Jesus Christ is (still) under attack

Our Lord seemingly can’t catch the proverbial break from certain evangelical theologians these days, and it doesn’t seem he’ll be getting one anytime soon.

Nearly a year after my initial piece on attempts to diminish Jesus Christ’s divinity, power and glory amid a new complementarian project called “eternal functional subordination of the Son” (hereafter, EFS), the God and Gender Wars have only gotten more intense and, with them, attacks on the Son’s deity.

To begin with, the last Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting saw passionate debate around a constitutional amendment that would effectively disfellowship local churches that see women serving in pastoral roles (even if they do not serve as elders or senior pastors). It failed by a razor-thin margin.

Also a motion for the SBC to adopt the Nicene Creed by adding its text as an appendix to the Baptist Faith and Message was referred to the Executive Committee, where it was sent to die. Former Southwestern Seminary professor and SBC presidential candidate David Allen opposed the motion.

No creed but Christ?

The Nicene Creed is the most widely recognized sufficient and authoritative statement of Christian belief. Contemporary evangelical theologian Daniel J. Treier explains the creed is “the most ecumenical statement of orthodox faith from the early Christian church.” Affirmation of the creed in substance, if not in word, is required for membership in the World Council of Churches. Several noncreedal groups, including Pietists and Baptists, have affirmed the creed as a helpful tool for Christian teaching on the Trinity.

Several knowledgeable sources have indicated Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg is not entirely opposed to the motion but has intimated there are currently “bigger fish to fry” concerning the fallout of the SBC’s abuse crisis, ongoing litigation (including with embattled and disgraced former SBC president Johnny Hunt), and the dire state of the SBC’s finances.

“Perhaps the single most consequential factor in the SBC’s war over creeds and Christ is a man so divisive that your very opinion of him is a window into your theological frame of mind.”

But perhaps the single most consequential factor in the SBC’s war over creeds and Christ is a man so divisive that your very opinion of him is a window into your theological frame of mind. This is by his design and, indeed, is a feature, not a bug, of his public ministry. He has even admitted as much since the inception of his career as a denominational statesman. I am, of course, speaking of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president and former SBC presidential candidate R. Albert Mohler Jr.

According to multiple knowledgeable sources, including supporters of the Nicene adoption motion, Mohler has opposed (albeit privately) efforts to adopt normative Nicene Trinitarian language for the SBC, citing it as “unnecessary.” Further, at least one initial signatory of a statement in support of the creed motion rescinded his support. Unsurprisingly, the offending signatory is a faculty member at Southern Seminary whom I have chosen not to name as a courtesy to him.

However, this supposed aversion to creedalism appears selective, as Mohler strongly advocated for the so-called Law Amendment barring women from leadership and quipped, “I mean all of us have heard somebody say, we know the Baptist position is no creed, but the Bible. No, that’s Alexander Campbell, thank you. That is not Baptist.”

He also is a strident advocate for his seminary’s “Abstract of Principles,” which functions as a creed since all faculty are required not only to affirm it but to sign it.

So, it appears Mohler does not have an issue with creeds as much as he does with Nicaea proper. This should not be surprising given his continued toleration of Christological error at Southern Seminary, especially from Southern theologian Bruce Ware.

Ware-ing us out

Most readers will not be familiar with Ware. However, many are intimately familiar with the flawed patriarchal sadism posing as theology from his son-in-law, culture-warrior and “strip mall seminary” professor Owen Strachan, who once rattled off this zinger with as much theological precision as a sledgehammer: “God has staked everything on men.”

A comprehensive account of Ware’s theology is unnecessary here, as several other theologians have challenged him adequately and charitably. What should be stressed, however, is that Ware is on the record denying the orthodox account of Christ’s eternal relation of origin as eternally begotten/generated by the Father “before all worlds” (Nicene Creed), opting instead to conceive of the Son’s eternal relations not through the patristic and creedal lens of “begottenness,” but through “eternal relations of authority and submission” (hereafter, ERAS).

