Kenoticism and The Eternal Subordination of the Son

In Hebrews 1:10-12, the writer quotes Psalm 102:25-27:

¹⁰ He also says,

“In the beginning, Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth,
    and the heavens are the work of your hands.
¹¹ They will perish, but you remain;
    they will all wear out like a garment.
¹² You will roll them up like a robe;
    like a garment they will be changed.
But you remain the same,
    and your years will never end.

From the viewpoint of the writer, Jesus is not only God, but because he is God, the writer has selected a verse that is normally directly associated with Yahweh (the Father) alone.[1]

            Similar equations between God and Jesus, founded upon the Septuagint, are made by the New Testament (Rom.10:13; 14:11; 1 Cor.1:31; 2:16; 10:22, 26; 2 Cor.10:17; Phil.2:10-11; 1 Thes.3:13; 4:6; 2 Thes.1:7-8; 2 Tim.2:19).

            When reading Hebrews 1:10-12, one is struck by the simplicity of the equation between the Son and God. It is a straightforward swap.  There’s no wiggle-room to say that the Son could be other than God Almighty himself. Moreover, divine action traditionally associated with the ‘Father’ is attributed directly to the Son. This being so, the profound and bottomless implication is that any verse referring to God in the Old Testament can be taken up and used of the Son. If ‘God’ parted the Red Sea; the Son parted the Red Sea. If God fed Israel in the wilderness; the Son fed Israel in the wilderness. If Israel prayed to God; Israel prayed to the Son. The Son is God and God is the Son.

            Of course, the writer of Hebrews distinguishes between the Father and the Son. Hebrews 1:10 begins, “He also says”. Who is “he”? It is God…God the Father. Yet, in the original context of Psalm 102:25-27, and the LXX, God the Father is not speaking; rather, the psalmist is writing about God. Was the psalmist the Father? Of course not! But the psalmist wrote the psalm by the power of the Father. It was the Father’s psalm that he ‘wrote’ through the psalmist; God the Father is speaking through the psalmist.

            The point is this: when God does anything in the Old Testament, it is the Father and the Son (and, of course, the Holy Spirit, but he’s not the focus of this paper) who are in action.

            The same principle and relationship is evident according to John 1:1-3:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Jesus is called God, explicitly. Yet, he was “with God” in the beginning, at creation. And as God (with God) he made all things. God the Son is called the Word in distinction to God (the Father) who was with him. Once again, it is the act of creation that John refers to, and, once more, there is utter and complete identity of action between the persons, so that it is impossible to separate between the Word and the Father in the act of creation; both are God and both create all things as a unit, in complete harmony. Patently, the writers of the New Testament wish to draw attention to the Son’s act of creation and that he was God (Col.1:16; Heb.1:2; cf., 1 Cor.8:6). 
         But why his work in creation? Why not his work in redemption, for example in the exodus of Israel from Egypt? The act of creating all things is the primal and first act of divinity in regard to created things. It distinguishes between the Creator and the created thing, and demonstrates the divinity of the Creator over against creatureliness. The Creator is the source of all things and the giver of life to all things. Man must worship the Creator. Only God can re-create a new world and remove sin. If the Word was the Creator of this world, then he is the Creator of the next.

            Given the unity and identity of the persons of the Trinity in the creation of all things, it follows that the persons of the Trinity created all things as one and as utterly and entirely equal as God. They created with one will, power, authority, and action.

            It is this oneness in action and identity of persons as God, who perform as one in action, that causes theologians to say that God is by nature, or in his essence, one and indivisible. You cannot divide God up into three parts; there is one God yet three persons. Nor can you divide up the actions of God into three parts; there is one action yet with three who perform the one action. In simple terms, whatever you say about the one person as God, applies to the other two. If the Father as God is the great I Am, so is the Son. If the Father as God existed before all things, so did the Son. If the Father as God is infinite and full of power from all eternity, so is the Son. If the Father as God is full of authority, so is the Son. However we define the Father as God applies in its fullness to the Son as God and to the Spirit as God.

            How does this knowledge help us to wrestle with the kenotic theory and the theory of the eternal subordination of the Son?

Kenotic Theory

The kenotic theory is taken from Philippians 2:5-7. Kenotic readings interpret these verses to say that the preexistent Son “emptied” (kenoo; from which we get kenosis and kenotic) (v7) himself of equality with God and took upon himself humanity to serve us. Some kenotic views say that the Son left behind omniscience, omnipresence, infinity, eternity, and a bunch of other divine attributes. Other versions of kenoticism say that the Son left behind only his glory (John 17:5).

