Equal to the Father as to his Godhead, inferior as to his Manhood

The Text

This one line is the master key to reading the Gospels, and most readers walk past it without noticing the lock it opens. Part I of the creed had said, flatly, that in the Trinity there is nothing greater or less — nihil maius aut minus (see [[athanasian-creed/none-greater-or-less-coequal]]). Now Part II says, just as flatly, that the Son is minor Patre — less than the Father. Set side by side, those look like the creed contradicting itself within twenty verses.

They are not a contradiction, and the reason they are not is the single most useful word in Christology: secundum. Equal to the Father — according to his divinity. Less than the Father — according to his manhood. The same person. Two respects. The Son is not equal in one part of him and inferior in another part; he is, as God, equal, and, as man, less — and both are wholly true of the one undivided Christ. This is the rule by which “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) and “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) are both Scripture, both true, and both about the same Jesus — not a high Christ and a low Christ, but the one Christ, spoken of now according to his Godhead and now according to his manhood. Hand a congregation this verse and you have handed them a lifelong way of reading the Gospels without flinching at either the worship or the weakness.

Translation Notes

aequalis Patri secundum divinitatem — “equal to the Father according to his divinity.” Aequalis is the identical word the creed used of the immanent Trinity (aequalis gloria, verse 6; coaequales, verse 26). Its reappearance here is deliberate: the Incarnation does not lower the Son’s deity by a degree. Secundum divinitatem — in respect of his Godhead — he remains exactly what verse 15 said he is.

minor Patre secundum humanitatem — “less than the Father according to his manhood.” Minor is not softened: it means less, inferior, lower. The creed does not flinch from saying the Son is less than the Father — but it pins the word down with secundum humanitatem. The inferiority is real, and it is located precisely and only in the assumed human nature, the forma servi, the economy of the Incarnation. Never secundum divinitatem.

secundum — the word the whole of Christology turns on. Secundum means according to, in respect of, qua, insofar as. Logicians call this reduplicative predication: a single subject can bear opposite predicates without contradiction if the predicates are asserted under different respects. Christ is — qua God — equal; and — qua man — less. Strike the two secundum clauses and the verse is nonsense (equal and not equal to the same thing). Keep them and it is the most powerful interpretive instrument the church possesses. The 1662 “as touching his Godhead / as touching his Manhood” is an exact and beautiful rendering of secundum.

the Augustinian root. The verse is Augustine’s exegetical regula (chiefly On the Trinity I–II; the Tractates on John) compressed to a line. Augustine taught that statements about the Son in Scripture fall under headings: some are said of him in the form of God (Philippians 2:6 — equal), some in the form of a servant (Philippians 2:7 — less), and some name his eternal relation of origin. The creed gives the first two; Philippians 2 is the biblical spine beneath the Latin.

Historical Context

Augustine’s canon and the Arian proof-text. “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) was the Arians’ favorite verse: if the Father is greater, the Son is by nature lesser — a creature. Augustine’s regula dismantled the inference. Scripture says the Son is equal (John 5:18; 10:30; Philippians 2:6 — forma Dei) and that the Father is greater (John 14:28 — forma servi); both stand, because they speak of the one Christ under different respects. The “greater” is secundum humanitatem (or, in the relational sense, the Father as principium) — never secundum divinitatem. The Athanasian Creed canonizes that rule for catechesis: the verse exists to make every Christian an Augustinian reader of the Gospels.

Leo’s Tome and Chalcedon. The same logic governs the conciliar settlement. Leo’s Tome (451): “each form does what is proper to it in communion with the other — the Word working what belongs to the Word, the flesh carrying out what belongs to the flesh.” Chalcedon’s “without confusion, without separation” is the structural guarantee that the two secundum clauses can both be said of one person without either dissolving into the other. Verse 33 is Leo’s agit utraque forma in miniature.

The communicatio idiomatum. Because the two natures are united in one person, the properties of either nature may be predicated of the one person named from the other: the Son of God died (death is secundum humanitatem, predicated of the divine person); the Son of Man came down from heaven. The secundum of verse 33 is the grammar that keeps these true sayings from collapsing the natures — and it is precisely here that the Lutheran and Reformed traditions diverge over how far the communication runs (see Interpretation).

Lines of Interpretation

The doctrine is catholic. The live, and currently heated, question is the scope of the minor: does the Son’s subordination obtain only secundum humanitatem (the creed’s plain restriction), or is there also an eternal or personal subordination?

Patristic

Tradition: Augustine, On the Trinity I–II, Tractates on John; Leo the Great, Tome; the Definition of Chalcedon

The Fathers fix the rule: equal in forma Dei, less in forma servi; the “greater” texts are economic or relational, never natural. The one Christ, two respects.

Strengths

• Resolves the entire apparent contradiction of the Gospel portrait with a single, teachable rule
• Decisively removes John 14:28 from the Arian arsenal without explaining the text away

Weaknesses

• The reduplicative move is subtle; readers untrained in it hear “less than the Father” and stop there
• Requires constant discipline to keep secundum humanitatem from sliding into secundum divinitatem

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III q. 20 (“Whether Christ is subject to the Father”)

Aquinas answers yes — secundum humanitatem. He formalizes the reduplicative predication (secundum quod homo, “insofar as he is man”) and shows precisely how one person is, without contradiction, both subject and equal: the respect, not the subject, differs.

