Pick the reply a well-read Trinitarian would make, from the Shema to John 1:1, and see how we answer each one from the Bible.
We state our position first. Under it are the replies a well-read Trinitarian would make, put as strongly as we can put them. Choose one to see our answer from the Bible, then the next reply that person might make. Every answer links to the fuller case, and every exchange has its own link you can share.
There is one God, the Father. Jesus is his Son: begotten by God through Mary, raised from the dead and made Lord, and even in glory he still calls the Father his God. The Holy Spirit is God’s own power at work, not a third person.
“But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.”
We agree there is one God. The Trinity doesn’t deny it: it says the one God exists eternally as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Verses that say ‘God is one’ don’t touch the doctrine.
Then the question is not whether God is one, but who the one God is, and Scripture answers by name. “To us there is but one God, the Father” (1 Corinthians 8:6). “One God and Father of all” (Ephesians 4:6). Jesus prays to his Father as “the only true God” (John 17:3). “There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Not once is the one God said to be three. Again and again he is said to be the Father, and Jesus is distinguished from him as his Son.
In 1 Corinthians 8:6 Paul takes the two key words of the Shema, ‘God’ and ‘Lord’, and gives one to the Father and one to Jesus. He is including Jesus within the identity of Israel’s one God.
It is a serious reading, but notice how Paul sets it up. Two verses earlier he says “there is none other God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:4). Verse 6 then 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 one through whom God acts. And ‘Lord’ is a title God gave him: “God hath made that same Jesus … both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). Paul gives Jesus a unique place under God, not a share in being God.
Read the full case: What Trinitarianism claims, and our reply
The Hebrew word for ‘one’ in Deuteronomy 6:4, echad, can mean a compound unity, as when husband and wife become ‘one flesh’ (Genesis 2:24). The Shema leaves room for plurality within God.
Echad is simply the Hebrew number one. It is used of a single man: “Abraham was one” (Ezekiel 33:24). In “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24) the plurality comes from the two people, not from the word for one. The best guide is how Jesus and his hearers understood the creed. When Jesus quoted it, the scribe replied, “there is one God; and there is none other but he” (Mark 12:32), and Jesus saw “that he answered discreetly” (Mark 12:34). That was the moment to add that the one God is three persons. Jesus did not.
The usual Hebrew word for God, Elohim, is plural. And in Genesis 1:26 God says, ‘Let us make man in our image’. From the first page the Bible hints at plurality within God.
Elohim is plural in form, but when it means Israel’s God it takes a singular verb: “In the beginning God created” (Genesis 1:1). The same word is used of one god, “Chemosh thy god” (Judges 11:24), and of one man: “I have made thee a god to Pharaoh” (Exodus 7:1). In Genesis 1:26 God speaks with the angels who attend him, the “sons of God” who “shouted for joy” at creation (Job 38:7). And the very next verse is singular: “So God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27).
Read the full case: The plural Elohim, on our Trinity pageElohim in the glossary
When Jesus calls the Father ‘my God’, or says ‘my Father is greater than I’, he is speaking in his human nature. In his divine nature he is fully equal with the Father. Both are true of the one person.
If ‘my God’ belonged only to his mortal life, it would stop at the resurrection. It does not. Risen, Jesus says, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17). From heaven he speaks four times of “my God” (Revelation 3:12). Paul prays to “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:17), and Hebrews says of the exalted Son, “God, even thy God, hath anointed thee” (Hebrews 1:9). The glorified Jesus still has a God. That is the relationship of a Son, not of an equal.
That is what the Council of Chalcedon taught: one person in two natures. Some things are true of Christ as God, others as man. It isn’t dividing him; it is holding together everything Scripture says.
Then test it against the texts. “Of that day and that hour knoweth no man … neither the Son, but the Father” (Mark 13:32): it is the Son, his highest title, who does not know. He “was in all points tempted” (Hebrews 4:15), yet “God cannot be tempted with evil” (James 1:13). “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience” (Hebrews 5:8). Was the divine person ignorant, tempted and learning? If not, two minds are at work, one knowing and one not. Scripture never divides Jesus like that. He speaks with one voice: “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30).