            However, the New Testament does not give us any latitude to say that the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, stopped being fully God. Philippians 2:6-7 is misinterpreted, I think, to say that the preexistent Son emptied himself of equality with the Father and descended from heaven to become a man. I have said in another place (in agreement with R. L. Reymond) that these verses denote the attitude of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, whilst he was on earth, and that he emptied himself in the sense that as Messiah he poured out his life unto death.[2] Indeed, Philippians 2:5, along with John 5:18, assumes that in the flesh Jesus was equal with God. John 1:14 states, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Likewise, Thomas’ exclamation in John 20:28 declares Jesus’ full deity.  Why do I say “full” deity? Is this not what Paul writes, “For in Christ dwells all the fullness of the Deity bodily” (Col.2:9; see 1:19)? When Thomas called Jesus “God” and “Lord”, what Jesus the Messiah revealed to him was the fine point of the needle, the tip of the iceberg. One cannot attribute the title God to anyone who does not have the capacity to carry the content of the meaning within that title. When Thomas called Jesus God, it was because “God” was shorthand for One who was the great I Am, the God of the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Creator, the giver of life to all, the eternal One, etc., etc., etc.. We know this because of Hebrews 1:10-12 and John 1:1-3, and other texts. Whatever is true of the Father as to his divinity and divine actions applies to the Son. Was the resurrected Son not omnipresent because he was standing before Thomas? But is not the LORD and his Spirit present in heaven and in Sheol and in the remotest parts of the world (Psa.139:77-9)? Did the resurrected Son stop being God? Then surely he was present everywhere…if we take seriously the view that Jesus is God just as the Father is God.

            The limitations that we acknowledge in the person of Jesus Christ are all due to his condition as a man. Man is, in some ways, the opposite of God. Man is a creature; God is the Creator. Man is finite; God is infinite. And so on. We would expect Jesus, the Messiah, not to know all things. How could he, as Messiah, that is, as the Man for us (1 Tim.2:5), be everywhere at all times? As the Messiah, the Man for us, he could not be everywhere, nor did he know everything, and so forth. In sum, Jesus was fully human, but without sin, so we expect that as a Man he does not know all things. This is just the nature of the case.

            So, we have this Man, called Jesus, who is also God…fully God… at the same time. As God, he did not stop being omniscient and so forth; nor did he ever leave behind his divine glory. It is said that Jesus left behind his divine omniscience, for example. He left behind nothing of the sort. His human nature, by default, could not access it. When you saw Jesus, you saw God…full God. As I’ve said already, God does not come in pieces. Let me illustrate. The Father revealed himself in a dream to Daniel (Dan.7) and to Ezekiel (Eze.1). Did the Father reveal everything about himself to Daniel and Ezekiel? Obviously not. In all of God’s revelation, we get a mere pinprick of who he is. We don’t get the full thing…EVER! When God is speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, was he now ‘emptied’ of his deity because he was ‘present’ with Moses on the Mountain? No; God is everywhere. And was God fully present in the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Man for us? Yes sir! It is because God is incomprehensible that he has to mediate his divine glory to us through revelation, and this, by the nature of the case, ‘dilutes’ God’s presence in the sense that we are ‘seeing’ merely a tiny speck of his being.

In actual fact, the human nature of the Messiah was specially crafted, according to the plan and wisdom of God, to make more accessible to us the full and complete divine glory of God. In other words, there is no better medium in the whole of God’s creation for revealing his glory than man himself! If there was anywhere God was going to reveal his complete deity it was in man, for man alone was especially created to be ‘the’ vessel of this glory- that is why man is called…the image of God! In particular, it was in the Man, the Mediator, Christ Jesus, that God’s full glory receives its most complete exposure to creation, yet. That is why he, above all others, is called the Image of God.

            Now, a common objection brought up against these views is that it ignores the order set out in Scripture, where God the Father, through the Spirit, empowers the Son to do something, or God gives the Son authority to say or do something. For example, the Son received the Spirit from the Father at this baptism, giving him power to do his miracles. This entails that Jesus omnipotence was not at all involved in the miracles, so the kenotic argument goes.

