General "God is One Person" from Matt Slick debate

[benadam1974]

We all agree there is one God (including Muslims and Jews) but this almost universal belief has been clouded by the doctrine of the Trinity. As a result, many Christians are forced to ask a rather silly question: How many is one God?

I will present 3 main points to show why in the Bible one God refers to One Divine Person, I.e., a non-human individual, a single Self.

1. The use of singular personal pronouns;
2. The one God described as a single soul, I.e., a divine Self;
3. Throughout the Bible the one God just is the Father.

First, the OT reveals the one God of Israel as YHWH, i.e., the Father of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And the NT teaches that this same one-Person God is the Father of Jesus, His unique, procreated human Son. Hence the importance of the Jewish-Christian creed known as the Shema from Deut 6.4:

Listen or Obey Israel:
The LORD, i.e., YHWH our God is One LORD, One YHWH.

When a Jewish scribe asked Jesus "of all the commandments, which is the most important?"
Jesus responded with this same creed in Mark 12.

The scribe then said to Jesus:
“You are right, Teacher.
You have spoken according to truth that He is One, and there is no one else besides Him, and to love Him with all the heart.”

The reader should immediately note 2 very simple, yet important facts about this statement:

1. The One Lord of this creed is identified by a proper, singular Divine Name, YHWH.
2. Jesus and the Jewish scribe agree the One Lord, One YHWH is a single He, a single Him.

The Bible uses these singular personal pronouns tens of thousands of times to define the one Lord God of the Shema. And as we all know, a singular personal pronoun means a single person, individual, self. When translated into English all 14 forms of the singular personal pronoun are used for that one God of the Bible. For example, "I," "Me," "Myself," “He,” “Him,” “Himself," etc. Add to this the fact that words like “God” and “YHWH” are used as proper names followed by singular verbs. So whatever language you speak, the meaning is always the same, i.e., the one God of the Bible is one Divine single Self.


For example, consider the words "he" and "himself" used for the one God in scripture.

Isa 93.1b BST
The Lord [YHWH] reigns.
He has clothed himself with honour.
The Lord has clothed and girded himself with strength.
For he has established the world, which shall not be moved.

Heb 6.13 CSB
For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater to swear by, he swore by himself.

This one Divine Single Self declares time and again that He alone is the Creator.

Isa 44.24
“I am the LORD, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself."

Some Hebrew mss. even add: "Who was with Me?"

The Brown, Driver and Briggs, Lexicon of the Old Testament says the phrase “by myself” means “in a state of separation, by one’s self.”

Second, the biblical writers describe the one God as one single Divine soul, i.e., a single Divine Person. In Hebrew the word is nephesh which any standard Hebrew lexicon like the BDB and Strong's Concordance define as a "self, person." Strong's adds "God’s being or person [self] is described as a soul" using Jer. 5.9:

“Shall I not avenge Myself [My soul]?"

Amos 6:8a Douay-Rheims Bible
“The Lord God hath sworn by his own soul.”

Lastly, in the OT the one Lord God is always identified as the Father alone:

Deut 32:6 CEV
Israel, the Lord is your Father, the one who created you, but you repaid him by being foolish.

Mal 2.10 ESVUK
Have we not all one Father?
Has not one God created us?

Other places where the one God is explicitly defined as the Father: Jer. 3.19; 31.9; Isa 63.16; 1Chron 29.10; Mal 1.6; Pro 3.12; Ps 103.13.

In the NT Jesus calls the Father "the only true God," John 17:3

Now this is eternal life:
That they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

i.e., the Father is the Only One Who is true God.

As a matter of fact, the ancient so-called early Church Fathers, like some modern-day trini scholars and even dictionaries agree!

The famous German Catholic scholar Karl Rahner agreed that “The Father is regarded as God par excellence.” And that this “goes back to the first Christian communities, because it is based on Scripture itself. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian all witness to this usage. This conception, even if not in so sharply defined a form, finds expression in the early Creeds; and it continued to be handed down in tradition. The Cappadocians had a general view of the Father as the absolute God or as the divine ousia.”

The Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, volume 1, p. 807:

"To men of the New Testament God was the God of the Old Testament, the living God, a Person….
Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the monotheism of the Old Testament was never abstract because the God of the Old Testament was never a conception or a substance, but always a Person."

Lastly, Trinitarian Dr. Millard Erickson makes this incredible admission regarding his own beliefs:

It is claimed that the doctrine of the Trinity is a very important, crucial, and even basic doctrine.
If that is indeed the case, should it not be somewhere more clearly, directly, and explicitly stated in the Bible?
If this is the doctrine that especially constitutes Christianity’s uniqueness, as over against unitarian monotheism on the one hand, and polytheism on the other hand, how can it be only implied in the biblical revelation?
“It is unlikely that any text of Scripture can be shown to teach the doctrine of the Trinity in a clear, direct an unmistakable fashion.”

Thus, the singular personal pronouns, the word soul, and the fact that the one God just is the Father prove that God is One Person.