Part of a series of interactions with God’s Yes to Women: Why the Bible’s Vision of Partnership Is Good News for Us All.
It is difficult to find a fresh perspective, in the decades-long evangelical debate over gender and trinitarian relations. The standard critiques have settled-in: God’s simplicity means no “social” trinity; divine relations are not really relationships; the patterns of Christ’s obedient earthly life must not be confused with his eternal sonship, and so on. Sometimes it can feel like people are talking past each other.[1]
Thus it was a great pleasure to read Dr Jacqueline Service’s contribution to the book God’s Yes to Women, “Rank or Reciprocity? Hierarchy or Gift? The Trinity, Authority, and Gender Relations in the Church”. Service writes from an analytic (and egalitarian) perspective and is certainly committed to an undivided Trinity. But she also believes that this simplicity allows for genuine inter-trinitarian personal relationships, and that the mission of Christ reveals the eternal life of God. I welcome her methodology, even if I disagree with some of her conclusions.
Radiance and Return
Dr Service begins to make her case with the radiance metaphor loved by the Nicene Fathers: the relationship between God the Father and Son is like that of a light source and its ray. There is order. There is an undivided and identical nature (light). There is distinction. There is also necessity: a ray cannot exist without a source; but neither can a light source be a light unless there is radiance. The Father needs the Son to be Father.
Dr Service leans heavily on this last point, perhaps a little too heavily. When she writes that, “light is not a one-way hierarchy: its existence arises through reciprocal mutuality—like a shared movement of gift and receipt” (p. 101), it sounds more like we are dealing with a series of mirrors. What might mutuality, reciprocity, and gift and receipt mean in the context of the analogy?
But her intent soon becomes clear. Service is seeking to augment the correlative necessity of the Son (the Father needs him to be Father) with something more active and symmetrical. Taking her cue from the missions of the persons in the world, she observes how:
the Father makes his self-revelation to the world dependent on the Son and Spirit. This means that the Son and Spirit share the same life-giving authority as the Father, and that the Father receives his Fatherhood dependently through them.
… the Father might even be said to “submit” to receiving his being as Father in relation to the Son and Spirit, and vice versa. (p. 101)
This last statement might trigger alarms for readers attuned to historical theology. The Nicene model is based around the Father being the source of the other two persons – “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”[2] If he receives his “being” (“subsistence” or “personal identity” might have been a better word choice) from the Son and Spirit, how is he not also a Son? How is the Son then not a Father? Moreover, if the Father is not truly the source of the Godhead then his distinct role in salvation history is hard to discern. We know what the Son and Spirit do (e.g. justify and regenerate). What can we appropriate to the first person if not sending? These are not trivial problems, and they should not be passed over without close scrutiny. If Dr Service intends a fully symmetrical (or perichoretically circular[3]) Trinity, it will not align easily with the patterns of the creeds or Scripture.
Mutuality and Circularity
This is not to deny that there is mutuality and circularity in the work of the Trinity. In creation, the Father honours the Son, and the Son brings glory to the Father through the Spirit. The Son both receives a kingdom and offers it to the Father (e.g. 1 Cor 15:24–28). As Service observes:
The New Testament is rich with portraits of giving and receiving among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. … Scripture depicts the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existing in a shared life of giving and receiving that enriches rather than ranks. This movement shapes God’s life: a life marked by generosity and humble other-centredness, where no divine person ever seeks their own glory but the blessing of one another. (pp. 103–104, emphasis original)
These portraits, as she calls them, are important and Service is right to call our attention to them. We need to think deeply about the way the persons of the Trinity work in the world and it is appropriate to wonder what those ways of working might tell us about their eternal relationships.[4] Modern reactions against eternal relational subordination seem incurious about (or even hostile to) the thought that the earthly mission of Christ might tell us anything about eternity. Dr Service’s portrayal of the incarnation as a revelation of the divine personalities is welcome.
Overreach
Unfortunately, I think Service errs on the other side. She moves too quickly and easily from the economic Trinity (revealed in the earthly mission of Christ) to the eternal (immanent) Trinity. It is one thing to acknowledge that the eternal Father never lacks his Word and Wisdom (and Spirit) as the Church Fathers do. It is another to depict him as depending on the other persons or receiving his identity from them. Modern theories which go in this direction (those of Pannenberg or Moltmann, for example) have received strong criticism.
Such speculations are legitimate, but Service also overestimates the degree to which the mission of Christ disrupts the traditional pattern of order/authority. When she writes that Matthew 20:25–28 redefines authority as “servanthood and vulnerability” (p. 104) it is unclear whether she means that the latter terms qualify Lordship or denote it. If it is the latter there is a problem. The fact that Jesus is the servant king is wonderful, but he is still our king. Jesus does not make servanthood mean the same thing as Lordship, nor is every servant really a king. The Lord who serves us remains the Lord who commands (e.g. Jn 13:13–16, 34).
