JBMW Forum: Q & A on the Trinity

JBMW: In light of the recent debate in the PCUSA over alternative language for the Trinity and the work of scholars like Kevin Giles, what do you envision the future will hold regarding the Trin­ity and gender?

Wayne Grudem: It is increasingly clear that egalitarians are becoming uncom­fortable with calling God "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," which are the names primarily used for the three persons of the Trinity in Scripture itself. The names "Father" and "Son" are objectionable to them not only because they are mas­culine names, but because they imply an authority given to the Father that is greater than the authority given to the Son (though they are equal in their be­ing and in all their attributes).

This provides a good parallel to human marriage as Paul explains in 1 Cor 11:3, where he says, "The head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God." There is a parallel between the Trinity, with equal value but different roles, on the one hand, and the equal value of men and women, together with the greater authority that God gives to the husband, on the other hand. So the Trinity shows that we can have equal­ity along with differences in role at the same time.

If feminists accept this argument, then their fundamental belief is shat­tered, the belief that true equality and gender-based differences in roles cannot exist together in marriage. Therefore, to be consistent with their fundamental conviction, they must deny the historic doctrine of the Trinity as it has been held by the church throughout its histo­ry. And that has come to fruition in the highly inaccurate and misleading book by Kevin Giles, The Trinity and Subor­dinationism (InterVarsity, 2002). I have answered Giles's arguments in some detail in my book Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (Multnomah, 2004). But I could say briefly here that he has so blatantly misread the history of the church, and distorted the church's teach­ing, that I doubt that his work will have much acceptance at all beyond the nar­row confines of those who are already disposed to latch onto any egalitarian argument they can find.

However, there is still more work that some other, probably younger, complementarian scholars have to do in providing a more detailed and more thoroughgoing answer to Giles's argu­ments than I have done. It can certainly be done, because he has not fairly rep­resented the history of the church, but that needs to be pointed out with ex­tensive quotations showing his misrep­resentations of the data, so that people in the future do not follow or believe what he has written.

Bruce A. Ware: There is a deeply dis­turbing movement today that seeks to reformulate both the language of the Trinitarian Persons and also our very conception of that Trinity of Persons it­self. On the question of language, such offense is taken by some in the main­line and liberal wings of the church over the Bible's own masculine language for God, and particularly for the Persons of the Father and the Son, that previously unimaginable substitutes for tradition­al God-language are being proposed. What often is not considered is that when "Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier," or "Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child, Life-giving Womb," are substi­tuted for "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," the result is either to de-personalize the Divine Persons into Functionaries, or to replace the transcendent God of the Bible with some panentheistic de­ity more akin to eastern mysticism than to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Ja­cob. But not only language is at issue; the very nature of the relations of the eternal Persons also are being "re-in­vented." Orthodoxy has held from the Nicean Creed (A.D. 325) onward that the Father is the eternal Father of the Son, and the Son the eternal Son of the Father. There has been, then, an eternal relationship that marks their very iden­tities as eternal Persons. As such, this relationship is irreversible—i.e., the Fa­ther could not have been the Son, and the Son could not have been the Father. Yet, because the eternality and irrevers­ibility of this relationship entails that the Father has an eternal and irrevers­ible authority over the Son, and the Son eternally and irreversibly submits to the Father, some are questioning whether such a relation, in fact, is necessary to the Trinitarian Persons. Again, what moves contemporary innovators of Trinitarian doctrine to deny this eter­nal authority and submission relation is not Scripture's own revelation but cul­tural pressures of feminist and anti-au­thoritarian egalitarianism. Once again we face the question: will we faithfully embrace and proclaim the revelation of God in Scripture or will we be enticed by cultural pressures to "improve" the God of the Bible?