Subordinationism

[5][6] According to Badcock, virtually all orthodox theologians prior to the Arian controversy in the latter half of the fourth century were subordinationists to some extent,[7] which also applies to Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen,[8][9] Hippolytus, Justin Martyr and Novatian.

[19] Arius (c. 250–336), a clergyman of Alexandria in Egypt, "objected to Alexander's (the bishop of the church in that city) apparent carelessness in blurring the distinction of nature between the Father and the Son by his emphasis on eternal generation".

For the reasons of him being moderate in the religious and political spectrum of beliefs, Constantine I turned to Eusebius of Caesarea to try to make peace between the Arians and their opponents at Nicaea I.

[23] Eusebius of Caesarea wrote, in On the Theology of the Church, that the Nicene Creed is a full expression of Christian theology, which begins with: "We believe in One God..." Eusebius goes on to explain how initially the goal was not to expel Arius and his supporters, but to find a Creed on which all of them could agree and unite.

Eusebius of Caesarea suggested a compromise wording of a creed, in which the Son would be affirmed as "homoiousios", or "of similar substance/nature" with the Father.

But Alexander and Athanasius saw that this compromise would allow the Arians to continue to teach their heresy, but stay technically within orthodoxy, and therefore rejected that wording.

[32] In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 1, chapter 13, Calvin attacks those in the Reformation family who while they confess "that there are three [divine] persons" speak of the Father as "the essence giver" as if he were "truly and properly the sole God".

Richard Muller says Calvin recognised that what his opponents were teaching "amounted to a radical subordination of the second and third persons, with the result that the Father alone is truly God".

The same doctrine is asserted by western theologians such as Augustine even when not using the technical term i.e. Monarchy of the Father[citation needed].

In so doing, the Church both repudiated the Arian compromise with Hellenism and deeply altered the shape of Greek, especially Platonist and neo-Platonist, metaphysics.

The American Lutheran theologian, F. Pieper (1852–1931), argues that behind this teaching lay an acceptance of ‘modernism’, or what we would call today, theological ‘liberalism’.

[42] More recently John Kleinig, of Australian Lutheran College, promoted a form of subordinationism and concluded: Well then, is the exalted Christ in any way subordinate to the Father right now?

[48][49][50] The mainstream Christian doctrine of the Trinity may be described as the teaching that God is three distinct hypostases or persons who are coeternal, coequal, and indivisibly united in one being, or essence (from the Greek ousia).

The three largest denominations that do not accept the Trinity doctrine are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Iglesia ni Cristo.

It is a characteristic tendency in much Christian teaching of the first three centuries, and is a marked feature of such otherwise orthodox Fathers as" Justin Martyr and Irenaeus.

Although others interpret the New Testament differently, John 14:28 (“the Father is greater than I”) and similar texts presents Christ as subordinate.During the Arian Controversy of the 4th century, Arius and his followers did regard the Son as divine, but the words theos or deus, for the first four centuries of the existence of Christianity had a wide variety of meanings.

[53] Arius, therefore, held that the Son was divine by grace and not by nature, and that He was created by the Father, though in a creation outside time.

[54] In response, the Nicene Creed, particularly as revised by the second ecumenical council in Constantinople I in 381, by affirming the co-equality of the Three Persons of the Trinity, condemned subordinationism.

It is a modern concept that is so vague that is that it does not illuminate much of the theology of the pre-Nicene teachers, where a subordinationist presupposition was widely and unreflectively shared.

[56]This handbook refers to subordination as "retrospective" and a "modern concept" because it is only able to define this term with the hindsight of the developments of the fourth century.

…Irenaeus follows a similar path… The theological enterprise begun by the Apologists and Irenaeus was continued in the West by Hippolytus and Tertullian… The ante-Nicene Fathers did their best to explain how the one God could be a Trinity of three persons.

[57] Mark Baddeley has criticized Giles for what he sees as a conflation of ontological and relational subordinationism, and for his supposed generalisation that "the ante-Nicene Fathers were subordinationists.