Nicaea Downunder

NICAEA DOWNUNDER

The Trinity in Australian Anglicanism

This lecture is the last of a series of lectures that were conceived to commemorate the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the holding of the Council of Nicaea in 325AD. At the outset Bill Leadbetter alerted those present to the importance of the role of the Emperor Constantine in the whole Nicene exercise.  Constantine ensured that the Council, which had originally been called by the Bishops, was relocated to Nicaea, close enough to allow him to attend in person; he then appeared in style decked out in purple and gold, as you would expect of an Emperor, but without his usual retinue of soldiers.  He came peaceably with a clear priority to encourage a productive consensus, and in his opening address to the assembled Bishops, stressed the need for them to secure the peace of the Church. Then Constantine even proposed what has become the enduring  legacy of Nicaea, the use of the definition of the homoousion – the declaration that we still repeat (though in English) Sunday by Sunday when in the words of the Nicene Creed we affirm that the Second Person of the Trinity incarnate in Christ was of the one very same substance as the Father (homo = same, and ousia = substance).  Or as we say today, Christ was ‘One in Being with the Father’ in terms of his truly divine nature.  This in a nutshell was Nicaea’s answer to the erroneous propositions of Arius who had been teaching that the Son was in some way subordinate to the Father, and of less-than-equal divinity. 

It is important to note that the heretic Arius had proposed not just that the incarnate Christ was subordinate to the Father in terms of his humanity, but somehow that the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, was subordinate to the Father, possessing a watered down kind of quasi-divinity, and even that he was not ‘eternally begotten of the Father’ but conceived at the beginning of the Father’s work of creation. It was said that the supporters of Arius could be heard on the streets of Alexandria mouthing the mantra ‘There was a time when he was not,’ implying his having been created by the Father as a matter of the Father’s will, not the eternally begotten of God’s being. Arius was thus declared to be heretical.  

The problem of Arius’s position was that the being and divinity that the subordinate Incarnate Christ revealed was not quite up to standard with the being and divinity of the Father.  This was quickly perceived even by lay people, who refused to attend services of worship led by Bishops influenced by Arius, for they knew that they worshipped Christ as God, not a lesser god, or some kind of semi-angelic figure, but true God from true God.  Hence when we say the Nicene Creed we affirm that the Son is not only of the same substance or ‘One in Being’ with the Father but also ‘eternally (or timelessly) begotten of the Father.’  There never was a time when he was not.

The modern translation ‘of one being with the Father’ rather than of the ‘very same substance as the Father’ that we were all brought up on, arose because of the difficult connotations of the word ‘substance’ in the modern world.  Its philosophical pedigree is from Aristotle’s distinction in understanding reality between the substance of something, let us say the ‘breadness’ of bread and the ‘accidents’ of bread, the multiple different shapes and kinds of bread, its different colours and textures. Despite these ‘accidents’ all are composed of the same underlying substance that makes it ‘bread.’ This was long before the world knew of atoms and molecules and genetic identity and so on. 

 I once had to preach for the Queen in the Church of All Saints in Windsor Great Park.  This was in 1988 just before the Lambeth Conference of that year, when we were commemorating the 400^th anniversary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Armada had been conferred with a blessing from the Pope, and  I was working in the ecumenical section for the coming Lambeth Conference, and so mentioned the importance not only of the ancient Creeds which we share but the agreed statements of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission since the Vatican Council of the 1960s and the importance of overcoming the disagreements of the past that often resulted from crossed wires and semantic misunderstandings. 

Somehow, I found myself managing to refer to a text book on religious education which told of an incident when a six-year-old child returned home from Sunday School one day and announced that the Sunday School teacher had taught them that day that God was like a huge Tapiocca Pudding.  The understandably disturbed parents remonstrated with the child, insisting that this could not have been possible, but the child continued to affirm that this is exactly what the teacher had said.  The following Sunday they quizzed the teacher about this and after a little exploratory conversation it was discerned that what the teacher had  actually said was that God the Father and God the Son shared the same divine ‘substance.’ The child thought of substance as something sticky made by the mother – and so ‘like Tapiocca pudding’.   At drinks afterwards in the Royal Lodge next to the Church the Queen thought the idea of God as a Tapiocca pudding was more very funny than I found it.

