1 Corinthians 15:28

“But when all things shall be subjected unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that subjected all things to Him, that God may be all in all.”

The δέ is progressive: from the subjection of all things to Christ, Paul passes to the subjection of Christ to the Father. We here return to the idea of 1 Corinthians 15:24: “Then the end, when He shall deliver up the kingdom...after having put down...” The last victory is gained, the end comes. Thus the meaning of the digression interposed in 1 Corinthians 15:25-27 is obvious: the end or the delivering up of the kingdom to the Father must be preceded by the destruction of all rebel forces (1 Corinthians 15:24 b); for the Son cannot give up to the Father an empire which has not been completely pacified; and this subjection of rebel forces can only take place through the Messianic reign and judgment of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:25-26); as the result of all, the subjection of all things to the Son (1 Corinthians 15:27). And now the conditions of the end are given.

What follows: “Then shall the Son Himself be subject,” reproduces more emphatically what had been said in 1 Corinthians 15:24 in the terms: “When He shall deliver up the kingdom to the Father.” The condition of the end was the subjection of all things to the Son; the end itself is the subjection of the Son, and in Him of all things, to God. The subjection of the Son is evidently voluntary. Hence it is that the apostle uses the second aorist passive, which more easily takes the reflective sense than the first aorist. The latter would express entire passivity. We here come on one of the most important and difficult conceptions of our Epistle, and of St. Paul's Epistles in general. It is very difficult to harmonize this idea of the subjection of the Son with the ordinary conception of the Trinity, according to which the Son is eternally equal with the Father. To escape the advantage which the Arians took of this passage, it has been sought in various ways to eliminate from it the idea of submission. The subjection of the Son, according to Chrysostom, denotes His full agreement with the Father. According to Augustine, it is the act whereby the Son will guide the elect to the contemplation of the Father; according to Beza, the presentation of the elect to the Father; according to others, the manifestation by means of which the Son will make the Father fully known to the whole world (Theodoret): meanings which are all utterly insufficient to render the force of the expression used by the apostle. It has also been attempted to understand by the Son here the mystical body of Christ, the Church (Ambrose); and this is perhaps the reason why the words ὁ υἱός, the Son, are omitted in some of the Fathers. A larger number distinguish between the Divine and the human nature of Christ, and ascribe what is here said of Him only to the latter. This attempt to divide the Lord's person into two natures, one of them subject, while the other remains free and self-sufficient, is the more unfortunate in this passage, as the word used to designate Christ is precisely that which most forcibly characterizes His Divine being, ὁ υἱός, the Son, absolutely speaking.

Many commentators apply what is here said of Christ to the cessation of His mediatorial office between God and men; for where there is no more sin, there is no more need of redemption or intercession. To the reign of grace, administered till then by the Son, there will succeed the state of glory (Luther, Melanchthon, Bengel, Olshausen, etc.). But Paul is not speaking of the cessation of priesthood; it is the delivering up of the kingdom which is in question, and of a kingdom whose principal work is to judge, a very different thing from redeeming and interceding, and in any case it is not to God that He could deliver up His mediatorial function. This is recognised by Meyer, Hofmann, Heinrici, and others. These apply the term βασιλεία, kingdom, to the judicial sovereignty exercised by Christ over the hostile powers (1 Corinthians 15:24), and to His universal sovereignty, which flows from it (1 Corinthians 15:27). “The subordination of the Son to the Father,” says Hofmann, “consists in the fact that He ceases to have in the view of the world that mediate position between the world and God, in consequence of which the world saw in Him a ruler different from God, possessing a sovereignty which belonged to Him as His own. This rule within the world ceases because it has reached its end.” This explanation would be satisfactory if we had only to account for the expression of 1 Corinthians 15:24: “to deliver up the kingdom to the Father.” But the phrase used in 1 Corinthians 15:28 to designate the same fact is very different: “the voluntary submission of the Son to Him who subjected all things to Him.” For this expression does not bear only on the function of the Son, but also on His personal position, and it seems difficult with such words before us to avoid the conclusion of R. Schmidt, when, in his monograph on St. Paul's Christology, he thus expresses himself: “Either the characteristic of absolute existence is not essential to the notion of God, which no one will allow, or it must be confessed that the apostolic conception here stated is incompatible with the Divine nature of Christ.” This author concludes that the idea of the subjection of the Son, as here taught by the apostle, is in contradiction not only to the ecclesiastical dogma of the Trinity, but also to all the expressions of St. Paul which imply Christ's divinity and pre-existence.

