Introduction

After questioning the motivation for the essay “The Obedience of the Eternal Son” in my first post, and then justifying my representation of the essay in the second, we are now in a position to enter into the substance of the discussion. But rather than continue with polemics, I have decided to take a piece of advice from Dr. Michael Allen and engage more constructively. (Plus, very few of my readers are even familiar with the essay under consideration as it is not easily linkable.) I do intend to continue questioning the thesis of the so-called “obedience of the eternal Son,” but rather by presenting what I believe to be an accurate representation of the Biblical data, and then comparing several alternate claims, concluding with an assessment of Drs. Swain and Allen’s parrying of the objections of Thomas Joseph White to their thesis.

As the work of Thomas Aquinas is the primary resource for Swain and Allen’s coordination of “the obedience of the eternal Son” with “traditional trinitarian metaphysics in the classical Catholic and Reformed tradition,” I will accordingly present what I perceive to be the Catholic and Reformed tradition as found in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

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