I know I should not name drop. On that occasion over Gin and Tonic I also discovered that the Queen and I had one thing in common.  We both hate name-droppers.

In any event, along with the Bishops of Nicaea we can also drop the name of the Emperor Constantine to whom we are indebted for the definition of the homoousion, which delivered the Church from the errors of the Arch-heretic Arius.

Well, that is by way of preface before tackling the question of ‘Nicaea down under’, for I now have to put my cards on the table and tell you that I am not alone in entertaining the view that many contemporary Christians, and particularly many of our Anglican brothers and sisters here in the Anglican Church of Australia, have in fact unwittingly been led into a contemporary form of the ancient heresy of Arianism.  Even today, 1700 years after Arius, there are those who declare that the Eternal Son is ‘subordinate to the Father’ or ‘eternally submissive’ to the authority of the Father even while they recite the Nicene Creed. 

Notwithstanding the contention that this may be asserted while at the same time contending that the Son is equal to the Father in terms of his divine nature, this was forthrightly judged to be a form of Arianism by the Melbourne theologian Kevin Giles, in Subordinationism and the Trinity, as lomg ago as 2002.[1]  

I myself somewhat clumsily indicated a similar concern in 2004 in Reflections in Glass: Trends and Tensions in the Anglican Church of Australia, which subsequently triggered a spirited discussion at the level of the Australian National Bishops’ Meeting; and more recently I have tried again to unpack the issues of concern in much more detail in two companion volumes: Arius on Carillon Avenue: More than a Memoir a Trinitarian Saga and The Subordinate Substitute: Another Wrong Turn on Carillon Avenue (2023).[2] 

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I think you will more easily get your head around this phenomenon of contemporary Australian Anglicanism, if we undertake a brief historical canter through the story of how we got this way.  It all started as long ago as 1560.  At that time there was a teacher of theology in the University of Heidelberg in Germany named Zacharias Ursinus, a Calvinist, who was born 18 July 1534, and died on 6 May1583. In 1563 Ursinus was the author of what became known as the Heidelberg Catechism.  

One of its key teachings is a kind of legalistic reading of Calvin.  Ursinus’s form of Calvinism is usually called ‘Scholastic Calvinism’ because it was pursued by scholars of Calvinism in the generation after Calvin, who in fact  tended to be more rigid than Calvin  had been. 

Ursinus’s rather legalistic form of Calvinism held that God had made a legal contact with Adam which was conditional upon Adam’s obedience.  Adam disobeyed God and thus broke the contract. As with all broken contracts, there is a penalty.  Because  God is a God of justice, he must uphold his justice; he cannot just turn a blind eye to the sin and disobedience wickedly introduced into his creation by Adam; He must therefore impose a penalty. The penalty was death, not only imposed on Adam himself but on all sinfully disobedient humanity after him, for Adam was the federal or contractual head of the human race, signing up to the contract on our behalf   Hence, according to Ursinus we are all destined to die as a result of Adam.   .

This means that death is not just natural to living things of created space and time, who live in a limited amount of space for a limited amount of time; in the case of humans, with a view of preparing for fellowship with God for all eternity. Rather Ursinus argues that death is explicitly a penalty imposed by God as the punishment for Adam’s disobedience.  This is the penal view of death.

On the basis of this legal reading of Adam’s fall from grace, the Christian Gospel  came to be proclaimed also in this legalistic framework.  Christ by dying on the cross in perfect obedience to the Father did what none of us imperfect and sinful humans could do, and thus paid the penalty for Adam’s disobedience.  This is essentially the ‘penal substitutionary theory’ of the Atonement. Christ died in perfect obedience to the Father as a substitute instead of us, paying the penalty of death for us, thus to save us. Christ is therefore the Second Adam, the federal or contractual head of the new humanity.

By contrast with this understanding of the Christian Gospel, most of us think of ourselves not as the condemned children of Adam but as the joyous inheritors of God’s promises to Abraham. We begin our Christian thinking like St Paul, not with an alleged contract with Adam of a rigidly legal kind, but with God’s gracious dealing with Abraham, with whom God made the covenant promise to be his God and the God of his descendants, and Abraham and his children would be God’s people ‘come what may.’  This was a covenant based simply on mutual trust or faith, as distinct from a legal contract that was conditional upon obedience. If they were unfaithful, God would nevertheless be unchangeably faithful and steadfastly loving, generously forgiving them their mistakes. The covenant was not conditional upon human perfection and obedience, but just the opposite it was generously unconditional, and grounded in mutually trusting faith: Our God is a God of steadfast faith, and as St Paul says, as the children of Abraham we are to be a people of faith like Abraham’s.  Justification, being put right with God is by faith.