God is infinite and we are not. The incarnation is a mystery, so we should expect it to be beyond our understanding, not reject it because it doesn’t fit our logic.
We agree that God is far above us. But in the New Testament a mystery is a secret God has now made known: “the mystery which hath been hid from ages … but now is made manifest to his saints” (Colossians 1:26). “Those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children” (Deuteronomy 29:29). And what God has revealed here is plain: one God, the Father, and a Son who did not know the day. When a doctrine has to call its conflict with plain words a mystery, the difficulty may lie in the doctrine rather than in God.
Read the full case: What Trinitarianism claims, and our reply
Philippians 2 says he humbled himself for a time. The Son’s subjection belongs to his earthly mission. Once it was finished, he returned to the equal glory he had before.
Scripture carries the subordination forward, never back to equality. Years after the ascension Paul writes, “the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3). The exalted Christ sits where God has put him: “Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool” (Psalm 110:1). And when his reign is complete, “then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). On earth, in glory and at the very end, the Son is under his Father.
Then it is a difference of role, not of being. A wife is equal to her husband, though he is her head; Paul uses that very comparison in 1 Corinthians 11:3. The Son can be equal in nature and subordinate in role for ever.
A role that is permanent and can never be reversed, because one begets and the other is begotten, one gives and the other receives, is more than a role. It describes who each one is. And what the Son receives is not a job description. He is given life: “so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). He is given authority: “All power is given unto me” (Matthew 28:18). He says, “my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). For this reason many Trinitarians themselves are uneasy with an eternal subordination of the Son.
The Nicene Creed says the Son is ‘begotten of his Father before all worlds … begotten, not made’. ‘Begotten’ describes an eternal relationship within God, not a beginning in time.
Scripture dates the begetting. The angel told Mary, “that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35), and gave the reason with ‘therefore’: the Holy Spirit would come upon her. The Psalm says, “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee” (Psalm 2:7), and Paul applies it to the day God “raised up Jesus again” (Acts 13:33). A begetting that happens on a day has a beginning. ‘Eternally begotten’ is a phrase from the creeds; no apostle uses it.
Read the full case: The Son of God begins with his conception
Micah 5:2 says of the ruler to be born in Bethlehem that his ‘goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting’. The Messiah existed eternally before his birth.
The Hebrew reads literally ‘from of old, from days of long ago’. The same words appear elsewhere for ancient promises. Micah himself speaks of what God has “sworn unto our fathers from the days of old” (Micah 7:20), and Amos of David’s house: “I will build it as in the days of old” (Amos 9:11). The ruler from Bethlehem has an ancient origin: the promises to Abraham and to David, and God’s purpose behind them. That is why Micah names Bethlehem, David’s town. His goings forth were planned long ago; his birth was still to come.
Read the full case: God speaks of what is not yet as though it were
Jesus forgives sins, will judge the world, and says ‘All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth’. Those are God’s own prerogatives. Whoever exercises them must be God.
Notice the word Jesus himself uses: “All power is given unto me” (Matthew 28:18). God is never given anything. When Jesus forgave the paralysed man, the crowds “glorified God, which had given such power unto men” (Matthew 9:8). The Father “hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man” (John 5:27), and God will judge the world “by that man whom he hath ordained” (Acts 17:31). “God hath made that same Jesus … both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). Every power Jesus holds, he has received.
Jesus is worshipped by the angels and by the whole creation (Hebrews 1:6; Revelation 5). Scripture forbids worshipping anyone but God. So Jesus must be God.
