Jump to content

Bernard's The Oneness of God - Chapter 11

From BelieveTheSign
Revision as of 15:56, 15 June 2026 by Admin (talk | contribs)


Click on headings to expand them, or links to go to specific articles.


Click here to find out about THE definitive book on William Branham - Under The Halo: Examining the Legacy of William Branham



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 11 of The Oneness of God by David K. Bernard

"Trinitarianism: Definition and Historical Development"

The Trinity, Bernard tells us in Chapter 11, has its roots in Babylonian paganism. From Babylon it spread to Egypt, then to Greece, then through Greek philosophy into the church. By the time Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicea in AD 325, a politically motivated emperor was essentially forcing bishops to sign a creed most of them didn't understand and that had no real connection to the Bible. That's the story Bernard tells.

It's a dramatic story. And it needs a serious response, because nearly every major claim in Chapter 11 has a significant problem.

What Bernard Gets Right

It is true that the word "trinity" does not appear in the Bible. It is also correct that the formal creeds — Nicaea in 325, Constantinople in 381 — represent the church's developed theological language, not a word-for-word quotation from Scripture. And Bernard is right that early figures like Tertullian and Origen held views on the Son's relationship to the Father that the church later refined and in some ways corrected.

These are fair historical observations. Theologians across the spectrum acknowledge that the precise vocabulary of Trinitarian doctrine — words like homoousios, meaning "of the same essence" — was worked out over time in response to specific challenges. That development is real and worth knowing about.

The problem is what Bernard builds on these observations. From "the word 'Trinity' isn't in the Bible," he concludes that the concept isn't biblical. From "the creeds developed over time," he concludes that the doctrine was invented. These conclusions don't follow, and Chapter 11 doesn't establish them.

Bernard Defines the Trinity — Then Attacks His Own Definition

The first major problem in Chapter 11 is that Bernard defines the Trinity in a way that makes it look like belief in three gods, then accuses it of being belief in three gods.

He quotes Trinitarian Pentecostals who describe the Father, Son, and Spirit as three beings with separate bodies, souls, and spirits. He cites examples of art that depicts God as three men, or as an old man, a young man, and a dove. He finds historical figures who pushed the language of three persons in a direction that ran close to, or over the edge into, something that sounded like three gods. From this he concludes that Trinitarianism "reduces the concept of God's oneness to a unity of plural persons" and amounts to "a form of polytheism."

But the examples he quotes are already recognized as problems by mainstream Trinitarian theology. The picture of three men is not an acceptable way to represent the Trinity. The definition of "person" as a fully separate individual human being is exactly what Trinitarian theologians have always resisted and warned against. Grudem writes plainly that tritheism — the belief in three gods — has been "decisively rejected throughout the history of the Christian church," and he notes that many evangelical Christians today "unintentionally tend toward tritheistic views of the Trinity" in ways that go beyond what the doctrine actually teaches.

Bernard has found real examples of bad Trinitarian thinking — there's no shortage of those — but he's presenting them as if they represent what Trinitarianism actually claims. The actual claim is more careful: one divine being, one nature, one essence, fully shared by three persons who are genuinely distinct but not separate. Bernard's Webster's dictionary definition of "person" as an individual human being is precisely what the church has always said does not transfer to God without serious qualification. That's not a modern revision. Grudem and others note that Augustine himself acknowledged the word "person" is imperfect and used it because there was no better alternative, not because it perfectly captured the divine reality.

You don't disprove a doctrine by showing that imprecise versions of it have problems. You engage what it actually says.

The "Nonbiblical Terminology" Problem Cuts Both Ways

Bernard makes much of the fact that the Bible never uses the words "trinity," "three persons," or "coequal." He calls this "nonbiblical terminology" and treats it as a serious strike against Trinitarian doctrine.

This argument has a real problem: by Bernard's standard, his own theology is equally guilty.

The word "manifestation" — the cornerstone of Oneness teaching about the Father, Son, and Spirit — doesn't appear in the Bible as a description of how the three names relate to each other. The phrase "dual nature," which Bernard uses throughout his book to describe how Father (deity) and Son (humanity) coexist in Jesus, isn't in the Bible either. The very word "Oneness" as a label for a theological position appears nowhere in Scripture. None of these terms are objectionable just because they're nonbiblical — they're attempts to summarize what the Bible teaches using words that help. But that means Bernard is doing exactly what he accuses Trinitarians of doing.

Grudem makes this point simply: we regularly use words that aren't in the Bible to summarize what the Bible teaches. "Incarnation" — the idea that God took on human flesh — is not a biblical word, yet it describes a biblical reality. The question is never whether a term appears in the text, but whether it accurately captures what the text teaches. That standard applies equally to "Trinity" and to "Oneness."

The Pagan Origins Argument: The Boldest Claim, the Weakest Case

Bernard's most dramatic argument in Chapter 11 is that the Trinity originated in pagan religion. He draws parallels to Babylon, Egypt, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Greek philosophy, and concludes that "the idea of a trinity did not originate with Christendom."