Because of its basic contractual arrangement Ursinus’s kind of theology is regularly called federal theology, from foedus = contract.  Donald Trump  would say that God did a transactional deal with the Son in heaven, and sent him into the world quite intentionally to pay the price of Adam’s sin, so to satisfy his need to show that justice had been done - in return with the promise that he would raise him up as the Second Adam. 

Well, to continue the story of federal theology, as it turned out in 1576  Ursinus himself fell from grace when the City of Heidelberg formally abandoned Calvinism, and became Lutheran. At this time Ursinus moved to Neustadt as the former Calvinist faculty of Heidelberg dispersed.

Even so, especially after his death in 1583 his Heidelberg Catechism was taken up enthusiastically across the Calvinist Churches of Europe. Its life in England may be attributed to the Puritan, Thomas Cartwright who had been one of Ursinus’s students at Heidelberg, and Cartright’s assistant and disciple, Dudley Fenner, who  in England in 1585 first coined the term foedus operum, or ‘covenant of works’ to refer to the contractual covenant God is said to have made with Adam. This was in the course of unpacking the fundamental elements of federal theology in the context of the rise of English Puritanism. Given this ‘covenant of works’ Fenner spoke of the new covenant made by Christ as the ‘covenant of Grace.’

In Scotland an influential theologian called Robert Rollock became a great proponent of federal theology,  as early as 1597 producing a mature treatment of the then relatively new notion of the foedus operum or ‘covenant of works’  that had been initiated by Dudley Fenner a little over a decade before in 1585. As Robert Rollock was to put it: ‘Christ himself as man was subject to the covenant of works and, by fulfilling its conditions in his holy life and by undergoing its curse against us for our breach of its stipulations, he satisfied God’s justice and merited God’s mercy for us.’  

At a famous Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1618-19 at Dort (Dortrecht), attended by representatives of Churches from 27 countries, including the Church of Scotland and even some individual Anglicans, the theology of the Heidelberg Catechism was endorsed and embraced. The same thing then occurred formally in England at the Assembly of Westminster, which was made up of Members of the Long Parliament and Church representatives of a Puritan mindset who sat between 1643 and 1653. The work of their reform agenda was done by 1649 when the King, Charles I was beheaded, and the House of Lord abandoned along with Bishops. The Westminster Catechism of 1646 Article VII explicitly speaks of a contractual arrangement with Adam that was conditional upon his obedience:

‘The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience.’

Even after the Restoration of the monarchy and episcopal ordering of the Church of England following the Commonwealth under Cromwell, in Scotland, this Westminster tradition became domiciled in the Presbyterian Church where it flourished. 

From Scotland federal theology quickly spread to Ireland, particularly in Ulster in the north. Foremost amongst federal theologians in Ireland was Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh (1581 – 1656), who had  been invited to the Westminster Assembly in 1643 but as a Royalist given his appointment as a Bishop by the King, chose not to attend, even though he was often quoted with approval in the Assembly.  

Then, to fast-forward and cut the story short, in 1936 an Irish cleric called Thomas Chatterton Hammond set out from Ireland to come to Sydney to be the Principal of Moore Theological College. Though a southerner from Cork, Hammond was an uncompromising champion of federal theology. He was enamoured of the Wesrnibster Confession of Faith, which he tended to rank with the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and even toyed with the possibility of becoming a Presbyterian at one stage, though, Hammond’s great theological hero was none other than Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, so this episcopal connection probably help him to remain Anglican.

Though Anglican, T. C. Hammond was fiercely Protestant and sectarian in temperament. As a member of the Ulster Protestant Association even in Dublin, he had led the Irish Church Mission to Roman Catholics; indeed, one gets the impression that it was as important for him to convert Roman Catholics to a Protestant mindset as to convert atheists to Christianity.  Here in Australia he became an Archdeacon, and Rector of St Philip’s Church, Church Hill, near the Rocks on Sydney Harbour, as well as Principal of Moore Theological College.  And even in Australia, he was known as a card-carrying Orangeman, who served as chaplain and finally, in the year prior to his death, was eventually elected. to the Grand Master of the Orange Lodge South Wales, but not before he set the Anglican Diocese of Sydney on a perilous theological trajectory.

