The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity

Giles

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498244428
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Since the late 1970s complementarian theologians have been arguing that the divine three persons in the Trinity are ordered hierarchically, and that this is the ground for the hierarchical ordering of the sexes. Suddenly and unexpectedly in June 2016 a number of complementarian theologians of confessional Reformed convictions came out and said that to so construe the Trinity is "heresy"; it is a denial of what the creeds and confessions of the church rule is the teaching of Scripture. A civil war among complementarians followed and in a very short time those arguing for hierarchical ordering in the Trinity capitulated. This book tells the story.

chapter 1

The Rise and Rise of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity

On 1 June 2016 it seemed that the complementarian hierarchical doctrine of the Trinity had won the day.26 Most of the best known evangelical and Reformed theologians were either positively advocating or openly supportive of this construal of the Trinity. They were agreed that the hierarchical ordering of the three divine persons was historic orthodoxy; what the creeds and confessions of the church taught and what the best of theologians from the past believed. The few critics, and I was the most published, were dismissed as “evangelical feminists” who were postulating the “co-equality” of the three divine persons to further their own agenda to deny or minimise male-female differentiation. They were the ones in error.

In this chapter I am going to tell when and by whom this complementarian hierarchical doctrine of the Trinity was first devised and made the basis for the traditional ordering of the sexes and how it prospered after a slow start, becoming foundational and integral to what we now call “the complementarian position.”

The invention of the complementarian doctrine of the Trinity

All new directions in theology are articulated first in a point of time, usually by one person, in most cases a man. The very first person in history to speak of “the role subordination” of women, and of “the eternal role subordination of the Son of God,” in both cases meaning in plain English their subordination in authority and nothing else, was George Knight III in his highly influential 1977 book, New Testament Teaching on the Role Relationship of Men and Women.27 In this book, he rejected the historic way of speaking of men as “superior,” women “inferior” that had reigned until the middle part of the twentieth century, arguing instead that men and women are “equal,” yet “role differentiated.” These differing “roles,” he said, were given in creation before the fall. As such, they give the God-given ideal and are transcultural and transtemporal. This wording sounded acceptable to the modern ear: who could deny that men and women are different in significant ways and tend to have different roles—women bear and nurture children, do most of the house-work; men do the gardening, cook at Bar-B-Qs, at least in Australia, and watch sport on TV?

For Knight, 1 Corinthians 11:3 is pivotal to his case. He says Paul “begins his argument about the role relationship of men and women [in this passage] by placing it in a hierarchy of headships.”28 He say the Greek word, kephalē, translated “head, is used ‘to denote superior rank.’”29 Thus, he concludes that 1 Corinthians 11:3 is speaking of “the authority relationships that God has established between the Father and the Son, the Son and man, and man and woman.”30 He says the text speaks of “a chain of subordination.”31 In descending order of authority stand the Father, Son, man, woman. In making this argument Knight grounded the subordination of women on his conclusion that the persons of the Trinity are hierarchically ordered.

Before Dr. Knight wrote, the modern word “role” had never been used to speak of the essential difference between men and women or of the essential difference between the divine three. Now we see the huge significance of his work. This one man produced a way of speaking of the male-female relationship that preserved what he called the “traditional” understanding of male “headship” that sounded acceptable to modern ears and in doing so reworded and redefined the doctrine of the Trinity in the terms he had invented to speak of what he believed was the primary difference between the sexes.

This formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, I must add, involved far more than just introducing the word “role.” Knight also argued that the divine three persons are ordered hierarchically. He spoke of a “chain of subordination.”32 In doing so he openly, but without admitting it, broke with historic orthodoxy. The Athanasian Creed says: “In this Trinity none is before or after the other, none is greater or less than another, . . . the three persons are coequal”; all three are “almighty” and “Lord.” The Belgic Confession of 1561 says, “All three [are] co-eternal and co-essential. There is neither first nor last: for they are all three one, in truth, in power, in goodness, and in mercy.” The Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 says that the “three persons [are] consubstantial, coeternal, and coequal,” and then it condemns those who teach that any divine person is “subservient, or subordinate to another in the Trinity, and that there is something unequal, a greater or less in one of the divine persons.” If I wanted to absolutely exclude hierarchical ordering in the Trinity, specifically the eternal subordination of the Son in authority, I could not do better than is done in these documents, which sum up what the church believes the Scriptures teach. Why so few recognized that Knight was teaching a doctrine of the Trinity explicitly excluded by the Athanasian Creed and the Reformation confessions is a question that demands an answer, but I will leave this answer to my readers.

Knight’s use of the modern English word “role,” which finds its late nineteenth-century origins in the theatre and its early twentieth-century academic usage in humanistic sociology, needs further comment. The word is not found in any of the more common modern translations of the Bible. In dictionary usage and in sociological texts the words “role” and its synonym, “function,” speak of routine behavior or acts, and so we ask, for example, who has the role of gardening, washing clothes, doing the shopping, managing the finances, etc., in the home? In this everyday usage it is understood that roles and functions can change and do change. They are not f...