Everybody Confused Yet?
This article is a response to the third session of a Church Age Book curriculum taught by Trevor Emond on November 11, 2018, covering Lessons 5 and 6.[1] All timestamps refer to that recording. The teaching begins at approximately [26:43].
Everybody Confused Yet?
That question is Trevor Emond's, asked of his own congregation at [49:21] while he is teaching them the doctrine of the Godhead. He asks it again in different words a minute later: "This Bible is so confusing" [51:08]. And again: "Where is Jesus sitting? I have no clue, but my head hurts now" [51:18].
He is not being flippant. He has just done something honest, and this article is largely about what he does next.
The problem he found
Emond wanted his class to see the Godhead in Revelation, so he had them read the passages in order. Watch what he collected.
- Revelation 4:2. One sat on the throne. He presses it: "How many sat on the throne? One" [46:51].
- Revelation 5:1. The one on the throne is holding a book in his right hand.
- Revelation 5:6-7. A Lamb comes and takes the book out of the right hand of him that sat on the throne. The Lamb is Jesus, so Jesus is receiving something from the one on the throne.
- Revelation 3:21. "I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne." Jesus seated with the Father.
- Hebrews 12:2. Jesus "is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." Which is where the book was.
Then he stands back and says, at [51:10]: "What do we do with all these things? How do we make all this fit?"
That is a real question, honestly arrived at, and he put it to his people instead of burying it. He could have skipped the verses that made trouble. Most preachers would have taken the ones that suited them.
The question has an answer, and it is not a new one.
Those passages are the reason the doctrine of the Trinity exists. One God. Three persons who address one another, send one another, and are seated in relation to one another. The church did not invent that scheme to complicate things. It arrived at it because the New Testament keeps doing what Emond has just watched it do: speaking of God as one, and then showing the Father and the Son and the Spirit acting toward each other.
Emond's resolution comes at [1:05:42]:
Many of these things that we're looking at, they're word pictures. They're types. They're ways so we can understand what God is doing.
The verses that would not fit became figures of speech.
And by [1:07:19] the doctrine has become this:
See, it's not three and it's not one. It's kind of two, but it's not. It's somewhere in the middle there.
When your account of God leaves you saying it is somewhere between one and two, the problem may not be the Bible.
A equals B equals C
The formal argument arrives at [43:22], and Emond is pleased with it:
So a little lesson in logic. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C ... If the Father and the Holy Ghost are one, and if Jesus and the Father are one, then Jesus and the Holy Ghost are one, right?
The logic is valid. Everything depends on what "one" means, because the rule only works for strict identity. If "one" means anything looser, the chain breaks.
So test it against the way Jesus uses the word. In the upper room, praying for his disciples:
That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us ... that they may be one, even as we are one. (John 17:21-22)
Even as we are one. Jesus asks that believers share the same kind of oneness that he has with the Father.
Run the logic on that. If oneness means numerical identity, then every Christian is numerically identical with every other Christian, and with God. Emond comes right up to this edge at [1:08:15] and asks his congregation, "Are you a part of God or not?", then adds hastily, "look, don't worship yourself here."
The hesitation is the tell. He can feel where the premise leads.
The chapter he stopped reading
The Godhead case rests on John 14, which the class read at [42:05]. Verses 5 through 9. Thomas asks the way, Philip asks to see the Father, and Jesus answers: "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father."
Emond's conclusion at [42:44]: "So if they're not the same person, that's a pretty good trick, huh?"
Keep reading the same chapter.
And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever. (John 14:16)
Jesus prays to the Father. The Father gives. And what is given is "another Comforter," which in Greek is allos parakletos, another of the same kind as the one speaking.
Then this, which Trevor Emond does read aloud, at [1:14:53]:
But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. (John 14:26)
Count the actors. The Father sends. The sending is done in the Son's name. The Spirit teaches and reminds. Three, named in one sentence, each doing something the others are not doing.
He quotes that verse in support of oneness. It is the clearest three-person sentence in the chapter.
"In the name"
The baptism argument begins at [40:31] with a piece of reasoning that can be checked against the verse in about ten seconds:
Doesn't it make sense if you're going to baptize in the name of Father, the name of Son, the name of the Holy Ghost. You have three names. It would make sense, if you have three names, that you would have three people.
Open Matthew 28:19.
Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
The name. Singular. Once. The Greek is to onoma, and it governs all three.
Emond said "the name of" three times. The verse says it once. He then reasoned from the version he had produced.
And notice what this does to his own case. At [1:16:08] he asks: "If God is one, then how many names does he have? He has one name." Matthew 28:19 agrees with him. One name, held by Father, Son and Holy Spirit together. The verse he is arguing against is the verse that states his premise.
The problem with the illustration
Most of the baptism section is an extended story about a young man in the congregation who calls his girlfriend by the wrong name [1:17:31]. It is funny and the room enjoys it, and the point is that names matter because relationships are personal.
Names do matter. But the illustration assumes exactly what is in dispute, which is whether "the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost" is a name or a substitute for one. Matthew 28:19 calls it the name, and Jesus supplied it.
The analogy also proves more than its author wants. Jesus taught his disciples to pray "Our Father." If addressing God as Father is impersonal because it is a title, then the Lord's Prayer is impersonal, and Jesus taught it.
Nicaea
At [40:12] Emond dates the corruption:
Before things were restored, this is the Council of Nicaea view ... in 325 AD, this is the portrayal that they came up with. As they went into Father, Son, and Holy Ghost baptism.
William Branham staked a great deal on this. He issued a public challenge:
If you can show me one text of scripture, or bring me one history, authentic history, that'll show me where that people ever baptized in the Bible in the name of Father, Son, Holy Ghost ... until the Nicene Council of the Catholic Church, come bring it to me. And I'll pin a sign on my back and walk through Jeffersonville ... "A false prophet misleading the people."[2]
The challenge has been answered, more than once, from documents anyone can read.
The Didache, dated by scholars to the late first or early second century and by nobody later than the third, instructs: baptize into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Justin Martyr, martyred around AD 165, describes baptizing converts in the name of God the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit.
Tertullian, writing around the turn of the third century, describes immersing three times, once at the mention of each of the three.
Origen, writing after AD 244, states that the Lord told his disciples to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
All four are before Nicaea. The earliest is roughly two hundred and twenty-five years before it.
What the council was actually about
The dating is out by a couple of centuries. The description of the council is out altogether.
Nicaea was convened in AD 325 to deal with Arianism. Arius taught that Jesus was a created being, brought into existence by the Father, and therefore not of the same substance as God. The council condemned that view and affirmed what the church had held: that Jesus Christ is fully God.
The Oneness position, known also as modalism or Sabellianism, had already been condemned by the church more than fifty years before Nicaea ever met.[3]
The created Christ
The most serious thing in the lesson comes next, and I doubt Trevor Emond has noticed where it puts him.
From [52:35] to [53:38] he teaches the origin of Christ:
Jesus was the firstborn of creation. He was the beginning of the creation of God. Is that right? Is that what your Bible says? ... Jesus has been created because he was the beginning of the creation of God.
Jesus has been created.
That is Arianism. It is the precise doctrine the Council of Nicaea was called to condemn, and it is what Jehovah's Witnesses teach today. Emond is blaming Nicaea for corrupting the Godhead while holding the view Nicaea actually met to reject.
The two texts he leans on do not carry it.
Colossians 1:15 calls Christ "the firstborn of every creature," and the next verse explains why: "for by him were all things created." Whoever made all created things is not himself among them. Prototokos carries rank and inheritance, not sequence.
Revelation 3:14 calls him "the beginning of the creation of God," and the word is archē, which means origin or source or ruler. He is the one creation begins from.
And John 1, the passage Emond builds his whole logos section on, closes the door:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1, 3)
In the beginning the Word was. Not came to be. And nothing that was made was made without him, which excludes him from the list of things made.
God left him at Gethsemane
This one belongs beside the last.
At [56:36] Emond relays Branham's teaching on the crucifixion:
Brother Branham teaches us that God left Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. And Jesus, as the man, did that all without God ... God can't die, so you can't put God on a cross and God die.
Ninety seconds later, at [58:07]:
This is God's body dying on the cross for us. This is God's, literally the blood of God, dripping down from the cross that's saving our souls.
God departed before the arrest, and yet the blood on the cross is the blood of God. Those cannot both stand.