Service makes a similar mistake when she sets things like paternal receptivity and self-giving against conceptions of the Father as the one “who commands, directs, wills, commissions, chooses, and decrees” (p. 105). Service is right to warn against reducing the Father to order and command, as if he were some kind of tyrant or impersonal emitter. But she pays too little attention to fact that it is the Father’s decree that appoints the Son to be heir of the world (Heb 1:1–2; Eph 1:3–10), and that it is through obeying the Father and fulfilling his purposes that the Son receives the Father’s gifts (e.g. Jn 15:9–10; Phil 2:5–11). From what we see in the life of Christ, order and authority are not in opposition to mutual enrichment. They structure the very patterns of mutual love and service that Service wants to commend.
Finally Service tends to gloss over an important aspect of trinitarian theology. She tells us that Jesus reveals the Father, such that “the self-giving and servant-hearted authority that characterises the life of Jesus must likewise characterise the Father.” That is true. But it is also true that Jesus reveals the Father as Son, Word, Image, Stamp and Radiance, and finally as a human being. These facts mean that some of what we see in Jesus will be an expression of his filiality and humanity, not just his divinity. As medieval theologians liked to point out, it was more fitting for the Son than the Father to become man because he was already from the Father in eternity.[5] See the subtlety of Augustine as he considers the congruence between Christ’s humanity and his sonship:
“For the Father is greater than I” and, “The head of the woman is the man, the head of the man is Christ, and the Head of Christ is God” … these statements have had a place given them, partly with a view to that administration of his assumption of human nature in accordance with which it is said that “He emptied himself” … and partly it was with a view to the consideration that the Son owes to the Father that which He is — thereby also certainly owing this in particular to the Father, to wit, that He is equal to the same Father, or that He is His Peer, whereas the Father owes whatsoever He is to no one. (Augustine, De Fide et Symbolo 9.18; NPNF 1.3.329)
What of Gender?
Which leads us to the stated topic of God’s Yes to Women. What does the Trinity have to do with gender relations?
Given her elevation of mutuality and service in the Godhead (not to mention her commendation of the same as patterns for us in her doctoral thesis), we might expect that Dr Service would be eager to apply her insights. Yet her final paragraphs admonish us against such analogising, since
any theology that attempts to draw a straight line from God’s inner life to human social arrangements must reckon with the profound differences between Creator and creature. While there is an affinity that allows for imitation, there is also a vast dissimilarity.
As argued above, this caution is appropriate, but it jars after her confident statements about the incarnation. If we can see God in the man Jesus, then the connection between human society and God has already been made—all the more so when Scripture explicitly and repeatedly presents Jesus to us as the template for our own lives. The lines extending from Jesus to divinity and humanity might not sit at quite the same angle—or even on the same plane—but he is nexus.
It is a shame that Dr Service didn’t find space in her essay to make some positive comments about how trinitarian patterns of service and mutuality might apply to gender. She might have followed Augustine and helped us to understand what the apostle means (or doesn’t mean) when he parallels the headship of Christ, men and God in 1 Corinthians 11. She might also have helped us to think how Paul tells husbands and wives to model their relationships on the ordered mutuality of Christ and the church. I particularly wish she had pursued this, because it seems clear that Christ entrusts himself to the church (for his mission and reputation) in a way that parallels the Father’s dependence on the Son. Service’s trinitarian insights might have helped our understanding of both Christology and gender relations. Yet she has laid a foundation for such discussions.
Dr Service has highlighted aspects of trinitarian reciprocity that deserve careful examination. She has rightly warned us against simplistic or authoritarian accounts of the Father. She challenges us to see the persons as truly revealed in the mission of Christ. These are all helpful contributions, despite some of the shortcomings that accompany them.
[1] For a by-no-means up to date or exhaustive list, see this collection of links.
[2] For historical discussion, see heading 3 (and its associated footnotes) in this TGCA post from 2016. Egalitarian readers might be interested in complementary observations in this recent video by Mike Bird.
[3] The three persons mutually ‘dwelling in’ one another.
[4] Some theologians seem allergic even to the word relationship—as any hint of a social relationship might turn the Trinity into a collection of three gods who like each other.
[5] So, for example, Thomas Aquinas writes that “as the Father is not from another, in no way is it fitting for Him to be sent; but this can only belong to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, to Whom it belongs to be from another,” (Summa 1.43.4). Peter Lombard and Bonaventure offer similar assessments.