The worship of Jesus is God’s own command: “let all the angels of God worship him” (Hebrews 1:6). In Scripture worship is honour given to one worthy of it, and it can be given to God’s appointed king alongside God: Israel “worshipped the Lord, and the king” (1 Chronicles 29:20). In Revelation 5 the Lamb takes the book from the one on the throne, and the praise is “unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb” (Revelation 5:13): two, not one. And all of it is “to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11).
Read the full case: If Jesus is not God, why is he worshipped?
In Isaiah 45:23 God swears, ‘unto me every knee shall bow’. Paul applies those words to Jesus in Philippians 2:10. A Jew like Paul would never give Yahweh’s unique honour to anyone less than Yahweh.
Paul applies it, and he tells us how. It is God who “hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name” (Philippians 2:9). Every knee bows “at the name of Jesus” (Philippians 2:10), and every tongue confesses that he is Lord “to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11). The bowing God claimed in Isaiah reaches him through the Son he has exalted. A man whom God has raised can receive that honour. The eternal God could never be “highly exalted”, or be “given” a name.
Jesus says that all should ‘honour the Son, even as they honour the Father’ (John 5:23). Equal honour can only be given to an equal.
Read the reason given just before it. The Father “hath committed all judgment unto the Son: That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father” (John 5:22–23). The honour follows from what the Father has given him. The next words explain it: “He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him” (John 5:23). To refuse the Son is to refuse the Father who sent him, as dishonouring a king’s envoy dishonours the king. Four verses earlier Jesus said, “The Son can do nothing of himself” (John 5:19).
‘I and my Father are one’ (John 10:30). The Jews took it as a claim to deity and picked up stones, saying, ‘thou, being a man, makest thyself God’. Jesus didn’t correct them.
He did correct them. He answered from Psalm 82, where judges are called gods: “If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken”, how could it be blasphemy to say, “I am the Son of God” (John 10:35–36)? That was his claim. And he showed what ‘one’ means when he prayed for his disciples “that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:22). They were to be one in mind and purpose, as he and his Father are, not one being.
Read the full case: Didn’t Jesus say “I and my Father are one”?
In John 5:18 it is the narrator, John, who says Jesus was ‘making himself equal with God’. That is the Gospel writer’s own verdict, not just his enemies’ charge.
Read the whole sentence. They sought to kill him “because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). John did not believe Jesus had sinned by breaking the sabbath; he was “without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). The sentence reports how his opponents saw it. And Jesus answered them in the very next verse: “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do” (John 5:19). He met the charge of equality by affirming his dependence.
Read the full case: Doesn’t calling God his Father make Jesus equal with God?
After the resurrection Thomas says to Jesus, ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 20:28). Jesus accepts it, and John makes it the climax of his Gospel.
Thomas does address Jesus, and we don’t explain that away. He had heard Jesus say, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). In the risen Jesus he saw the God who had raised him and was revealed in him. The same chapter fixes the meaning. A few verses earlier Jesus calls the Father “my God, and your God” (John 20:17), and straight afterwards John states the purpose of his book: “that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31). Thomas’s confession is the climax of that, not a contradiction of it.
Thomas was a Jew who knew the Shema. He would never call a mere man ‘my God’. He can only mean that Jesus is the God of Israel.
The Hebrew Scriptures themselves call men God when they stand in God’s place. God told Moses, “I have made thee a god to Pharaoh” (Exodus 7:1). Of Israel’s judges he said, “Ye are gods” (Psalm 82:6), and Jesus quoted it (John 10:35). Psalm 45 is addressed to a king of David’s line on his wedding day, and still says, “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (Psalm 45:6). The next verse gives that king a God of his own. A Jew could call God’s anointed King ‘God’ without making him the God who anointed him.
Read the full case: Passages that call Jesus GodHebrews 1:8, where the Psalm is quoted of Jesus
In Hebrews 1:8 the Father himself addresses the Son: ‘Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever’. The writer sets the Son above the angels as God.
These words come from Psalm 45, “A Song of loves” spoken “touching the king” (Psalm 45:1), a human king of David’s line. The next verse shows what kind of ‘God’ is meant: “God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows” (Hebrews 1:9). The one addressed has a God over him and companions he is raised above. The one true God has neither. Hebrews gives Jesus the highest royal title God has given any man; it does not make him the God who anoints him.
Hebrews 1:10 goes on to apply Psalm 102 to the Son: ‘Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands’. That is creation, credited to the Son.
Hebrews names its own subject at the start of the next chapter: “the world to come, whereof we speak” (Hebrews 2:5). So does Psalm 102: “When the Lord shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his glory” (Psalm 102:16). Scripture often uses heavens and earth for a nation’s order. 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). The Son lays the foundation of the world to come, as the one God “appointed heir of all things” (Hebrews 1:2).
Isaiah 9:6 names the promised child ‘The mighty God’, El gibbor, the same title used of Yahweh in the next chapter (Isaiah 10:21). The Messiah is God himself.
These are names the child would be called, and in Scripture a name declares what God is doing through someone. Of his angel God said, “my name is in him” (Exodus 23:21). El and gibbor are both used of men; David had his “mighty men” (2 Samuel 23:8). The son bears his Father’s name because he does his Father’s work, as Emmanuel means “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). And if these were titles of the Godhead, “The everlasting Father” would make Jesus the Father, which Trinitarians deny. The verse begins, “unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6).
Whatever the King James Version says, many modern translations of Titus 2:13, Romans 9:5 and John 1:18 call Jesus ‘God’ outright, and they have serious Greek scholarship behind them.
Each of these turns on a question scholars genuinely argue over: a rule of Greek grammar, the punctuation of a sentence, or which manuscripts preserve the words. We will take each one honestly; choose which to look at. But notice the contrast. A doctrine as central as who God is should not hang on a disputed comma or a manuscript variant, when the apostles say plainly, with no textual question at all, “to us there is but one God, the Father” (1 Corinthians 8:6).
Titus 2:13 reads ‘our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ’. By the Granville Sharp rule, when one article governs two singular nouns joined by ‘and’, both refer to the same person. Jesus is the great God.
Jesus told us how his appearing will look: “the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels” (Matthew 16:27). Paul’s Greek reads literally ‘the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ’, and it can be read with Jesus Christ as that glory: the Father’s glory seen in his Son. Paul calls the Father ‘God our Saviour’ in this same letter (Titus 1:3; Titus 3:4). And he opens it with “God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour” (Titus 1:4), keeping the two distinct.
Romans 9:5 says of Christ that he is ‘over all, God blessed for ever’. The most natural reading of the sentence has Paul calling Jesus God.
The earliest manuscripts had no punctuation, so translators decide where the sentence breaks. With a full stop after “Christ came” (Romans 9:5), the end is a blessing of God: ‘God, who is over all, be blessed for ever’. Paul blesses God this way elsewhere: “the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen” (Romans 1:25); “The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is blessed for evermore” (2 Corinthians 11:31). And if it is read of Christ, he is over all because God “gave him to be the head over all things” (Ephesians 1:22).
The oldest manuscripts of John 1:18 read ‘the only begotten God’ (monogenēs theos), not ‘Son’. So John calls Jesus God at the beginning and at the end of his prologue.
Even on that reading, look at what the verse says. It opens, “No man hath seen God at any time” (John 1:18). The one who declares him is begotten, and is “in the bosom of the Father”: close to God, and distinct from him. A begotten god is not the unbegotten God. He is the Son who bears his Father’s name, as those to whom God’s word came were called gods (John 10:35). John’s own summary of his Gospel is “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31).
Read the full case: The Name of God, and God made known in his Son
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1). Verse 14 says the Word became flesh. That is Jesus, existing as God with the Father before creation.
John’s opening echoes Genesis 1, where everything comes into being as God speaks: “And God said, Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made” (Psalm 33:6). God’s word is his mind expressed and his purpose in action. So the Word “was with God” as a man’s purpose is with him, and “was God” because God’s word is God himself speaking, not a second being beside him. Then “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14): God’s purpose became a living man, his Son.
