Back to the Foundations of Community and Marriage

Although it is true that there are some passages in the Bible that seem to teach a one-way submission of wives to the authority of their husbands, and, some claim, this is patterned after the relationship between the Son who submits to the Father, and the Father who has eternal authority over the Son, I disagree. 

As I was reading Timothy Keller's "The Reason for God", more specifically, chapter 14, "The Dance of God," in which Keller explains the profound, life-shaping implications of believing in a triune God in which each person is "other-centered" and defers to the other, I couldn't help but turn his argument around to examine the profound, life-shaping implications of believing in a hierarchy of authority within the Godhead instead.
I don't really have much time to organize all my thoughts at this point, (perhaps I'll get back to this later and structure it all a little more clearly),  but if you can try to stick with me, I promise you will find something of value in this mess.

Timothy Keller starts, 

"The Gospel writer John describes the Son as living from all eternity in the 'bosom of the Father' (John 1:18), an ancient metaphor for love and intimacy. Later in John's gospel, Jesus, the Son, describes the Spirit as living to 'glorify' him (John 16:14). In turn, the Son glorifies the Father (17:4) and the Father, the Son (17:5). This has been going on for all eternity.
What does the term "glorify" mean? ...To glorify someone is also to serve or defer to him or her. Instead of sacrificing their interests to make yourself happy, you sacrifice your interests to make them happy. Why? Your ultimate joy is to see them in joy.
What does it mean, then, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit glorify one another? If we think of it graphically, we could say that self-centeredness is to be stationary, static. In self-centeredness we demand that others orbit around us..."

(and don't complementarians claim that the Son and Holy Spirit submit to the Father, but the Father does not submit to the Son and Holy Spirit?)

Read on.
 

"The inner life of the Triune God is utterly different. The life of the Trinity is characterized not by self-centeredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two. So it is, the Bible tells us. Each of the divine persons centers upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him. Each voluntarily circles the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them. Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others" (emphasis mine).

However, some of us do not believe that the Bible teaches this kind of reciprocal glorification within the Trinity, but a nonreciprocating submission by only two persons of the Trinity to the other, who they claim is primary of the three.

"That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love. The early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this - perichoresis. Notice our word 'choreography' within it. It means literally to 'dance of flow around.'"

So just to clarfify: complementarians then define perichoresis as the dance of authority and submission as opposed to mutual love and submission?
Interesting. I wonder how what the historical view of the perichoresis is.

My question for the complementarian crew would have to be, first, why do we assume that structures of authority and submission exist eternally between the persons of the Godhead? There is no biblical basis for this assumption. Yes, no one denies that Jesus, or, God the Son, submits eternally to the Father. He always does the will of his Father. But the Father always does the will of the Son as well. And he always does the will of the Holy Spirit. Apart from the logical impossibility of authority and submission marking the very nature of God (as they assert), do we not see how critically important it is that we recognize that there is mutual submission between all three persons of the Trinity? Let me try to explain.

If there does exist a hierarchy of authority in the Trinity where two persons flow around one, the implication is that ultimate reality becomes a community of persons where you will find that some are in fixed positions of authority, and some in fixed positions of subordination. And this role of authority or subordination is permanent and has it's roots in the essence of that person. So it is an ontological primacy or an ontological subordination. Love may exist within these relationships, but is it secondary to the hierarchy. This, then, becomes the foundation for inequality, racism and sexism among people. (This is what Hinduism is all about [the foundation of it's caste system]. I will try to flesh this out in more detail in a few days, but until then, you can purchase Richard Howell's "How Hierarchy Leads to Abuse" here.)
And there are other consequences for those in the authority positions to whom others must submit.

"You will, then, never get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitation that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature and the nature of things. ...You were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made."  ~ Timothy Keller

Can it be that we are actually crippling half of the human race - namely, men - simply because of this distortion that teaches them to expect others to revolve around them instead of each person revolving around the other? This is a very serious question, because Jesus made it clear that "you must lose yourself in service to find yourself" (Mark 8:35) - and he was recounting what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity, who we are fashioned after and who we will find our ultimate joy and satisfaction in emulating.

Yes! Within the Trinity we find mutual deference between each person, and that means that ultimate reality is a community of persons who find their ultimate joy in submitting one to the other (Ephesians 5:21). In this way, as Timothy Keller describes, 

"Imagine there is someone you admire more than anyone else in the world. You would do anything for him or her. Now imagine that you discover this person feels exactly the same about you, and you enter into...a romantic relationship and marriage. Sound like heaven? Yes, because it comes from heaven - that is what God has known within himself but in depths and degrees that are infinite and unimaginable. That is why God is infinitely happy, because there is an "other-orientation" at the heart of his being, because he does not seek his own glory but the glory of others."

And this is how we will find our ultimate joy as well, both men and women, husbands and wives. And if we agree on nothing else as egalitarians and gradationists (hierarchicalists), we have to agree that gradationists DISAGREE with Timothy Keller's conception of the "Dance of God."