the authority and submission that exists within the relationships of the members of the immanent
trinity? Furthermore, while that point alone (i.e., of authority and submission) might have been
communicated with Mother and Daughter, the choice for Father and Son also indicates
something of the Father`s role over all of creation, and the Son`s role in creation and, more
particularly, in the incarnational mission. The First Person of the Godhead chooses to name
himself Father (and not Mother) to indicate the respect and honor that is due him, as he
anticipates in the created order the role that he will give to earthly fathers as the leaders or the
heads of their homes (e.g., Malachi 1:6; cf. Jer 49:13, 18; Ezek 35:9; and Obad 10). Likewise,
he gives to the Second Person who stands under his authority the name of Son, both as the
appropriate name in relation to him as eternal Father, but also as most appropriate in depicting
the Son who will come to save, and then be the Groom-Head over, his bride, the Church (e.g.,
Eph 5:22-33; Rev 19:7; 21:2, 9). That Christ, then, in his pre-incarnate state is the eternal Son of
the eternal Father stands as strong theological basis for believing that the incarnate One, viz., the
human nature that is conjoined but not confused with the divine nature of the Second Person of
the Trinity, must, then, himself be a male human being. The eternal Son must be joined with a
human son (and not daughter), so that the incarnate Christ may express to the world both his
relation to the Father, i.e., as the Son of the Father, and his relation to the Church, i.e., as the
Savior, Lord, Head, and Groom of the Church.
matriarchial culture, Christ might have come as a woman. At a conference recently, Haddad
commented:
come as a female? Would that be possible? Would that do violence to Messiah and the
role of Messiah? . . . Because of the fall, the way gender seemed to go after sin entered
the world where power went more or less to the masculine branch of image bearers,
because there was that power brokering on the behalf of male gender, I think then you
ended up with patriarchal cultures and Christ came as male. . . .
Three brief comments are in order. 1) Is it reasonable to look at the way God made man and
woman respectively, and conclude from this that women might just as well have been the power
brokers throughout the cultures of the world? Clearly, God made men stronger and bigger, as a
gender, and he made women able to give birth to, feed, and nurture children. By these
fundamental God-designed differences, shall we think that God considered that the dominant
power of the sexes might have gone the other way? 2) Apart from her interpretation of what
happened in the fall, this does not change the fact that the Second Person of the Trinity was
eternally under the authority of the First Person, and this is true regardless of what you call them.
Authority and submission inhere in the Trinity itself, and this same authority and submission
relationship is reflected in the created order. So, if God chooses to invest in males a kind of
headship (i.e., authority) in the community of faith and in the home, then God will declare his
own identity to us in ways fitting that design. He will choose masculine terminology as his self-