John says ‘all things were made by him’ (verse 3) and ‘he was in the world’ (verse 10). The Word is a person, a ‘he’, who made all things before the incarnation.
The Greek word logos is masculine, so pronouns referring back to it are masculine too, and translators must choose between ‘him’ and ‘it’. Tyndale and the Geneva Bible chose ‘it’: all things were made by it. Scripture often speaks of God’s wisdom as a person: “Then I was by him, as one brought up with him” (Proverbs 8:30), yet in the next chapter she builds a house (Proverbs 9:1). John’s letter explains his Gospel: “that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 John 1:2). With the Father, then made known in a man.
Read the full case: “The Word was made flesh”And Hebrews 1:10, the Son and the foundation of the earth?
‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (John 8:58). Jesus claims an existence before Abraham, in the very words God used of himself, and the crowd understood him well enough to pick up stones.
Start with what Jesus said first: “Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad” (John 8:56). Abraham saw it by faith. Before Abraham came on the scene, Christ was already the promised seed in God’s purpose, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). And the words ‘I am’ are the same as earlier in the chapter, where Jesus claims to be the Messiah: “if ye believe not that I am he” (John 8:24). The man born blind uses them too: “I am he” (John 9:9).
Read the full case: “Before Abraham was, I am” answered in full
Jesus’ words, egō eimi, are exactly what the Greek Old Testament puts in God’s mouth at the burning bush. He was claiming the name revealed to Moses.
In Exodus 3:14 God’s name is ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‘I will be who I will be’; the same word is translated “Certainly I will be with thee” two verses earlier (Exodus 3:12). The Greek Old Testament the apostles read has egō eimi ho ōn, ‘I am the one who is’, and the name Moses was to give was ho ōn, ‘the one who is’. Jesus did not say ho ōn. He said egō eimi, the ordinary words for ‘I am’, the blind man’s words. In the same discourse he said, “I do nothing of myself” (John 8:28).
If Jesus only meant that he was the Messiah in God’s plan, why did they take up stones (John 8:59)? They heard a claim to be God.
Crowds often misunderstood Jesus. When he spoke of the temple of his body, they thought he meant Herod’s temple (John 2:20–21). Here they had already asked, “Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead?” (John 8:53), and a claim to rank above Abraham was offence enough. When they took up stones again in John 10, Jesus said plainly what his claim was: “I said, I am the Son of God” (John 10:36). Their anger tells us what they feared, not what he taught.
Read the full case: “Before Abraham was, I am” answered in full‘I and my Father are one’, and the stones of John 10
In John 17:5 Jesus prays, ‘glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was’. That is a memory of heaven, not a plan.
Read on in the same prayer. Of disciples not yet glorified, Jesus says, “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. Jesus grounds his own glory in the Father’s love “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24), the phrase Peter uses of Christ “foreordained before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:20). God “calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Romans 4:17). And Jesus asks for this glory. He does not resume it by right.
Jesus says, ‘I came down from heaven’ (John 6:38), and asks, ‘What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?’ (John 6:62). That is plain pre-existence.
His hearers took it literally: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph … how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven?” (John 6:42). Jesus replied that his words “are spirit” (John 6:63). Like the manna, and like every good gift that “cometh down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17), he came from heaven because God was his source. As for ascending “where he was before”: Daniel had seen a son of man in heaven, coming to the Ancient of days to receive the Kingdom (Daniel 7:13–14). Jesus would go where prophecy had set him.
Paul says Christ was ‘in the form of God’ and thought it not robbery ‘to be equal with God’, then ‘made himself of no reputation’ and was ‘made in the likeness of men’. He existed as God before he became a man.
Paul is urging humility: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). Set it beside Adam. Made in God’s image, Adam reached for equality when told “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). Jesus, in the form of God, did not grasp at it. To bear God’s form is to show his likeness, as Adam bore his image; it is not to be God. He “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death”, and “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him” (Philippians 2:8–9). An eternal God cannot be promoted; a faithful man can.