Strengths

• The most rigorous statement of qua-predication — the logical machine that makes the verse coherent
• Pins the subjection exactly where the creed pins it, and nowhere else

Weaknesses

• The technical apparatus rarely survives into the pew, where the verse most needs to work
• Aquinas’s larger account of Christ’s human knowledge can pull against the genuine human limitation the forma servi implies

Lutheran

Tradition: the communicatio idiomatum; the genus tapeinoticum and the state of humiliation (Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ)

The Lutheran tradition reads the minor through the state of humiliation: the Son, who secundum divinitatem possesses all majesty, truly humbles himself in the forma servi, the divine majesty hidden (and, in Lutheran Christology, genuinely communicated to the human nature even as the person walks the way of lowliness).

Strengths

• Takes the minor with full existential seriousness — a real, willed humiliation, not a verbal qualification
• Holds the union so tightly that the secundum never splits Christ into two acting subjects

Weaknesses

• The strong communicatio (the genus maiestaticum) strains the Reformed reading of secundum humanitatem (see [[athanasian-creed/uncreate-and-immeasurable]])
• “Majesty communicated to the humbled flesh” is hard to hold steady with a genuinely minor human nature

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.14; Commentary on John 14:28; the extra Calvinisticum

The partitive exegesis is a Reformed signature. Calvin reads John 14:28 as spoken secundum humanitatem and of Christ’s mediatorial office; the extra Calvinisticum is the corollary — the Son qua God is never minor, even while incarnate, since deity cannot be diminished or contained.

Strengths

• Keeps secundum divinitatem inviolable: no incarnational lowering of the Godhead at any point
• Gives the working preacher a clean, repeatable rule for the hard texts

Weaknesses

• Pressed without care, the partitive rule can sound like two Christs taking turns
• The extra invites the Lutheran charge of dividing the person (the long Reformation impasse)

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: the Eternal Functional Subordination / Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission debate (Grudem, Ware vs. Giles, Butner); the kenotic question; Karen Kilby’s caution

Verse 33, with verse 25, is the precise exegetical front of the modern dispute. The anti-ESS argument is, in effect, that the creed permits minor only secundum humanitatem, and that ESS illicitly extends the minor into the eternal relations (a subordination secundum divinitatem or secundum personam in all but name). The ESS reply is that the New Testament’s obedience and sending language requires an eternal disposition of the Son, not merely an economic one. The kenotic question presses alongside: the minor secundum humanitatem must be a genuine human limitation (the growing, unknowing, tempted Jesus of [[athanasian-creed/god-and-man-perfect-god-perfect-man]]), not a stage role.

Strengths

• The anti-ESS side reads the creed’s restriction (secundum humanitatem) at face value and guards verse 25’s nihil maius aut minus
• The ESS side rightly refuses to flatten the genuine New Testament taxis and the Son’s real obedience into mere appearance
• Kilby’s caution applies to all: the immanent relations are not a screen for projecting (or denying) a model of human authority

Weaknesses

• “Eternal submission” is very hard to state without a minor creeping in secundum divinitatem — which this verse, read plainly, forbids
• A purely economic reading can under-describe the Son’s real filial obedience; the verse disciplines the over-reach of both, and both sides are tempted to let a contemporary human dispute set the question

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley read John 14:28 in exactly the words of this verse, and his Explanatory Notes prove it: the Father is greater than the Son “as he is Mediator” and “as touching his manhood,” never as to the divine nature, in which the Son is “equal with the Father.” Wesley did not need the Quicumque to teach him the rule; the rule is simply how his Notes read the whole Gospel. A text shows Christ’s deity; another shows his humanity; the one Christ. “Fact, not the manner” (Sermon 55) applied to Christology becomes precisely Augustine’s regula: confess both, sort each secundum its nature, and do not pry. The Methodist Articles of Religion, Article II — “very God and very Man” — is the verse’s two halves held in one clause.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the use the tradition makes of the minor. Where a defensive theology treats “inferior to the Father” as an embarrassment to be neutralized, Wesley’s heirs hear it as the gospel’s own shape. The One who is aequalis Patri made himself minor — for us. The equality is the height; the inferiority is the measure of how far love was willing to descend. This is the doctrinal content of the most Wesleyan stanza in English hymnody: “He left his Father’s throne above — / so free, so infinite his grace — / emptied himself of all but love, / and bled for Adam’s helpless race” (Charles Wesley, And can it be). That is verse 33 sung: the aequalis who became minor, not by ceasing to be God, but by taking the forma servi to the cross. And Wesley’s instinct here runs, avant la lettre, against eternal-subordination construals: the Son’s subjection is the servant-form, freely assumed for our salvation, consistent with the flat Trinitarian equality he confessed in Article I and which the creed states at verse 25 — not a rank within the eternal Godhead.

