Kevin Giles

Kevin Giles
Nationality	Australian
Occupation	Clergyman, author, speaker

Kevin Giles is an Australian pastor and Theologian. He is an ordained evangelical Anglican who was in parish ministry for over forty years. He and his family live in Melbourne, Australia. Giles studied at Moore Theological College in Sydney, Durham University, England and Tubingen University, Germany. He has a Doctor of Theology degree from the Australian College of Theology.

He has published widely on matters related to the health and growth of the church, some at a popular level and some at an academic level. He has scholarly books on church leadership, the doctrine of the church, the biblical case for gender equality, the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. He has been prominent in the debate about the status and ministry of women and the way complementarians have until recently grounded women’s subordination in the Trinity.

In a number of publications, Giles has argued that complementarians unwittingly have embraced the heresy of subordinationism by arguing that the Trinity is “hierarchically” ordered; specifically that the Son is necessarily and eternally subordinated in authority to the Father. Since his subordination is what irrevocably identifies him as the Son in distinction to the Father, a difference in being is implied. In his 2006 book, Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity, Giles argued that complementarians had "reinvented" the doctrine of the Trinity to support their views of men and women, adopting a heretical view similar to Arianism. He has consistently argued that the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, the creeds and confessions exclude any hierarchically ordering in the eternal or immanent Trinity and there is no correlation between a threefold divine relationship in heaven and a twofold, male-female-relationship on earth.

In response, Wayne Grudem has argued that the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father is a biblical doctrine, while Dave Miller has argued that it is the historic doctrine of the Church. One review of Giles' 2002 book, The Trinity and Subordinationism, argued that he "intentionally ignores the accepted distinction" between functional and ontological subordination, and that this negatively affects "his reading of modern evangelical writings on the subject." What this criticism misses is that Giles does not argue that the temporal, functional subordination of the Son in the incarnation implies subordinationism and is thus heretical, but rather that the eternal functional subordination of the Son necessarily implies the ontological subordinationism and is thus heretical.

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