I read Kevin Giles’ article “Response to Michael Bird and Robert Shillaker: The Son is Not Eternally Subordinated to in Authority to the Father,” TrinJ 30/2 (2009): 237-56 (thanks to Justin Dodson for passing along a copy) earlier today and it’s the same old same that I’ve read in his books. He plays the victim and accuses his opponents of misunderstanding or misrepresenting him (or the sources he uses to bolster his claims) repeatedly throughout the article (as he also did in his book Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity). For example:
- “What did not please me was in seeking to refute my case that historic orthodoxy rejects with one voice the eternal subordination in authority of the Son, they either get what I say wrong, distort what I say, do not note that I address the questions they put to me, or fail to make clear that several important points they make are ones that reflect almost word for word my conclusions.” (p. 237)
- “In outlining my position on function and role they completely misrepresent what I actually argue.” (p. 239)
- “Bird and Shillaker totally misrepresent me when they say I hold that ‘functional subordination requires onological inferiority’… ‘one’s function determines one’s person’… ad infinitum, and important in the concluding summary.” (p. 240)
- “Many a time I wondered if in fact they had read my book completely; they have certainly not read it carefully. It is almost as if they are attaching a straw man.” (p. 242)
- “This assertion makes me wonder yet again if my two critics have read my book, let alone any substantial book on the historical development of the doctrine of the Trinity.” (p. 243)
- “It is my opinion that Bird and Shillaker misrepresent the teaching of both of these great modern theologians [i.e., Karl Barth & Wolfhart Pannenberg].” (p. 244)
- “First I note that my two critics do not get Rahner’s rule right.” (p. 244)
- “My two critics make no reference to my work and seem ignorant of the complexities of Rahner’s rule.” (p. 245)
I also found that the article should have been called “Response to Michael Bird, Robert Shillaker, Bruce Ware, Wayne Gruden, George Knight, III and Millard Erickson.” Not contented to simply address Bird and Shillaker’s article “Subordination in the Trinity and Gender Roles: A Response to Recent Discussion,” TJ 29/2 (2008): 267-83, Giles felt the need to rehash old arguments with the likes of the CBMW boys and a couple of others. This detracts greatly from his interaction with Bird and Shillaker because unlike Grudem and Ware they argue that the Trinity is NOT a model for male-female relationships, something Giles acknowledges and claims to agree with but in practice does not. Giles parrots his book Jesus and the Father when he “plead[s] with [his] fellow evangelicals to work out first of all, completely independently of any concerns about the relationship of the sexes, what exactly is the orthodox Christian doctrine of God.” (p. 238 cf. Jesus and the Father, 54) If only he’d take his own advice! Giles has no interest in the doctrine of the Trinity in its own right; his is a doctrine that has been crafted precisely to bolster his egalitarianism. Anyone who has read his two books on the subject or his numerous articles can see this for themselves, so when Giles claims that “[he] do[es] not appeal to [his] co-equal understanding of the Trinity to justify [his] views on the man-woman relationship” and “[i]n thirty years in the debate about the God-given ideal for the man-woman relationship, I have never used this argument” (p. 250) his credibility is seriously called into question. In the preface to Jesus and the Father he speaks of the side of the debate that rejects subordination (i.e., egalitarians) saying:
The persons of the Trinity are to be understood as “coequal,” each being alike “almighty” and “Lord,” as the Athanasian Creed declares. This understanding of the Trinity, they insist, in no way justifies the permanent subordination of women, or unchangeable hierarchical social ordering in any context. As this particular debate impacts on a little more than half the human race, it would be hard to dispute that how we construe the doctrine of the Trinity is of huge practical consequences. The point seems beyond dispute. A right doctrine of the Trinity is needed for right belief and right behavior. No doctrine could be more important. (Jesus and the Father, 13, emphasis mine)
Seeing as how this post is already long I’ll jot down my other thoughts on the article in another post.
B”H
Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth 