Subordination of the Spirit?

Something dawned on me that I had never thought of until this weekend: just as the neo-Calvinists subordinate the Son to the Father, they subordinate the Spirit to the Son.

This realization dawned on me as I read the second to last chapter of Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text. Both V and Grant Osborne keep the Holy Spirit on a short leash when it comes to biblical interpretation. According to them, the Spirit does not innovate when it comes to biblical meaning. He illuminates the intended meaning of the text and leads us to apply the appropriate significance of that meaning to our lives. He blows wherever He wills, but not whatever He wills. He does not make it mean something out of continuity with something it meant.

Of course whether the Spirit is subordinate to the Father or Son, this particular theology seems to crash on the rocks of NT texts. The Spirit seems to blow all over the place often with little concern for the intended meaning of OT texts. I guess He didn't read the rule book.

The question of subordination is an interesting one, though. Classic orthodoxy of course rejects any subordination of the persons of the Trinity within the Godhead itself. In that sense, individuals like Wayne Grudem and John Piper are unorthodox. They would see the subordination of the Son to the Father within the Godhead as a paradigm for the household today in which the wife is subordinate to the husband.

But since in my own way I accept the Protestant principle ecclesia semper reformanda--"the church always needs to be reformed"--I am open to the possibility that this consensus might need adjustment. I will give it the benefit of the doubt, mind you, to the consensus of the church over these "neo-reformers."

Certainly in the NT we see Christ subordinated to God the Father (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28). But then again, questions about the relationships within the Trinity go well beyond the NT. When Paul subordinates Christ to God the Father, he is not thinking of the subordination of the second person of the Trinity but the subordination of the Messiah as mediator of God's kingship on earth. I remain convinced that Paul has no understanding of Christ's divine ontology.

And the logos Christology of John did not get the Trinitarian rocket fully into orbit. The classic creeds of the church did not use logos language because it played into views of Christ that did not see Christ to be quite as much God as God the Father.

So I see people like Grudem and Piper as inconsistent. If they're going to believe in the Trinity, then they're going to have to be willing to put some faith in the Spirit working through the church of the fourth and fifth centuries (and not just in an individual named Augustine :-).

But the same Spirit that led that generation to affirm the Trinity led them to affirm the persons of the Godhead as unsubordinated to one another.