I do not think that so logical a mind as that of the apostle can with any probability be suspected of self-contradiction, especially on a point of such fundamental importance. I have already remarked once and again (1 Corinthians 3:23 and 1 Corinthians 11:3), that the idea of the subordination of the Son to the Father expressly forms part of his Christological conception, no less than that of His Divine pre - existence. The two notions are simultaneously included in the title Son, which, as Edwards says, implies “the possibility of subjection and, at the same time, equality of nature.” Exactly so is it with the term Word in John. As the word is subordinate to the thought, and yet one with it, so in the notion of Son there are united the two relations of subordination and homogeneity. The living monotheism of Paul, John, and the other apostles was not less rigorous than ours, and yet it found no contradiction between these two affirmations. Now if, in Paul's view, it is so with the Son in His Divine state, must not the position of subordination have appeared in Him still more compatible with the character of the Son when He had once entered into the mode of being belonging to a human personality? Subordination was therefore, according to him, in harmony with the essential relation of the Son to the Father, in His Divine and human existence. If consequently He is called to reign, by exercising Divine sovereignty within the universe, it can only be for a time, with a view to the obtaining of a particular result. This end gained, He will return to His normal position: subordination relatively to God the Father. Such, as it seems to me, is the true thought of the apostle. How did he understand the state of the Son after this act of voluntary subjection? In his view, this act of subjection could be no loss to the Son. It is not He who descends from the Divine throne, it is His subjects who are raised to it along with Him: “To him that overcometh, will I grant to sit on My throne, as I overcame...” (Rev 3:21). Even on the Divine throne, Christ is only “as an elder brother in the midst of many brethren” (Romans 8:29). “Heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,” says St. Paul in the same sense, that is to say, sharing with Him the Divine inheritance, the possession of God Himself. He is therefore no longer a king surrounded by His servants, but a brother who in relation to His brethren keeps only the advantage of His eternal priority (πρωτότοκος, first-born). We must therefore beware of understanding this subjection in the sense of an absorption of Christ in the Deity, so that His personality thenceforth disappears. The expression to be subjected denotes quite the opposite of this idea, which is besides incompatible with the apostle's various sayings which we have just quoted. The thought of St. Paul seems to me to be this: The Son returns to the state of submission which He had left to fill the place of Messianic sovereignty, because, God communicating Himself directly to all, He ceases to be mediator of God's sovereignty over them.

The καί, also, before αὐτός (Himself), in the Byz., ought certainly to be preserved; it has been rejected as too closely identifying the Son's subordination with ours, in the same way as it was thought necessary here to reject ὁ υἱός to avoid the risk of doing wrong to His divinity.

The periphrasis: to Him who subjected to Him, serves to justify the delivering up of the universe to the Father; He restores it to Him who gave it to Him.

The last words: that God may be all in all, do not depend, as Hofmann and Grimm think, on the secondary idea: who subjected all things to Him. What needs to be explained is, not the end for which God subjected all to the Son, but the end with a view to which the Son restores all to God. Such is the dominant thought of the whole passage from 1 Corinthians 15:24. This in order that depends, therefore, on ὑποταγήσεται, shall be subject. He effaces Himself to let God take His place. Formerly it was He, Christ, in whom God manifested Himself to the world; it was He who was all in all (Col 3:12). But He took advantage of His relation to the faithful only to bring them to that state in which God could directly, without mediation on His part, live, dwell in them, reveal Himself, and act by them. This time having come, they are, as to position, His equals; God is all in them in the same way as He was and is all in His glorified Son. They have reached the perfect stature of Christ (Ephesians 4:13).

