We Cannot Reject EFAS By Nestorian Arguments

Do not argue against eternal relations of authority and submission by saying that Christ’s divinity does some things and his humanity does other things

This article examines the (incorrect) notion of eternal relations of authority and submission (EFAS) in God, and why solutions that separate Christ's divine and human natures fail to satisfactorily defeat EFAS.

Put simply, do not argue against eternal relations of authority and submission by saying that Christ’s divinity does some things and his humanity does other things. That is Nestorian. Instead, say that Christ, the only Mediator between God and man, submits to the Father in all things for us and for our salvation.

The Trinity Debate of 2016

In 2016, Christian theologians debated the doctrine of the Trinity. Some felt that the way in which the Father relates to the Son from all eternity was through a relation of authority and a relation of submission. This view held that the Father was authoritative and the Son was submissive according to the relational properties of the one nature of God.

No one went so far as to say that this submission implied an ontological inferiority of the Son to the Father, but the arguments paralleled Arianism so clearly that it became evident this was an inappropriate way to describe the eternal relations of the Father to the Son.

The Orthodox Solution

The basic solution to this problem is to say that the way in which the Father relates to the Son from all eternity is simply by being a Father, and the way in which the Son relates to the Father from eternity is by being a Son.

The biblical words or verbs to describe this eternal relation is to say that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Father eternally begets the Son. The word "beget" or "begotten" is the old-fashioned word that we don't have an equivalent for today, but that describes how children descend from parents.

The Incarnational Submission Question

But there is some confusion on the matter still. When the Word of God the Father became flesh as John 1:14 says, he takes it upon himself to do whatever the Father does. He submits his will to the Father in his incarnation for our salvation.

And so some people might say the simple solution to the problem is that when the Word from the Father took human flesh to himself, he added humanity to himself, and for this reason we can say that the humanity of Jesus obeyed the Father while the divinity of Jesus was equal to the Father.

Perhaps at first blush this seems entirely reasonable, except this argument parallels the teaching of Nestorianism.

Nestorius taught that the two natures of Christ should be highly distinguishable and preserve the properties of each, and he underplayed the importance of saying that the single subject (the one Lord Jesus Christ) is the single subject of all the actions that he does. Whether that means the one Lord Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary or even suffered under Pontius Pilate, for Nestorius both of these terms were unacceptable because God himself is impassible—unable to suffer or change through transformations like being born or suffering on the cross.

So Nestorius wanted to divide the natures so far apart they ended up kind of being almost independent things, or two persons or hypostases. Now, Nestorius himself confusingly would talk about each nature having its own hypostasis and own person, but he would affirm that when they were together they formed a "prosopic union." This prosopic union showed some sort of unity, we might say, of the two natures of Christ from two prosopa or persons.

In other words, the one Lord Jesus Christ as the Creed says and as the Bible says pretty clearly cannot be easily said to suffer and to be born and to do all the things that he did as the role of mediator in Scripture, for Nestorius, because this would imply that this happened to the nature of God which would include the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Cyril's Orthodox Response

Cyril of Alexandria, for his part, said no, it was always the one Lord Jesus Christ who is the subject of these actions. He was born and he suffered in the flesh that he made his very own. And it is through making flesh his very own that we can say that Christ, the God-man, the single subject, truly suffered and truly was born of the Virgin Mary. We do not divide Christ into two natures and say that his human nature did something and his divine nature did something. It was always the one Lord Jesus Christ who acted.

The Real Solution to the Authority-Submission Problem

So when it comes to the question of how the Son in his incarnation submitted to the Father, how do we understand this? If we say that the Son in his incarnation submits to the Father, does that imply the divine nature submits to the Father, and in which case the view that the eternal relations of authority and submission would seem at least correct through this change in God by the incarnation?

The answer, of course, is no. The purpose of the incarnation was that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son into the world to save it (John 3:16). As Jesus Christ came, he took upon himself the role of mediator, the only mediator between God and man as 1 Timothy 2:5 says. In this economic or temporal role of mediator that he took upon himself through the incarnation, he submitted his life fully to God the Father for our sake so that he might undo what Adam did in the Garden of Eden by reversing the curse, overcoming sin, obliterating death, and crushing the head of the serpent as the one Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate man Jesus Christ.

And as he fulfills his economic role, as 1 Corinthians 15 tells us, he will hand all things over to the Father, and God will once again be all in all at the end of redemptive time.

Conclusion

The solution to the problem of the eternal relations of authority and submission is not to posit that the human nature does some things that are human and that the divine nature does things that are divine, or even to simply say that Christ acts as the divine nature and as the human nature.

The solution is to say that the one Lord Jesus Christ is always the subject of the actions that he does, and in his incarnate humanity, he became the only mediator between God and man, “the man Jesus Christ”.

As 1 Peter 4:1 says, Christ "suffered in the flesh" for our sake, and this is precisely because, as John 1:14 says, "the Word became flesh." He made flesh his very own, and so he could suffer in the flesh. But it's always he that is suffering, not the flesh abstracted that suffers—it's Christ that suffers.

And since only his own flesh is capable of suffering, we might say something more nuanced like "the one Lord Jesus Christ suffered in the flesh that he made his very own." For me, however, it's simple enough to quote 1 Peter 4:1 that says "Christ suffered in the flesh."