During the course of his voyage to Sydney in 1936 he worked on the manuscript of a book he had written, called In Understanding be Men, which quickly became a kind of handbook at Moore College.  I remember when I was myself a theological student at St John’s College at Morpeth near Newcastle, going with a student colleague on an exchange to Moore College in 1961; two Moore College men visited Morpeth at the same time. I observed that if the Moore College students at that time held Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion in one hand, they held Hammond’s In Understanding Be Men firmly in the other.  I resisted buying a copy from the Moore College Bookshop; it is only over the last five years or so that I have got a copy.

Very significantly, apart from articulating the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement, Hammond drew out the implication of the belief that God sent his own Son  into the world  to die as our substitute: On page 56 of my edition Hammond declares that ‘there were three essential ingredients of the doctrine of the Trinity: In short, the full Christian doctrine demands all three of the following 

‘1 The unity of the Godhead. 

2 The full deity of the Son (who was “begotten”) and of the Spirit (who “proceeds” from the Father and the Son).

 3 The subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father.’ (my italics)

Immediately Arian alarm bells should begin to sound.  After nodding assent to the ‘full deity’ of the Son Hammond nevertheless then imagined that he could affirm the functional or relational ‘subordination of the Son’ to the Father, without self- contradiction. 

Since then his disciples to this day  have imagined that it is possible to comply with the homoousion by saying that the Father and the Son are equal in terms of their divine being, but that they relate or function together in a complementary way as superior to inferior, just as men and women are equally human, but  allegedly should function is such a way that the man always exercises authority over the wife in what is essentially a relationship of domination and submission.   This is actually the basic thesis of a Report of the Sydney Doctrine Commission of 1999: . “The Doctrine of the Trinity and its bearing on the relationship of men and women.” Reports to Synod, document 18, 1999.

Alas, it is not possible to separate the being and nature of the divine identities, and their divine functioning or relating together in this way. The model of husbands and wives who are said to be equally human, but who must allegedly function nevertheless as superior to subordinate will not hold.  It is not as though in thinking of the Holy Trinity we are to imagine three divine individuals of equal divinity sitting around a table who decide to relate together or to function together in some way as a matter of will.  Their relating or functioning together is not just a matter if will, because the very Being of the Trinitarian God is constituted from all eternity as a relationality of Persons, whom Nicaea insisted were equal in Being.  Their very relationality as equals in one unity of Being, if you like, is the substance of divinity.  In other words, God’s eternal Being is a matter of the relationality of equal persons in communion.

Indeed, in the middle of the fourth century some Early Fathers (e.g. very notably Basil of Caesarea) spoke of God not as Three Persons and one substance (though the word same substance had been around for about 50 years), but as Three Persons and one Communion.  God is an interpersonal communion, or an Eternal Communion of inter-related Persons of equal status, for God is love.  The very Being of divinity is a matter of an inter-personal relationality, it is not a matter of Persons of some kind of undefined divinity being said as a matter of will to relate or function together in a particular kind of way.  Rather the inter-personal relationality of equals is a matter of eternal Being not just a matter of the exercise of will by Persons said to be equally divine.

I know this is not easy to get yoru head around. At this stage all you need to try to grasp is that it is problematic to nod assent to the homoousion, and to acknowledge that the Persons of the Trinity are equal in divinity, without defining what is understood by divinity, and then  to assert that the same Persons relate or function together in a way that makes them unequal in status and dignity in a relationship of domination and submission, when Trinitarian theology affirms that the essence or substance of the divinity of God is a communion  of Persons of equal status and dignity related together in one Unity of Being.