Charles Wesley made the descent the church’s Advent and Passion voice: “mild he lays his glory by” (Hark! the herald angels sing); “he laid his glory by, / … and wrapped him in our clay” (Let earth and heaven combine). The secundum humanitatem is never, in the Wesleyan register, a logical escape hatch; it is the road grace took.

Hymnody

This verse is sung as descent — the equal One becoming less, for us — and the church’s richest kenotic hymns are its commentary.

“And can it be” is verse 33 in its purest hymnic form: “emptied himself of all but love” — the aequalis Patri who, secundum humanitatem, “bled for Adam’s helpless race.” “Hark! the herald angels sing”: “mild he lays his glory by.” “Let earth and heaven combine”: “he laid his glory by … and wrapped him in our clay.” “Let all mortal flesh keep silence”: “King of kings, yet born of Mary” — the two secundum clauses in a single line. Graham Kendrick’s “The Servant King” (“he laid aside his majesty”) carries the same descent into contemporary worship.

And Philippians 2 itself — the verse’s biblical root — is sung straight in “At the name of Jesus”: the humbling (forma servi, minor) and the exaltation (forma Dei, aequalis) in one hymn, the church bowing because the One who went all the way down is the One who was always equal. The hymnody never argues the reduplicative rule; it sings the love that the rule exists to keep legible.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

This is the verse to put directly into a congregation’s hands, because it solves, permanently, a problem every thoughtful believer and every honest skeptic eventually hits.

Teach the question secundum quid? The puzzle is universal: the Jesus of the Gospels is worshipped — and is hungry, exhausted, weeping, afraid in a garden, ignorant of the day and the hour, dying, praying to God as to another. The skeptic calls it contradiction; the believer often just quietly looks away from the hard verses. Verse 33 ends both responses with one habit of reading. When you meet a statement about Jesus, ask: secundum quid? — in respect of which nature? “Before Abraham was, I am” — secundum divinitatem. “Jesus wept”; “he did not know the day” — secundum humanitatem. Not a higher Christ and a lower Christ taking turns, but the one Christ, truly God and truly man, spoken of now according to the one, now according to the other. A congregation taught this once can read all four Gospels without fear, and answer the skeptic’s “contradiction” without panic. It is the most portable tool in the entire creed.

Name the two reductions it forbids. The rule cuts equally in both directions, and a pastor should name both idols. Drop the forma Dei and keep only the forma servi and you have the liberal Jesus — admirable man, no Lord, nothing to worship and nothing that can save. Drop the forma servi and keep only the forma Dei and you have the docetic Jesus — God in a human costume whose hunger and fear and dying were never real, who therefore never reached the places we actually live. Verse 33 refuses to let the church keep either comfortable half. The Christ who can save must be aequalis Patri; the Christ who can reach us must be genuinely minor — really tired, really tempted, really forsaken on the cross. The reduplicative rule is not a debating trick; it is the church’s refusal to lose either the deity that redeems or the humanity that is redeemed.

Preach the minor as the gospel, not the problem. The deepest pastoral move is to stop apologizing for “inferior to the Father” and start preaching it. The point is not that the creed cleverly contains an awkward subordination. The point is that the One who was equal to the Father chose to become less — for you. The equality measures the height; the inferiority measures the love. The God you could never climb up to came all the way down to where you actually are — not by ceasing to be God (secundum divinitatem, unchanged and equal) but by becoming, in the flesh, minor, hungry, weeping, obedient unto death. To the person convinced God is distant and untouched by their smallness, verse 33 is the answer the whole creed was built to give: he is not distant; he made himself less than himself to get to you. And then send them to Philippians 2 in the hymnal — at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow — and let them feel why the church bows hardest precisely at the One who went lowest: because the lowest and the highest are, secundum and secundum, the same Lord.

Further Reading

• John 5:18; 10:30; 17:5 — the Son’s equality with the Father (forma Dei)
• John 14:28 — the Father is greater than I (forma servi / the Mediator) — the verse’s hinge text
• Philippians 2:6–11 — in the form of God … the form of a servant — the biblical root of the rule
• Mark 13:32 — of that day … neither the Son (a real secundum humanitatem limitation)
• Hebrews 1:3 (the radiance of God’s glory) with 5:7–8 (he learned obedience) — the two respects in one epistle
• Augustine, On the Trinity I–II; Tractates on the Gospel of John 36, 78
• Leo the Great, Tome; the Definition of Chalcedon (451)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III q. 20
• Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ (the Lutheran communicatio); Francis Turretin, Institutes (the Reformed reading)
• John Calvin, Institutes II.14; Commentary on John 14:28
• The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article II
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on John 14:28 and Philippians 2; Standard Sermons, Sermon 55
• Charles Wesley, “And can it be”; “Let earth and heaven combine”
• Kevin Giles, Jesus and the Father (Zondervan, 2006); D. Glenn Butner Jr., The Son Who Learned Obedience (Pickwick, 2018)
• Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection,” New Blackfriars 81 (2000)