Why I Am Convinced That the Trinity Doctrine Is a False Doctrine
Why I Am Convinced That the Trinity Doctrine Is a False Doctrine
Proof Texts
A proof text is one which can only be legitimately interpreted one way i.e. it is very plain as to what it means.
DEUTERONOMY 6:4
“Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one”
MARK 12:28, 29, 32
“…one of the scribes…asked [Jesus], ‘Which commandment is first and most important of all [in its nature]?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first and principle one of all commands is: Hear, O Israel, The Lord (Yahweh from Deut. 6:4) our God is one (Gk eis and so indicating one person) Lord; and you shall love the Lord ... And the scribe said to him...You have said truly that He is one (Gk eis) and there is no other but Him’” (Amplified Bible).
JOHN 17:1, 3
Jesus prayed, “Father…this is the life of the age to come—that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus the Messiah, whom you sent.”
1 CORINTHIANS 8:6
“…yet to us there is one God, the Father, from whom is everything, and for whom we live; and one lord, Jesus the Messiah, through whom is everything, and through whom we live.”
1 TIMOTHY 2:5
“Indeed, there is but one God, and one mediator between God and humanity, a human—Messiah Jesus.”
GALATIANS 3:20
“However, the mediator implies more than one person, and God is one person (Gk eis)!”
EPHESIANS 4:6 “there is one God and Father of all, who is over all”
The Singular Person Yahweh Is the One True God
In spite of Trinitarian tinkering with language by redefining the word “person” to being simply “mind” there is no biblical reason to imagine that God is triune i.e. three persons in one essence or three minds in one essence. So, however one defines the word “person” God speaks of Himself as a single person with a single mind and is spoken about in this way throughout the Scriptures.
When we look at the entire Bible there are more than 20,000 singular personal pronouns and verbs attributed to God (e.g. Deut. 4:35; Ex. 20:3-5; Matt. 4:10; Matt. 19:4) indicating that He is a single person. If the Scriptures did teach Trinitarianism then all references to the “persons” of God require the use of plural personal pronouns and verbs. Yet this never occurs.
NOTE: The “we/us” passages (Gen. 1:26; 3:22; 11:7 and Isaiah 6:8) all have a natural explanation as found in 1 Kings 22:19, 23; Job 15:8 and Jeremiah 23:18 showing that God is speaking, not within Himself, but so as to include others—almost certainly the angels (Job 38:7).
ONLY YAHWEH IS GOD
So how many persons must there be in Yahweh God according to God’s statement in Isaiah? “Yahweh...I am the first and I am the last...there is no God except me” (Isa. 44:6 NJB). Evidently, He is only one person. Therefore, there is no God in the sense of the very alien concept of multiple personalities within one essence as Trinitarianism proposes because there are not three persons in Yahweh. He always speaks using the grammar of a single person.
As an illustration, whenever one is told that someone did something alone, one never imagines that three persons or three minds did it, but rather it is common sense to think that a single person using his single mind did that particular deed. This is true of the picture that the Bible gives us concerning Yahweh God when it says “...the LORD [YHWH] alone guided him, no foreign god was with him” (Deut. 32:12). So, if there were two or three persons within the essence of “Yahweh” then no one individual could be said to be alone. Indeed, even the word ‘alone’ refers to a single individual, in this case Yahweh. In fact, there are many Hebrew Scripture texts that show us that Yahweh is one person because of His being alone in His actions: Ex. 22:20; 2 Kings 19:15, 19; Neh. 9:6, Ps. 4:8, 72:18, 83:18, 148:13; Isa. 2:11 and 44:24.
