Doug Wilson – Trinitarianism in Trouble

Recently, Doug Wilson released an episode of his podcast titled Trinitarianism and Trouble. You can listen here. The episode is an attempt on Doug’s part to defend his Trinitarian Bona Fides. While it’s an admirable effort, he ultimately fails to do so.

Doug holds to a view called Eternal Functional Subordination, although he doesn’t want to call it that. His view is that fundamentally the Son is not just obedient to the Father, but in some sense actually is obedience itself. He writes “The Son’s existence is obedience — eternal obedience, obedience that could not be otherwise. The Father’s existence is authority.”

This obedience and authority in Doug’s thought is explicitly not related to anything outside the Godhead. It is ad intra. He writes “The Fatherhood of the Father did not come into existence after the decision to create the world. It is not in any way dependent upon the decision to create the world.”

This is why I say that Doug’s attempt to defend his bona fides is unsuccessful because he doesn’t actually have any. His understanding of the nature of God is hopelessly self-contradictory here, and the most recent episode defending it proves it.

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s grant his axiomatic assertion that he affirms the Nicene Creed and his axiomatic rejection that the above statement necessarily entails a plurality of wills in the Godhead. He affirms that “Orthodox Trinitarian theology affirms that God has one will.” Let’s take him at face value here and accept that he holds that and that, somehow, his view doesn’t entail the opposite. Does what he says and how he articulates the Trinitarian theology here hold water?

Doug proceeds to engage in some partitive exegesis, which makes me wonder why he doesn’t draw the ire of James White on this… to aptly distinguish between passages that are referring to Christ according to his humanity and passages which are referring to the Son according to his divinity. But this is where it goes sideways and contradicts what he has said in the previous article.

Doug poses the question here “What about intra-trinitarian realities before the incarnation happened?” The specific intra-trinitarian reality that he identifies is the Father sending the Son into the world.

Do you see that? Did you catch it?

How can the Father sending the Son into the world be an intra-trinitarian reality? Is the world something ad intra to the Trinity? If the Father’s identity as Father is not only grounded in his exercise of authority… which Doug here associates with his sending the Son into the world… but the Father’s existence itself simply is the authority he exercises, would this not make the world which the Father sends the Son into also part of his identity ad intra? Likewise, the Son’s existence itself simply is the obedience he exercises and his identity would be dependent on and in some sense constituted by the world he is sent into.

If what Doug is saying here is the case, then the very existence of the Father as Father, and the very existence of the Son as Son is directly dependent on there being a world to be sent into. The very nature of the relations within the Godhead is dependent on the world, which is precisely what Doug says is not true.

There are a number of ways that one can identify a faulty argument. One way would be if you have to axiomatically reject most of the logical entailments of your argument. Another would be if you have to constantly clarify that the words you are using mean something different than the standard technical meanings of those words. The final would be if the argument itself is not internally coherent. As someone once said “Inconsistency is the sign of a failed argument.”

Doug’s Trinitarian articulation fails on all three of these measures, and therefore must be rejected.