Already this month Nick Norelli has posted about the Trinity at least a dozen times, mostly in connection with his Trinity Blogging Summit. I have not yet had time to read most of these posts. But I have read one of the first of these dozen posts, Giles’ Reply & Paulson’s Response, which I quote in full here:

Following Matt Paulson’s critique of Kevin Giles’ Trinitarian theology came a reply from Giles and a response from Paulson. I have not yet read either of these but will probably post some thoughts when I have done so.

Now Matt Paulson is apparently the real name of Phantaz Sunlyk, whose discussion of the eternal subordination of the Son I recently critiqued. I did not respond earlier to Nick’s post quoted above as I was waiting for him to read and post his thoughts on the reply and the response. But he has not yet done so, although some of his commenters have, and Nick’s own contribution to the blogging summit is relevant. So now I am myself reading the reply and the response, and the comments, and posting my own thoughts here.

And these thoughts are interesting. First, I am reading what Giles has to say. He notes that he has been studying the doctrine of the Trinity since the 1960s, whereas Sunlyk is an unqualified layman, a BA student. In Giles’ view

Sunlyk’s views are entirely his own. They do not represent informed Roman Catholic opinion.

Giles argues that Sunlyk has seriously misunderstood Athanasius. For example,

Sunlyk believes that it was only the Son who could become man because he is the subordinated Son for all eternity. Sons do the will of their fathers: all sons are subordinated to their fathers. Hanson and I think that Athanasius is totally opposed to that idea. He will not allow that God can be defined in human categories.

It is interesting to see what Giles has to say about the link between the Trinity and gender issues:

If I had my way I would rather that debate about the doctrine of the Trinity and the status and ministry of women were kept completely apart. It is the evangelical subordinationists who first connected these matters in an attempt to bolster their case for the permanent subordination of women.

In the light of this I did not feel very inclined to read any more from Sunlyk, but I decided it was right to skim his rejoinder. But there is little new here. Sunlyk may have a point that Giles has not taken full account of how he distinguished his position from evangelical functional subordinationism. But the basic problem remains, that Sunlyk does not understand the debates in which Giles is involved. To a large extent they are arguing past one another.

As for which of them is right about what Athanasius taught, I don’t know and I don’t particularly care. But I think it is telling that Giles has had books published by IVP and Zondervan, whereas as far as I know Sunlyk has not been published in print at all. Go figure!

In fact I now regret having given Sunlyk the amount of time I have put into my previous post and this one.

Meanwhile I note that in Nick Norelli’s version of eternal subordination in the Trinity

The Father commands without demanding. There is no coercion on the part of the Father, and the Son and Spirit do not obey begrudgingly.

Thus he upholds the position that “The Father commands, and the Son obeys” but adds some important clarifications which are missing in other presentations. But he still disagrees with Giles, who has written:

the idea … that the Father commands and the Son obeys breach[es] divine unity and impli[es] tritheism.

This quote is from Giles’ 2006 book Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine, of which large parts, but not all, are available at Google Books.

Anyway, Nick’s argument fails to convince. We can agree that the Son obeyed the Father by allowing himself to be sent, and that logically that preceded the incarnation, implying that it is not only the incarnate Son who was obedient. But there is a huge logical leap when Nick argues from this single act of pre-incarnate obedience to subordination throughout all eternity.

So, probably to conclude my treatment of this subject, it seems that although there are some differences between the roles of the Father and the Son in the Trinity, there is no clear teaching in the tradition that these differences are fixed and eternal, nor that they involve any kind of unwilling subjection of the Son. And, even if it is right to link this issue with gender relationships, there is nothing here to justify subordination of women.