It may also be useful at this stage to note that this tendency to speak of trinitarian relationality as a matter of will, rather than of the divine being or substance, appears to have been a  basic problem for Arius in the fourth century.  He did not appreciate  the importance of understanding that the Being of divinity, or the substance of Divinity, or of the divine nature, was  from all eternity comprised of a relationality of Persons of equal status and dignity, but instead spoke of the divinity of the Father, who as an act of will created the Son to assist in the work of creation, necessarily with a subordinate status and dignity to that of the Father.  His basic problem was that he conceived the relation of Father and Son essentially as an act of will of the Father, rather than a matter of the eternal Being of God the Holy Trinity of Persons of equal status and divinity in the unity of a single inter-personal Communion.

If you find this hard to get your head around, don’t worry right now.   I will return to this and its implications for Trinitarian orthodoxy in a moment.

First, let us look at what is wrong with the Penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement and the problematic notion of God that underpins it, and that is inevitably implied by it.

1.    What are we to make of the Penal view of death? Federal theology from the Heidelberg Catechism onwards, regularly cites Genesis 2.17 where, in addressing Adam God says: ‘… you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it you will surely die.”  However, there is no mention at all of a covenant in this verse, let alone a contractual covenant, conditional upon Adam’s compliance with it. This has to be read into it.

2.    Indeed, the statement ‘you will surely die’ in Genesis 2.17 may not be a threat of punishment, it may simply be a warning: as in  ‘You must not put Death Cap mushrooms into a Beef Wellington, for if you do, on that day you will surely die.’  In other words, in Genesis 2.17 God warns Adam that if he refuses to walk in fellowship with God in trusting faith and insists on living autonomously, going it alone in the world, he will naturally come to a disastrous end.

3.    Furthermore, the penal view of death, and the notion that humanity suffers the punishment of a wrathful God as a consequence of Adam’s broken covenant is not only absent from Genesis 2.17; it is  not found anywhere else in the Old Testament scriptures.  Only one verse,  Hosea 6.7 even mentions the existence a covenant with Adam; RSV has ‘At Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me.’[3]  But, even here, there is no suggestion that it is a legally binding contractual covenant with death as the penalty for breaking it.  If anything the suggestion is that it is a non-contractual covenant grounded in faith; at the time of Adam people dealt ‘faithlessly’ with God – it is more like the covenant with Abraham than a contract with strings attached – conditional upon obedience, and with a penalty for breach of contract. 

4.    Furthermore, even in the Genesis story itself the consequence of the disobedience of Adam is not death but expulsion from the garden of Eden.   This had the further consequence that Adam and Eve forfeited access to the Tree of Life at the centre of the Garden and the possibility of ultimate immortality with God, but Adam did not die, certainly not on the day he ate the apple.  In fact Genesis says Adam lived on for 930 years.  I guess, if he had the task of populating the Earth he needed some time to do it. 

5.    A  poorly argued Report of the Sydney Doctrine Commission of 2010 tried to defend the penal substitutionary theory which depends on the penal view of death as a punishment by citing Genesis 2.17 just as the Heidelberg Catechism did, and then went on to argue that death must be a punishment because of the repeated use of the refrain ‘..and he died’ in relation to the OT Patriarchs.  Isaac did x, y, z ‘and he died’, Jacob  did x, y and z  ‘and he died’ …and so on.  Clearly, that refrain is equally applicable to death understood as a natural phenomenon of creaturely life in space and time.  There is no logically necessary implication that death is a punishment.

6.    Without the underpinning of the penal view of death, the penal substitutionary theory that the Father sent the Son to pay the penalty of death crashes to the ground.

7.    In fact, in the New Testament the Biblical language of Atonement speaks of the newfound sense of reconciliation and peace with God wrought by the death and resurrection of Christ and the gift of his Spirit in a variety of descriptive metaphors. This newfound experience of salvation  in Christ is as though a burdensome debt has been paid in our behalf; or it is like the payment of a ransom and the release of hostages from the clutches of an enemy; it was like the expiating effect/or the propitiating effect of the sacrifices of the ancient world, or it was like victory in battle; or alternatively both the Raised Christ and the Spirit are said to be mediators who ‘intercede for us in our behalf’.  The New Testament does not privilege any one of these descriptive metaphors.

8.    We need to note also that metaphors generally are often difficult to unpack in precise literal specification, and are often not at all amenable to the construction of an elaborate theory on the basis of them.  The New Testament metaphors of atonement are rather used simply to describe something concretely experienced and participated in as we enjoy the communion of God won by Christ’s death, resurrection and the gift of his Spirit. 

