The Immutability of the Divine Persons
A Brief Consideration of the Eternal Son and the Submissive Spirit
Not long ago, I wrote and spoke about the biblical case for my view of the Trinity. My remarks were not written to drive controversy; I have no desire to battle back and forth with folks who have already banished me to the utter darkness. That is their prerogative.
Instead, in good faith, I seek to clarify my view for those interested in genuine discussion and good-natured debate. Such clarification has become necessary because though a horse-ton of theologians and pastors have held to the view called eternal relations of authority and submission (ERAS), in our time many misconceptions have developed over it. To restate myself so that no one (who is fair-minded) misunderstands me, my purpose in writing is not to generate more heat, nor to battle the “opposite side” as if Trinitarian matters are a pick-up game at the local Y. It is, rather, to take some time to address a matter that numerous readers wanted to learn more about.
Enough throat-clearing. In my previous post, I made a simple point that a number of folks have said they found encouraging: that the Father and Son do not morph over time into something they once were not, but remain steadfast and trustworthy, their identities stable and immutable. I got many responses to this biblical assertion, and so decided after thinking and praying about it to write more on this matter.
The insight I have just named is not my own—it was taught to me first by Bruce Ware—but I have treasured it as pure gold ever since I learned it. (In this essay, the view I unfurl is my own, and should not be read as anyone else’s stance.) It helped me understand that there are not “two Trinities” given us in Christian theology. There is one Trinity, one Godhead.
This means that there is not an ontological Trinity, and a different economic Trinity. So too there is not an ontological Father and a different economic Father, nor an ontological Son and a different economic Son. There is only the Father, eternal Father, and the Son, eternal Son, and the Spirit, eternal Spirit. Indeed the whole notion of terms like “ontological Trinity” and “economical Trinity” and so on must be handled with care, lest in using them we carve up the Godhead and create different versions of it. (Doing so would irreparably mangle the biblical doctrine of God.)
We could say it this way: each of the divine persons are fully and self-existently God, or autotheos, as Calvin so marvelously put it.
The Immutable Persons
This is simple but essential material. In the economy, the Father does not take on new “relative properties and personal relations” per the Second London Baptist Confession. The Son does not take on new “relative properties and personal relations” per the Second London Baptist Confession. The Spirit does not take on new “relative properties and personal relations” per the Second London Baptist Confession. Each remains immutably who they are.
It is of course true that the Father sends the Son to accomplish the work of redemption. In doing so, the Son effects “subtraction by addition,” for he takes on a human nature (see Philippians 2:5-11). This does not cause a change in his personal being, of course; he is not one Son pre-incarnation and a wholly different Son post-incarnation. He is always and immutably the Son. But it is nonetheless true that while he does not become a different being, he does embrace the humility of humanity for us and for our redemption. (You can call this discharge of work the economy of redemption, if you like.)
The Son, then, is always the Son. He is the Son who, in his coming, tells us beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has come to do his Father’s will (John 4:34). He is humble, submissive, self-effacing, and servant-minded to a shocking degree. On this count, we may make an important observation. Though there is much disagreement on many finer points of Trinitarianism, with regard to the humility of the incarnate Son, all Bible-affirming sides of the ERAS debate agree: the Son submits to the Father in coming to earth, accomplishing redemption, and sitting down at the Father’s right hand (1 Corinthians 15:27-28). This makes sense; after all, the Father is identified as the “head” of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:3).
The debate over ERAS (among Bible-obeying Christians, that is) is thus not at all a debate over whether Christ submits to the Father, though it is sometimes wrongly portrayed as if it is. Both sides agree that the Son submits to the Father in terms of the economic period and the post-economic period; Scripture is nail-in-the-coffin clear on this count. The debate, rather, is over whether Christ submits to the Father in eternity past.
Before we return to that matter, though, it is worth pointing out that the two sides are not polar-opposites. Not at all. The absolutely necessary affirmation of the Son’s submission within redemptive and post-redemptive terms is not a small one in terms of knowing the Son’s identity. In this sense, Fatherly authority and Sonly submission are clearly not only in bounds, but very widely-held affirmations on both sides of the ERAS debate.
We Do Not Have Two Sons, But One
But we can indeed go further than what we have just affirmed; indeed, I believe that obedience to God’s perfect and wholly-sufficient Word entails that we must go further. As stated, the Son revealed to us in the New Testament is not a different Son than the pre-economic Son. The New Testament teaches us that the Father—as I observed earlier—sent the Son. The Father did so according to his will and purpose of redemption (Ephesians 1:3-14). In coming to earth, the Son obeys the Father, loves the Father, prays to the Father, and makes clear that he wishes above all to glorify the Father (see the entire swath of John 13-17, among other texts).
In all this, the Son is wholly equal to the Father in terms of essence. He is of the very same essence as the Father, in fact—not a similar essence, nor the essence of a created being with aspirations of godlikeness. Me genoito! No, the Son, as we have noted, is eternally the divine Son. The Sonly qualities he displays in his earthly life and ministry are the same qualities true of him in his eternal Sonship. When you are reading about the Son’s character and identity as laid out in the Gospels, therefore, you are gaining God’s perfectly sufficient revelation by which to know, love, and worship the eternal Son (not merely the Son in one spliced-up moment in time).
