EFS has overlooked that the blueprint of biblical ethics is not the ineffable eternal relations of the Trinity, but the word of our Lord who is one. “The Scriptures ground ethics upon metaphysics, for God’s supreme authority to command our trust and obedience derives from his supreme being – who and what he is.” There are no scriptural texts where our duty before God is rooted in the Son’s eternal obedience to the Father in God. Scripture, however, regularly bases our moral obligations upon His simple unity as God. The Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 is the rationale for the Great Commandment to “love the LORD your God” (v. 5) and to teach His laws to succeeding generations (vv. 6-7).

Western culture today parades its rebellion against nature and our Creator, against the goodness of bearing God’s image as men and women. Christians must defend the Bible’s teaching on God’s design for both sexes and how each complements the other. Many, however, do so by arguing that our roles and relationships as men and women are patterned after the Trinity itself,[1] specifically in the Father’s authority over the Son in an “Eternal Functional Subordination” (EFS).[2] While I agree with many EFS proponents on the biblical order for the home and the church, there is a tragic irony to their method. By implicitly dividing our simple God, they undermine the foundation of the very scriptural ethics that they endeavor to preserve.
The Simple Unity of God
Scripture emphatically cuts against humanity’s penchant for polytheism.[3] The basic confession of God’s people was the Shema, “The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut 6:4). If our Lord is an exclusive, singular unity, He must therefore be a simple unity.[4] If the One who created all things is composed of any things (or parts) prior to Him, then it could not be said that He created all things (Gen 1:1; Rom 11:36). In the 17th century, Edward Leigh explained:
God is absolutely Simple, he is but one thing, and doth not consist of any parts… If he did consist of parts, there must be something before him, to put those parts together; and then he were not Eternal.[5]
Divine simplicity is why Scripture not only describes qualities God has but uses substantives to say what He is, as in “You are good” (Ps 119:68) and “God is love” (1 John 4:8).[6] When God told Moses “I AM who I AM” (Exod 3:14-15), He revealed His peerless nature by His name, “Yahweh” (usually represented by “LORD” in English), something of a pun on “I AM.”[7] God’s essential name means He is “Being itself,”[8] “an Absolute Being, nothing but Himself,” so that “whatsoever you can say of God, is God.”[9] As the One who is (cf. Rev 4:8), God is exalted above any possibility of cause, change, chronology, or categorization.[10] Creatures are divided into individual beings who can be grouped with others who share their nature, as members of a common species. How can this be true of the Creator of all natures? How could He come to exist in a category that is prior to Him with peers who are like Him? “It is thus divine simplicity that undergirds monotheism and ensures that it does not just so happen that God is one, but it must be that God cannot but be one being because of what it means to be God.”[11] There is no one like our simple God (Isa 44:8).
When He spoke to us by His Son, the Lord revealed that He is a simple being who exists as Father, Son, and Spirit. So, Paul could ascribe Israel’s Shema to the Father and the Son, who are “one” and who created “all things” (1 Cor 8:4-6; cf. Col 1:16; Jn 1:3). As the early church reflected on such texts, they understood that “[t]he generation of the Son and the breathing of the Spirit thus occur within the bounds of the divine simplicity.”[12] In other words, “The persons are not different things from that thing which is the divine essence.”[13] God simply is the Father begetting the Son and, with the Son, breathing forth the Spirit.[14] Divine simplicity, far from being inconsistent with the Trinity, is in fact its “lynchpin.”[15] How else could we be kept from thinking of the Father, Son, and Spirit as individual beings of a divine species like creatures?[16] Or even as a council of deities that we have just named “God”?[17] God is Triune, not in spite of His simplicity, but because of it. Swain put this plainly:
there was and is no need for the doctrine of the Trinity if God is not simple, for there were and are plenty of sophisticated and unsophisticated ways of conceiving how three persons may comprise one complex divine being or community.[18]
So, if we think about the Trinity in mathematical terms, we do not need to say “three” (as if the persons are individual beings of a divine species). We can always say the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. However, if we do not say that God is “one,” then we would be saying little more than polytheists say about their deities.[19] In order to count to the true and Triune God, the essential number is one.
