Issues with Trinitarianism and its Christology — Part 3

Issues with Trinitarianism and its Christology — Part 3

Thomas Allen

    36. How could the preexisting God the Son become a man without any diminishment of his deity? How could God the Son live a fully human life while continuing to exercise his divine function?
    37. How can Christ be both finite (human) and infinite (Deity) simultaneously? How can one be both God and the Son of God simultaneously?
    38. Do today’s Trinitarians follow the early Trinitarians and believe the Trinity Doctrine and its dual-nature Christology because it is impossible?
    39. Jesus states that God is spirit. If Jesus is God, how could he be flesh — unless the heretical Docetists are correct?
    40. How can the Son be God’s equal if God has appointed the Son heir? If the Son is the heir, there must have been a time when he was not the owner. If Christ were God, he would be the owner, or under the Trinity Doctrine, part owner. Therefore, he could not be an heir.
    41. If the Son were equal to the Father, why did he derive his power from the Father? Would not he, being God and equal to the Father, already have these powers and authority?
    42. The Bible states that blaspheming the Son will be forgiven, but blaspheming the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. If the Son and the Holy Spirit are coequal persons in one God, should not the result of blaspheming one be the same as blaspheming the other? Why are these coequal persons treated unequally?
    43. Many verses of the Bible clearly and plainly call Jesus a man. Also, the Bible declares that “God is not a man” (Numbers 23:19), If God is not a man and if Jesus is a man, then how can Jesus, a man, be God, who is not a man? Likewise, if God is not “a son of man,” how can Jesus, who is called “a son of man,” be God?
    44. If Jesus Christ is God, why does he lack the attributes of God: self-existent, immortality, unchanging, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent? The Trinitarian would reply that Jesus’ human nature lacks these attributes, but his divine nature does not.
    45. In developing their Christology, the Trinitarians abandoned the Scriptures in favor of the Church Fathers. The Scriptures did not support their dual-nature doctrine. However, they could find statements in some of the writings of the Church Fathers that did.
    46. Both God the Father and God the Son have thrones in heaven. However, God the Holy Spirit does not have a throne in heaven. Why not? (Anyone who claims that the Holy Spirit does have a heavenly throne, needs to provide the Scriptural support that explicitly states that the Holy Spirit has a heavenly throne.) If the Holy Spirit does not have a heavenly throne, how can he be equal to God the Father and God the Son as the Trinity Doctrine declares?
    47. According to the Trinity Doctrine, God the Holy Spirit is omniscient. Yet, Mark 13:32 declares that only God the Father knows when the end will occur. Not knowing when the end will occur, God the Holy Spirit is not omniscient. Nor is God the Son. However, Trinitarians avoid God the Son lacking omniscience in the passage by claiming that Jesus is speaking in his human nature and not in his God nature. Yet, unless Jesus had two minds, which Trinitarians deny, how could his mind both know an event and be ignorant of it simultaneously? Further, they do not have the dual-nature out for the Holy Spirit. Lacking omniscience, which is an essential characteristic of God, God the Holy Spirit is not equal to God the Father, who is omniscient. Thus, the Trinity Doctrine of three coequal Gods collapses.
    Further, Trinitarians may not even use the Jesus-speaking-in-his-human-nature argument to avoid God the Son’s lack of omniscience without risking heresy. Cyril’s Twelve Anathemas or Twelve Chapters were accepted as orthodox at the Council of Ephesus (where Mary was formally declared the Mother of God) and the Council of Chalcedon (where Jesus was declared to have two independent natures and wills). The fourth anathema reads: “If anyone distributes between the two persons or hypostases the expressions used either in the Gospels or in the apostolic writings, whether they are used by the holy writers of Christ or by him about himself, and ascribes some to him as to a man, thought of separately from the Word from God, and others, as befitting God, to him as to the Word from God the Father, let him be anathema.” (The Word is the God the Son.) Thus, whenever Jesus spoke, he always spoke as God the Son and never as a mere human. As Mark 13:32 clearly shows, Jesus, who spoke as God the Son, was not omniscient. Not being omniscient, God the Son cannot be equal to God the Father. Thus, the Trinity Doctrine falls.
    48. If the Holy Spirit is one of the three coequal Gods of the triune God, how can he be given to people? How can such a divine person be given by another divine person unless he is under the authority of the giver? Coequals cannot be under the authority of other coequals and remain equal. Moreover, if the spirit of God is the third person of the triune God, how can he be divided and distributed?
    49. If the Holy Spirit is the third person of the triune God, why does the Bible fail to command the worship of the Holy Spirit? Being a coequal person of the triune God, should not the Holy Spirit receive the same amount of worship as the Father, who is his coequal?
    50. The description of the Holy Spirit given in the Bible suggests that he not be independent or self-existent, and, therefore, should be referred to as “it” instead of “he.” Moreover, the relation of the spirit of God is to God as the spirit of man is to man. If the spirit of man is not another person distinct from himself, and it is not, then the spirit of God is not another person distinct from Himself.