Indeed, Ware’s son-in-law has gone as far as to say that “the Son is the Son because he submits to the Father’s will,” a statement that is a razor’s edge away from full-blown Christological catastrophe and heresy that, according to the Athanasian Creed, damns the soul.

Curiously, Mohler has defended Ware and other such theologians as “orthodox” despite also claiming the eternal generation of the Son is the teaching of the Church Fathers. How these seemingly antithetical theses cohere remains a mystery. Instead, Mohler remains more preoccupied with contemporary politics and ensuring women remain out of leadership and pastoral offices in denominational life than the deity of Jesus Christ.

I do not say this out of glee or as a means to attack the man but as a theological observer.

“Tolerance of these theological errors remains indispensably tied to the efforts … to provide a theological rationale for their backward convictions on women.”

Tolerance of these theological errors remains indispensably tied to the efforts of Mohler and other hyper-complementarian theologians to provide a theological rationale for their backward convictions on women. The latest edition of the journal for the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which the Southern Seminary continues to patronize and platform with institutional resources, saw one contributor defend the heterodox Christology of EFS theologian Wayne Grudem as “filled with complexity.” Such opposition to Grudem’s grave error must be rooted in “evangelical feminism” rather than genuine concern for orthodoxy, CBMW claims.

That claim is rich, for just as many complementarian theologians have publicly opposed EFS/ERAS as have egalitarians. Among such men are Matthew Barrett, Steve McKinion, Malcolm Yarnell, Carl Trueman and Samuel Parkison. Several publications ascribed to complementarian thought also have opposed EFS/ERAS, including The Gospel Coalition, Credo Magazine, the Center for Baptist Renewal, the Center for Classical Theology, Mere Orthodoxy and more (contemporary evangelicals love their organizations and publications). These complementarian contributors and organizations cannot reasonably be considered “evangelical feminists,” and it is lunacy to suggest otherwise.

Arius

Astute readers are familiar with the story of the heresiarch Arius, who taught that the Son is the greatest and first being created by the Father. While condemned at several ecumenical councils and seeing his position explicitly rejected in the words of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, Arianism would continue to plague the patristic church and various Christian groups throughout church histories.

Even today, Arianism and its offshoot errors remain the official position of cults and religious sects claiming a Christian heritage worldwide, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter Day Saints/Mormons, Unitarians, Black Hebrew Israelites, Rastafarians, and Christadelphians.

Celebrated church historian Alistair McGrath also has noted in his Historical Theology that the Arian error extended beyond a belief in the Son as created, but also that the Arians taught that “the status of the Son is itself a consequence of the will of the Father.” This position would be most excoriated by Arius’ primary theological rival, St. Athanasius of Alexandria. This position also was held by Arian church leaders and theologians who conceded the eternality of Christ but continued to subordinate him to the Father by affirming the Son was somehow logically or personally “willed” into existence. Later Christological clarity arose out of necessity and in response to this continued error in the Chalcedonian Definition and Athanasian Creed.

With this important caveat, we may sadly add EFS and ERAS theologians to the above list of heretical sects.

Tragically, Ware, Strachan and Grudem all have suggested the Son’s voluntary submission of his will to the Father is essential to his sonship. If this is the case, the Father’s will is the source of the Son’s essence. This is one textbook definition of Arianism. As the theologians above affirm the Son’s eternal preexistence, it is perhaps more accurate and more charitable to designate their teaching as “Semi-Arian.” However, it is, again, a razor’s edge away from “heresy” in its technical sense as a rejection of codified Nicene orthodoxy.

As I have previously written, this error is not new and is rooted in the ancient errors of subordinationism and kenoticism. However, I would like to argue that participants in this discussion must note this specific strain of subordinationism is endemic to the theology of Southern Seminary and American High Calvinism.

Holy Holman!

The most recent example of this error being endemic to Southern Seminary outside of the contemporary EFS/ERAS theologians mentioned belongs to former Southern Seminary professor and Southwestern Seminary Provost Randy Stinson. Stinson was tragically forced to resign from Southwestern in 2020 following revelations that he had a substance use disorder. He has since made a full recovery.