The Divided Community of EFS
While EFS advocates undeniably affirm the exclusive unity of God, their modern revision of the Trinity endangers it. Theology requires, as Sinclair Ferguson has written, that we “point out the logical implications of presuppositions.”[20] EFS logically entails the division of our simple God in more than one way, ignoring Calvin’s warning not to “think God’s simple essence to be torn into three persons.”[21]
First, God’s indivisible unity means that whatever we say of God’s nature is equally true of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that includes His will and authority.[22] By His will and power, Scripture identifies God as God, “I am God, and there is no one like me… My purpose shall stand” (Isa 46:9-10). So, each Person exercises that divine will inseparably from the other two as God.[23]
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The Covid vaccine, unlike every other mandated vaccine, has a religious connotation to it. For this reason, Christians in our day need to be instructed by Revelation 13 as much as Romans 13. And I pray this essay might help us to see what is going on and to respond in freedom and faith—whatever that means for you and the vaccine.

Since the Biden Administration mandated soldiers and federal workers to be fully vaccinated, while also requiring private businesses larger than 100 employees to require vaccines, chaos has ensued. Defending the freedoms of Americans, many have begun to address the constitutional problems this mandate creates.[1] Others have begun seeking a religious exemption for this mandate based upon the fetal cells used in the research and production of these vaccines.[2] Still others object to the mandates because they have already contracted Covid, have natural immunity, and believe (with a long history immunology supporting them) that taking a vaccine is unnecessary and may be potentially harmful to their body.[3]
At the same time, other Americans, and many Christians among them, have opted to get the vaccine, even arguing for its morality. Add to this the difference between seeking a vaccine exemption on medical grounds versus moral and religious grounds, and the complexity multiplies.[4] Not surprisingly, with all of these arguments out there, people of faith are led to ask: What should I do?
To answer that question, I am putting myself in the shoes of the men and women in the military and federal government who are now ordered to get vaccinated. Some of them have willingly received the vaccine, and done so in faith. Many others, however, are not able to receive the vaccine in faith. As I have spoken to church members and other Christians about this, many are crushed in spirit at the thought of injecting a serum that has come about by the use of stem cell lines that ultimately trace back to cells derived from aborted babies. Others are not bound in conscience by the use of fetal cell lines, but are nevertheless are unable to take the vaccine in good faith. It is for this latter category, I am writing.
In what follows, I offer a twofold argument for why this vaccine mandate should lead some men and women to seek a religious exemption (not just a medical exemption). These two arguments are based upon a genuinely held religious belief that this mandate (1) eliminates the free exercise of their faith and (2) forces upon them the faith another religion. Along the way, I will show why this vaccine and its accompanying mandate is different in nature than previous vaccines. Unlike previous vaccines, like Jonathan Salk’s polio vaccine or the more recent anthrax vaccine, the Covid vaccine comes with a moral imperative that is downright religious, complete with Fauci prayer candles and vaccine jewelry.
At the outset, I admit that this argument may not resonate with everyone, and that is fine. I am not writing to persuade everyone to seek a religious exemption. Seeking a religious exemption is deeply personal and should be based on one’s genuinely held beliefs. So, I am not seeking to bind anyone’s conscience regarding the vaccine. At our church, we have labored hard to stress the liberty Christians have to receive or reject the vaccine, because we really believe that one’s health care decisions are matters of personal responsibility and liberty, not public morality and coercion.
That said, as a pastor with many members seeking religious exemptions, I am writing to Christians to offer biblical rationale for why Christians can—and in many cases should—seek a religious exemption. So, to the text of Scripture we go.
The Mandate Replaces Faith with Coercion
In the Bible, the locus classicus for liberty of conscience is Romans 14. And while the whole chapter provides a rich resource for understanding the biblical view of human conscience, the last verse provides a starting point for distinguishing faith from coercion, as well as offering a connection between conscience, faith, and sin.
Summarizing his argument on conscience and religious devotion to God, Paul writes: “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (v. 23). This simple principle needs to guide Christians at all times, but especially in moments when governing authorities are binding consciences by way of coercive actions that do not proceed from God’s truth. In fact, the first point to make is that coercion always makes faith null and void.
