Product Description

This book is about the contemporary debate among evangelicals on the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and the controversial issues surrounding the relationship between the divine Father and Son. It particularly challenges eternal economic subordination of Son to the Father—a view espoused by many evangelicals—and explains what the historic distinctions between economic Trinity and immanent Trinity really imply.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #843770 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From the Back Cover
The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the cornerstones of Christianity. In Jesus and the Father, Kevin Giles wrestles with questions about the Trinity that are dividing the evangelical community:

What is the error called “subordinationism”?
Is the Son eternally subordinated to the Father in function?
Are the Father and the Son divided or undivided in power and authority?
Is the Father-Son-Spirit relationship ordered hierarchical or horizontal?
How should the Father and the Son be differentiated to avoid the errors of modalism and subordinationism?
What is the relationship between the so-called economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity?
Does the Father-Son relationship in the Trinity prescribe male-female relationships in the home and the church?


"Kevin Giles points out serious problems in the teaching that the Son is eternally subordinated to the Father and argues effectively for the full eternal equality within the Trinity. This book should be read by all who wrestle with the complex but crucial doctrine of the Trinity."—Millard Erickson, author, Christian Theology



“By showing that subordinationism is a revival of a heresy that was systematically rejected by the non-Arian Church, the author reinstates the classical orthodox doctrine of the Trinity in all its scriptural majesty and grandeur.”—Gilbert Bilezikian, professor emeritus, Wheaton College



“Giles skillfully places before us the stark choice which each generation of theologians must face: will we allow the Bible to speak its message about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to us, or will we use the Bible to advance our own agenda? This important book deserves to be widely read and carefully considered.”—Paul D. Molnar, professor of systematic theology, St. John’s University

About the Author
Kevin Giles (Th.D., Australian College of Theology) is the Vicar of St. Michael’s Church in North Carlton, Australia. He has been in Anglican parish ministry for over thirty years. Dr. Giles has published numerous scholarly articles and ten books including, Women and Their Ministry, Created Woman, Patterns of Ministry Among the First Christians, What on Earth is the Church?, Making Good Churches Better, and The Trinity and Subordinationism. He is a contributor to the IVP Dictionaries, Jesus and the Gospels and The Later Writings of the New Testament and Their Development. He and his wife, Lynley, have been married for 34 years. They have four grown children and five grandchildren.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Jesus and the Father
Copyright © 2006 by Kevin Giles
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giles, Kevin.
Jesus and the father : modern evangelicals reinvent the doctrine of the Trinity /
Kevin Giles — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-310-2664-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-26664-8
1. Trinity — History of doctrines. 2. Evangelicalism. I. Title.
BT111.3.G45 2006
231'.044 — dc22 2005034545
CIP
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of Churches of
Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture verses marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or
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17
Chapter
1
Contemporary Evangelicals
and the Doctrine
of the Trinity
In the past thirty years there has been an amazing resurgence of interest in the doctrine
of the Trinity. Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox
theologians have published numerous studies and books on the Trinity, and they
are continuing to appear. Evangelicals at first were not involved, but a change is under
way, as this book and others written recently by evangelicals indicate.1 After a long
period of neglect, this doctrine is now on center stage as it should be, because it is
nothing less than our distinctive Christian
doctrine of God.
Most contemporary books on the Trinity have two foci. They look back to the
historical sources to see how the doctrine was developed by the best of theologians
across the centuries, and they look at the present to see how this fundamental doctrine
can be best expressed building on all the work and thought that has gone before.
Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, and
Calvin are the most commonly studied historical authorities. One of the most important
developments in this doctrinal renaissance has been the recognition that there
is much to learn from the early Greek-speaking theologians, particularly Athanasius
1 For example, Millard Erickson, God in Three Persons: A Contemporary Interpretation of the
Trinity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1995); Roger E. Olson and Christopher A. Hall, The
Trinity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002); Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune
God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004); Brian Edgar, The
Message of the Trinity (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity, 2004); Robert Letham, The Holy
Trinity in Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 2004).
and the Cappadocian Fathers, who for centuries were somewhat forgotten by Roman
Catholic and Protestant theologians. Right at the heart of their doctrine of the Trinity
was the belief that God’s triunity was to be understood communally. The three
persons are the one God in the most intimate, self-giving fellowship. This development
has lead to a widespread move away from Tertullian, Augustine, and Aquinas’s
practice of speaking of God in unity as “one substance,” an expression which sounds
impersonal and abstract, even if this was not intended. In this prevailing “communal
model” of the Trinity, the coequality of the divine three both in unity and in relation
to one another as persons is very much to the fore.
Given this starting point for the doctrine of the Trinity, any suggestion that the
divine three are ordered hierarchically, or divided in being, work, or authority, is
unthinkable. Ted Peters in his 1993 book God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality
in Divine Life2 describes contemporary thinking about the Christian
God as “antisubordinationist
trinitarianism.” Similarly, the conservative evangelical Millard Erickson
in his 1995 study, God in Three Persons, says that along with other contemporary
theologians he believes in “the complete equality of the divine three.”3 David Cunningham
in his 1998 book, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology, is
of much the same opinion. He speaks of “a radical, relational, co-equality” in modern
trinitarian thinking.4 In my opinion the finest study on the Trinity in the last ten
years is that by Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian
Doctrine of God: One Being Three
Persons.5 He too emphasizes the coequality of the differentiated divine persons. Building
on the work of Athanasius and the Cappadocians, he makes the Trinity itself the
monarche (sole source or origin) of the divine three and the Son the monarche of divine
saving revelation. He is totally opposed to subordinationism in any form.
In the light of this contemporary stress on the coequality of the divine persons
who are understood to be bound together in the most intimate bond of love and
self-giving, it is of no surprise that some of the best contemporary expositions of the
doctrine of the Trinity see the Trinity as a charter for human liberation and emancipation.
6 If no one divine person is before or after, greater or lesser because they are
“coequal” (as the Athanasian creed says), this suggests, we are told, that all hierarchi-
18 JES US AND THE FATHER
2 Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville: Westminster,
1993).
3 Erickson, God in Three Persons, 331.
4 David Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 113.
5 Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian
Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons. (Edinburgh:
T&T Clark, 1996).
6 Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (New York: Orbis, 1988); Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity
and the Kingdom (New York: Harper and Row, 1981); Catherine LaCugna, God for Us (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); Erickson, God in Three Persons.
cal ordering in this world is a human construct ref lecting fallen existence, not God’s
ideal. God would like to see every human being valued in the same way. It is thus the
Christian’s
duty to oppose human philosophies and structures that oppress people,
limiting their full potential as human beings made in the image and likeness of God.

