Why we reject
the Trinity.

Begin where Jesus and Paul identify God.

Jesus’ prayer addresses the Father in verse 1. In verse 3, he identifies that Father as the only true God and himself as the one sent by him. Paul’s confession likewise names the Father as the one God, the source of all things, and Jesus as the one Lord through whom God works.

We take these explicit identifications as the starting point for understanding the more difficult passages. The distinction is not merely between two speakers: it is between the God who sends and the Christ he sends, the source of all things and the Lord through whom his purpose is accomplished.

Paul’s confession leaves no room for a second person within the one God. He begins, “there is none other God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:4), and then names that one God: “the Father”. Jesus is not added to the one God; he is the one God has made “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). Trinitarians reply that these verses distinguish persons within God. We answer that reply below.

The relationship continues in glory.

This is the force of the cumulative argument. Jesus calls the Father his God after rising from the dead. The exalted Lord does so again in his message to Philadelphia. Paul carries the Son’s subjection forward to the completion of his Kingdom work.

These passages cannot all be explained as descriptions of temporary weakness before the resurrection. The dependence belongs to the risen and glorified Son too. Our reading is that exaltation confirms his unique authority under God; it does not make him a second co-equal person within God.

Honour the Son as the Father commands.

Rejecting the Trinity does not reduce Jesus to an ordinary teacher. His birth is God’s act. He is sinless, the perfect revelation of his Father, the appointed judge, the risen Saviour and the Lord to whom every knee must bow.

John 5:19–30 joins extraordinary honour with received authority: the Father gives the Son life and judgment. Philippians 2:9–11 describes God’s exaltation of the obedient Jesus, culminating in universal confession of his lordship to the Father’s glory. We honour the Son fully by receiving the identity and authority his Father gives him.

What does classical Trinitarianism actually claim?

Classical Trinitarianism teaches one God in three distinct persons sharing one divine nature. It does not teach that the Father and Son are the same person, or that there are three independent gods. See the Catholic Catechism, paragraphs 253–255, for one authoritative Trinitarian formulation.

A Trinitarian therefore accepts that Jesus prays to the Father and distinguishes himself from him. He usually explains Jesus’ continuing subjection by saying that Jesus speaks as a man: in his human nature he has a God, while in his divine nature he is equal with the Father.

That explanation does not fit the texts. Jesus does not say the Father is God from a human point of view; he says the Father is “the only true God” (John 17:3). Scripture never divides Jesus into a part that has a God and a part that does not. It is the Son himself, risen, immortal and reigning, who will “be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). A God who has a God, and who will be subject to him for ever, is not co-equal with him.

Some Trinitarians read 1 Corinthians 8:6 as placing Jesus inside Israel’s confession of the one God, by sharing out its words “God” and “Lord” between Father and Son. But Paul had just said “there is none other God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:4), and verse 6 tells us who that one God is: the Father, “of whom are all things”. Jesus is the one Lord “by whom are all things”, the agent through whom God works. Paul gives Jesus an exceptional place; he does not make him a second person of the one God.

The issue is decided by the whole scriptural account, and that account is consistent. Our case does not rest on the absence of the word “Trinity”; it rests on what Jesus and his apostles say about who God is.

What about passages that call Jesus God?

Thomas: “My Lord and my God”

Thomas addresses Jesus, and we do not explain the words away as an exclamation aimed at the Father. Thomas had heard Jesus say, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). Seeing the risen Jesus, he saw the God who had raised him and was revealed in him, and he confessed him as the one in whom God was present.

The same chapter fixes the meaning. A few verses earlier the risen Jesus calls the Father “my God” (John 20:17), and John states the purpose of his whole book in verse 31: that you “might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God”. Thomas’s confession is the climax of that book, not a contradiction of it.

Hebrews 1:8–9: “Thy throne, O God”

These words come from Psalm 45, and the psalm tells us who first heard them. It is “A Song of loves” addressed to a human king of David’s line on his wedding day: “I speak of the things which I have made touching the king” (Psalm 45:1). The queen stands at his right hand, and his bride is told to “forget also thine own people, and thy father’s house” (Psalm 45:9–10). That king is called elohim, God, because he sat on God’s throne as God’s representative. Hebrew uses the word this way elsewhere. God told Moses, “I have made thee a god to Pharaoh” (Exodus 7:1), and of Israel’s judges he said, “Ye are gods” (Psalm 82:6). Jesus himself quoted that verse when he was accused of blasphemy, and the claim he defended was “I am the Son of God” (John 10:34–36).