There are many ways to get at this argument, but one of them has to do with faith, thanksgiving, and using the good gifts of God. Here’s how Paul puts it in 1 Timothy 4:1–5,
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, 3 who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, 5 for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
While Paul’s words take aim at false teachers who forbid marriage and require abstinence from food, his argument stands upon a universal truth: Christians are those who give thanks to God for every good gift. While those in rebellion against God take his gifts and refuse to acknowledge him or give thanks to him (Rom. 1:23), Christians are those who give thanks to God (Luke 17:19) and praise him for every good and perfect gift that comes down from our Father in heaven (James 1:17). These gifts include, food and drink, sex and marriage. But they also include sunshine and rain (Matt. 5:45), agricultural wisdom (Isaiah 28:26), and medicine (James 5:14).[5]
Accordingly, for Christians to receive the vaccine in faith means that Christians can give thanks to God for the good gift that he has given. And more than that, Christians must give thanks to God for anything they put in their body. Not only are we called to glorify God with our bodies (1 Cor. 6:20), but if we refuse to give thanks to God, we are not exercising faith and are by definition sinning (see Rom. 14:23).
By contrast, when Christians eat, drink, or take a vaccine, they do so with personal thanksgiving to their Lord. And over the course of the last year, this is what many Christians have done. In faith, they have prayed against Covid and for a vaccine. Covid is a real threat and one that continues to cut short the lives of those whom we know and love. Accordingly, Christians have given thanks to God for the vaccine, and no one who has taken the vaccine in faith should feel condemned.
My argument here is not anti-vaccine; it is anti-mandate. Because thanksgiving for the vaccine is predicated on a free conscience, I am making the case for personal freedom to making wise choices for one’s health. Remove that freedom of conscience, by forcibly causing someone to do something against their will (and their body), and the ability to offer genuine thanksgiving is gone.[6] And without thanksgiving to God, faith is eliminated, and sin remains. Those who deny God may make light of this thinking, but for those who seek to do all things to the glory of God, this way of thinking stands at the core of their being. And this why liberty of conscience has always been protected in our nation.
Going back to the early church, Christians from many faith traditions are on record for defending the rights of individuals, Christians or otherwise, to live according to their faith.[7] Likewise, Andrew Walker, in his recent book on religious liberty, has argued that making religious choices freely is part of what it means to be made in God’s image.[8] Accordingly, religious liberty “is not a political question,” but a question of what it means to be human. Religious liberty, he argues, “arises from a theology of creation—that humanity bears a unique origin, design, and purpose in its constitution” (Liberty for All, 110). More confessionally, the Second London Confession (1689) puts it this way.
21.2. God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his word, or not contained in it. So that to believe such doctrines, or obey such commands out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith, an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also.
Christ alone is Lord of conscience. This is the critical point of tension in our moment. This tenet of our faith is in sharp conflict with state and health officials who exalt themselves as conscience-binding-lords.[9] They refuse to give room for religious exemptions or conscience, and thereby seek to bind the conscience which is free in Christ.[10] As state and health officials masquerade as conscience-binding-lords, we must reply: Solus Christus.[11]
Protestants have always opposed church or state pronouncements that coerce action or bind conscience. In 1769–70, six Baptists were jailed in Culpeper, Virginia for this conviction, and James Madison worked with likes of John Leland, another Virginia Baptist, to instantiate in the  Constitution of the United States (1789) a clause protecting religious liberty—what we know as the First Amendment. Thus, religious liberty has been a defining feature of America, and one that reflects the human dignity and personal freedom set forth in Scripture.[12]
Sadly, with the recent vaccine mandates, liberty of conscience has been withdrawn and in its place the state has eliminated the chance for citizens to live according to their religious convictions. As a result, many Christians, still unconvinced by the need for this vaccine, have lost the chance to be persuaded of its goodness and the chance to receive it with thanksgiving. Hence, the first reason that many Christians should seek a religious exemption is because instead of the state using the power of persuasion, which could preserve personal liberty and would lead to thanksgiving, the state has used its power of coercion to eliminate personal freedom for the sake of its religious belief that the vaccine is the savior we all need.