9.     It is understandable that, unlike the divinity of Christ, or the doctrine of the Trinity, the Church has never defined a single or indeed any doctrine of Atonement.  Yet federal theology tends to speak of the penal substitutionary therey as the pulsating heart of the Gospel, the defining doctrine of evangelicalism.

10.Then, most importantly, we come to the problematic view of God implied by federal theology and the penal substitutionary story of God the Father sending his subordinate Son to die on the Cross in order to satisfy his own need for retributive justice to be done.  It all  sounds a bit like a military general who has bungled in a battle and who shoots himself in the foot simply to demonstrate his remorse.  More importantly, the underlying morality of an innocent victim somehow suffering  punishment for the sins of another has to be questioned. Steve Chalke, a British Baptist leader, very provocatively, contended earlier this century that it all sounds like a case of ‘cosmic child abuse’.  

11.This is what actually triggered a report of the Sydney Doctrine Commission in 2010.  

The answer to this charge of child abuse of the authors of the Sydney Report, an answer that is regularly repeated in some Evangelical circles, is that God acted out of love for us and that we need to note that by requiring the death of his Son, God does not punish a third party, but in a sense took the punishment on himself,  and that therefore this is not abuse in the sense of the mistreatment of an unwilling party. In response to the Father’s command, Christ in willing obedience for the love of humanity goes to his death on the Cross.

It was therefore argued that this means that it is actually a Trinitarian view of God that entails that God in a sense takes the punishment upon himself, by punishing his own Son who willingly complies with his Father’s command.  This is supposed to make it morally acceptable.  It is not child abuse. On the other hand, we might observe that the domestic abuse by a husband of his wife, when the wife willingly puts up with it, and hangs in at the home for the sake of her children who need to be housed and fed, does not make the husband’s behaviour somehow morally acceptable.

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Well, so far so bad, but there is worse to come.

The alleged trinitarian view of God that is supposed to deliver the penal substitutionary theory from the charge of ‘cosmic child abuse’ turns out to be, not only sub-trinitarian, but actually heretical.

Briefly put, the argument of those of us who entertain concerns about this view of God is that talk of a complementarity of willing in the so called complementarian view of the Trinity, is first that it inevitably involves talk of two different if complementary divine wills.  This is so even if these wills are said to be expressed functionally, or perhaps particularly when expressed functionally, such as in references to the exercise of ‘the commanding will of the Father and the obediently subordinate will of the eternal Son’ in the context of expositions of the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement. 

By contrast, in orthodox Trinitarian belief there is one divine nature (or the sharingof the same substance) which the Three Persons equally share, as defined by the use of homoousios at Nicaea, and a single divine will expressed in accordance with that indivisible divine nature, ensuring both the unity of God and the undivided operation of the Persons of the Trinity in the world. What the Father wills, the Son wills and so does the Holy Spirit.  All three may be said equally to will the redemption of humanity, for example. [4]

By asserting that the Father sent the Son into the world, not so that the world ‘might not perish but have life’ (John 3.16), but explicitly that the Father sent  the Son into the world to die upon the Cross, with the Son in turn being willingly obedient to this command, so that as T.C.  Hammond says, the Son is ‘eternally subordinate to the Father,’ we would inevitably fall into the trap of suggesting two divine wills in the Trinity. In other words, insofar as Hammond distinguishes the complementary roles of the Father and the Son, he cannot avoid the implication of two logically separate personal operations within the Trinity that are matched by two different and complementary wills, the commanding will of the Father and the obediently submissive will of the Son.

Indeed T. C. Hammond is even prepared to draw on the motif of ‘contractual covenant’ to declare, not only that God made a covenant with Adam and then with redeemed humanity through the work of Christ, but that God the Father made a covenant with the Eternal Son in order to carry through the work of redemption!  In sending his own Son to execute his will, the Father is explicitly said to initiate his redemptive plan with the Son, whose willing response of obedience is necessary to achieve the Father’s redemptive purpose. In the interests of achieving the redemption of fallen humanity, the Father is even said to have chosen ‘the atoning sacrifice of Calvary as its necessary means.’ Hammond then goes so far as to say that ‘the Father is the Author of the plan; the Son . . . performs the redemptive will of the Father.’[5] Clearly, we cannot fail to detect here the seeds of a division of what the Sydney Doctrine Commission Report came to speak of as two complementary wills within what in orthodox theology is spoken of as the entirely undivided life of the Trinity in the unity of a single will and purpose.

