When you read the Gospel of John you will come across two sayings of Jesus that may seem to contradict each other to some readers.
“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30 KJV)
“My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28 KJV)
These passages are fairly representative of two ideas in scripture that co-exist – Jesus is one with God the Father in some aspects yet submits to him in other aspects. These two concepts don’t seem to contradict each other, no? It’s entirely possible for to be equal in some respect yet lesser in another respect. For example, one person can be taller than another but they are both equally humans. This is consistent with the doctrine of the Trinity, which is affirmed consistently by scripture (see “The Biblical Basis of the Doctrine of the Trinity” by Robert Bowman Jr. for a demonstration of this).
But some men try to make a contradiction out of this anyways. It’s not uncommon to find Muslims, the Watchtower sect (“Jehovah’s Witnesses”), and other Trinity-deniers use John 14:28 to “prove” Jesus didn’t claim to be God. But it isn’t just other religions that claim this – you will also find many academics try to make the argument that the Bible and the early Church Fathers taught some sort of “subordinationism”. According to Wikipedia, “Subordinationism is defined as hierarchical rankings of the persons of the trinity, implying ontological subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Wikipedia, “Subordinationism”)
An older version of the Wikipedia article (from 2 January 2022 – since then edited out) lists several quotes from Ante-Nicene Christians that Unitarians claim espouse “subordinationism”. St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Clement of Rome, and many others are all claimed to support “subordinationism”. However, if you look at these quotes, none of them imply Jesus somehow has a lesser ontological nature than the Father.
Here are some of these Ante-Nicene quotes they cite:
“The Father Himself is alone called God, who has a real existence, but whom you style the Demiurge; since, moreover, the Scriptures acknowledge Him alone as God; and yet again, since the Lord confesses Him alone as His own Father, and knows no other” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.28.4)
“Be subject to the bishop, and to one another, as Jesus Christ to the Father, according to the flesh” (Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians, 13)
“There is, and that there is said to be, another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things” (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 56)
Of course, Jesus submitting himself to the Father doesn’t mean that he isn’t of one nature with him. What isn’t cited by anti-Trinitarians is all of these other passages from those same early Christians:
“To Christ Jesus, our Lord, and God, and Saviour, and King, according to the will of the invisible Father” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.10.1)
“No one of the sons of Adam is as to everything, and absolutely, called God, or named Lord. But that He is Himself in His own right, beyond all men who ever lived, God, and Lord, and King Eternal, and the Incarnate Word” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.19.2)
“Jesus Christ, who was with the Father before the beginning of time, and in the end was revealed” (Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians, 6)
“Christ is called both God and Lord of hosts” (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 36)
“Some Scriptures which we mention to them, and which expressly prove that Christ was to suffer, to be worshipped, and to be called God, and which I have already recited to you, do refer indeed to Christ” (Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 68)
(SIDENOTE On Dialogue with Trypho ch. 56 – The phrase “another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things” is probably the only passage here that implies Jesus if of a different nature. But in the full Dialogue, the exact phrase is used before by Trypho the Jew in ch. 50, 55, and later in 61. Justin here is probably just using the insistent terminology of Trypho.)
So it’s clear that Ante-Nicene Christians didn’t see any contradiction between Jesus being subordinate in some ways but not in others. When the Arian heresy rose up in the 4th century, the Christians of that era needed to defend the Nicene Creed from Arian abuse of the aforementioned John 14:28 – and so St. Athanasius, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Augustine all did so among others. The way they understood things, there was no contradiction here. Here is some of them talking about the issue:
“Hence it is that the Son too says not, ‘My Father is better than I,’ lest we should conceive Him to be foreign to His Nature, but ‘greater,’ not indeed in greatness, nor in time, but because of His generation from the Father Himself, nay, in saying ‘greater’ He again shows that He is proper to His essence” (Athanasius, Discourse (Oration) Against the Arians 1.58)
“If any one say that the Father is greater, inasmuch as He is the cause of the Son, we will not contradict this. But this does not by any means make the Son to be of a different Essence” (John Chrysostom, Homily 75 on John)
“In that very respect wherein the Son is not equal to the Father, in that was He to go to the Father, just as from Him is He hereafter to come to judge the quick and the dead: while in so far as the Only-begotten is equal to Him that begot, He never withdraws from the Father; but with Him is everywhere perfectly equal in that Godhead which knows of no local limitations” (Augustine, Tractates on John, Tractate 78.1)
So as we can see here, what the New Testament-era Church taught about Jesus’ relation to the father is no different from what the Nicene-era Church taught, and both of them are no different from what the saints in between them taught. In the New Testament, St. Paul tells us that “the head of Christ is God” (I Corinthians 11.3 KJV). He also said that Jesus, “being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God” (Philippians 2.6 KJV), also translated as saying he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Philippians 2.6 ESV). Both of these are true given how Jesus is “the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1.3 KJV) or “the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1.3 ESV). The Christian faith has always taught this truth, that the Jesus is ontologically of one nature with the Father but submits to him and his will.
Nikaea 325 