R.K. McGregor Wright

Cheryl K.’s thoughtful comments (at 18 above) prompt me to comment on the technique of quoting early church Fathers to support a resurgent heresy.  Most of us who have read somewhat in the Fathers (the field is called “Patristics”) know quite well that most of them were unsound on one thing or another.  Many are also wordy, inexact, boring and idiosyncratic).  One can always select from such a large body of documentary testimony, the kind of emphasis that will support one’s views.  The Tractarians (the Anglo-Catholic movement in England in the 1800s) soon discovered that when they pleaded that the earliest Christianity must have been the purest, they quickly confronted the fact that the Fathers contradicted each other on almost everything .
Since references to the Trinity in the Fathers fall into the two categories of references to the Ontological OR the Economic Trinity, and since most of the references are to the Economic Trinity as God interacts with history in time, the vast majority of quotes on the Trinity in the Fathers is naturally going to include a lot of verses and interpretations implying subordination of the Son in time to the Father.  This is NOT EVIDENCE OF ETERNAL SUBORDINATIONISM, but only of passages describing or assuming the Economy of redemption.  Like certain other speculative theories, eternal subordinationism has disastrous implications for other areas of theology, as the followers of Origen eventually were forced to see.  There are very good reasons why, despite his real devotion to Christ, and his enormous scholarly output and vast and respectful following in the ancient churches, Origen is not “Saint Origen.”  The main one is that eternal subordinationism is flatly a heresy and the Holy Catholic Church has recognized this uniformly for well over 16 centuries (i.e., since 325 AD with the use of homoousios at Nicea).  Once more, notations of the economic aspects of God’s actions to redeem us in time have no bearing whatever on whether the three Persons are related in Eternity by a subordination of either function or being.  When the Reformed half of the Reformation insisted that “Finitum non capax Infinitum” (the finite is not capable of encompassing the Infinite) they were making this very point.  Therefore it is a serious error to measure what God “must” be like in Eternity (before the creation), by what we see him doing in the flow of time.  It should be the other way around: the Trinity is the presupposition and Origin of Meaning for understanding everything else.  Without assuming the Creator-creature distinctionm, we are just stuck with various grades of Pantheism.
The methodology of the New Subordinationism is to start with how they think of women in their churches, then move from that as a model to insist that Jesus was subordinate to the Father in the drama of redemption (which nobody denies, as it was a condition of the Incarnation) to then arguing what God “must” be like in Eternity.  In the fourth century, this was the method of Arius, with VERY bad results.
Love,  Bob K. Wright