arius) and recasting the Father's authority and the Son's submission as an “eternal relation.” Read the sequence honestly and it looks like sincere people refining their language under fire, keeping the substance (the Father's eternal authority over the Son) while shedding the word that drew it.

The motive was rarely hidden. As the Son eternally submits to the Father though equal to him, so wives/women submit to husbands/men though equal to them. The Trinity was offered as the eternal pattern for a view of men and women through the lens of hierarchy. When you get the cart before the horse it causes chaos and a huge mess. And that is exactly what happened when a group certain men gathered in Danvers did. They had their objective (women submit to me) and then made up a theology (the Son submits to the Father) around it.

The first problem: counting the wills

Submission requires a will to submit with. So everything turns on a question the church already answered, at great cost: where does the will live? The answer, settled at the Third Council of Constantinople in 681 and defended by Maximus the Confessor (exiled and, by the ancient accounts, mutilated for it), is that a will belongs to a nature, not to a person. A will is the capacity a nature has to want and to act.

Carry that into the Trinity and the result is immediate. One divine nature means one divine will. Father, Son, and Spirit do not each have a will; they share the single divine will, acting inseparably as the one God they are. There is no "Son's will" set over against "the Father's will" in the Godhead. The very thing eternal submission needs does not exist there.

Where, then, does the Son's submission actually appear? In the incarnation, and only there. The Word took a complete human nature, and with it a human will, so that now there are two wills because there are two natures. This is exactly the scene we are given: "not my will but yours be done" (Luke 22:42) the Son's human will, recoiling from death by nature, freely brought into accord with the one divine will. The submission is real. It is also human, in time, for our sake.

This puts the proposal in a bit of a jam. To place submission in eternity, you must give the eternal Son a will distinct from the Father's, and there are only two ways to do it.

1) Make it a distinct divine will, and you have a second divine nature, which is two Gods.

2) Make the will personal rather than natural, and you have three wills in God, which is three Gods.

There is no third option. When the debate broke open in 2016, a wide range of theologians, many of them complementarian, said as much, some calling the position functionally Arian. The objection was never about gender. The doctrine of God was being bent.

Basil saw the shape of it long before the council named it. On this very verse (1 Corinthians 15:28) he distinguished the mode of the Son's submission: if the Son submitted in a divine manner, he would have been subjected from all eternity; but Paul says he "will later be subjected," so the submission is in a human manner, on our behalf, not divinely on his own account. The submission lives in the humanity the Son assumed, not in the divinity he eternally is.

The same verse, read the other way

Here is the part I find beautiful. The verse the modern proposal treats as its strongest proof of the Son's eternal subjection was, for the early church, a proof of the opposite.

It begins with Origen, already arguing against people who used the verse to demote the Son. His answer, which the tradition picks up almost verbatim, is that the Son's "subjection" is not inferiority but the gathering of all humanity, who are his body, into the Father. Subjection belongs in the salvation register, not a rank word: "subjection means the salvation of those who submit," and because it is voluntary, submission and salvation are the same event.

Gregory of Nyssa turns this into a whole treatise, In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius (On the passage: Then the Son himself), on the restoration of all things. The image he uses is that of head and body. The Son does not submit as one demoted; he submits as the head whose limbs are still being gathered. He has not yet submitted, Gregory says, because he is waiting for his own limbs, and it is we who submit to the Father in Christ. The Son "submits" when his whole body submits, which is to say when all of humanity is healed and brought home. Nothing, he concludes, will remain outside those who are saved. With the same verse he defends the equal dignity of the Son against the very people who used it for subordination.

And he grounds the whole thing in love. If the Father loves the Son, and all of us are in the Son, then the Father loves all of us as the Son's own body, and the Son's submission means that all will come to know God and be saved. Love is the first word and the last. The mechanism is the gathering of everything into Christ. The result is restoration. All of it read out of the verse used by some modern scholars to put the Son eternally under the Father.

The invitation

Let’s look at the beauty that opens up to us with Gregory’s interpretation:

A God who is genuinely one: one nature, one will, one undivided love, three persons not ranked but related, distinguished by the mystery of origin rather than by command and obedience, truly equal in power and glory and honor (not just in lip service).

And a reading of Scripture in which the strangest verse about the Son's submission turns out to be a an amazing promise. "The Son himself will be subjected" is the last movement of salvation, the moment the head finally submits because the last part of his body has come home, so that God may be all in all.

The Son who submits is not the Son kept low. He is the Son who will not be complete until he has carried all of us back to the Father. That is a Son worth following, and a love worth being drawn into.

So let’s lose the ESS, or EFS, or ERAS and follow Gregory into a God who one essence, three hypostases, all working as one with one will, one operation, and one plan to redeem all those made in his image.