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This is our series of articles analyzing David Bernard's book, The Oneness of God. You are on the page that is in bold. Click on the links to go to a particular chapter:

The God Who Is One — and Why That Doesn't Settle Everything

A Critique of Chapter 1 of David Bernard's The Oneness of God

"There is one God, and Jesus Christ is that one God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." If you've spent any time in a Oneness Pentecostal church, you've heard some version of that claim. David Bernard's The Oneness of God is the most systematic defense of it in print, and Chapter 1, "Christian Monotheism," is where he lays his foundations. It's worth spending serious time here — not because the chapter is hard to engage, but because the errors are foundational. Get these wrong, and everything built on them goes crooked.^[1]

Bernard opens by sorting Christian views of God into four categories:

Trinitarianism (three persons in one God),
Binitarianism (two persons),
strict monotheism that denies the deity of Christ, and,
Oneness (one God who is fully revealed in Jesus).

He positions Oneness as the only view that is both strictly monotheistic and affirms Christ's full deity. It's a tidy arrangement. The problem is that it's built backwards.

The categories are rigged from the start

What Bernard has done in that opening categorization is commit what logicians call question-begging — he has assumed the very thing he needs to prove. He defines "strict monotheism" in a way that, by definition, excludes Trinitarianism before a single Scripture has been examined. If "strict monotheism" means there can be no plurality of persons within the divine being, then of course Trinitarianism fails the test. But that's the entire question. Bernard needs to demonstrate from Scripture that "one God" means "one without any personal distinctions." He hasn't done that yet — he's just defined it that way and moved on.

Norman Geisler, in Come, Let Us Reason Together, identifies the structure of this kind of error precisely. When the middle term of a syllogism shifts meaning between premises, you don't have a valid argument — you have what Geisler calls a four-term fallacy or an ambiguous middle. Bernard's middle term is "one." In the texts he cites, "one" means numerically one God as opposed to many gods — the anti-polytheism assertion that Israel's God alone is God, that there are no rivals. But then, without argument, Bernard slides "one" into meaning structurally singular, admitting of no internal distinctions. Those are two very different claims, and the second doesn't follow from the first.

Gregory Boyd, who spent four years in a Oneness Pentecostal church before his conversion to orthodox Christianity, names this pattern with characteristic directness:

"It is only a nonscriptural and rationalistic assumption about what the singularity and indivisibility of God must mean... that leads Oneness believers to such an unscriptural position."

You need to think about Boyd's point. The Oneness reading of monotheism isn't derived from Scripture — it's imposed on Scripture. Rather than asking what the biblical authors meant when they said "God is one," Bernard begins with a philosophical definition of oneness (absolutely simple, structurally undivided) and then reads every monotheistic text through that lens.

What the Shema and Isaiah Are Actually Doing

The bulk of Chapter 1 is a string of Old Testament texts: the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4, a run of Isaiah passages (43:10–11; 44:6, 8, 24; 45:6, 21–22; 46:9; 48:11; 37:16), and various New Testament monotheism statements. Bernard presents these as a unified front demonstrating that God is one in a way that rules out the doctrine of the Trinity.

But who was the audience for these texts, and what were they being told? Biblical Israel was surrounded by nations with many gods. The Egyptians, Canaanites, Babylonians, and Assyrians all operated with large collections of Gods. When Isaiah's God declared, "Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me" (Is.43:10), or "I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God" (Is. 44:6), the target of these declarations was outside rivals — other gods, other nations' deities, the idols of Isaiah 44. These are not statements about whether there is or isn't personal distinctions within the being of God. They're statements that Yahweh has no competitors.

Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology lays out the basic rule that should govern this kind of Bible reading: a theologian must "collect and understand all the relevant passages" before drawing conclusions. Bernard has collected passages — but only the ones that speak to God's uniqueness. He deliberately leaves out the texts that complicate things. Psalm 110:1 has Yahweh speaking to "my Lord." Genesis 1:26 has God saying "Let us make mankind in our image." John 1:1–2 has the Word who "was with God and was God" — simultaneously distinct and identical in nature, "in the beginning with God." John 17:5 has Jesus asking the Father to restore "the glory I had with you before the world began." Mark 1:9–11 has three simultaneous, distinguishable presences at the baptism of Jesus.

These aren't awkward verses to be explained away — they're evidence that any honest reading of Scripture has to account for. Grudem calls the Trinitarian position a paradox: seemingly contradictory, but not actually self-contradictory when we understand that "God is three persons" and "God is one being" are statements about different things. Geisler makes the same point in Come, Let Us Reason Together: "The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity says that there are three persons in one being. There is no self-contradiction in that." Saying God is three persons in one being is no more self-contradictory than saying a triangle has three angles but one shape. What would be a contradiction is saying God is three persons in one person, or three beings in one being. That's not what the church has ever taught. Bernard attacks the extreme version of a position and ignores its actual center — that's a straw man.

The Half-Quotation That Changes Everything

Bernard cites 1 Corinthians 8:6 as evidence for his view. He quotes: "But to us there is but one God, the Father." Full stop. He doesn't finish the verse. The complete sentence reads: "But for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live."

The passage Bernard uses to establish that the Father alone is the one God is the same passage that places Jesus, under the title Lord — the word Greek-speaking Jews used to translate Yahweh in their Scriptures — in the same grammatical position and role as the Father. One God, the Father. And one Lord, Jesus Christ. Paul puts them together, in the same breath, as the two through whom and for whom all things exist. You can't use the first half of that verse without reckoning with the second half — and Bernard doesn't reckon with it. This is exactly what Grudem warns against: drawing a conclusion from a passage while ignoring what that same passage goes on to say.