    51. Since the “breath of God” is synonymous with the “spirit of God,” is the breath of God a distinct person from God — one of the coequal Gods of the triune God? It is if the Trinity Doctrine is correct. Moreover, if the breath of God is a distinct person, then the breath of man has to be a distinct person from man. Likewise, the “spirit of God” is synonymous with the “hand” and the “finger.” Does this make the hand and finger coequal Gods of the Godhead? Or, are they and the spirit of God subordinate to the will of God?
    52. Every writer of the New Testament epistles identifies himself with God and the Lord Jesus Christ, yet none identifies himself with the Holy Spirit. Did they fail to understand the Trinity Doctrine and its importance, even its necessity, for salvation? Further, did they fail to believe in a triune God?
    53. The Greek word for “spirit” is neuter; therefore, the appropriate pronoun referring to the Holy Spirit should be “it” instead of “he.” (In Hebrew, the word for spirit is feminine.)
    54. Except for a few difficult verses that are often misunderstood, the Bible offers no incontrovertible proof or even indication that the Holy Spirit is a coequal, coeternal person with the Father and Son.
    55. God usually speaks through one or at most a few people. Almost never does he speak through councils and committees: for example, the 400 prophets of Ahab versus the one prophet of God. The unanimous majority of Ahab’s prophets were wrong, whereas the minority of one prophet was right. A majority in some council has adopted all the major creeds of Christendom.
    56. Trinitarians are notorious for changing the meaning of everyday words, e.g., person and begotten, when they apply to God. As most of the Bible is about God, how does one know what the words in the Bible really mean? Are they being used in the ordinary sense, or are they being used in a theological technical sense? Does a word mean what it means in its ordinary, everyday use, or does it mean something else? Only a trained, enlightened theologian knows. Therefore, only a trained and enlightened theologian can really understand the Bible. Unless such a theologian explains the Bible and its meaning to the laity, the laity forever remains ignorant even if he reads and studies the Bible daily. (Were the Bereans who searched the Scriptures to see if what Paul told them was true trained theologians? If not, were they wasting their time because they were searching in ignorance?)
    57. Trinitarians maintain that biblical truths are incomprehensible mysteries. Examples of such truths being mysteries are the Trinity Doctrine and the doctrine of the dual nature of Christ. Thus, Trinitarians depend on mysticism instead of the Scriptures and reason. Yet, speculation about this mysterious, unknowable God has brought forth the Trinity Doctrine. If God is incomprehensible, then how does one know that he is a triune God?
    Moreover, honest Trinitarians admit that they worship an incomprehensible Deity. Furthermore, no attempt should be made to try to understand their God.
    58. Most Trinitarians maintain that God had to die so that man could be saved; the crucifixion of a human who possessed no divine nature is not enough for salvation. Salvation depends on God dying. Besides the human egotism involved in this assertion, it also suffers from the inability of God to die and still remain God.
    59. An underlying premise of the incarnation of God is that it is necessary for the deification of man. Maximus the Confessor, Athanasius, and other Orthodox Trinitarians declared that God had to become man so that man could become God. Was not the desire to become like God the great sin of Eve and Adam? (Additionally, one of the Mormon doctrines that cause Trinitarians to consider Mormonism a heresy is the doctrine of man becoming a god.)
    60. Under the creeds related to the Trinity adopted by the ecumenical councils, salvation ceased depending on faith in Jesus or even good works. Salvation came from believing, or at least claiming to believe, in what some council said about Jesus.
    61. The notion that only an uncreated, eternal being, i.e., God Himself, can redeem mankind comes from Gnosticism and was incorporated into orthodox Christology. Where is the scriptural support for this notion? According to the Scriptures (v. Romans 5:15), redemption came from a man, Jesus Christ.
    62. If belief in the triune God of the Trinity Doctrine is necessary for salvation as many Trinitarians claim, why did Jesus never teach such a doctrine? Further, why did Jesus never even teach the doctrine of the Trinity? Nowhere does the Bible give a systematic presentation of the Trinity. Nor does it state that God is a triune God of three coequal, coeternal persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Moreover, it does not claim that Jesus is 100 percent God and 100 percent man.
    63. Do Trinitarians agree with Bernard of Clairvaux that “faith in God has no merit, if human reason provides proof for it”? Is faith believing what one does not comprehend, or does faith require some kind of mental understanding?
    64. Why did Jesus teach his followers to pray only to the Father? Why did he not also teach them to pray to the Father’s coequal Gods: the Son and the Holy Spirit?
    65. Often, Trinitarians seem to stress the theoretical over the practical, a system of dogmas over the development of principles, and a series of unknown and unintelligible propositions that must be subscribed to and believed in over a revelation of truths which common minds may understand and sincere and honest hearts appreciate.

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

Part 2

More religious articles.