In the Shema—“Yahweh Is One”—Not Three
The Hebrew word shema means “hear” or “listen” and is the first word in Deuteronomy 6:4 which gives Israel’s declaration of the oneness and uniqueness of God when it says, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD (Heb. Yahweh) our God (Heb. Elohim), the LORD (Yahweh) is one” (Deut. 6:4 NIV). Here the NIV is carefully following the Hebrew grammatical structure as do most other translations and so leads to the conclusion that God is one person because he is Yahweh and “Yahweh is one.” This usage of the Hebrew words Yahweh and Elohim in Deuteronomy 6:4 leads Trinitarian apologist Murray Harris to conclude that:
[In Heb. 1] o theos [God] was understood to be ‘God, the Father.’ Similarly the differentiation made between o theos as the one who speaks in both eras, and uios (Son) as his final means of speaking shows that in the author’s mind it was not the Triune God of Christian theology who spoke to the forefathers by the prophets. That is to say that for the author of Hebrews (as for all NT writers one may suggest), the God of our fathers, Yahweh, was none other than ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Such a conclusion is entirely consistent with the regular NT usage of o theos. It would be inappropriate for Elohim [God, 2,570 times] or Yahweh [6,800 times] ever to refer to the Trinity in the OT, when in the NT theos regularly refers to the Father alone and apparently never to the Trinity. Jesus as God, p. 47n.
Furthermore, The Illustrated Bible Dictionary notes that: “There is only one supreme and true God and he is a Person.” This in coming from a Christian source is in addition to the fact that Judaism today recognizes the Shema as referring to a unipersonal God and never to two or more persons. In fact, the Jews have never considered God to be comprised of two or three persons. Sadly, it is the Trinitarian proposition that because God calls Himself “I am” in Exodus 3:14 that Jesus must also be God, making two persons who are God. This faulty reasoning is because Jesus said in John 8:58, “before Abraham was I am” and therefore making a second person in the Godhead. However, the two phrases are quite different as is shown in Chapter 54 of my book. Nevertheless, for example in Exodus:
““Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:13, 14).
However, the correct meaning is: “I will be what I will be” although the LXX gives, “I am the One who Is (exists).” Nevertheless, in both Hebrew or Greek, the grammar of these pronouns and verbs is singular, thereby showing that God speaks of Himself as a singular person. This is a very important fact for those seeking to know how many God is. Indeed, the Jews knew of only one person who was God as noted in 2 Samuel, “For who is God but Yahweh” (2 Sam. 22:32 NJB) and neither Jesus nor the holy spirit are Yahweh who is shown in the shema to be one person.
In the New Testament the Greek Word for One
Means One
Means One
Further to the fact that Jesus is not part of a so-called “Godhead” the Apostle Paul stated that, “for there is one (Gk eis) God, also one (Gk eis) mediator of God and of men, the man (Gk anthropos) Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). Because the Greek word eis is a numerical absolute, the term, “one mediator” obviously refers to a singular person. Clearly, the term “one God” is in the same sense as the term “one mediator,” and so also refers to a singular person. Furthermore, the one mediator—Jesus—is called anthropos (man) and so is fully human in the same sense as all other humans. So, the Greek words eis (masculine) = ONE PERSON and, en (neuter) = ONE THING. (See Appendix B).
Only the Father Is the Almighty God
Of course, Trinitarians state that they worship only one God, but that He comprises three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet this latter statement is in direct contradiction of Malachi’s statement that only the Father is the God when he says: “Have we not all one (Heb. echad) Father (in the national sense)? Has not one (Heb. echad) God created us?” (Mal. 2:10). So, because the Hebrew word echad is the numerical absolute term, the term “one Father” obviously refers to a singular person. Clearly, the term “one God” is in the same sense as the term “one Father” and so also refers to a singular person. God is also the Father of Messiah in the personal sense (Ps. 2:7, 89:26; 2 Sam. 7:14; and 1 Chron. 17:14).
GOD IS THE SAME IN BOTH OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
Some Trinitarians propose that the ancient Jewish belief in a singular person as God was superseded with a further revelation as to how many “persons” make up God according to the New Testament i.e. that Jesus was then revealed as “God the Son.” However, this idea falls down when one examines the statements by the New Testament writers, which show that they never contradicted the Jewish understanding that Yahweh was the one person God of Israel and was the Father of the nation. The Jews stated that: “We have one Father—God” (John 8:41), and the disciple James said to Jews, “You believe that God is one…” (Jas. 2:19). Also, Paul states that: “I confess to you [Governor Felix], that according to the way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers…” (Acts 22:14). So, in Romans he asks, “Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one” (Rom. 3:29). Earlier, to the Jews, Jesus had stated that, “…you receive glory from one another and do not seek glory from the only God” (John 5:44). All of these statements show that New Testament thinking was identical to that of the Jews who believed the shema of Deuteronomy 6:4.
