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all held to have been temporarily compromised, and only in the end will it be restored
that God may be all in all."
Here the titles "Father" and "Son' are kept in their place as relative terms. Tertullian
is said to have introduced the term oikonomia into the answer to the problem, meaning by
its use to teach this, that the Trinity is not to be affirmed of God in the Absolute sense,
but was assumed by God for the economies and dispensations of Creation and
Redemption. Appendix 4 of The Companion Bible has this note "Elohim is God the Son,
the living `WORD' in a Divine form to create" (John 1: 1; Col. 1: 15-17; Rev. 3: 14);
and later, with human form to redeem (John 1: 14). Dr. John Kaye, Bishop of Lincoln,
said of the attitude of Clement of Alexandria:
"The whole tenor of the passage proves that Clement ascribed all the
attributes of the Godhead to Christ: but when He is spoken of as the Son, with
reference to the Father, or as sent forth by the Father to conduct the economy,
the relation itself implies a certain subordination or inferiority."
"Clement then dilates on the impossibility of describing God, or giving him a
proper name, `for whatever has a name must have been generated or begotten'
. . . . . Before creation was, He was God, He was good; and on this account He
chose to be Creator and Father . . . . . Inasmuch as the cause or beginning of
anything is always most difficult to be discovered, God, Who is the Beginning
and Cause of existence to all things, can never be described by words. You
cannot apply to Him the terms, genus, difference, species, atom, number,
accident, subject of accident, whole, part, figure; nor can any name be properly
or essentially given Him. When we call Him One, or the Good, or Mind, or the
Existent, or Father, or God, or Creator, or Lord, we do not profess to give His
name; but through inability to discover more appropriate terms, apply these
honourable appellations in order that the thought may have whereon to rest.
These appellations do not simply express the Deity, but are collectively
indicative of the power of the Almighty. Names are given with reference either
to some quality of the thing named, or to the relation to some other thing; but
neither of these circumstances is applied to God."
Clement of Alexandria seems to have seen the truth far more clearly than Athanasius
whose creed so dominates the mind of many. "Economy, relations, subordination,
inferiority". Here in a truer sense he distinguishes "substance" from "person".
Dr. Burton of Oxford wrote: "It will be observed that the sense which the church has
attached to the Son of God is strictly literal; by which I mean that she takes the term Son
in the same sense which it bears in ordinary language . . . . . Whereas every other
hypothesis, not excepting the Arian . . . . . uses the Son in a figurative or metaphorical
sense . . . . . What would be said of a philosophical writer who used the relative terms
Father and Son, who spoke of the two Beings acting toward each other, loving each other,
as human fathers and human sons, and yet expect his readers not to understand these two
Beings to be distinct and separate Persons?"
Bishop Burton wrote: "The Father is not the true God without the Son or the Holy
Spirit, and therefore to call the Father the true God (John 17: 3) does not exclude the