{"id":4468,"date":"2013-03-13T05:01:42","date_gmt":"2013-03-13T09:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=4468"},"modified":"2013-11-19T23:04:45","modified_gmt":"2013-11-20T04:04:45","slug":"subordinationism-dale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/subordinationism-dale\/","title":{"rendered":"“Subordinationism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"grammar-vader\"<\/a>In the recent and ongoing series<\/a><\/strong>, I have been showing that famous early “fathers” are not, contrary to popular accounts, trinitarians at all, once we carefully define the term. They are unitarians, again, carefully defining the term.<\/p>\n

But these recent comments<\/a> by reader “Villanovanus” got me thinking.<\/p>\n

He finds it outrageous<\/em> that I call people like Irenaeus and Origen “unitarians,”<\/strong> even though I also call them “subordinationists.” Isn’t a subordinationist by definition<\/em> a trinitarian? (When one reads the trinitarian authors of histories of theology, they are usually a little more modest, saying that these folks are sort of, kind of, maybe trinitarians, if not good ones, or fully developed ones, etc.)\u00a0 Am I not grammatically challenged, or perversely unwilling to look up terms in a dictionary? If a “subordinationist” is by definition a trinitarian, then “subordinationist unitarian” is a contradiction in terms.<\/p>\n

He cites a number of dictionary type definitions of “subordinationism”, e.g.<\/p>\n