Prayer, Obedience, and the Equal Honour of the Son

Article 5 of 13 in the series “The Old Paths of Trinitarian Doctrine: Reading Edmund Calamy’s Thirteen Sermons.”

The fifth sermon completes Calamy’s extended answer to arguments for the Son’s essential inferiority. The objections are substantial because they arise from undisputed biblical facts: Jesus prays to the Father, receives commandments, obeys, is sent, and receives authority. Calamy does not deny any of them. He asks what they prove.

They prove the reality of the incarnation and the mediatorial office. They do not prove that the eternal Son possesses a lower grade of deity.

The Son Truly Prayed

The Gospels repeatedly portray Jesus withdrawing to pray, continuing all night in prayer, falling upon his face, and offering supplications with strong crying and tears. Prayer ordinarily proceeds from an inferior to a superior. Calamy willingly grants the inference in the proper respect.

Christ is inferior according to the human nature he assumed and according to the office of servant and mediator. His prayers are not appearances. The human will depends upon God, experiences sorrow, and expresses submission. In Gethsemane the petition, “Not my will, but thine, be done,” belongs to the genuine obedience by which the second Adam fulfils righteousness.

But the one who prays is also the eternal Son who possessed glory with the Father before the world existed. His prayer does not erase that glory. It reveals the depth of his condescension: he who receives the prayers of the church entered the condition in which he offered prayer for the church.

Calamy therefore prefers to say Christ prayed as man or as mediator. Both descriptions preserve the truth. Neither licenses the conclusion that his divine nature is inferior.

The Son Receives Commandments and Gifts

The Father gives the Son commandments, anoints him, commits judgment to him, and grants him the mediatorial kingdom. Scripture also says the Son receives what belongs to the successful discharge of his office.

Calamy interprets these passages covenantally. Redemption is presented as a compact or ordered counsel between Father and Son. The Son freely undertakes to assume human nature, obey, suffer, and redeem. The Father promises the necessary endowments and the reward of the finished work.

Reception therefore belongs to office and incarnation. Before any mediatorial gift is bestowed, the Son is God over all. As God he possesses all power; as the incarnate mediator he receives all power for the public administration of salvation. The same person possesses power originally according to deity and receives it officially according to the economy.

This distinction prevents two opposite errors. It prevents us from making the obedience unreal, and it prevents us from turning voluntary humiliation into eternal inferiority.

Is the Son Only a Mediating Object of Worship?

Calamy’s opponents attempted to distinguish the Father as the ultimate object of worship from the Son as a mediate or subordinate object. Believers might honour Christ as the appointed route to God without giving him the supreme worship due to the Father.

Calamy can accept a limited use of “subordinate worship” if it describes prayer to Christ in his mediatorial office—asking him to intercede and apply his purchased benefits. What he denies is that this exhausts the worship due to Jesus. The Son possesses an original right to divine worship because he is eternally God.

The distinction is decisive. Mediatorial exaltation manifests and enforces Christ’s claim; it does not create deity. If Christ had no antecedent right to divine worship, no command could make creature-worship lawful. God cannot suspend the Creator-creature distinction by decree.

The Scriptural Worship of Christ

Calamy surveys the New Testament’s worship of the Son:

• disciples believe in him with the trust they place in God;
• believers call upon his name;
• Stephen commits his departing spirit to the Lord Jesus;
• Paul repeatedly invokes the Lord and receives the answer, “My grace is sufficient for thee”;
• Thomas addresses Christ as “My Lord and my God”;
• apostolic doxologies ascribe eternal glory to him;
• Revelation joins the Lamb with the one upon the throne in universal praise;
• the canon closes with the prayer, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

These acts include prayer, faith, love, self-devotion, thanksgiving, and final trust. They are not the civil honours paid to a king. They are acts that recognize the object as Lord of conscience, giver of grace, keeper of souls, and judge of all.

The Lord’s Supper also contains worship of Christ. The church does not merely recall a deceased teacher. It proclaims the death of the living Lord, receives the signs of his covenant, gives thanks for redemption by his blood, and renews devotion to the one who purchased body and soul.

“In That Day Ye Shall Ask Me Nothing”

One objection appeals to John 16:23: “In that day ye shall ask me nothing,” followed by the promise that believers will ask the Father in Christ’s name. Calamy argues that the first “ask” concerns the disciples’ habit of questioning Jesus for instruction. After the Spirit’s coming they will no longer depend upon his visible presence to resolve their confusion in that way.

The verse therefore does not prohibit prayer to Christ. Even if it emphasizes prayer to the Father through the Son, that form of prayer cannot cancel the direct invocations recorded elsewhere. Scripture authorizes prayer to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit; it also records address to the Son and petitions for the Spirit’s communion.

Trinitarian worship is not a competition in which honour given to one person is withheld from the others. The one God receives worship according to the personal relations and saving economy he has revealed.

Baptism and the Creator-Creature Boundary

Calamy again invokes baptism. Christians are baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. If the Son were a creature, the initiatory act of Christian worship would consecrate believers jointly to God and a creature.

The problem cannot be solved by saying that the human nature is included in the person worshipped. The humanity is not worshipped as an independent creature. The person of the Son, who possesses divine and human natures, is worshipped because he is God. The union does not change humanity into deity; it identifies whose humanity it is.

This is why the doctrine of the person matters for worship. Christians do not divide Christ into two subjects, worshipping one and ignoring the other. They worship the one Lord Jesus Christ according to his divine right, while confessing the true humanity in which he mediates.

No Perplexity between Supreme and Inferior Gods

Calamy’s practical inference exposes the pastoral failure of subordinate-deity theories. Pagan religions distinguished a supreme god from many inferior divinities, leaving worshippers uncertain which power should receive which petition. Christianity delivers believers from that perplexity.

There is one God. The Father and Son are not rival recipients of prayer. Christians may address the Father through the Son, Father and Son together, or the Son directly without falling into idolatry, because the divine being is one.

Calamy’s formulation should be handled carefully. The ordinary pattern of prayer remains to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. Yet the pattern expresses personal order, not unequal deity. Direct scriptural invocations of the Son confirm that he is not merely the courier carrying worship to someone else.

Zeal, Charity, and Final Judgment

Calamy closes with a moral caution as well as a doctrinal warning. He refuses to infer the final state of everyone who uses defective language. He preserves a Latin judgment about some who diminished the Son while intending to honour the Father:

Errant igitur, sed bono animo errant, non odio, sed affectu Dei… Qualiter pro hoc ipso falsae opinionis errore in die judicii puniendi sint, nullus potest scire, nisi judex.

“They therefore err, but they err with a good intention—not from hatred but from devotion to God… No one but the Judge can know how they are to be punished on the day of judgment for this very error of false opinion.”¹

The statement does not make the error harmless. It distinguishes the objective gravity of denying the Son’s honour from a creature’s ability to pronounce upon every heart. Truth requires refutation; love forbids us to assume God’s throne.

Calamy’s completed case is therefore both doctrinal and devotional. Christ’s prayers and obedience reveal the true mediator. Christ’s reception of prayer and worship reveals the true God. The church must confess both, honour the Son as the Father commands, and leave final judgment of persons to the Lord who searches hearts.

Previous: Article 4, “The Mystery of God, the Father, and Christ.”
Next: Article 6, “The Deity of the Holy Ghost.”