Is there subordination within the Trinity and is this useful for understanding male/female relationships in the Christian home and church? This has been getting a lot of discussion in recent days. While I am confident in the biblical depiction of complementary, we need to know if we can appeal to the Trinity as an eternal example of this. What does Jesus mean when he says that he does what the Father commands (John 14:31)? What does Paul mean in 1 Cor. 11:3 about the head of Christ being God?

These have implications in the US as we defend gender roles and biblical marriage. But they also have implications for the global church. In China, the church is still majority women (growing numbers of men) and divided into many small congregations. This makes for a lot of tough discussions on biblical ecclesiology. Being able to defend the biblical model of church leadership (male elders with men and women serving under elder authority) with an appeal to the Trinity is valuable. This current debate is trying to say whether such an analogy is biblical or warranted.

An explainer: the latest complementarian debate isn’t over women’s subordination—but Christ’s.

Source: Gender and the Trinity: From Proxy War to Civil War | Christianity Today