In verse 7 the Greek says he ‘emptied himself’ (ekenōsen). You can only empty yourself of what you already have. That points to divine glory laid aside at the incarnation.
He did have something to lay aside, and the Gospels show what it was. God gave him the Spirit without measure (John 3:34). He could have asked for “more than twelve legions of angels” (Matthew 26:53), and he had every right to be served. He set all of it aside to serve and to die. Paul’s words echo Isaiah’s servant, who “hath poured out his soul unto death” (Isaiah 53:12). The verbs that follow spell out the emptying: he took a servant’s form, humbled himself and became obedient to death. Every step is something a man does.
Read the full case: Rich, yet poor; in the form of God, yet a servant
Colossians 1:16 says ‘by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth’. The Son is the Creator, and ‘firstborn’ in verse 15 means pre-eminent, not created.
We agree ‘firstborn’ means pre-eminence, and it is a pre-eminence God gives: “I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:27). Now look at what Paul lists: “thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers” (Colossians 1:16), ranks of authority. His subject is the new creation, “the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13), where “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Paul explains it himself: “the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence” (Colossians 1:18).
Read the full case: Doesn’t Colossians 1:16 say Christ created all things?
Colossians 2:9: ‘in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’. Not part of God but all of God dwells in Jesus. That is the incarnation.
Paul has already told us where that fulness came from: “it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell” (Colossians 1:19). It 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 his character and power living in you fully. In Jesus that is complete, as in no one else. It does not make him the God who fills him.
Jesus calls the Spirit ‘he’ (John 16:13). The Spirit speaks, teaches, intercedes and can be grieved. Those are the marks of a person, and a divine one.
The Spirit speaks and wills because God speaks and wills by it. Scripture calls it “the power of the Highest” (Luke 1:35), and compares it with a man’s own spirit: “the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:11). A man’s spirit is not a second person inside him. To grieve it is to grieve God: “grieve not the holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30). It is poured out, given by measure and filled into people, which is never said of a person. Our study takes each passage in turn.
Jesus commands baptism ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ (Matthew 28:19): one name, and three persons side by side as equals.
Being named together does not make three equal persons. Israel “worshipped the Lord, and the king” (1 Chronicles 29:20). 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 are God. A name stands for authority. The baptised come under the Father who planned their salvation, the Son who achieved it and the Spirit by which God revealed it. That is why the apostles could baptise “in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38).
1 John 5:7 says it outright: ‘there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one’.
Those words 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. What John certainly wrote is that three witnesses, “the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one” (1 John 5:8), testify that Jesus is the Son of God.
The word ‘Trinity’ isn’t in the Bible, but neither is ‘incarnation’. The councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) simply put into words what Scripture already teaches, and the church has confessed it ever since.
We agree that the missing word proves little. What counts is a missing idea, joined to plain statements against it. No apostle says the one God is three co-equal persons; they say “one God, the Father” (1 Corinthians 8:6). And the doctrine took centuries to form. In 325 Nicaea said of the Spirit only, ‘And in the Holy Ghost’. In 381 Constantinople added that the Spirit is worshipped with the Father and the Son. The Athanasian Creed later said ‘the whole three persons are coeternal, and coequal’. The question is whether Scripture says so.
Jesus promised the Spirit would ‘guide you into all truth’ (John 16:13). Would he let almost the whole church believe something false about God for 1,700 years?
The promise was made to the apostles, who were guided into the truth and wrote it down for us. The same apostles warned what would follow: “of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things” (Acts 20:30), and “the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine” (2 Timothy 4:3). Paul said the day of Christ would not come “except there come a falling away first” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). Majorities have been wrong before. The test Jesus and his apostles gave was not numbers, but what is written.
Read the full case: Corruption from within: the biblical pattern
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