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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:

A Critical Analysis of Chapter 10 of The Oneness of God by David K. Bernard

"Oneness Believers in Church History"

"The simple, indeed … who always constitute the majority of believers, are startled at the dispensation (of the Three in One)…"

That quote is from Tertullian, writing around AD 213 against the modalist teacher Praxeas. Bernard puts it near the center of Chapter 10 as evidence that the ordinary Christians of his day were Oneness believers, not Trinitarians. It's one of the more dramatic claims in the book — that the early church was mostly on Bernard's side, and that it took centuries of political maneuvering and philosophical drift before Trinitarian theology won out. The problem is that Tertullian himself — in the same document, just a few paragraphs earlier — says something Bernard doesn't quote: that Praxeas was "the first to import to Rome out of Asia this kind of wrong-headedness." Tertullian says modalism is a novelty. He says the Trinitarian faith he's defending:

"has come down from the beginning of the Gospel, even before all former heretics, not to speak of Praxeas of yesterday."

Then Bernard quotes Tertullian's description of the simple believers in the same letter and presents it as proof of Oneness dominance.

This is the heart of Chapter 10. Not because that one quote settles everything, but because it shows the method Bernard is using throughout: take what his opponents said about modalism's popularity and treat it as proof, while ignoring what those same opponents said about modalism's novelty.

What Bernard Gets Right

Bernard is correct that the formal, fully developed doctrine of the Trinity — the language of three co-equal, co-eternal, distinct persons sharing one divine substance — was not articulated in that precise form until the fourth century. The Council of Nicaea was in AD 325, and Trinitarian language continued to be refined at Constantinople in 381. That's not a conspiracy. Theological language develops over time in response to specific errors that arise, and the church put precise language around the Trinity when precise language became necessary to guard against specific errors.

Bernard is also right that some early figures used language that doesn't map neatly onto later Trinitarian categories. The second-century Apologists sometimes expressed the relationship between Father and Son in ways that later theologians found imprecise. That's real history.

But Bernard moves from "the formal doctrine wasn't fully developed yet" to "therefore the early church was Oneness," and those are very different things. You can acknowledge that the vocabulary of the Trinity developed over time while still recognizing that the basic content — one God, the distinct Father, the distinct Son, and the distinct Spirit — was present from the beginning.

The Argument That Proves Too Much

Bernard's three main conclusions in Chapter 10 are: that the post-apostolic fathers were Oneness, that Oneness was dominant through the second and third centuries, and that Oneness believers survived throughout history until the present day.

To support these claims, Bernard faces a real problem: most of the early Christian writings that survive don't look Oneness. They speak of the Father and Son as distinct in ways that don't sit comfortably with modalism. Bernard's response to this is threefold, and each response reveals a flaw in his method.

First, he suggests that Trinitarian readers misread the early fathers because of their own biases. Fair enough — no reader is perfectly neutral. But this cuts both ways just as easily. Oneness readers have just as many reasons to read their own framework into ambiguous texts.

Second, he suggests that early Trinitarian passages may be the result of later scribes adding material that wasn't originally there. This is a real phenomenon in manuscript history. It happened. But Bernard applies it so broadly that it becomes an all-purpose escape hatch. Anytime an early document looks Trinitarian, there's a possible explanation ready: interpolation. A historical standard that explains away any inconvenient evidence is no standard at all — it's just a way of protecting a conclusion you've already reached.

Third, he notes that false doctrine crept into the church from early on, so some early Trinitarian material may just reflect early corruption of the true faith. This again proves too much. If early documents can always be dismissed as either misread or corrupted, then no early document can ever count as evidence against Oneness. You've made the position impossible to challenge from history.

Here is the core problem: Bernard cannot allow any piece of early Christian evidence to weigh against him. If a second-century writer looks Trinitarian, he either misread it, someone added to it, or false doctrine got in early. No matter what the historical evidence shows, there's always a ready explanation for why it doesn't actually count. That's not historical argument — it's historical insulation.

The Ignatius Problem

Bernard says that Ignatius, who wrote around AD 110 — close enough to the apostolic age to have personally known people who had known the apostles — "emphasized the doctrines associated with Oneness." He makes this claim in his book. He does not, however, supply a single passage from Ignatius's actual letters to back it up.

That's a significant omission, because the letters of Ignatius are not vague on this point.

Ignatius writes that Christ was "before the ages with the Father and appeared at the end of time." Before the ages. With the Father. This is the preexistence of Christ as a distinct person alongside the Father — not a thought in God's mind, not the Father wearing a different mode, but a genuine someone who existed in relationship with the Father before time. Ignatius makes this point in passing, without arguing for it, which means he wasn't introducing a new idea. He was assuming his readers already knew it.

Ignatius also writes: "Let all run together as to one temple of God, as to one altar, to one Jesus Christ, who came forth from one Father and remained with the One and returned to the One." Came forth from. Remained with. Returned to. Every phrase describes a relationship between two distinct parties. Then he goes further and explicitly exhorts his readers as Jesus was subject to the Father in the flesh, and as the apostles were to Christ and to the Father — drawing a line of relationship that only makes sense if Father and Son are genuinely distinct.