This division of willing in the Trinity is theologically disastrous.  This was seen clearly by the Early Fathers who wrote at length on the importance of the Trinitarian belief in a single undivided  divine nature equally sheared, and of the exercise of a single divine will, in order to secure the unity of one God and the undivided action of God in the world.   St Augustine in De Trinitate is a classic example. Augustine in effect argued strenuously against subordinationism because he perceived the theological importance of maintaining belief in the unity of a single divine will, shared by all three identities of the Trinity, and their resulting single and indivisible divine action in the world.  Thus, he said, ‘The will of the Father and the Son is one, and their working indivisible.’[6]

I do not have the time to canvas this from the writings of the Fathers, but perhaps it would be a more interesting to cite the awareness of this very difficulty of suggesting two complementary divine wills even from the ranks of federal theologians of the historical past. In the seventeenth century, the highly competent and erudite Nonconformist theologian, the great John Owen of Oxford University (1616 – 1683), who was born into the world of federal theology, nevertheless saw that it was not appropriate to speak of a contractual covenant between the Father and the Son as though they were two separate individuals with different even if complementary wills.[7]  Owen highlighted the problem that the covenant of redemption could not be ‘properly federal’ because a covenant requires the willing consent of at least two parties, while God’s acts are acts of a single and undivided will.[8] Owen then went to considerable lengths to expound an understanding of redemption in terms that avoided the Son’s subordination to the Father understood as a personal property of the Son, and instead insisted on the free redemptive act of the undivided divine nature.

‘The will is a natural property,’ he said, ‘and therefore in the divine essence it is but one. The Father, Son, and Spirit have not distinct wills. They are one God, and God’s will is one, as being an essential property of his nature; and therefore are there two wills in the one person of Christ, whereas there is but one will in the three persons of the Trinity.’ [9]

Insofar as a diversity of function issaid to express a diversity of willing, the commanding will of the Father and the obediently submissive will of the Son, we therefore have a very serious theological problem. The problem is that a diversity of divine wills, even if complementary, in turn appears logically to lead to a form of tri-theism – belief in three equally divine individuals, or three Gods each exercising different though complementary wills. And clearly, insofar as the will of the Son is said to be eternally submissive or eternally subordinate to the commanding will of the Father, this appears to be inimical to the homoousion of Nicaea and thus inevitability to attract condemnation as a kind of Neo-Arianism by denying the equality of substance and hence the equally shared divine nature.

I think we have to conclude that much contemporary evangelical Christianity, particular under the influence of T. C. Hammond here in Australia, characteristically presents the gospel, perhaps without knowing it, in such a way as to tick many of the boxes that were characteristic of federal theology.  

In more recent times, perhaps sensing some discomfort about the insecure biblical foundations of federal theology, some Australian Anglican evangelicals have tried to distance themselves from federal theology by saying they no longer teach it.  Unfortunately, however, its essential elements live on: like the smile on the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, the smile continues to appear even when the cat has disappeared. The Australian inheritance from federal theology continues alive and well.

Alas,  the continued proclamation of the penal substitutionary view of the Atonement,  not  just as a peripheral matter, but as the ‘pulsating heart’ of the Evangelical presentation of the gospel, leads with a kind of logical necessity to the development of a redemptive schema in which concepts of justice and legal principle bulk large, even to the point of developing an understanding of God’s grace itself in legal  terms as the fulfilment of the  just requirement of the payment of the penalty for human sin and evil. In doing so it unfortunately has to rely upon talk of two wills in the inner life of the Trinity, the commanding will of the Father and the obediently submissive will of the Eternal Son, with disastrous consequences for any pretence to stand for the truth of orthodoxy Christian trinitarianism..

There is no doubting that apart from the Diocese of Sydney, T. C. Hammond has exercised an enormously damaging influence in Australian Anglicanism. The Diocese of Sydney has more or less successfully colonized the Dioceses of Armidale, and perhaps to a less degree Bathurst, and Canberra-Goulburn in New South Wales, though Grafton, Newcastle and Riverina seem to be holding out. Also, Tasmania and North West Australia have fallen to the same mind-set.