So, neither Jesus nor his emissaries contradicted their recognition that only the Father was God. In fact, Jesus further stated that the God of the Jews was his own Father when he said: “It is my Father (in the personal sense) who glorifies me, of whom you [the Jews] say, He is our God” (John 8:54).
Jesus Was Not a Trinitarian
JESUS REPEATS THE SHEMA
One must ask: If Trinitarianism were true then surely Jesus would have known it was true and so believed and clearly taught the Trinity. However, as a good Jew he confirmed the original belief stated in the Shema (Deut. 6:4) that God, who is Yahweh in the Shema, is one person. This was revealed when:
“…one of the scribes…asked [Jesus], ‘Which commandment is first and most important of all [in its nature]?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first and principle one of all commands is: Hear, O Israel, The Lord (Yahweh from Deut. 6:4) our God is one (Gk eis and so indicating one person) Lord; and you shall love the Lord ... And the scribe said to him...You have said truly that He is one (Gk eis) and there is no other but Him’” (Mark 12:28, 29, 32 Amplified Bible).
Both Jesus and this scribe are here affirming the Unitarian creed of Deuteronomy 6:4, that is, that Yahweh is one person and so meaning that God is one person.
“God, the Father” Is Not a First Person of the Trinity
Because the Scriptures use the term “God the Father,” Trinitarians assume that Jesus must be ‘God the Son’ and that there must be a ‘God the Holy Spirit.’ For example: “For on him [the Son of Man] God the Father has set his seal” (John 6:27). However:
THERE IS NO ‘GOD THE SON ’OR ‘GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT’
Because there is no mention of a ‘God the Son’ or a ‘God the Holy Spirit’ anywhere in the Scriptures, the biblical phrase “God the Father,” which occurs 15 times in the New Testament, gives no logical reason to assume that this phrase refers to a first person in the Trinitarian sense. In fact, in all of the Scriptures there is no “God the Father” in _such a Trinitarian sense as implying that there is a second person or a third person according to the following comparisons:
THE COMPLETE GOD = THE FATHER
In John 8:42 Jesus says: “I came from God,” and in John 16:28 he also says: “I came from the Father...” He further says, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17). Here Jesus does not distinguish between the terms “the Father” and “God.” This causes confusion in Trinitarianism: Is only the Father all of God or is the Father only part of God? Scripturally only the Father is all of God. Furthermore, the phrase “God the Father,” as expressed in Galatians 1:3, Ephesians 6:23, 2 Timothy 1:2, and Titus 1:4, is used in these verses in similar contexts to the phrase “God our Father” in the following greetings and means the same with reference to the One God who is our Father.
GOD AND JESUS ARE DISTINCT IN THE GREETINGS IN THE LETTERS
In the majority of the letters in the New Testament the various introductory salutations used make a total distinction between God and Jesus. The Father is shown to be God and Jesus is shown to be the Messiah. For example, in Romans 1:7 Paul says: “Peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” This phrase is also found in 1 Cor. 1:3; 2 Cor. 1:2; Eph. 1:2; Phil. 1:2; Col 1:2; 1 Thess. 1:1,3; 2; 2 Thess. 1:2; 1 Tim. 1:1:2 and Philemon 1:3. These all show that the Father only is God and that Jesus is a separate person to God.
Also the phrase “God the Father” contextually means the same as “God and Father,” as in the following texts: “...according to the foreknowledge of God the Father ... Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:2, 3), “…one God and Father of all, who is over all” (Eph. 4:6) and “…before our God and Father” (1 Thess. 3:13).
