Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity by Thomas McCall & Michael Rea

Author:Thomas McCall & Michael Rea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

But we also read that

no one person has any attributes that are not possessed by the others.14

But if the Son has as an essential property being subordinate to the authority of the Father, and the Father has as an essential property being authoritative over the Son, then the Father and the Son have not only a difference in attributes, but a difference is essential attributes, and hence have different natures. The same holds for the Holy Spirit, who on the divine authoritative hierarchy view has either the property of being subordinate to the Father or the property of being subordinate to the Father and the Son, again as an essential property. So the Holy Spirit has a different nature from the Father, or the Father and the Son, and in the former case (Holy Spirit subordinate to only the Father) the Father has another essential property that the Son lacks, namely having authority over the Holy Spirit. It will not do to say that these are “only roles” because it is said to be essential to the Trinitarian persons that they have these roles. Having them is “essential to the very nature of God himself.”

If the authority and the subordination statuses are essential to the very nature of God then the Trinitarian persons, each having a different status from the others, and one that is not grounded in or based on any properties that any Trinitarian person has other than having the status he has, then each Trinitarian person has a different nature – a different essence – with the difference in essence being utterly unexplained by, grounded in, or due to, any other attribute that any Trinitarian person has. This is no longer Role Subordinationism. It is Ontological Subordinationism, which Role Subordination rejects, and indeed criticizesas unorthodox and heretical.

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