            Let me respond. All of Jesus’ miracles revealed his glory (see John 2:11). This is not merely Messianic glory, for Jesus prayed to the Father to receive glory from the Father, the same glory he had with the Father before the world was created (John 17:5). John writes:

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth….¹⁸ No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

That Jesus’ divine glory was ‘revealed’ and that the Son prayed to be glorified was due to his position as Messiah, for he was asking for his divine glory to be shown off through his Messiahship.

            The fact that Jesus received power from the Father, by the Spirit, did not in any way undermine the revelation of his divine glory. What happened during creation? What were the roles of the persons within the One God? The Father commanded; the Son was that command in action (the Wisdom or Word); and the Spirit was the executive of the command. The order is Father, then Son, then Spirit. Christ’s miracles were the will of the Father, put into action in the Son’s command, and executed by the Spirit. Yet, it was the one divine power and will in action but revealed through the Mediator, the Man Christ Jesus.

            Classic theism says to the kenotic theory that it obliterates traditional categories. God is one. There is one divine essence; one divine nature. God is indivisible and cannot be split into parts. All persons in the Trinity inhabit, or dwell in, the divine essence. There is one essence in three persons. If one person evinces the essence, this entails that the other two possess it. Where we read that the Father is God, this indicates that the Son is God and is in full possession of all the divine attributes.[3] If you take attributes away from the Son, or put them in abeyance in regard to his office of Messiah, you redefine the Son as God, and, by extension, redefine God and the one essence, three persons distinction.

            There is also a point of logic we must press. The kenotic theory puts the stress on Jesus’ deity: as God-man, Jesus’ deity was attenuated in some way, shape, or form. It is interesting that anti-deists, such as Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons, reverse the order. They argue that what is really happening is that the Man Christ Jesus is becoming more and more like God. In terms of theory, there is absolutely no difference between the kenotocists and the anti-deists.

            There is one final comment to be made. Most traditionalists who reject kenoticism maintain that Jesus hid his divine glory. This is perhaps the very mildest form of kenoticism. Jesus did not hide anything. He was God revealed to us, God in all his glory…as far as we can bear as humans! Creation revealed his glory; the Father revealed his glory; the Spirit revealed his glory. What changed was that the Son’s full divine glory was now revealed in a different mode, namely, the Messiah himself. So that, it is our perception of this glory that has changed. Due to the weakness of Christ’s fleshly state as Messiah, his full divine glory shone throne weakly. However, in his ascension and exaltation, his divine glory burns like a million suns! So, Jesus did not hide his glory from us; rather, it was hidden to our perception because of the flesh. More pointedly, the glory that was hidden was in regard to a certain quality. God’s glory, Christ’s glory, is everywhere, as I’ve said. What John’s Gospel stresses is that Jesus’ glory as Son was hidden from our view until his incarnation. It is not the absence of quantity (the absence of glory as such), but the hiddenness of quality (the revelation of the Word as Son of the Father).

The Eternal Subordination of the Son

The theory of the eternal subordination of the Son (ESS) is another version of the kenotic argument, in that it imposes an incarnational model of the Son upon the divine nature of the Son. I understand the confusion. After all, did not the Father command the Son and give to him authority (John 5:27; 10:18; 17:2)? But it is far easier to read these instructions as pointing to the Messianic office of the Son. As the Man for us, he could do nothing without his Father’s authority. But that is exactly what we would expect in a relationship between God and man. The key is to see that this human relationship is modeled as closely as ‘humanly’ possible to imitate the divine relationship between Father and Son. We already have commented on that aspect, for the Messiah was crafted to house more of the divine glory than ever before. He is not called the “temple” for nothing! Yet, it is a ‘housing’, and he was and is flesh. This implies his subordination in the flesh to the Father. The Son was a Man, the Suffering Servant, who served in obedience unto death. The idea of reading back Jesus’ earthly submission to the Father into divine and eternal relations is no more plausible than the kenotic theory of reading back Jesus’ lack of knowledge into his divine nature. The one place we would expect subordination to be present is in the Creation-event. Instead, we find that the Father issues a command, which command is the Son or Word in action, and that command is empowered by the Spirit. The Son and the Spirit are not commanded; they ARE the command in action. That is why Jesus is the Voice of God, the Word, and the Wisdom of God (Gen.3:8; John 1:1; Prov.8:22-30).

            ESS theory responds by saying that the exalted Son is still in subordination to the Father, and when he hands over the kingdom to the Father this will be done in subjection to the Father (1 Cor.15:25-28). All of this is proof of ESS.

