Kevin Giles, The Father and the Son: modern evangelicals reinvent the doctrine of the Trinity, Zondervan, 2006. Address given at the launch of Kevin Gile’s book in Sydney, 21 June 2006 Introduction In his book, Kevin Giles, otherwise known as Australo-Athanasius, or AA for short, reminds us that Augustine began to write his major work, De Trinitate, when he was a young man and finished it as an old man. When I began to read Kevin’s book I was middle aged. By the time I had finished it, I had repeated much of my life, reviewed 2000 years of church history, and been swept up into the timeless embrace of the immanent Trinity. So I was by turns plunged into depression at the recollection of frustrated attempts to get the diocese to give the women a break, stimulated out of my tiny mind by the review of a philosophical exercise about the nature of God which has been likened to the intellectual achievement of landing humans on the moon, and even freed from the trammels of doctrinal disputation and ideological conflict, so that I was enabled to soar into the eternal wonder of uncreated love, only to find that I was made quite dizzy through being whisked around in the perichoretic dance. So, it might take till your hair turns grey to finish Kevin’s latest book, but paradoxically, if it doesn’t kill you, it will keep you young. This book is huge. It is a prodigious effort, written by a genuine theologian. We don’t have many of them in the Australian church. But of course it is not the first time in Church history that a theological magnum opus has been generated out of a local dispute among Christians. If nothing else comes of this dispute, we may be glad that it has generated a work of this erudition. But it is not nice being in dispute, when our Lord commanded us to be one, so let’s see if we can seek the truth in love and not in acrimony. With that goal in mind, let me cover four matters: 1. The point at issue in this debate 2. The Historical context of the debate in Sydney 3. Kevin’s contribution to the debate 4. An appeal to our opponents in this debate The Point at Issue in this Debate What is at stake here? According to Kevin, what is at stake is nothing less than our understanding of the nature of God – in particular the relation of the Father and the Son, and our understanding of the role of women in Christian ministry, and what the one has to do with the other. ‘What divides evangelicals today,’ writes Kevin, ‘is whether women are permanently subordinated to men and whether the Son of God is eternally subordinated in function and authority to the Father’ (48). In this book, Kevin raises a number of questions. In what sense, if any, is the Son eternally subordinated to the Father? Is the sense of the Son’s subordination held by those who insist on role subordination by women in the Christian ministry threatening to take us outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy? Are the opponents of women’s ordination fighting with weapons forged by Arius, the theologian who gave his name to a movement made up of all the theologians from post-apostolic times who eternally subordinate the Son to the Father? Does the subordination of the Son in role and/or authority effectively undermine the equality or oneness of being which the Son has with the Father, for if one is eternally subordinate in role or authority, isn’t one less than God? And how can one who is less than God be our Saviour? Is the current subordinationist 1 view of socially conservative evangelicals constructed in response to the need to bulwark the major theological issue of the day, namely the permanent subordination of women? If so, would not that easily corrupt the doctrine? (44). Of course, we are all corrupt, and opponents of the ordination of women contend that its supporters do exactly the same thing – they want to find in the relations within the Trinity an equality which supports role equality between men and women. When I reflected on this in the light of Kevin’s book I found myself wondering if that is exactly what we did in Sydney when we fought for the ordination of women in the crucial years 1996 to 1998. So, I’ll move out of theology into my comfort zone for a while if I may and go over this history. Kevin invited James McPherson to launch his book to the sound of a theological trumpet and me to launch it with an historical trumpet. The Historical context of the debate in Sydney Those of you who long for peace in this matter will be thrilled to learn that all Sydney Anglicans believe in the ordination of women: it’s just that some of us believe in the ordination of women to the priesthood while the rest believe in the sub-ordination of women to men. During the debates on the ordination of women its supporters, not its opponents, were the ones who first raised the matter of its analogy to the Trinity. This was at the special Synod Conference which was held, appropriately enough, at Trinity Grammar School on 16 May 1998. You will recall that the decision to ordain women to the priesthood in the Anglican Church was made in most Australian dioceses in 1992. From 1993 to 1995 we were not allowed to debate the matter in the Sydney synod: there was a three-year moratorium on the debate. Then we had three years of debates over Justice Keith Mason’s proposal to allow ordination to the priesthood without headship of a congregation, a sort of subordination ordination. But the opponents saw even this proposal as the thin end of the wedge and said ‘no’, not by much in the house of laity, but by a considerable margin in the house of clergy. So Harry Goodhew convened the Trinity school conference. Harry was distressed by the division the matter was causing, and, it was perceived, he was not as impressed by the arguments against female ordination as its opponents thought he should be as the one who had to safeguard the diocesan heritage. He invited synod members to meet and consider two pre-circulated papers, one for and one against female ordination.1 The pro-case was beautifully written – by me. It was entitled ‘Not Compromise; Not Uniformity; But Liberty: A Case for the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood’. It was there that the issue of the relevance of the subordination of the Son in the Trinity was first raised in a synod debate with reference to female ordination. I have on my computer three drafts of this paper. The first is dated the 4th of April; the second 22nd April and the third, the 27th of April. Not until the last draft did the Trinity get a mention. In the first, there appears the claim that the ‘biblical texts bearing on this matter are more supportive of a partnership model of ministry than a subordination model’. In the second that had matured into the claim that ‘The creation texts in Genesis are more supportive of a partnership model of ministry than a subordination model’. But then in the third, the 1 We then broke into discussion groups and addressed this question which was devised by the Archbishop: "We are faced in our diocese and synod with a serious division of opinion over whether or not there should be included amongst the many ministries exercised in the Church by women, the opportunity to fulfil the ministry of presbyter. Can you conceive of any generally acceptable approach to this question that would satisfy the convictions of both groups, and relieve the synod of the prospect of regularly debating bills calculated to make such ministry possible or to rescind such bills?" 2 Trinity is invoked. I remember my surprise at the advent of this argument. It came from Bill Lawton with the support of John MacIntyre, both of whom were to speak so movingly at the special synod. So I might have written the document, but I did it with Bill Lawton guiding the pen, and John MacIntyre, patting Bill on the back. You see it was the product of an undivided trinity, with my pen humbly subordinated to the other two with whom I was not the ontological equal. This is something of what we said: The language of 1 Corinthians 11.11,12 is unequivocal. Paul argues no priority of male or female and no subordination, only a fundamental equality. Verse 11 specifies a necessary interdependence of male and female. This is all consistent with Paul's idea of headship which is based on his understanding of the Godhead. That God is the head of Christ means that the Son is 'eternally begotten of the Father', or 'of the same stuff as' and therefore equal to God. By analogy, the female is 'of the same stuff as' and therefore equal to the male. For, in creation, God made us human, male and female. There is no order of subordination in this understanding of headship. In fact, the opposite is true: there is an explicit order of creation which gives equality of status to male and female. When Paul speaks of Christ's headship, as in Ephesians, he means not the authority of Christ in the Church, but the unity Christ gives the Church.