The next verse shows what kind of “God” is meant. The one addressed has a God of his own: “God, even thy God, hath anointed thee”. And he is anointed “above thy fellows”, raised above companions of his own kind. The one true God has no God over him and no fellows to be raised above. A man anointed above his brethren is exactly what the Messiah is (Hebrews 2:11, 17). Hebrews 1:8 gives Jesus the highest royal title God has given any man; it does not make him the God who anoints him.

Hebrews 1:10–12: “Thou, Lord, in the beginning”

Hebrews next quotes Psalm 102:25–27: “Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands.” Taken alone, it sounds like the creation of Genesis 1. But Hebrews names its own subject at the start of the next chapter: “unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world to come, whereof we speak” (Hebrews 2:5). The writer is speaking about the age to come, not the first creation.

Psalm 102 is about the same thing. Its centre is a future work of God: “When the Lord shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his glory”; “This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord”; “When the people are gathered together, and the kingdoms, to serve the Lord” (Psalm 102:16, 18, 22). The creation in view is a people and a kingdom.

Scripture often uses heavens and earth for a nation’s order of rulers and people. God put his words in his servant’s mouth “that I may plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, Thou art my people” (Isaiah 51:16). When God says through Haggai, “I will shake the heavens, and the earth” (Haggai 2:6), Hebrews explains that this “signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken”, so that “those things which cannot be shaken may remain” (Hebrews 12:26–27). The old order “decayeth and waxeth old” and is “ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13), just as the heavens of Hebrews 1:11 “wax old as doth a garment”.

So the Son lays the foundation of a new heavens and earth: the world to come, which will replace the present order and never pass away. He does it as the one God “appointed heir of all things” (Hebrews 1:2), who “by inheritance obtained a more excellent name” (Hebrews 1:4). The eternal God inherits nothing and is appointed by no one.

Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1

Paul looks for “the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Jesus told us how that appearing will look: “the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels” (Matthew 16:27). The Greek reads literally ‘the appearing of the glory of the great God’: the Father’s glory will be seen in his Son. The same letter opens with “God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour” (Titus 1:4), keeping the two distinct.

Peter writes of “the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:1). His very next sentence shows how he thinks of them: “the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord” (2 Peter 1:2). God and Jesus are two, and Peter names them side by side.

Colossians 2:9: “all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”

Paul has already told us where that fulness came from: “it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell” (Colossians 1:19). The fulness dwells in Jesus because the Father chose to put it there. And Paul prays that ordinary believers “might be filled with all the fulness of God” (Ephesians 3:19). To be filled with God’s fulness is to have God’s character and power living in you fully. In Jesus that is complete; it does not make him the God who fills him.

Philippians 2:10–11: every knee shall bow

Paul takes words God spoke of himself, “unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isaiah 45:23), and applies them to Jesus. He also tells us why and to what end. It is God who “highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name” (Philippians 2:9), and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord “to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11). Bowing to the Son God has exalted is how the world bows to God. The honour is given to Jesus and ends with the Father.

Revelation: “the first and the last”

In Isaiah, God says, “I am the first, and I am the last” (Isaiah 44:6). In Revelation, Jesus uses the same title (Revelation 1:17; 22:13). But Revelation says at its first verse where everything in it came from: it is “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him” (Revelation 1:1). God has given his own titles to the Son who acts for him. Jesus explains the title in a way that could never be said of the immortal God: “These things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive” (Revelation 2:8). The same speaker says, “I am the root and the offspring of David” (Revelation 22:16), and he speaks four times of “my God” (Revelation 3:12).

Revelation 5 gives the Lamb extraordinary honour, and keeps him distinct from God. The Lamb “took the book out of the right hand of him that sat upon the throne” (Revelation 5:7), and the praise goes “unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb” (Revelation 5:13). That is the pattern of the whole New Testament: the highest honour for the Son, given by the Father, and never at the cost of the distinction between them.

1 John 5:7–8: “three that bear record in heaven”

The King James Version reads: “there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth”. The words from “in heaven” to “in earth” are a later addition. They are absent from the Greek manuscripts of 1 John until the late medieval period, appearing first in Latin copies and only afterwards in a handful of late Greek ones. Erasmus left them out of the first two editions of his printed Greek New Testament, and modern translations, Trinitarian ones included, omit them or mark them as doubtful. They should not be used as proof by anyone.

Removing them does not settle the question either way. What John certainly wrote is that there are three witnesses, “the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one” (1 John 5:8). That is testimony to Jesus as the Son of God (5:5, 9), and it says nothing about the nature of God himself. The case for or against the Trinity has to be made from passages whose text is secure, and that is where we have made ours.

What about the Word and Christ’s pre-existence?

