Oneness and Trinity AD 100-300
This article is part of our series examining a number of David Bernard's major publications. Please click on this link if you would like to go to the list of pubications we have reviewed - Links to Bernard's other books.
Critical Response to Oneness and Trinity A.D. 100-300 by David Bernard
The Oneness of God and The Oneness View of Jesus make their case primarily from Scripture. This book is different. Oneness and Trinity A.D. 100-300 is a church history argument. Bernard's thesis is that the early church, from the death of the apostles to the Council of Nicaea in 325, was Oneness rather than Trinitarian, and that Trinitarianism was a later philosophical invention that displaced the original faith.
This response does not repeat arguments addressed in earlier responses to those books. It focuses on the arguments that are unique to this one. Bernard raises some real historical questions, and fair credit will be given where his points land. But the overall case has serious problems, starting with the method itself.
"We Can't Trust What the Early Church Writers Actually Wrote"
Bernard opens by warning that ancient documents have been altered, added to, and suppressed. Trinitarian scribes, he argues, had both the motive and the opportunity to corrupt texts, so any passage that looks Trinitarian may be a later addition. He applies this logic throughout, particularly with Ignatius and the Didache.
This sounds reasonable on the surface, but it works too well. Once you decide that any text can be dismissed as a possible interpolation, you have given yourself the power to ignore any evidence you don't like. Bernard doesn't actually demonstrate that specific passages were altered by using the tools historians employ for that kind of work: comparing manuscript traditions, analyzing word choices, checking whether a passage fits the style and context of the surrounding text, or examining whether later writers quote the disputed passage. He asserts interpolation as an explanation whenever a text is inconvenient. That is not historical argument; it is special pleading.
Textual scholars have studied these documents for centuries, and most of them reach their conclusions without any stake in Trinitarian or Oneness outcomes. The standard text of Ignatius, for example, is the shorter version that scholars broadly accept as genuine. Bernard uses this fact throughout his book. But then he also applies the interpolation suspicion to passages within those same accepted letters when they don't support his reading. The question is not whether any ancient document could theoretically have been altered. The question is whether there is actual manuscript evidence of a specific alteration. In most of the cases Bernard raises, there is none.
There is another problem with this method: Bernard never applies it to texts that support his own position. The apocryphal writings he cites in Chapter 9 as evidence for Oneness belief among common people are accepted at face value, without any concern that later Oneness-sympathizing copyists might have shaped them. The interpolation suspicion cuts only in one direction in this book. A method that only challenges the evidence against your view is not a historical method; it is a defense strategy.
"Trinitarians Can't Have It Both Ways with the Church Fathers"
Bernard points out, repeatedly and with some justification, that Trinitarians appeal to early church fathers as authorities for the Trinity while rejecting those same fathers on other points. Irenaeus taught that baptism is necessary for new birth. Tertullian subordinated the Son to the Father in ways Nicene orthodoxy later condemned. Origen was excommunicated. If these writers are your authorities for the Trinity, why aren't they also your authorities on everything else they taught?
This is a fair rhetorical challenge, but it proves less than Bernard thinks. Trinitarian Christians don't accept everything Tertullian wrote because Tertullian wrote it. They examine whether his statements reflect what Scripture actually teaches. When he got something right, they receive it. When he didn't, they don't. The church never claimed the pre-Nicene fathers were infallible guides. It treated them as witnesses who were grappling with the same texts and drawing on the same apostolic tradition, sometimes well and sometimes poorly.
Bernard himself uses exactly this method. He cites passages from Ignatius, Irenaeus, and Origen where those writers sound Oneness-compatible, and he takes those as evidence that the early church leaned Oneness. When those same writers sound Trinitarian, he dismisses their statements as interpolations, philosophical corruptions, or failures of nerve. He applies precisely the selective reading he criticizes Trinitarians for making. This doesn't mean the point has no force at all. But it does mean Bernard has no high ground from which to make it.
"The Letters of Ignatius Were Changed by Later Copyists"
Bernard argues that the longer forms of Ignatius's letters, which contain the most clearly Trinitarian content, are later expansions. Scholars have long agreed with this. The shorter form of the letters is the standard accepted text, and the longer version is widely recognized as expanded by later hands.
The problem is that Bernard then treats the standard, accepted, shorter text as though it supports a Oneness reading. It doesn't.