The half-quotation isn't a minor slip. It's a sign of a method that picks what confirms the conclusion and leaves out what complicates it. Good theology doesn't work that way.

The Argument from Silence Proves Nothing

One of Bernard's more clever moves in Chapter 1 is the observation that the Old Testament refers to God as "the Holy One" (singular) rather than "the Holy Three." The implied argument is: if God were truly Trinitarian, we'd expect some hint of threeness in the Old Testament monotheistic texts. We don't find it. Therefore, God isn't Trinitarian.

Boyd is blunt about this kind of reasoning: the argument from silence is "universally recognized to be an invalid form of argumentation." Geisler agrees. The absence of a word or concept in a text tells you only that the author didn't say it there — it says nothing about whether the thing is true. The Old Testament doesn't mention the internet either, but that doesn't mean the twentieth century didn't have one. An argument from silence simply can't prove anything about what God is or isn't like.

There's another problem with the "Holy One" observation. The Old Testament's silence about explicit Trinitarian language is easily explained by progressive revelation — the pattern in Scripture where God's self-disclosure unfolds over time, with later revelation building on and clarifying earlier revelation. The New Testament itself tells us that certain things were previously hidden but are now disclosed (Ephesians 3:4–6; Colossians 1:26–27; Romans 16:25–26). Bernard elsewhere accuses Trinitarians of leaning on progressive revelation as a convenient excuse. But it isn't a patch job. Progressive revelation isn't invented to rescue Trinitarianism — it's a pattern that runs through Scripture's own account of itself.

The Jewish Rejection Argument Cuts Both Ways

Bernard raises the point that Jewish people rejected Trinitarian Christianity as a departure from monotheism. This is historically true. But Boyd notes something Bernard doesn't: Jewish people rejected Oneness Pentecostalism too, and for exactly the same reason — both views make Jesus divine. The barrier wasn't the Trinity; it was the divinity of Christ. Any theology that identifies Jesus as God in any sense departs from first-century Jewish monotheism in the same fundamental way. If the Jewish rejection proves Trinitarianism wrong, it proves Oneness theology wrong by identical logic. Bernard can't use this argument selectively.

The Core Logical Gap: "One" Doesn't Mean "No Internal Distinctions"

Step back from the individual arguments and look at the chapter's logic as a whole. Bernard's case rests on a move from "God is one" to "therefore, God has no personal distinctions within himself." But that step simply doesn't work. The first claim is about God's uniqueness compared to other gods — there is only this one God, not many. The second claim is about God's internal nature — what is or isn't going on within the divine being. These are completely different questions.

Geisler's work on logical arguments is directly applicable here. For a logical argument to hold, the connecting idea has to mean the same thing throughout. Bernard's connecting idea — "God is one" — only means what the texts actually say: that Israel's God has no rivals. It never means what Bernard needs it to mean: that God has no personal distinctions within himself. No biblical text makes that second jump. So Bernard's conclusion goes further than his evidence can reach. He's drawing from a well that doesn't go that deep.

Boyd lays out the full picture: the Oneness argument begins with two premises that orthodox Christians affirm without hesitation — there is one God, and Jesus is God. But the conclusion drawn from them (Jesus therefore is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — the only divine person) doesn't follow from those premises. The premises are correct. The conclusion is an extra assumption smuggled in under cover of logical necessity. It isn't logically necessary. It's one possible reading of those premises, but not the only one, and — given all the texts Bernard has left out — not the most defensible one.

What This Means for the Reader

If you grew up in a Oneness church or a Branhamite context, you were probably taught that the Trinity is a pagan invention, a philosophical import from Greek religion, and a clear violation of biblical monotheism. Chapter 1 of Bernard's book is designed to put that conviction on a scholarly footing. The problem is that the scholarship doesn't hold up.

The Shema is about Israel's exclusive allegiance to Yahweh, not about whether Yahweh has personal distinctions within himself. The Isaiah passages are arguments against pagan gods, not statements about God's internal nature. The half-quotation of 1 Corinthians 8:6 cuts against Bernard's argument the moment you read the whole verse. The argument from silence he uses against the Trinity is universally recognized as an invalid argument. The Jewish rejection argument applies equally to Oneness theology. And the central argument of the chapter assumes the very thing it needs to prove.

None of this means the question of God's nature is simple. Grudem is candid that the Trinity is genuinely hard to hold in the mind — it's a paradox, a mystery that presses against the limits of our thinking. But a paradox is not a contradiction, and the discomfort of holding two true things in tension isn't evidence that one of them is false. What it actually requires is honest engagement with the full range of biblical testimony: not just the texts that confirm what you already believe, but the ones that press back, complicate, and ultimately — if you follow them all the way — lead somewhere larger than any of us would have arrived at on our own.

That's not an easy ask. But it's the right one.

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Primary sources used in the critique of this charter include:
- Gregory Boyd, Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity (Baker, 1992);
- Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks, Come, Let Us Reason Together (Baker, 1990);
- Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Zondervan, 1994);
- David Bernard, The Oneness of God (Word Aflame Press, 1983).

[1] Primary sources used in the critique of this charter include:
Gregory Boyd, Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity (Baker, 1992);

Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks, Come, Let Us Reason Together (Baker, 1990);

Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Zondervan, 1994);

David Bernard, The Oneness of God (Word Aflame Press, 1983).

[2] Gregory Boyd, Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity (Baker, 1992);

[3] Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks, Come, Let Us Reason Together (Baker, 1990);

[4] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Zondervan, 1994);

[5] David Bernard, The Oneness of God (Word Aflame Press, 1983).

[1]