A Subordinationist Christology in John?

A common line in scholarship is that the Jesus of John’s Gospel is subordinated, i.e., Jesus is not merely the Father’s agent, but he is in some ways inferior to the Father.

The fact that the Johannine Jesus declares at one point, “The Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28) would seem to put the matter to bed as this is an explicit statement of the Son’s inferiority. Many, from Arians to Unitarians to modern scholars, have thought so.

But as I’ve been trolling through my notes, I’ve found a couple of good quotes on this topic from two Durham scholars, James D. G. Dunn and Francis Watson:

That is, various aspects of the Son Christology should not be read independently of the Logos Christology, but rather as intended to serve the Logos Christology. I am thinking not simply of the accusation that Jesus was making himself equal with God (5.18) and Jesus’ striking claim to be one with the Father (10.30); for such claims are an obvious expression of Logos/Wisdom Christology – Logos/Wisdom being the self-expression of the otherwise invisible God. Nor am I thinking only of the sending motif, where the Son sent is wholly representative of the Father who sent him (e.g. 10.36; 12.45). I am thinking more of the features of John’s Son Christology normally referred to as the Son’s ‘subordination’ to the Father – summed up by 14.28, ‘The Father is greater than I’.  In fact, however, the thought is not so much of subordination, as though that was already an issue. The issue is not the relation between the Father and the Son (as later), but the authority and validity of the Son’s revelation of the Father, the continuity between the Father and the Son, between the logos unuttered and the logos uttered. (James Dunn, Neither Jew nor Greek, 353).

In the context of the fourfold canonical gospel and its reception, the Gospel of John is important not so much for its supplementary narratives as for its radical Christology, which asserts Jesus’ equality with God – not as a “second God” but by virtue of the mutually constitutive relationship of Father and Son. It has been asserted again and again that the Johannine Christology has little or nothing in common with the christology of Nicaea, that it is far from the evangelist’s thought to see Jesus as “very God from very God,” and that it is his subordinationist statements that express his real view. Yet the Nicene account arises in large part out of an ongoing dialogue with Johannine and other scriptural texts. Indeed, that dialogue – of which the object is Jesus – is already underway within the texts themselves. (Francis Watson, Gospel Writing, 340).

Dunn and Watson disagree about whether the key issue in texts like Jn 14:28 is the Father-Son relationship (Watson) or the Son’s revelation of the Father (Dunn). In either case, they reject a subordinationist view that makes Jesus somehow lesser than the Father.

My own view is that the statements about onenes, i.e., “the Father and I are one” (Jn 10:30) and mutual indwelling, i.e., “the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (Jn 10:28), lend themselves to thinking of Jesus as divine in not merely a functional sense, but in terms of sharing in the Father’s very own being.