Boyd, who examines this argument directly, says it plainly: the claim "cannot be sustained with any solid evidence and valid argumentation. This is why no recognized contemporary scholar supports this notion."

There are several layers of problems here.

First, the parallels Bernard finds are much thinner than he presents them. The Babylonian trinity of father, mother, and child is not the Christian Trinity. The Hindu Trimurti of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu are three distinct gods with separate identities, worshipped separately, with competing temples and priests — the opposite of the Christian claim that Father, Son, and Spirit share one divine nature and are not divisible into parts. Taoism's Three Purities are similarly separate divine beings. A vague sense of "threeness" in a religious system is a very long way from the specific claim that one God fully and eternally exists as three co-equal, co-eternal, distinct persons sharing one essence. Boyd notes that scholars today are "generally much less inclined to make anything of these" parallels than they were a century ago.

Second, the argument proves far too much. The Bible contains accounts of a great flood, a creation, and promises of a coming divine figure — all of which have parallels in other ancient religions. Does that mean these biblical accounts were borrowed from paganism? The fact that another religion has something resembling a concept found in Christianity doesn't tell you which direction the borrowing went, or whether there was borrowing at all. Boyd points out that some Christian thinkers have argued the opposite: that the faint "threeness" found in various religious traditions might actually be evidence that the triune God left his mark on humanity — that people groping after truth occasionally glimpsed something real about the God who made them.

Third, Bernard's primary source for the Babylonian claim is Alexander Hislop, whom he describes as a "trinitarian scholar." Hislop was actually a 19th-century Free Church of Scotland minister who wrote a polemical attack on Roman Catholicism comparing its practices to Babylonian religion. He was not a trained scholar of ancient Near Eastern languages or religion. His central work has been consistently criticized by those who have actually worked in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian source material, who have pointed out that Hislop regularly misread, mistranslated, and misidentified his sources. Calling him a "trinitarian scholar" misrepresents both his actual qualifications and his purpose.

Fourth — and this is the most important point — if the Trinity had crept into the church from pagan religion, you would expect the church's trinitarian teachers to show signs of borrowing it from pagan sources, and you would expect the people already in the church to resist this corruption of their faith. Boyd points out that when modalism arrived in the late second century, it caused a massive controversy precisely because it was new. But we find no such controversy surrounding Trinitarian language in the early church. Justin Martyr, writing mid-second century, assumes Father, Son, and Spirit distinctions as normal without any suggestion that he borrowed this from Athens or Babylon. If the Trinity was a pagan import, the import apparently happened without anyone noticing or objecting — which is exactly what you'd expect if it wasn't an import at all.

The Constantine and Nicea Argument

Bernard presents the Council of Nicea as a politically motivated event where Constantine pressured bishops into signing a creed. He quotes at length about Constantine's moral failures, his political motives, and his indifference to theology.

There is some truth here. Constantine did convene the council for political reasons — he wanted unity in the empire. But Bernard himself states that Constantine "was not interested in any particular outcome, as long as the participants reached agreement." If that's true, then the substance of the Nicene declaration came from the bishops themselves, not from Constantine. A man who didn't care about the theological content didn't determine the theological content.

The actual theological work at Nicea was driven primarily by men like Athanasius, who had no political power at the time — he was a young assistant to the Bishop of Alexandria, not even an official delegate. What Nicaea decided — that Jesus was of the same essence as the Father, not of similar essence — was a distinction that mattered enormously to the theologians who argued for it, and the argument was made from Scripture and theological reasoning, not from political convenience.

Bernard also says Constantine "assured unanimity by banishing all the bishops who would not sign the new professions of faith." But if political pressure alone determined the outcome at Nicaea, it's hard to explain what happened immediately afterward. After Constantine died, his son Constantius backed the Arians, deposing Athanasian bishops and reinstating Arians across the empire. Athanasius was exiled five or six times. Arianism dominated politically for decades after Nicaea. If the Trinitarian settlement had been purely a product of Constantine's political arm-twisting, why didn't it collapse the moment that arm was removed? The fact that it survived decades of sustained political pressure from the opposite direction is actually evidence that its roots were deeper than politics.

Bernard uses Nicea's political context to cast doubt on its theological outcome. But the political context of any decision doesn't automatically invalidate the decision. The apostolic letters were written in a Roman political context. The Old Testament was compiled under kings. The question is always whether the content is true — and that has to be settled on the evidence, not by pointing out that imperfect people were involved.

The Tertullian and Origen Problem: Judging the Doctrine by the Man

Bernard notes that Tertullian, the first major articulator of Trinitarian language in Latin, eventually became a follower of Montanus (a leader the church condemned as a heretic) and was excommunicated. He also notes that Origen — who developed the doctrine of the eternal Son — held multiple positions condemned as heretical and was himself excommunicated.

This is all accurate history. But it's being used to suggest that because the early articulators of Trinitarian language were flawed or later condemned on other grounds, their Trinitarian contributions are therefore suspect.