Even here in Perth, if you attend some notable parishes you are also very likely to hear a sermon, almost certainly referencing the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement as the essence of the Gospel, alas with clear echoes of federal theology. 

So what is the contemporary Anglican Church to do about this drift into Arianism?  

These days, given democratic values of personal moral and religious freedom in all liberal democratic societies in which the individual is free to do his or her own thing in matters of religious belief and private morality we are less likely to engage in a heresy hunt than was once the case. In liberal democratic societies  ‘You do your thing and I will do mine.’  Or ‘You believe your thing and I will believe mine.’

I tend to the view, however, that truth matters.  The problem in liberal democratic societies based on the freedom of the individual, is that if your view of things moral and religious is as good as mine, then truth actually goes out the window.  For this reason I do not answer to name-calling when sometimes I am called a liberal; I prefer to call myself ‘progressive orthodox’.  Orthodox because truth actually matters. Futhermore, the cut and thrust of public theological debate is really important in the corporate discernment of truth.  Individual freedom is all well and good, but a more communitarian approach to truth in which we enter into serious public theological debate is vital to the pursuit of truth. 

Perhaps, we seem destined to have to grapple with this Neo-Arian phenomenon for some time to come.  Unfortunately,  these days we do not have an Emperor to sweep in decked out in purple and gold, to bang the heads of bishops together, or to take them all off to a hotel retreat at the Margaret River, each  with two assisting priests and three deacons, and to pay for all their transport and accommodation for six months till a resolution is found (as Constantine did at Nicaea).  

However, that said, the Church operates in accordance with the law of the land.  Church property, for example, is secured at law for the beneficial ownership of orthodox members of the Anglican Church of Australia as legally Constituted.  The present national Constitution is a legal document, secured by Acts of Parliament  in all States, and in the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER I. - FUNDAMENTAL DECLARATIONS of the Constitution makes it clear that

‘1. The Anglican Church of Australia, being a part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ, holds the Christian Faith as professed by the Church of Christ from primitive times and in particular as set forth in the creeds known as the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed.’ 

It seems that those who promote heretical Neo-Arian convictions fail to qualify to occupy property that is legally held in trust for those who profess the ‘Christian faith as professed by the Church of Christ from primitive times’ and particularly the Trinitarian Faith as set forth in the Nicene Creed of 325AD. 

Let us hope that the in-coming Primate, the national Doctrine Commission and the Canon Law Commission of the Anglican Church of Australia may be able to address this issue as a matter of some urgency,  and so save us from a series of unbecoming legal wrangles over the beneficial ownership of property in years to come.

+Peter Carnley                                                      Fremantle, WA, 15 November 2025

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[1] This was a serious response to a notorious Report of the Doctrine Commission of the Diocese of Sydney, entitled ‘The Doctrine of the Trinity and its bearing on the relation of men and women’ that was presented to the Sydney Diocesan Synod in 1999.

[2] For those who may not know, Carillon Avenue in Newtown, Sydney, is historically the location of Moore Theological College, the epicentre of these complementarian views, though this kind of thinking is now dispersed across the Anglican Church of Australia.

[3]   In the Ded Sea Scrolls scrolls, Adam’s relationship with God is spoken of as a covenant also. Adam ‘broke faith’ with God (CD 10.8) and Israel, ‘like Adam, broke the covenant’ (4Q167 frag 7.1).

[4] See Peter Carnley, Arius on Carillon Avenue, 125.

[5] See T. C. Hammond, In Understanding Be Men,  87.

[6] Augustine,  De Trinitate, II. 5. 9

[7] See ‘Federal Transactions between the Father and the Son’ (1668) ; alsoPeter Carnley, Arius on Carillon Avenue: More than a Memoir: A Trinitarian Saga, 139.

[9] ‘Federal Transactions’, 87. Here Owen was upholding the orthodox teaching that there are two wills in Christ, a divine and a human will (Dyothelitism) and not just a single will (Monothelitism). Dyothelitism was  defined at the Third Council of Constantinople in 680AD, drawing out the implications of the doctrine of the two natures of Christ as defined at Chalcedon in 451AD.   Within the eternal life of the Trinity, however, there is but one single and undivided will.