This is the second argument to be made, that instead of merely eliminating personal liberty and the chance to offer thanksgiving to God for this vaccine, the Biden administration and its various agencies have forced upon Christians a medical procedure that is championed as a secular sacrament. Still, before getting into that argument, the fact remains that many Christians who are called to do everything from faith and to give thanksgiving to God for every good gift, including vaccines, are not able to do that. And for that reason, those who cannot take the vaccine in faith, should not take the vaccine at all. Instead, they should seek a religious exemption and band together with others who share their convictions to stand for personal liberty.[13]
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When Genesis 5 traces the line from Adam to ­Noah, the refrain “and he died” is a reminder of the curse of death—but that each man had a son is a reminder of the promise that comes through birth (Gen. 3:15). The God who has put eternity into our hearts (­Eccl. 3:11) also means to put children into the womb (Mal. 2:15). When we grasp one, we will grasp the other.

The most significant thing happening in the world may very well be a thing that is not happening: Men and women are not having children. The biblical logic has been reversed, and the barren womb has said “Enough!” (Prov. 30:16). The paradigmatic affliction of the Old Testament is now the great desire of nations. If ­Rachel wanted children more than life itself (Gen. 30:1), our generation seems to have concluded that nothing gets in the way of life more than children.
True, human beings are reproducing—but in most countries, not fast enough to replace themselves. Measuring total fertility rate (TFR) is not an exact science, so the numbers vary from source to source, but the trends are undeniable. Outside of Africa, which is home to forty-one of the fifty most fertile nations, the planet faces a bleak demographic future. Many major European nations—such as Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and Spain—have a TFR of 1.50 births per woman or lower, disastrously below the replacement rate of 2.1. Italy’s future is especially grim, as that country has one of the lowest TFRs in the world, just 1.22. Virtually every country in Europe—including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Finland, and Denmark—has a TFR below 1.8. Only France, with a TFR of 2.03, comes close to the replacement rate. Decline is on its way. The Russian population is already contracting. Germany’s population is on pace to shrink from 83 million to around 70 million over the next thirty years. If trends do not reverse, Europe’s population will plummet from 750 million today to less than 500 million by the end of the century.
The numbers for East Asia are even worse. Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan each have a TFR around 1.0; South Korea’s is 0.81. These countries make aging and shrinking Japan, with its TFR of 1.37, look almost vibrant. And whatever military and economic power resides in China, increasingly children do not. Despite the replacement of the notorious one-child policy by a two-child policy in 2016 and then a three-child policy in 2021, China’s birthrate has continued to tumble. As recently as 2019, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted that China’s population would peak in 2029. But the decline has already started. This year, for the first time since the Great Famine (1959–61), China’s population has shrunk, by just over 1 percent since 2021, according to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
For many years, the United States appeared to be an exception to the rule of declining birthrates in the industrialized world. In 2007 the United States had a TFR of 2.1, whereas the figure for the European Union was below 1.6. But since then, the U.S. birthrate has fallen by 20 percent, to as low as 1.73 according to some estimates. What looked like American exceptionalism less than a generation ago now looks like mere delay.
At no time in history have people been having fewer children. In most countries the number of births per woman is well below the replacement rate, and even in countries with a high TFR, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa, the rate is dropping. The human race seems to have grown tired of itself.
The reasons for declining fertility are no doubt many and varied. Surely, some couples want to have more children but are unable to do so. Others struggle with economic pressures or health limitations. But fertility does not plummet worldwide without deeper issues at play, especially when people around the world are objectively richer, healthier, and afforded more conveniences than at any time in human history. Though individuals make their choices for many reasons, as a species we are suffering from a profound spiritual sickness—a metaphysical malaise in which children seem a burden on our time and a drag on our pursuit of happiness. Our malady is a lack of faith, and nowhere is the disbelief more startling than in the countries that once made up Christendom. “I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven,” God promised a delighted Abraham (Gen. 26:4). Today, in the lands of Abraham’s offspring, that blessing strikes most as a curse.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted worldwide famine and a “race to oblivion” in his book The Population Bomb. Fifty years later, the bomb has not detonated. Today, we must fear population bust rather than boom. The list of Very Bad Things—as Jonathan Last calls the consequences of declining fertility in his 2013 book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting—is long and depressing: an aging population, a shrinking workforce, a declining tax base, a decrease in technological and ­industrial dynamism, difficulty in finding a spouse, empty buildings and crumbling infrastructure, unfunded entitlements, and a general disquiet as more and more people get older and sicker with fewer people to care for them. Some future president might be forced to coin the campaign slogan, “It’s midnight in America.”
