Authority is command and so is not a kind of receptivity or subordination, but any authority not creating ex nihilo has to work within given conditions and so is subordinate to these givens as a condition of exercise.
These givens are volitional since we have to accept them in some way or another, though much of this acceptance was done before we were born by those with the power to decide for us. Whether contemporary Americans accept republican government was decided by someone else just as much as the decision that makes one a native speaker of English or Portuguese, a meat-eater or vegan, African or Latino, Atheist or Hindu. My parents could have chosen to speak Klingon to me, or to divorce each other and marry people of other races before I was conceived, or feed me whatever food or doctrines they felt like.* All such decisions are made by others, and at least some of them are deeply significant and irrevocable.
Others often consent for us; if they cannot then the normal life of raising and ruling is nothing but violence. Jefferson’s musing that no generation has the right to bind the next to a form of government sounds noble but makes all child raising unjust, and if we understand the claim that “no one can make another believe something without their consent” as ruling out the possibility of consenting for others we are committed to the same absurdity. What godparents and parents decide for a six-week-old child being baptized only formalizes a decision that parents are making all the time, and which they make even in the choice of whom, when and where to become parents at all. Governments claim an even more expansive power to consent for future citizens, even after these future citizens become adults. No American has been asked recently to vote on continuing colonial independence, and none needs to be.
The Fatherhood of God involves a similar power of consent for others, and so creation involves a veritable divine command theory.
*Though in keeping with the argument, some of these decisions might well be made for the parents in advance, since any authority they have is conditioned and made possible by things they have already consented to by others.
Just Thomism 