Customer Reviews

This book sheds light on the debate on women in ministry.
For anyone who cares to be orthodox in their thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity, this is a don't miss read. In this book Kevin Giles explains a number of important things: 1) that the distinctive mark of the Christian God is that God is Three in One; 2) that unless we understand that the Father, Son, and Spirit are equal in authority and power, we fail to carry forward the historic doctrine of the Trinity; 3)that much of the contemporary debate in conservative evangelical circles on the doctrine of the Trinity is really not about the Trinity, but rather about the proper role of women in the Church.

Giles rightly explains that it is heretical to think the Father has more authority than the Son. Church fathers such as Athanasius, the Cappodocians, Augustine, John of Damascus battled--on the basis of rigorous Bible study and the principles of logic--that the Father, Son, and Spirit have one authority. Yet Giles fails to make clear that it's one thing to deny Christ's deity (as the Arian heretics did), and another thing to deny the Son's equal authority with the Father (as Wayne Grudem and others are doing).

The Problem of Modern Evangelicalism.
In 2006, Kevin Giles, Anglican scholar and vicar of St. Michael's Church in North Carlton Australia published this book, "Jesus and the Father, Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity". In many ways it is a defense and further exposition on his earlier work, "The Trinity and Subordinationism".

The importance of this book both in it's target field (the doctrine of the Trinity) and in the larger scope (the state of Evangelicalism) cannot be understated. Giles convincingly makes his case in the following points: First, that modern Evangelicals have strayed away from the historic, orthodox, Catholic, doctrinal formulation of the Trinity and have come extremely close to various Arian heretical reformulations of it. Several popular Evangelical scholars are taken to task on this point such as George Knight III, Wayne Grudem, Bruce Ware, Norman Geisler, John Frame, Robert Letham and Robert Doyle to name but a few. No denomination or Protestant tradition is safe from the penetrating analysis that Giles applies using the weapons of the historic orthodox voice, the regula fide. Evangelical, Reformed and Anglican scholars are exposed as being severly lacking in the proper understanding of historical theology.

The main point of contention is that modern scholars are defending the eternal subordination of Jesus in authority and function to the Father. If this surprising revelation is not enough, these scholars use this proposition to defend the 'hierarchical' view that a women should be subordinate to her husband, since we are told, this is the example Jesus shows us in His relationship with the Father.

In 300+ pages Giles inspects this modern innovation in painstaking detail exposing it's weakness on many grounds from both the voices of the early fathers, Calvin and modern conservative scholarship. Giles sober handling of the issues and breath of knowledge on the secondary literature is impressive and I must quote him in length on this point, "I have read all the contemporary books on the Trinity on the shelves of the university library I use, as well as other books on this topic I have borrowed elsewhere or bought, including all the conservative evangelical works that endorse the eternal sobordination of the Son" (p.169).

What we as Catholics say is that this one issue (and a major distortion it is) is but one symptom of the larger disease of modern evangelicalism. Modern Christianity has built it's house on sand rather than on the solid unshaking rock of history. And with the smallest of winds, bits and pieces fall over and exposes the emptiness inside. Imagine, what is the central piece, the very cornerstone of our faith, who our God is - is mangled and reinvented in modern garb. It is not difficult to prove then that the remaining tenets of our Catholic-historic faith have been similarly misunderstood and reinvented. To the credit of this great Anglican scholar he admits as much when he speaks very highly of Roman Catholic scholars on this issue, such as Edmund Fortman, Karl Rahner and Yves Conger to name but a few. I close tonight quoting Giles again on page 169 of this great work, "I have not found a Roman Catholic theologian who gives any support to the idea that the Son is eternally subordinated in any way".

Incredibly important book
This book discusses how the Godhead is to be conceived in Christianity. As Voltaire wrote "God made man in his image and man returned the favor." The temptation to make God in our image is always with us and results in nothing less than a false "god" and therefore is idolatrous. We see how some evangelicals (like Wayne Grudem) are rewriting history and word definitions in order to promote the Arian idea of the eternal subordination of the Son in order to promote the subordination of women in family and church.