But, strange to say, Paul does not use either the name Father, or that of God and the Father (1 Corinthians 15:24); he says: “that God may be all in all.” And yet it seems as if the name Father would be the corresponding one to the title Son. All is so maturely weighed in the apostle's style, that he must have had an intention in his choice of the name. He did not here wish to designate God specially as Father, in opposition to the Son and the Spirit, but God in the fulness of His being, at once as Father, the source of all, both in Himself and in the universe, as Son revealing Him, and as Spirit communicating Him. It was in this fulness that God dwelt in the man Jesus, and it is with the same fulness He will dwell in every man who has become in Him His child and heir. Such are “those things” of which Paul spoke 1 Corinthians 2:7, “which God has prepared for our glory.”

The expression: πάντα or τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν, all in all, certainly does not merely signify: to be all to them (to their hearts) because of their love and admiration, as has been concluded from certain analogous Greek expressions. The in denotes a real indwelling. The living God thinks, wills, and acts through them. They are as Jesus was, on the earth, at once His free and submissive agents, the depositaries of His holiness, the bearers of His love, the interpreters of His wisdom throughout the boundless spaces and unnumbered worlds of the universe. It is by filling them that through them God fills all things. It seems to me that the neuter πάντα, all things, by no means obliges us to take the ἐν πᾶσιν, in all, in the neuter sense. The meaning is: all in each, so that every member of this glorified society has no longer anything in him which is not penetrated by God, as the transparent crystal is all penetrated with light. The masculine sense is demanded, as Meyer well says, by the correlation to the αὐτὸς ὁ υἱός, the Son Himself. This meaning also comes out very naturally from the analogous saying Colossians 3:11: πάντα καὶ ἐν πᾶσιν Χριστός. At the height at which he has arrived, the apostle can only think of a being of God spiritually, like that of which Jesus speaks in His last prayer: “As Thou, Father, art in Me and I in Thee, that they also may be in us” (John 17:21). It is therefore a mistake in Hofmann and Edwards to take πᾶσιν in the neuter sense: “all in all things,” even in inanimate beings.

We must certainly read, with the Vaticanus and the Cantabrigiensis, πάντα without the article; the τά has come in from the three τὰ πάντα which precede; but there τὰ πάντα denoted the totality of the universe, which is unsuitable here.

The partisans of universal salvation have always regarded this last saying as one of the most solid points in support of their theory. But the expression in all may be explained in two ways, without ascribing this idea to Paul. Either it may be held that he is thinking only of those who have freely joined in the submission of the Son, and who, united to Him, are embraced in Him; or the in all may be applied even to the reprobate, in the sense that in them too the Divine perfection will shine forth, in the twofold aspect of justice and power; comp. Philippians 2:10-11, a passage which, however, refers neither to the same time nor to the same fact. If the idea of universal salvation were Paul's view, it must apply also to devils, as Olshausen himself cannot help admitting. But 1 Corinthians 15:25 does not lead to such a conclusion, and this thought evidently goes beyond all the limits of the biblical view. What the apostle meant to express here is this sublime idea: that the goal of history and the end of the existence of humanity are the formation of a society of intelligent and free beings, brought by Christ into perfect communion with God, and thereby rendered capable of exercising, like Jesus Himself when on earth, an unchangeably holy and beneficent activity. This view, which is also that of one of the greatest thinkers of our day, Lotze, exclusive of the Christian element on which it rested in the case of the apostle, sets aside, on the one hand, the Pantheism which denies all existence of its own and all free activity to the creature, this is contradicted by the ἐν πᾶσιν, in all, and on the other the Deism, which ascribes to man an activity in good separately from God, which is excluded by the πάντα ἐν, all things in, of St. Paul.

The apostle has thus assigned to the resurrection of the body its place in the system of the Christian salvation as a whole. He has brought out its three phases (Christ's resurrection, the resurrection of believers, the universal resurrection), and he has pointed out the correspondence between these phases and the three principal epochs of the Divine work (the consummation of salvation in Christ Himself, the inauguration of His Messianic kingdom, and the close of His whole work). Certainly such a discussion exhausted the first side of the question, the reality of the resurrection of the body. Before, however, passing to the second aspect of the question, the possibility of so extraordinary a fact, Pauls adds one or two considerations as to the practical consequences, to which the denial of this truth naturally leads (1 Corinthians 15:29-34).