            How so? Is the Son no longer man? Will he stop being man at the end of time? Is he not the Messiah until the Last Day? Is he not reigning as the Man for us? Is not 1 Corinthians 15:25-28 in a context which refers to the exaltation and life of the Second Man and Last Adam (vv45, 47)? Is it not as Second Man and Last Adam that the Son reigns? Is it not as such that he will hand over the kingdom to the Father? Is this not what we would expect from the leader of the heavenly human-race?

            And let us pause for a moment to examine the claims of ESS from the viewpoint of classic theism. There is only one will of God. One sovereignty. One power. One authority? Surely it follows that there is only one authority…right? When “God” created, the Father issued a command, the Son was the command going forth, and the Spirit was the command taking root, becoming effectual. One authority through different stages, so to speak. One authority with three persons in different roles in enacting that authority. One authority leading to one action and one result. Surely, if authority is an attribute, or part of an attribute, it belongs to the nature and essence of God, and as such is possessed by all persons equally, without division. One can no more think of one person having more authority than another, than one can conceive of the Father having more knowledge or power than the Son.

Some advocating ESS claim that authority-relations belong to the persons of the Trinity and not the essence. If they belong to the persons, this would have become clear at creation. But let’s follow through on ESS’s claim. So, the Father is in authority over the Son, and both are in authority over the Spirit. What were they doing all eternity for the Father to be in authority over the Son? What commands was the Son fulfilling? What commands of the Father and Son was the Spirit fulfilling? (After all, the Father and Son sent the Spirit to do their will.) But then again, how can one be in authority over someone without the accompanying power? If I have the authority to build a house it entails I have the power and right to do so. It also entails others do not have the power and right. If the Father has authority and commands, then the Son does not have authority and command, at the point where he is under the Father’s authority and command. Nor does he have power and right, at least to the degree to which he is under power and right of another. Consequently, the Son is not omnipotent or sovereign. For what is sovereignty but the complete and utter rule and right over all things and persons? So, even if we take our cue from the persons of the Trinity, we are forced back upon the nature and essence of the Trinity and the divine attributes.
       Certain scholars tie in the eternal subordination of the Son with the eternal decree: the Son was under the Father's authority inasmuch as the Son was always the "Christ for us" of the eternal decree. I have no problems with positing this view as a hypothesis. It does not affect any structural doctrines, that I can see. However, to posit it one would have to concede from the outset that eternal subordination is merely a construct and not a reality, for subordination in that case belongs to the decree only. Simply put, the Son's subordination in the decree is the subordination of the Messiah, the Man Christ Jesus, and not unless we are willing to say that the Son was eternally submissive Man can we say that he was eternally submissive Son according to the decree. If we give 'life' to the eternal decree and make it a controlling factor on the divine being, we make the same methodological mistake as before: that is, we are reading the humanity of Christ (in the decree) back into his divinity. The decree is a 'decree' for a reason, because it is the divine will for that which was to be, not which was. 

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[1] Psalm 102:23-28 states:

In the course of my life he broke my strength;
    he cut short my days.
²⁴ So I said:
“Do not take me away, my God, in the midst of my days;
    your years go on through all generations.
²⁵ In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
    and the heavens are the work of your hands.
²⁶ They will perish, but you remain;
    they will all wear out like a garment.
Like clothing you will change them
    and they will be discarded.
²⁷ But you remain the same,
    and your years will never end.
²⁸ The children of your servants will live in your presence;
    their descendants will be established before you.”

Psalm 101:25-27 (LXX) says:

25μὴ ἀναγάγῃς με ἐν ἡμίσει ἡμερῶν μου,

ἐν γενεᾷ γενεῶν τὰ ἔτη σου.

26κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς σύ, κύριε, τὴν γῆν ἐθεμελίωσας,

καὶ ἔργα τῶν χειρῶν σού εἰσιν οἱ οὐρανοί·

27αὐτοὶ ἀπολοῦνται, σὺ δὲ διαμενεῖς,

καὶ πάντες ὡς ἱμάτιον παλαιωθήσονται,

                                                    καὶ ὡσεὶ περιβόλαιον ἀλλάξεις αὐτούς, καὶ ἀλλαγήσονται·                  

[2] John Harley, “Robert L. Reymond and Philippians 2:5-11,” Ridderbos Times (April 2, 2018), http://ridderbostimes.blogspot.com/2018/04/robert-l.html, accessed 4/5/2018.

[3] This is a big theme of John Calvin’s.