None of this is how a modalist would write. Bernard claims Ignatius, but he doesn't engage Ignatius's actual text. His case depends on what he doesn't show you.

Polycarp's Dying Prayer

Bernard also brings up Polycarp — the student of John the apostle himself — as evidence of Oneness belief. But Polycarp's dying prayer has come down to us, recorded by those who witnessed his martyrdom around AD 155. He prays:

"I bless you, I glorify you, along with the everlasting and heavenly Jesus Christ, your beloved Child, through whom be glory to you, with him and the Holy Spirit, both now and to the ages to come."

That is a prayer addressed to God the Father, offered through Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit — three distinct parties in a single act of worship. This is not how a Oneness believer prays. In contemporary Oneness churches, directing prayer to "God the Father" as a distinct person from Jesus would be considered at best confused and at worst heretical. The fact that this prayer was offered at the death of a man who personally knew the Apostle John, and was recorded and preserved by his own congregation as a precious expression of faith, tells us something important about what that community believed.

Boyd, who examined these documents directly, concludes that across Ignatius, Clement, Polycarp, and others, "never is Jesus once called 'Father,' " and the distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are everywhere assumed, never argued, and never qualified. When something appears in the writings of the church's earliest leaders without argument or defense, that usually means it wasn't controversial — it was simply what everyone believed.

The Tertullian Quote, Read in Full

The quote Bernard uses from Tertullian's Against Praxeas deserves more careful attention, because it's being asked to carry more weight than it can hold.

Tertullian does say that many ordinary believers were bothered by Trinitarian distinctions because they feared anything that sounded like multiple gods. That's historically plausible — ordinary people have always been more sensitive to practical monotheism than to theological precision. But here is what Bernard leaves out.

In the very same document, Tertullian says Praxeas — the modalist teacher — "was the first to bring this kind of error to Rome from Asia." Not the latest in a long line. The first. Tertullian also says he's defending the faith that "has come down from the beginning of the Gospel" against what he calls the teaching of "Praxeas of yesterday." Tertullian's entire argument against Praxeas rests on the principle that what is earliest is true and what is later is counterfeit. And by Tertullian's own account, modalism is later. It's the innovation. Trinitarianism is the tradition.

Bernard quotes Tertullian to show that simple believers leaned Oneness. But Tertullian himself — in the same letter — says Oneness is what Praxeas introduced to Rome for the first time. You can't use a man's letter as evidence that his opponents were the majority while ignoring the part where he says his opponents just arrived on the scene.

The Missing Controversy

There's a pattern in history that Bernard's account cannot explain. When modalism was introduced in the late second century, it caused a massive controversy. Tertullian wrote against it. Hippolytus wrote against it. The Roman church debated it for years. It clearly disrupted existing belief with something new.

If Oneness was the original apostolic doctrine and Trinitarianism gradually replaced it through the second century, you would expect the opposite pattern: you would expect Trinitarians to have caused the controversy when they introduced their new, multiple-person view against the original Oneness faith. But there is no record of any such controversy. Not one document from the early second century shows a Trinitarian minority fighting against a shocked Oneness majority. The writings of Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and others in the mid-second century express clearly distinct Father-Son theology without any apparent opposition or protest. They write as though what they're saying is normal.

Boyd puts the problem sharply: "If the Oneness doctrine was in fact the original apostolic doctrine, why didn't it cause so much as a whimper 'fading away' (in one generation!) while it caused such an incredible uproar 'coming back'?" There is no good answer to that question — unless the Oneness doctrine never faded away because it was never there in the first place.

The Modalists Were Condemned as Heretics

Here is something Chapter 10 treats very lightly: the modalist teachers Bernard holds up as heroes — Noetus, Praxeas, Sabellius — were all condemned as heretics by the church in their own day. These weren't faithful believers silently keeping the apostolic flame alive and getting persecuted for it. They were teachers who introduced what the church recognized as a distortion of the faith it had received and handed on.

Bernard is aware of this. He discusses Tertullian and Hippolytus as the main opponents of the modalists and acknowledges that his information about the modalists comes largely from those opponents. He even notes, fairly, that the modalists' own writings don't survive and that we're reading them through hostile sources. That's a legitimate point.

But the cure he offers is to simply trust his own reconstruction over the church's judgment. He takes the hostile sources, strips out what he doesn't like, and reconstructs a modalism that looks much more like modern Oneness Pentecostalism than what the actual historical sources describe. That's not neutral historical method. That's reverse-engineering your evidence to fit your conclusion.