In the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Stinson defines the term “Submission, Subordination” in the following way: “Voluntary placement of oneself under the authority and leadership of another.” Since this definition implies submission is a voluntary act of the will, EFS/ERAS must be categorically rejected since there is only one divine will.

Stinson adds a subheading under the article titled “The Trinity.” In it, he suggests the following:

One aspect of submission in the Godhead is seen in the relationship between the Father and the Son. Although fully equal with God the Father (John 5:18), the Son freely submits himself to the Father in eternity past (1 Corinthians 8:6; 11:3), throughout his earthly ministry (Philippians 2:6–11), and in the eternal kingdom (1 Corinthians 15:20–28). Within the Godhead there is equality of essence but difference in role and function, providing another possible paradigm for headship and submission in marriage.

This is textbook EFS/ERAS and fraught with error.

To begin with, 1 Corinthians 8:6 and 11:3 make no mention of the Son’s submission to the Father in eternity past. Indeed, one may argue that suggests the exact opposite. Paul equated the “One God” with the “One Lord, Jesus Christ” (Greek kyrios, used in the LXX for the tetragrammaton) in his expansion of the classic prayer of Jewish creational monotheism, the Shema. Indeed, roughly 60% of the vocabulary is shared between the two verses. 1 Corinthians 11:3 states, “the head (or, source, kephale) of Christ is God” and does not mention ad intra Trinitarian relations, but redemptive/economic distinctions.

Second, Stinson tragically misunderstands Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15. In it, Paul states that, in the end, Christ will deliver the kingdom to the Father and “become subject” (from the Greek hupotasso) to him. The same Greek word is used throughout the New Testament to describe Christ’s reign and rule, where all things are “subjected” to the Son of God.

Thus, 1 Corinthians 15 should not be interpreted to mean the Son will cease to be King and share in the one power and authority of the One God as an act of voluntary submission.

Indeed, Cyril of Jerusalem wrote of this interpretation: “Some say that when (Christ’s) enemies have been put under his feet, he will no longer be king, a bad and stupid thing to say. For if he is king before he has finally defeated his enemies, must he not be all the more king when he has completely mastered them?” It is not Christ who is being delivered up to the Father’s rule, he argues further, but the subjects of Christ’s kingdom of which Christ is forever the King.

St. Hilary of Poitiers contended this passage teaches a reciprocal communion of singular divine authority for the redeemed, for just as the Father made all things subject to the Son, so the Son would subject himself to the Father so that we “made subject to the glory of his body … may possess the glory with which he reigns in the Body.”

Such also was the interpretation of John Calvin, the great Reformer and forerunner of the system of theological thought that now bears his name. In his Institutes, Calvin argued the designation “Father” also includes the very divine essence of which also eternally subsists of the Son, calling any other interpretation “absurd.” Calvin writes:

Paul elsewhere says that Christ “shall deliver up the kingdom to the God and Father” (1 Corinthians 15:24), “that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). Nothing is more absurd than to deny that Christ’s deity is everlasting. But if he will never cease to be the Son of God, but will ever remain the same as he was from the beginning, it follows that there is comprehended under the name of “Father” the unique essence of God which is common to both. And certainly for this reason Christ descended to us, to bear us up to the Father, and at the same time to bear us up to himself, inasmuch as he is one with the Father. Therefore, to restrict the name “God” to the Father, to the exclusion of the Son, is neither lawful nor right.

To say that one is in interpretive trouble when Cyril, Hilary and Calvin call it “bad and stupid” and “absurd” is a tremendous understatement.

James Boyce: Founder of Southern Seminary, heresiarch

But before we attack Stinson and EFS/ERAS colleagues too brashly, we must trace the error further into Southern Seminary, and one can go no further in Southern than its founder, the slaveholding apologist James Petigru Boyce.