In the authentic letters of Ignatius, Jesus Christ is called "God manifested in flesh" (Ephesians 7:2). Ignatius writes of "Jesus Christ who before the ages was with the Father and appeared at the end of time" (Magnesians 6:1), placing Christ alongside the Father as a distinct presence before the Incarnation. In Trallians 11:2, Ignatius writes of "Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father." In Magnesians 8:2, he describes "Jesus Christ, his Son, who is his Word proceeding from silence." None of this is the longer, disputed version. All of it is from the short letters scholars accept as genuine.
These passages don't describe one person appearing in two modes. They describe the Father and the Son as distinguishable, with the Son having an existence alongside the Father before the Incarnation. That language, applied carefully, leads toward Trinitarian thinking, which is why Trinitarian writers have always cited Ignatius. The interpolation argument removes the more explicit Trinitarian language, but the shorter authentic text still does not support a Oneness reading when examined honestly.
"The Didache's Baptismal Formula Was Added Later"
Bernard argues that Didache 7:1, which gives the threefold baptismal formula ("baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit"), was inserted by a later Trinitarian scribe. He notes that the only manuscript of the Didache dates to 1056, that Didache 9:5 refers to being "baptized in the name of the Lord," and that the Eucharistic prayers in that document don't address a Trinitarian God. Therefore, he concludes, the threefold formula in chapter 7 doesn't fit the original document.
The manuscript date of 1056 doesn't mean the text was composed or altered late. Virtually every ancient document survives only in medieval manuscript copies, because that is how transmission worked before the printing press. The Didache's content has been dated to the late first or early second century by scholars across different traditions, based on its early and undeveloped theology, its reflection of Jewish Christian practice, and what other ancient writers say about it. A late copy date is not evidence of a late interpolation.
As for the internal conflict Bernard sees: Didache 9:5 says those who are "baptized in the name of the Lord" may eat from the Eucharistic table. This passage identifies who is eligible for Communion; it doesn't describe a competing baptismal formula. "The name of the Lord" is a broad phrase that would include someone baptized with the threefold formula. There is no contradiction. And the absence of an explicitly Trinitarian address in the Eucharistic prayers is not evidence for Oneness theology. Those prayers address God in ways compatible with either position. Silence about Trinitarian distinctions is not the same as Oneness affirmation, and Bernard uses this kind of silence as evidence far more freely than it can bear.
"Justin Martyr Invented the Trinity from Greek Philosophy, Not from the Apostles"
Bernard argues that Justin Martyr, writing around 150, was the first to introduce a threefold baptismal formula and to define the Word as a second divine being. Justin, he says, borrowed the Logos concept from Philo of Alexandria and Plato rather than receiving it from the apostles. Therefore Justin's theology was a philosophical import, not a preservation of apostolic teaching.
It is true that Justin's language about the Logos reflects his philosophical background. He was a philosopher who converted to Christianity, and he used the vocabulary of his training to explain what Christians believed to educated pagans. But the claim that the Logos concept was imported into Christianity from Greek philosophy ignores something Bernard never addresses directly: the New Testament itself uses Logos language. John 1:1-14 already says "In the beginning was the Word," already identifies the Word as God, and already says the Word became flesh. What Justin did was engage the existing vocabulary to explain what John had already said. Whether he did so successfully is a fair question. But the origin of Logos language in Christian thought is not Philo; it is John.
More importantly, Justin's theology was subordinationist. He described the Son as a second divine being, lower in rank than the Father. This is a theological problem, and Trinitarian Christians acknowledge it. But notice what kind of problem it is: Justin affirmed a genuinely second being, just defined that being as lesser than the Father. Oneness theology denies that there is any second being at all. These are opposite positions. If Justin deviated from original Christianity, he deviated in the direction of two-ness, not in the direction of one. Bernard wants to argue that Justin started with a Oneness instinct (the Logos originally inherent in the one God) and corrupted it. But Justin's corruption was toward affirming a distinct Logos, not toward denying one. His theology has more in common with Arius than with Oneness Pentecostalism.
"The Other Greek Apologists Weren't Truly Trinitarian Either"
Bernard extends his argument about Justin to Tatian, Theophilus, Athenagoras, and Melito. Their views were not orthodox Trinitarianism by Nicene standards. They subordinated the Son to the Father. Some of them described the Logos as originally impersonal within God before being "begotten" at some point before creation. Bernard concludes that these writers represent an evolution away from Oneness, not toward Trinitarianism, and that Trinitarian scholars are dishonest when they claim these men as early Trinitarians.