And there is an uncomfortable implication at the far end of this move. If Bernard is right that the modalists were the faithful remnant, and if the Oneness view is a necessary part of the gospel, then the church that condemned these men — including its recognized leaders, bishops, and teachers across multiple regions — was not just wrong about a theological nuance. It was suppressing the gospel. Every believer who lived under trinitarian teaching for the next sixteen centuries was, on this account, cut off from salvation through no fault of their own. Bernard doesn't say this directly. But it follows from his premises, and he doesn't adequately face it.

Servetus, Swedenborg, and the Shifting Goalposts

Bernard's survey of later "Oneness believers" in church history includes figures like Michael Servetus and Emmanuel Swedenborg. These men did reject certain traditional Trinitarian categories, and that's worth noting. But Bernard himself admits of Swedenborg that he "taught a number of questionable or erroneous doctrines." He acknowledges that Swedenborg's soul-body-spirit analogy for the Trinity is "not particularly appropriate." And Swedenborg's framework is in fact different enough from modern Oneness theology that calling him a Oneness forerunner requires a good deal of generous reading.

Servetus is a different case. He was burned at the stake in 1553, with the approval of John Calvin — a genuine historical tragedy. But Servetus rejected the eternal preexistence of the Son, something modern Oneness theology affirms. He held that there is no person of God but Christ, but his actual system doesn't map cleanly onto the Acts 2:38 framework that defines modern Oneness Pentecostalism.

Bernard's list of historical Oneness figures works by broadening "Oneness" to include anyone who questioned Trinitarian categories, regardless of whether their actual views match modern Oneness teaching. That's a loose standard. You could compile an equally long list of figures throughout history who affirmed something like three distinct persons in the Godhead, including the church's most celebrated theologians, teachers, and martyrs. The breadth of that list would not prove Trinitarianism right — and Bernard's list doesn't prove Oneness right either.

The Implications Bernard Doesn't Face

There's a point Boyd makes that gets at the deepest problem with Bernard's historical argument. If Oneness theology is correct, and if the correct mode of baptism ("in Jesus' name only") and the correct understanding of God (Jesus alone is Father, Son, and Spirit) are necessary for salvation, then the conclusion of Chapter 10's historical argument is this: almost no one was saved between roughly AD 200 and the founding of the modern Oneness Pentecostal movement in 1914. Every Christian of the Middle Ages — including people who died in poverty serving the sick, people martyred for refusing to deny Christ, people who gave their whole lives to Scripture and prayer — was not actually saved, because they held a mistaken view of the Trinity and received the wrong baptism.

Bernard doesn't say this explicitly in Chapter 10. But if his historical argument is correct, it follows. And it deserves to be said plainly, because it's exactly the kind of conclusion that should make someone ask whether the premises that lead to it might be wrong.

The Real Logical Problem

Chapter 10 functions as a historical argument for a theological conclusion, but it's built on a series of moves that protect that conclusion from any possible counter-evidence. If early fathers look Trinitarian, they were either misread, corrupted, or interpolated. If modalists were condemned as heretics, that just shows how early the apostasy spread. If no Oneness believers left records, it proves they were suppressed. Every historical scenario, favorable or unfavorable, ends up supporting the same conclusion.

That is not how historical argument works. A good historical argument has to be able to say what evidence would count against it. Bernard's argument in Chapter 10 doesn't leave room for anything to count against it. That's not a sign of a strong historical case — it's a sign that the conclusion came first and the history was shaped around it.

Grudem, in his systematic theology, notes that modalism "must deny the interpersonal relationships within the Trinity that appear frequently in Scripture" and that it "loses the heart of the doctrine of the atonement." But beyond the biblical problems, the historical record simply doesn't support Bernard's picture of a Oneness early church gradually overtaken by Trinitarian philosophy. The earliest witnesses we have — from the generation immediately following the apostles — already speak as though the distinctness of Father, Son, and Spirit is simply part of the faith. When modalism arrived, the church recognized it as something new and said so. The burden of proof is on those who claim otherwise to show, from actual evidence, that things were different.

A Word to the Reader

If you've grown up being told that the doctrine of the Trinity was invented at Nicaea, cooked up by Greek philosophers, and imposed on a church that originally believed something much simpler — Chapter 10 is designed to confirm that story. It gives you names: Noetus, Praxeas, Sabellius, Servetus. It gives you the sense of a faithful underground, Oneness believers surviving across the centuries despite violent opposition.

But the story only holds together if you agree, in advance, that every early document suggesting Trinitarian belief is either misread, interpolated, or early corruption. That's a very high price. It requires you to believe that the disciples of the apostles — men who personally knew Peter, John, and Paul — got the doctrine of God wrong within one generation, and did so without a single person raising an objection.

Ignatius of Antioch, writing around AD 110, was almost certainly taught by people who knew the apostles personally. His letters describe Christ as existing with the Father before the ages, coming forth from the Father, and returning to the Father. If the apostles had taught Oneness, Ignatius would not write like this — not without argument, not without explanation, and not without someone in his churches finding it strange. But no one does. Because it wasn't strange. It was simply what the church had always believed about the God who sent his Son.

Footnotes

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