And Emond has already quoted, through Branham at [53:45], the sentence that settles it: "the Bible teaches that God was in Christ." Paul's words are:
God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself. (2 Corinthians 5:19)
Reconciling. That is what was happening on the cross, and Paul says God was in Christ while it happened.
The historic doctrine holds the whole of it without strain. Christ is one person in two natures, fully God and fully man. He can die because he is truly man. His death has infinite worth because he is truly God. Nobody has to leave the garden.
This is why Lee Vayle taught his version of the Godhead, which Trevor Emond would likely reject. But in his comments, he is parroting Branham's Arianism and Nestorianism.
The dress correlation
A short note, because it lands on real people in that room.
At [1:25:25] Emond offers an observation:
The ones that baptize in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ still believe in holiness. The ones that baptize in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost don't. Generally, Trevor's observation only. Very informal poll.
He flags it as informal, and that is to his credit.
But it does not stay flagged. Within a minute it has become an argument [1:26:03]:
Once you leave off the baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, once you leave off that God is one ... does it matter how you dress? Who are you marrying? You've married your denominational system ... You don't even know your own husband. How do you know how he wants you to dress?
A baptismal formula now predicts a woman's wardrobe, and her wardrobe reveals whose bride she is. That is a long chain built on an informal poll of one man's acquaintances, and the weight of it falls on the women listening.
The messengers
The Church Age Book creates a difficulty for itself here, and this class will meet it in a few weeks when they reach chapter three.
The whole of Lessons 5 and 6 teaches that the Trinity is the corruption, arriving at Nicaea and requiring restoration in this last age. William Branham put it more strongly, calling the doctrine of the Trinity "of the devil."
Now look at the messengers he chose for the ages.
Martin of Tours, the messenger to Pergamos, spent his ministry defending Trinitarian doctrine against the Arians.
Branham claimed that Irenaeus, his messenger to Smyrna, condemned the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea. Irenaeus had been dead for more than a hundred years when that council met.[4]
Branham also taught that those who rejected the messenger of their age were lost.
Put the three claims together and the arithmetic is unpleasant. Believers in every age before Laodicea would have been required to follow messengers who taught, and in one case fought to defend, a doctrine the last messenger called Satanic.
Conclusion
My concern here is not to defend a creed. It is that a room full of people were handed a set of Bible passages, told the passages do not fit together, and then taught that the ones causing the trouble were word pictures.
They fit. They have fitted for two thousand years, in the reading the church arrived at by doing exactly what Trevor Emond did that evening: gathering all the texts instead of some of them.
One sits on the throne and the Lamb takes the book from his hand, because they are distinct persons. They are one God, because Scripture says so plainly and often. Both are true at once, and holding them together is the whole of the doctrine he was taught to reject. It is why Jesus prays to the Father in John 14 while the Father sends the Spirit in the Son's name, all three of them in a single verse that was read aloud in that class.
Baptism goes into one name, held by three, as Matthew 28:19 says and as Christians were doing two centuries before any council met at Nicaea.
And Jesus Christ was not created. He is the one by whom all things were created, and he did not leave the cross to a man abandoned in a garden.
Trevor Emond asked whether everybody was confused yet. The honest answer is that the confusion was not in the text.
Further study
If you would like to look at some of the issues raised above in more detail, please see the followin articles on this website:
- What did William Branham believe about the Godhead?
- William Branham and the Trinity Doctrine
- The Historic Doctrine of the Trinity
- Did William Branham Teach Oneness?
- What is Oneness theology?
- William Branham and Arianism
- Did William Branham teach Nestorianism?
- Bible Study on the Trinity
- A Defense of the Doctrine of the Trinity
- Q&A on the Godhead - Answers to emails we have received
- Christians that God required to believe the Satanic Trinity doctrine
- Other articles on the Godhead
- Giants of the faith who believed the doctrine of the Trinity
- Water baptism
Footnotes
- ↑ https://www.messageteacher.com/cab-curriculum-videos/cab-lesson-5/
- ↑ Cited in Under the Halo, chapter 12, "The Seven Church Ages."
- ↑ Under the Halo, chapter 12, which sets out the Nicene material and the four pre-Nicene baptismal sources in full.
- ↑ Under the Halo, chapter 12. Branham's character descriptions of Irenaeus, Martin of Tours and Columba were taken from R. C. Hazeltine's How Did It Happen, an early Pentecostal tract, and the historical errors came with them.