We understand the Word as God’s own self-expression, wisdom and purpose, made flesh in Jesus. The opening describes the divine Word; verse 14 tells of its embodiment in the Son. We do not understand this as the incarnation of a personally pre-existent Son. The Word was fully divine because it was God’s own Word.

“All things were made by him” (John 1:3) does not change this. The Greek word logos is grammatically masculine, so “him” is one possible translation, but the first printed English New Testament, Tyndale’s, and after it the Geneva Bible rendered it it: all things were made by God’s word. That is how the Old Testament speaks of creation: “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made” (Psalm 33:6), and in Genesis 1 God creates by speaking. John’s Word is what God said and purposed, not a second person beside him.

John 17:5, where Jesus asks for the glory he had with the Father “before the world was”, deserves a direct answer, and the same prayer supplies it. Two verses later Jesus says of disciples who had not yet been born, “the glory which thou gavest me I have given them” (John 17:22). Glory can be “had” and “given” in God’s purpose before it is possessed in fact. That is how Scripture speaks of the Lamb “slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) and of Christ “foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times” (1 Peter 1:20). God “calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Romans 4:17).

Jesus prayed for glory that was promised to him. He did not remember a life he had lived before Bethlehem. Luke tells us when the Son of God began: “that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Our fuller study works through every pre-existence passage.

The Holy Spirit: God’s own presence and power.

Luke 1:35 places the Holy Spirit alongside the power of the Highest in describing Jesus’ conception. In 1 Corinthians 2:10–12, Paul compares God’s Spirit knowing God with a person’s spirit knowing that person. We understand the Spirit as God himself acting, revealing and empowering, rather than another co-equal person.

The Spirit speaks, directs, wills and can be grieved (Acts 13:2; 1 Corinthians 12:11; Ephesians 4:30). These are real expressions of divine agency. Our answer is that God speaks and acts by his Spirit; the language does not require an additional divine person. The advocate passages in John 14–16 likewise describe the continuing presence and guidance of the Father and Son with the disciples.

Matthew 28:19 names Father, Son and Holy Spirit together, and baptism is into all that God has revealed in them. But naming three together does not make them three co-equal persons. Paul charges Timothy “before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels” (1 Timothy 5:21), and no one concludes that the angels share the divine nature. The verse names the God who saves, the Son through whom he saves, and the power by which he works.

A fuller creed requires a biblical case.

Nicaea’s brief confession of the Holy Spirit became a much fuller definition in the creeds of the later church councils. The historical question is what was added. The decisive question is whether those additions faithfully express the apostles’ teaching. The documents let us distinguish the two.

Did the Spirit first become a distinct person in 381?

The surviving writings rule out that simple account. Before Nicaea, Tertullian already distinguished Father, Son and Spirit, while arguing for their unity of substance and power. Yet his language also differs from later formulations: he calls the Father “the entire substance” and the Son “a derivation and portion of the whole”. His account combines divine unity with an ordered derivation from the Father. It should be examined in its own terms, rather than assumed to be identical either to the mature creed or to Christadelphian belief. Tertullian, Against Praxeas, chapters 2 and 9.

Gregory of Nazianzus, himself a defender of the Spirit’s deity, reports substantial disagreement in his own time. He describes Christians who regarded the Spirit as divine activity, as a creature, as God, or who withheld judgment. This is evidence of a contested development, not a uniform early consensus for either side. Gregory, Oration 31, section 5.

The challenge these documents raise

A council’s definition cannot substitute for demonstrating the doctrine from Scripture. Trinitarians understand these formulations as clarifying what the apostles already taught. Our objection is that the added definitions must still be reconciled with the apostles’ explicit identification of the Father as the one God and of Jesus as his Son.

1. Identity: where does Scripture identify the one God as three co-equal persons, rather than the Father whom Jesus calls the only true God?
2. The Son: how does equality of divine being account for the risen Jesus’ continuing reference to his God and his final subjection to him?
3. The Spirit: what establishes a distinct, co-equal person, beyond passages describing God speaking and acting by his own Spirit?

These questions require engagement with the Trinitarian readings already considered above. The date of a formulation cannot, by itself, prove it false. Our case rests on the scriptural pattern; the history shows why the fuller creedal formula needs to be argued for, rather than simply read back into every mention of Father, Son and Spirit.

Return to the scriptural foundation · Compare the Trinitarian reply · Examine the Spirit passages

The confession we believe fits the whole account.

One God, the Father; one Lord, Jesus Christ, his uniquely begotten Son; and God’s Spirit accomplishing his will. This honours Jesus’ divine origin, sinless obedience, saving work and supreme authority under his Father, while preserving the distinction Jesus himself makes.

We therefore reject the Trinity and confess Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God. We invite you to read the passages in context and bring the strongest text you think this explanation has not answered.

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