So, the Son is always the Son. This name itself is “metaphysical,” as Bavinck beautifully observes in his Doctrine of God:
"But the name Son of God when ascribed to Christ has a far deeper meaning than the theocratic: he was not a mere king of Israel who in time became an adopted Son of God; neither was he called Son of God because of his supernatural birth, as the Socinians and Hofman held; neither is he Son of God merely in an ethical sense, as others suppose; neither did he receive the title Son of God as a new name in connection with his atoning work and resurrection, an interpretation in support of which John 10:34-36; Acts 13:32, 33; and Rom. 1:4 are cited; but he is Son of God in a metaphysical sense: by nature and from eternity.” (The Doctrine of God, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1951, 270).
The Son, I repeat, is always the Son—and always the same Son. He is not one Son in the pre-economy period and a different Son in the economy; he is immutable.
The Spirit’s Submission as a Divine Person to the Son: Explosive Implications
We have already covered some serious ground in this piece. A question lingers, however. Perhaps some good-hearted folks out there affirm the eternality of the identity of the divine persons. But maybe they still wonder—with genuine, good-hearted curiosity—about the matter of eternal divine submission. It is understandable that they would have questions on this count. After all, they may have read somewhere that the Son’s submission to the Father can and must be located only in the context of his human nature. According to anti-ERAS voices, a divine person cannot submit to another divine person. This violates both the essence of divinity and the “one will” doctrine.
This argument has gotten some traction today, but though seemingly logically sound, it is actually not true to Scripture. (We remember, briefly, that our theology is first exegetical theology unto biblical theology, not first philosophical theology or historical theology.) First, we cannot so neatly splice the natures of the Son; they are not the same and do not blend into oneness, but neither can they be inseparably polarized. Here I mean simply this: the Son is an undivided being, not two beings held in one body.
Second, the Spirit’s glorification of Christ shows us that it does no violence whatsoever to a divine person to come under another divine person’s authority. If you boggle at this last sentence, I encourage you in all good cheer to hear John 16:13–14 afresh:
[13] When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. [14] He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
This is explosive for the entire ERAS debate. To put this in the simplest terms I can, the Spirit, unlike the God-man Jesus Christ, has no human nature. And yet the Spirit speaks not “on his own authority” (13), but does so in obedience to the Son (who is clearly acting in obedience to the Father). It is very clear that the Son’s authority over the Spirit is directly in view here because the Spirit “will take” what is the Son’s and declare it to the disciples in order to “glorify” and exalt the Son, not the Spirit (14).
The Spirit does not generate his own material, we see here; he takes what is the Son’s and passes it on. The Spirit’s ministry under the Son is, like the Son’s mission from the Father, one of humble service to a greater authority (not a greater being). The Spirit does not bring his own material with him, but comes to glorify the Son. What glorious humility—hard for us proud beings to grasp—this displays!
These biblical truths shows us beyond a shadow of a doubt that it does not compromise the essence of divinity for one member of the Godhead to serve or obey or submit to one another. Instead, the distinct persons have their own relationship to the other members of the Godhead, and both the Son and Spirit as persons submit. It is especially noteworthy that the Spirit’s following of the Son is done under a divine person with a human nature (and also a divine nature).
This is doubly troubling for the argument made by anti-ERAS folks that submission compromises divine relations among Trinitarian persons without a human nature. The Spirit not only is under the Son’s authority, but is under the Son who has both a divine and a human nature. This is distinct from the Son’s submission to the Father, for the Father has no human nature. The Spirit’s humility, you could say, is as striking as the Son’s, and even more out of alignment with a philosophical Trinitarianism that makes no place for submission of one divine person to another.
To Submit Is Divine
If we were putting a fine point on this matter, we would say, given the appropriate framing, that to submit is divine. The Son submits to the Father, and the Spirit does not speak to the disciples on his own authority, but the Son’s authority. This is remarkable stuff. As I have pointed out, this reality may seem strange to a philosophical framework, or a logical one. Perhaps this is not the Godhead we expect—or, as creatures influenced by a fallen world, perhaps this is not the Godhead we want.
But this is the Godhead we have in Scripture. The Father we meet in the New Testament is the eternal Father; the Son we meet in the New Testament is the eternal Son; the Spirit we meet in the New Testament is the eternal Spirit. These three persons are unchanging. They never change identities; they never mutate; they never become a different divine being than they formerly were. They are eternal Father, eternal Son, and eternal Spirit.
Conclusion
If there are other Trinitarian matters to sort (as there surely are), let it be so. We can converse and even disagree on points of high-level Trinitarian doctrine, I pray, in charity and carefulness. I am thankful for many fellow believers who do just this, wherever they land on the matters in question. They are the vast majority of the church. These are, after all, the highest and holiest matters of the Christian faith.
Indeed, what wonder the matters touched on here communicate to us lowly creatures. With all our faculties straining to comprehend the glorious eternality of the immutable Godhead, we embrace the clarity, simplicity, and beauty such a confession brings. We are humbled, and profoundly so. As with the Son and the Spirit per the clear teaching of Scripture, you could say, so with us.