In his Abstract of Systematic Theology, Boyce contends subordination of the second and third persons of the Trinity is “natural” and “is due doubtless to the difference in the modes of subsistence in the divine essence.”

In other words, Boyce argues the Son and Spirit are subordinate to the Father because of something intrinsic to their person. The heresy alarms should already be ringing, but Boyce places the final nail in his coffin with the following section: “The Father thus subsists independently of the will, or the action of any other person. He is thus simply God; not originated, not begotten, not proceeding from. The Son is originated, his filiation is willed, though necessarily, by the Father.”

It is true the Father is unbegotten and eternally generates the Son. But eternal generation is not an act of the Father’s will. But this is not where Boyce commits his gravest and most damnable error. The Son is not “willed into existence,” and the Son has no “origin” apart from his eternal relationship to the Father. Although Boyce attempts to clean up his sloppiness by claiming the Son’s filiation is “necessary,” to argue that the Son is “originated” and “willed” makes him no different than a creature (a thing that is created). Boyce has committed the gravest sin a Christian theologian can commit: to diminish Jesus Christ.

For skeptical readers or Southern apologists who would be tempted to think I am misrepresenting him, Boyce leaves no room for doubt in his final section of subordination: the Son and Spirit are subordinate to the Father “both in nature and relation” and “it is probable that the official subordination (Christ’s willful submission to the Father in his redemptive offices and Incarnation) is based upon that of the personal relations.” Predating Ware and Strachan, Boyce argues the subordination is natural to the Son and essential to his nature, making him a creature and mere object on which to be acted by a patriarchal god with a tyrannical will to power.

Defending the honor of Christ

By sacralizing the power of the slaveholder, Boyce projected his sadism onto the glorious and undivided Trinity. He turned the eternal King Jesus Christ into a mere instrument of his slaveholder in the sky. By sacralizing the power of the husband/father/pastor, Mohler, Ware, Strachan and Grudem have projected their relish in male power onto the Trinity and turned Jesus Christ into a submissive housewife for their sinister project.

Origen reminds us that God’s omnipotence does not exist beyond God’s relations. God is not a sovereign who wields his rule over unwilling subjects because he can. Rather, his benevolent omnipotence entails a relationship within himself and the creation he has acted to redeem through Jesus Christ, the very wisdom and power of God:

No one can be a father without the existence of a son … the title of ‘Omnipotent’ cannot be older than that of ‘Father’; for it is through the Son that the Father is omnipotent … because the Son, as Wisdom, was the agent of creation. And it is because all things are subjected to him through Christ that the Father enjoys the glory of omnipotence. All things were subjected by means of wisdom, that is, word and reason. … This is the fairest and clearest glory of omnipotence, when all things are subjected by reason and wisdom, not by force and constraint. … The existence of the Son derives from the Father, but not in time, nor does it have any beginning, except in the sense that it starts from God himself.

For the sake of renewing the church and defending the honor, power, glory and deity of Jesus Christ, EFAS/ERAS and the heretical slaveholding theology of James Boyce and the Southern Seminary theologians must be utterly repudiated.

Many have often spoken of a “conservative resurgence.” It is time for another resurgence: a Christ Resurgence. Indeed, this is the only “CR” you will hear me give my full-throated support.

The Preacher reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. Just as the church rejected Arianism under the divine guidance of the Holy Spirit, so too am I hopeful evangelical theologians, including those in my former Southern Baptist camp, will get rid of the theological leaven in our midst to the honor and glory of the One God and the One Lord, Jesus Christ.

Yea, amen; let all adore thee,
High on thine eternal throne;
Savior, take the power and glory;
Claim the kingdom for thine own:
Alleluia!
Thou shalt reign, and Thou alone.

(Charles Wesley, Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending)

 

David Bumgardner is a graduate of Southwestern Seminary’s Texas Baptist College and is a former BNG Clemons Fellow. He lives in North Texas and is a graduate theology student at Winebrenner Theological Seminary of the University of Findlay, Ohio.