Sunday, June 10, 2018
Another look at trinitarian concepts
Ware is a highly esteemed theologian and author in the evangelical world. He came to Southern Seminary from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where he served as chairman of the Department of Biblical and Systematic Theology. Prior to this, he taught at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary and Bethel Theological Seminary. In his book "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance' he reveals an already known reality regarding submission between Father and Son.
On pages 18,44,48, and 153 this submission is felt even into prayer where he admittingly proposes prayer only to the Father as ascribed."We may encourage our children to open prayers with, 'Dear Jesus,' despite the fact that Jesus said to pray to "our Father in heaven...". He also understands the difference between Jehovah as the Father and Jesus as the Son. It appears that Ware has his own form of Social Trinitarianism which includes submission attitudes between Father and Son. Also on pg 44 he seems to want to ascribe different modes of being to God. He goes on to say that the Father is "the God". "And what a delight it is to contemplate the greatness, the majesty.....that is God--the true God, the living God, the Creator of heaven and earth...our God. It should not astonish us ....that whom we here behold is in fact 'the God'.Yes God is grear , and God is one. And yet this one god is also three."pg44 Here I am scratching my head as he uses the term God I assume for the father then switches to God being three. Is the Father three? Because all the time in this paragraph he is speaking of the Father being God. Yet then he says God is three.So if the Father is God, and God is three, then the Father is three. And then I might ask, three what's or whom's? Of course in my opinion all Ante-Nicene Church Fathers were Submissionist. Of course Ware is a strict adherent to Trinitarianism but sounds so much like a Unitarian.
In the end when you look at his understanding of submissiveness between Father and Son, it appears he self contradicts himself using pure logic and simple syllogisms. I have not yet completely read his book but to pass it off at this point as simple conjecture leading to confusion, which in most cases portray most Trinitarians, is most likely how it will end with me.
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Dear Dokimazo
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Your critique of Ware trades on a handful of category mistakes that repeatedly surface in anti-Trinitarian polemics: confusing “God” used essentially with “God” used personally, collapsing the economic missions into the immanent life of God, and treating the Son’s incarnate obedience as proof of an ontological subordination. Once those confusions are cleared, the supposed contradictions evaporate.
ReplyDeleteWhen a Christian theologian says “the Father is God,” he is not claiming “the Father is the Trinity” or that the Father alone exhausts what “God” means. He is making an essential predication: the Father is truly and fully divine. Classical Nicene teaching—shared by Catholics and many evangelicals—simultaneously affirms “the Son is God” and “the Holy Spirit is God,” while denying there are “three Gods.” That is why the Athanasian Creed can say without blinking: “The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God; and yet they are not three Gods but one God.” In Thomistic terms, “God” names the one simple divine essence; “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” are distinct subsisting relations of origin in that one essence. To infer, as you do, that Ware’s “the Father is the God” plus “God is three” yields “the Father is three” just equivocates on the copula. “Is God” there is predication of nature, not identity with the whole Trinity. No serious Nicene theologian—Catholic or evangelical—equates “Pater est Deus” with “Pater est Trinitas.”
Your worry about Ware sounding “unitarian” because he focuses devotionally on the Father ignores a second, equally basic distinction: Scripture and tradition sometimes use “God” personally (often for the Father as fons divinitatis) and sometimes essentially (for the Godhead as such). The New Testament does both. Paul’s doxologies speak of “one God, the Father” without demoting the Son, and in the same breath he ascribes to Christ prerogatives and titles of Yahweh (1 Cor 8:6; Phil 2:10–11). John calls the Son “God” (John 1:1; 20:28) and the author of Hebrews applies “O God” to the Son from Psalm 45 (Heb 1:8). The point is not oscillation but coherence: there is one simple divine nature, personally possessed by three who are distinguished by relations of origin—paternity, filiation, and spiration—not by rank, deity-quotient, or competing wills.
The charge that Ware’s emphasis on the Son’s “submission” proves inner-Trinitarian inequality likewise conflates economy and theology. In Catholic dogma, the Son’s obedience pertains formally to His created, human will assumed in the Incarnation: “He became obedient unto death” precisely as man (Phil 2:8). Within the immanent Trinity there is one intellect and one will; there is an order (taxis) of persons according to origin—Father unbegotten, Son begotten, Spirit proceeding—but no subordination of nature, power, or glory. The Cappadocians were explicit: the Father’s monarchy means causal priority of person, not inferiority of essence in the Son or the Spirit. Aquinas is even blunter: there is “no before and after, no greater and lesser” in God; any “priority” is of origin alone (ST I, q.42, a.3–4). If some contemporary Protestants speak of an “eternal functional subordination,” Catholics reject that phrase when it suggests distinct wills or an eternal hierarchy. But even then, the thing your syllogisms need—that the Son is ontologically less than the Father—never follows. A taxis of origin and an economic obedience in the flesh do not entail an inequality of deity.
DeleteYour prayer objection misfires for similar reasons. Jesus’ “pray like this: Our Father” gives a paradigmatic pattern, not an exhaustive liturgical law. The New Testament contains explicit prayers to and invocations of the Son: Stephen prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59); the Church “calls upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 1:2); the liturgical cry “Our Lord, come” is addressed to Christ (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20). The Church’s worship is irreducibly Trinitarian: to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit—while also directly venerating the Son as “my Lord and my God.” To insist that a model prayer addressed to the Father precludes prayer to the Son is to oppose Scripture to itself and to confound the very relations that the Gospel reveals.
Finally, branding the ante-Nicene Fathers “submissionist” recycles a tired anachronism. Long before 325, Christian writers confessed both the Father’s monarchy and the Son’s true deity. Justin Martyr distinguishes persons without denying worship to the Logos; Irenaeus grounds salvation in the Son’s consubstantial recapitulation of Adam; Tertullian, far from modalism, coins “tres personae, una substantia.” When they speak of the Son “doing the Father’s will,” they are expounding John’s Gospel—not endorsing Arian subordination. The councils of Nicaea and Constantinople did not invent that faith; they fenced it against misconstrual by clarifying that the Son is homoousios with the Father and the Spirit is adored and glorified together with them.
DeleteWhat your critique repeatedly calls “pure logic” depends on equivocations: “God” as essence versus person, “is” of predication versus identity, order of origin versus inequality, economic obedience versus immanent subordination. Clear those, and Ware’s evangelical piety reads as what it is—an attempt, however Protestant in accent, to speak within the Nicene grammar that Catholics have taught for centuries. If you want to press a serious objection, it is better to contend with the biblical data that ascribe full deity to the Son and Spirit while preserving the Father’s monarchy, and then to show how your unitarian scheme can honor all those texts without truncating any. Until then, the head-scratching stems less from Trinitarian incoherence than from a set of category mistakes smuggled into your premises.