Scholar Mark Edwards on Christological Subordinationism (John 1:1, Etc.)

"There is little in the New Testament to suggest that the Son is equal to the Father, and not even an explicit assertion of their coeternity. The Word (not yet called the Son) was with the Father in the beginning (John 1.1)—an expression which takes us no further back than the origin of the world, perhaps no more than four thousand years before the incarnation on a strict construal of biblical chronology. He (or should we say 'it'?2) is said to be theos, but the absence of the definite article—used in the previous clause when the subject is God the Father–permits, or may even embolden, us to take this usage of theos as predicative rather than denominative. The New English Bible captures this well in its rendering 'what God was the word was', and the closest parallel in the Bible itself is Exodus 7.1, 'I shall make thee theos to Pharaoh', where the implication is evidently that Moses will be all that Pharaoh knows of God, not that he will be God in substance. There is no other passage in which the word theos is incontrovertibly applied to the Son: even Thomas’s exclamation 'My Lord and my God' (John 20.28) is understood by a minority of readers as a prayer of thanksgiving rather than an apostrophe to the resurrected Jesus."

Source: Edwards, Mark Thomas. “Is Subordinationism a Heresy?” TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology (2020): pages 2-3.