Trinitarian historians largely accept this critique. The Apologists' language was imprecise and, by later Nicene standards, inadequate. What Bernard misses is the significance of what these writers do consistently affirm: when the Apologists began to think carefully about God and Christ, they all ended up distinguishing the Word from the Father as two realities, not one person in two modes. Even with their flawed and subordinationist vocabulary, every careful philosopher who engaged the Christian doctrine of God ended up moving toward recognizing some form of distinction in the Godhead.
If the early church were genuinely and simply Oneness, as Bernard argues, you would expect trained reasoners to see that clearly and defend it. Instead, every early thinker who tried to explain Christianity to the educated world ended up affirming some form of distinction. Some of them expressed it badly. Some of them expressed it in ways that leaned toward two gods rather than one. But they all moved in the same direction. That is a pattern. It needs explaining. Bernard's explanation is that they were all corrupted by Greek philosophy. But the simpler explanation is that the New Testament, read carefully, keeps pressing people in that direction.
"Irenaeus Sounds More Like Oneness Than Trinity"
Bernard argues that Irenaeus, the most significant theologian of the late second century, retained most of the key Oneness emphases: God is one, Jesus is God, the Word is the mind and expression of the Father, and the Son is the visible revelation of the invisible Father. He didn't speak of a trinity of essence; he spoke of a threefold revelation or activity. Bernard concludes that if Irenaeus were alive today, he would probably fit within the Oneness movement.
Irenaeus is genuinely interesting and genuinely ambiguous in places. Bernard is right that he avoided some of the Logos speculation of the Greek Apologists and that his language sometimes sounds like what Oneness writers say. But Bernard draws too strong a conclusion from the ambiguity.
Irenaeus consistently uses the language of real distinction between the Father and the Son, even while maintaining their unity. He writes that "the Son, eternally co-existing with the Father, from of old, yea, from the beginning, always reveals the Father to Angels" (Against Heresies 2:30:9). He describes the Father speaking to the Word and the Wisdom in Genesis 1:26, treating the Word as a genuine conversation partner before creation. When Irenaeus discusses the Old Testament appearances of God to the patriarchs, he says the Word appeared as the Father's visible manifestation, distinguishing between the invisible Father and the visible Son in terms that aren't simply mode language. He speaks of the Word as "always present with" the Father, not as a role the Father takes on at a certain moment.
Bernard himself acknowledges at the end of his Irenaeus chapter that "it is not altogether clear whether Irenaeus regarded the Son/Word and Spirit/Wisdom primarily as impersonal aspects of God's nature, as first impersonal and then personal in some sense, or as eternally distinct from the Father." When the most informed Oneness reader of Irenaeus ends up saying it's genuinely unclear whether he meant Oneness or Trinity, that is not evidence Irenaeus was Oneness. That is evidence Irenaeus was working through categories that resist easy mapping onto either modern position, but that consistently describe something more than one person in two modes when you press the texts carefully.
"The Founders of Trinitarianism Were Themselves Condemned as Heretics"
This is one of Bernard's most rhetorically effective points. Tertullian, he notes, was a schismatic who joined the Montanists and attacked the mainstream church vehemently. Origen was excommunicated and formally condemned by two councils, in 543 and 553. Hippolytus headed a rival church in Rome. These are the people who developed what became Trinitarian doctrine. If the founders were condemned, why should the doctrine be trusted?
Trinitarian Christians have never argued that Tertullian or Origen were infallible authorities whose personal integrity authenticates their theology. They are sources, not saints. The test for their theological contributions is not their church membership in good standing but whether their insights correctly reflect what Scripture actually teaches.
Tertullian, despite his Montanist defection and his vicious attacks on the church he had left, formulated language about one God in three persons that proved more adequate than anything that had come before. Origen, despite his many theological errors and his excommunication, contributed the concept of the eternally begotten Son, which corrected the Apologists' tendency to make the Son temporally dependent on the Father. The church didn't receive these men uncritically. It accepted what matched Scripture, refined what was imprecise, and condemned what contradicted the apostolic witness. The fact that the formulators of early Trinitarian language were imperfect men with troubled church relationships tells us something about the men. It tells us nothing about whether their core insight, that Father, Son, and Spirit are genuinely distinct yet one God, is true.
"Baptism in Jesus' Name Was the Original and Dominant Practice"
Bernard documents at some length that baptism invoking Jesus' name was widespread through the second and third centuries. He cites apocryphal writings, Cyprian's correspondence, and particularly the anonymous Treatise on Rebaptism, which describes the Jesus Name formula as having the support of "the most ancient custom and ecclesiastical tradition." Bernard concludes that the threefold formula ("in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit") was Tertullian's innovation, and that the Jesus Name formula was the original apostolic practice.