THERE IS NO ‘GOD THE TRINITY’ IN THE BIBLE
In all the immediately above texts Jesus is not referring to a “God the Father” and a separate “God the Trinity.” For all the events recorded in the Scriptures there is no indication that some were performed by a Trinitarian version of “God the Father” in contrast to some being performed by other separate parts of God or the full Trinity.
Examples are: The Genesis Creation, the Flood, and the parting of the Red Sea. Regarding the Genesis creation Genesis 1:2 says “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” but we know it was God who was responsible for the whole creation (Isa. 44:24) by his word-spirit-power (Ps. 33:6, Job 33:4, and Jer. 10:12).
So, when God’s voice is heard at the time of Jesus’ baptism it is not the voice of only part of God—a Trinitarian God the Father; but rather it is the One only true God Himself who speaks and sends His spirit on the fully human Jesus. If the Spirit were Almighty God and if Jesus were Almighty God that would really make two further almighty Gods in addition to the true Almighty God. This would no longer be the monotheism of the Bible. Again, Trinitarian Murray Harris establishes that: “When o theos is used, we are to assume that the NT writers have the Father in mind unless the context makes this sense of o theos impossible.” Jesus as God, p. 47.
When Trinitarians vacillate between the two different definitions of God i.e. sometimes God is the Father or at other times God is the Trinity, they either cause confusion or they are positing tritheism.
NOTE: Please see Chapter 19 to examine the two times that the context makes the word theos a reference to Jesus, that is, in a representational sense.
“The Father” Is the Qualifying Term for “One God”
The Apostle Paul notifies us that, “for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things” (1 Cor. 8:6). This grammatical construction is called “in apposition” so that the second noun describes the first noun. For example, “Gladstone, the famous statesman, was born in Liverpool.” So, in 1 Corinthians 8:6 the noun “Father” is in apposition to the noun “God.” Therefore, only “the Father” is the “one God,” as Jesus said, “I have come in my Father’s name … the only God” (John 5:43, 44), and “Father...you (singular), the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:1, 3) and “Now the mediator is not of one, but God is one (Gk eis = one person)” (Gal. 3:20). This is rendered in the original Amplified Bible as: “Yet God is [only] one Person”
Summary Texts
DEUTERONOMY 6:4
“Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one”
JOHN 17:1, 3
Jesus prayed, “Father…this is the life of the age to come—that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus the Messiah, whom you sent.” So only the Father is the true God. Jesus is the Messiah (Christ).
1 CORINTHIANS 8:6
“…yet to us there is one God, the Father, from whom is everything, and for whom we live; and one lord, Jesus the Messiah, through whom is everything, and through whom we live.” Again, only the Father is God. Jesus is the human lord—the Messiah.
1 TIMOTHY 2:5
“Indeed, there is but one God, and one mediator between God and humanity, a human—Messiah Jesus.” Clearly, Jesus as the “one mediator” is not “the one God” who is shown in the above texts to be “the Father” only.
GALATIANS 3:20
“However, the mediator implies more than one person, and God is one person!”
The Greek word here is eis and means “one person”—a detail lost in most translations. However, the original Amplified Bible shows this clearly as do the Greek-English Interlinears.
EPHESIANS 4:6 “there is one God and Father of all, who is over all”
………..
So, from these and many other texts God can be seen not to be two persons or three persons—but one person. He is the Father as shown in the above texts. These New Testament texts are in full harmony with the ancient Jewish understanding of God as being one person as stated in Deuteronomy 6:4: “Listen, Israel! Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one” This is taken from the Hebrew Interlinear original text.
Concluding Comment
The Scriptures make it very plain that there is only one Almighty God and that He is one person—the Father. In Old Testament times He made Himself known as Yahweh, and “Yahweh is one” according to the Shema. Furthermore, and most importantly, some 20,000 singular personal pronouns and verbs are used with reference to Him making it very plain that He is a single person, rather than a triune entity. If Jesus were also the Almighty God, he had plenty of opportunities to directly say, “I am the Almighty God” but he never did so!
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