Last emphasizes economic and national concerns, the sort of developments that get the attention of presidents and parliaments. But the problems with declining fertility, and the accompanying collapse of the family, go much deeper. Whittaker Chambers was led to reject atheism by studying the miracle of his infant daughter’s ear. As he watched his daughter eat in her high chair, an “involuntary and unwanted” thought entered his mind: “Those intricate perfect ears” could have been “created only by immense design.” Faith can give us a heart for children, but children can also give us the eyes of faith.
When family formation fails, so does the inculcation of faith. This is Mary Eberstadt’s argument in How the West Really Lost God: Family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline; it is also a cause of it. Religious people are more inclined toward family life, but it is also the case that something about family life inclines people toward religion. There is no need to prioritize chicken or egg. It is the indissoluble connection that matters: The fortunes of faith and family rise and fall together.
There are many plausible reasons for this connection. The Christian story is set within the matrix of family—from the expectation of Eve’s Snake-Crusher, to the Promised Seed of the ­patriarchs, to great David’s Greater Son, to the birth of the Christ Child to Mary with Joseph at her side. The presence of children often drives parents to church, whether for help in raising them or because the experience of creating children helps us apprehend our Creator. The sacrifices required in parenting are the same kinds of sacrifices required in a life of Christian discipleship.
The connection between faith and family cuts in the opposite direction as well. As Eberstadt observes: “In an age when many people live lives that contradict the traditional Christian moral code, the mere existence of that code becomes a lightning rod for criticism and vituperation—which further drives some people away from church” (emphasis original). In other words, if your parents were divorced, or you grew up with two mommies, or you are currently sleeping with your girlfriend, or you are not particularly enamored of the thought of monogamy and raising children, the Christian faith—which has always been a scandal to sinners—carries an additional offense, which previous generations did not have to overcome. “People do not like to be told they are wrong,” Eberstadt notes, “or that those whom they love have done wrong. But Christianity cannot help sending that message.” No doubt, secularization has undermined family formation. Just as surely, though, the collapse of the married, intact, childrearing family has made the Christian faith harder to swallow. The biggest plausibility structure for faith is not intellectual but familial.
Carle C. Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization (1947) is remembered as a book about family types, but it is fundamentally a book about fertility. Borrowing from Augustine and Aquinas, Zimmerman argues that marriage has historically had three functions: proles, fides, and sacramentum. That is to say, the good of marriage (and of family life more broadly) depends on childbearing, sexual fidelity, and the permanence of the marriage bond (whether one holds to a Catholic view of the sacraments or not). ­Peter Lombard ordered the marital goods somewhat differently, placing fidelity before childbearing. But ­Zimmerman observes that the ordering of ­Augustine and Aquinas emphasizes childbearing—or ­prior to marriage, the intention of it—as the first and determinative step in the development of marital fidelity and permanence. Without children (or an openness to children), the other two commitments lose their moral and logical coherence.
Already in 1947, Zimmerman saw that the atomistic family—the family based on individualistic assumptions about happiness and the role of marriage—would lead to rapid and groundless divorce; that looser family structures would be proffered as solutions to family problems, only to make those problems worse; that the stigmas inhibiting adultery would deteriorate; that fertility would decrease; and that sexual perversion would be normalized. He also predicted that the decline of fertility among intellectuals would embolden them to challenge the validity of marriage itself; that it would take two generations (slowed by ­immigration) for family decay to become ­evident; and that the Christian Church would be the ­only cultural institution capable of encouraging a view of family grounded in something more than ­personal fulfillment.
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