This is arguing against the person rather than against the argument. A doctrine's truth or error doesn't depend on the character of those who articulate it. Tertullian's Trinitarian distinctions stand or fall on whether they accurately reflect Scripture — his later Montanism doesn't change that. Origen's subordinationism — the idea that the Son was in some sense lower than the Father in existence — was actually corrected and rejected by the Council of Nicaea. So rather than showing that the early church simply accepted whatever its teachers said, Origen's case actually shows the opposite: the church evaluated these teachings against the biblical evidence and rejected Origen's subordinationism as going too far. That's not blind deference to theological innovation. That's a community testing doctrine.

Bernard also notes that Tertullian held an "economic" view of the Trinity — meaning the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct for the purposes of God's work in history, and these distinctions will one day cease. Bernard uses this to argue that early Trinitarianism was quite different from what Trinitarians believe today. That's fair. But the church recognized this as an inadequate formulation and moved beyond it — precisely in the direction of affirming that the personal distinctions in Father, Son, and Spirit are real and eternal, not temporary modes that God wears for our benefit. The fact that early articulations were refined over time is simply how theological understanding develops. Oneness theology itself has developed over time.

The Apostles' Creed

Bernard argues that the Apostles' Creed — which begins "I believe in God the Father Almighty" and goes on to describe "Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord," and "the Holy Ghost" — doesn't actually teach the Trinity, because it doesn't describe the Holy Spirit as a distinct person of the Godhead.

This is an odd argument to lean on. The Apostles' Creed names God the Father, Jesus Christ his only Son, and the Holy Ghost as three distinct objects of faith. That the creed doesn't use the precise language of Nicaea doesn't mean it teaches Oneness. Bernard himself says he can read the creed without objection if the terms are defined his way — but a Trinitarian can make exactly the same claim. The creed is capable of bearing both readings, which means it can't settle the argument either way.

What's interesting is what the creed says about Jesus: "born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried." These describe the human Son. But the creed also describes him as "Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord" — language that distinguishes him from the Father as a genuinely other person, not simply the Father taking on flesh. Bernard says the creed "describes the Son of God only in terms of the Incarnation." But that's partly because the Apostles' Creed is structured as a narrative of the Son's work in history, not as a comprehensive doctrine of God. To argue from its silence on the eternal Son that the eternal Son is therefore not biblical is another version of the same mistake: treating absence of a term in a specific document as if it were evidence that the concept doesn't exist.

The Real Logical Problem

Bernard's chapter works through a series of arguments against Trinitarianism — it's tritheistic, its language is nonbiblical, it has pagan roots, it was imposed by a pagan emperor, its early articulators were heretics — and then declares in conclusion that Trinitarianism is "nonbiblical both in terminology and in historical origin."

But he's trying to establish a historical and logical case without engaging the biblical evidence. Whether the Trinity is true can't be determined by cataloguing the failures of Tertullian or tracing triangles in Assyrian artwork. It has to be settled by asking what the New Testament actually describes when it describes God. Does it describe one person who plays three roles in succession, or does it describe a genuine relationship between a Father who sends and a Son who is sent, with a Spirit who intercedes and a Son who makes requests? The New Testament's answer to that question — which Bernard tries to answer in earlier chapters with the Four Aids and the dual-nature framework — is where the real argument has to be made.

Chapter 11 is essentially an attempt to discredit Trinitarianism by its history rather than by its content. And history is the wrong tool for the job. If Trinitarianism is false, it's false because the biblical evidence doesn't support it — not because Will Durant or a 19th-century Scottish minister found triangles in Babylon.

Grudem points out that when we use nonbiblical words to summarize biblical realities — whether "Trinity" or "Incarnation" — the test is always whether those words faithfully represent what Scripture teaches. That test has to be applied to the Bible, not to the history of councils and controversies that surrounded the doctrine's development.

A Word to the Reader

If you grew up being told that the Trinity was invented by Constantine at Nicea, or that it came from Babylon through Rome and corrupted the original faith, Chapter 11 gives that story its most organized form. It names sources. It quotes historians. It follows a timeline from Babylon to AD 381.

But look carefully at what the argument requires. It requires trusting a 19th-century minister's claims about Babylonian religion over the work of contemporary scholars of the ancient Near East. It requires reading the parallel of "some kind of threeness in other religions" as evidence that the specifically Christian Trinity was borrowed from those religions. It requires dismissing the Council of Nicaea because Constantine had political motives — while ignoring that Constantine's political pressure in the opposite direction (under his son Constantius) failed to unseat what Nicaea decided. It requires treating the personal failures of Tertullian and Origen as evidence against the doctrine they partially articulated, while ignoring that the church itself tested and refined their formulations.

None of this adds up to what Bernard claims. The historical case against the Trinity in Chapter 11 is built on thin parallels, misrepresented sources, and arguments that would prove too much if applied consistently. The question of whether the Trinity is true still has to be answered from the Bible — and that is exactly what the earlier chapters of this book have tried, and failed, to settle in Oneness's favor.


Navigation

Retrieved from "https://en.believethesign.com/index.php?title=Bernard%27s_The_Oneness_of_God_-_Chapter_11&oldid=27830"