Some of this history is real. There was genuine debate over baptismal practice in the third century, and baptism invoking the name of Jesus was practiced broadly. That is worth acknowledging honestly.
But Bernard's reading of the Treatise on Rebaptism, his star witness, doesn't hold up. The author of that treatise does not argue that Matthew 28:19 is a later invention or that the threefold formula should be abandoned. He explicitly says that the threefold formula "is true and right, and to be observed by all means in the Church" and that it "has been used to be observed." His argument is that invoking Jesus' name over a baptism is so significant that even baptisms performed outside the church have some efficacy, and that candidates who come from schismatic groups don't need to be re-baptized in water. The author sees invoking Jesus' name and the Matthew 28:19 formula as compatible, not competing. He says the invocation of Jesus' name is the "beginning of the mystery of the Lord" that the full formula fills up. That is not a Oneness reading of Matthew 28:19. It is a reading where Jesus' name is the central, personal name that stands behind the Father, Son, and Spirit of the commission. Which is, of course, exactly what Trinitarians who baptize using Matthew 28:19 believe they are doing.
"Most Early Believers Didn't Think in Trinitarian Terms"
Bernard quotes Origen, who complained that "the general run of Christians" didn't understand the distinction between the Father and the Son and essentially thought in modalistic terms. Athanasius lamented that in one region the doctrine of the Son "was scarcely any longer preached in the churches." Tertullian described "the majority of believers" as horrified by Trinitarian language because they thought it meant two or three gods. Bernard takes all of this as evidence that Oneness was the dominant popular view.
What Bernard accurately describes is that most ordinary believers in the second and third centuries held vague, undeveloped beliefs about God. They affirmed one God. They prayed to Jesus as God. They had not thought very carefully about how to articulate how those two things fit together. What Bernard calls "Oneness thinking" was largely the absence of precise theology, not the presence of a different worked-out theology.
Origen's actual concern is revealing. He writes that many sincere believers "are afraid that they may be proclaiming two Gods" and that this fear "drives them into doctrines which are false and wicked." That fear is not itself a Oneness conviction. It is a concern about maintaining monotheism that every serious Christian shared, on every side of the Trinitarian debate. The modalists resolved the fear one way, by collapsing Father and Son into a single person. The Trinitarians resolved it another way, by insisting the unity of God was fully real even while Father, Son, and Spirit were genuinely distinct. The popular instinct toward monotheism explains why modalism spread easily. It doesn't show that modalism was the apostolic faith.
"The Modalists Were the Original Oneness Believers, and They Were the Majority"
Bernard's most detailed historical argument is that the modalistic monarchians — Praxeas, Noetus, Callistus, Sabellius — held essentially the same core beliefs as modern Oneness Pentecostalism: the absolute oneness of God, the full deity of Jesus as the Father incarnate, "Son" referring specifically to the humanity of Christ, the Word being not a second person but the Father's self-expression, and Jesus' name as the name by which God is revealed. He also documents, using the testimony of their opponents Tertullian, Hippolytus, Novatian, Origen, and Athanasius, that modalism was the dominant view among common believers through much of the third century.
The evidence that modalistic thinking was widespread in this period is real, and Bernard marshals it effectively. Trinitarian historians themselves say that modalism was the most serious challenge to early Trinitarianism between 180 and 300. That is not a fabrication.
But Bernard presses the evidence too hard in two directions. First, the similarities between the modalists and modern Oneness, while real on several points, break down at others. Bernard himself acknowledges throughout the chapter that "the historical evidence is insufficient to establish with certainty that all the modalists baptized in the name of Jesus," that the doctrine of successive manifestations attributed to Sabellius is something "modern Oneness does not accept," and that there is "no historical link" between the modalists and Oneness Pentecostalism. These are Bernard's own admissions. A movement that shares some emphases with an ancient group is not the same as proving historical continuity.
Second, and more fundamentally, the modalists were condemned — not just by Tertullian and Hippolytus, whose personal positions and motivations Bernard correctly questions, but broadly across the church. Callistus, who himself held views close to modalism, still excommunicated Sabellius. Councils in Rome (258), Nicaea (325), and Constantinople (381) all condemned Sabellianism. Bernard's explanation is that this shows the victors suppressing the truth. But the condemnations came from people holding very different theological positions, including people like Callistus who had no reason to suppress modalism if it were genuinely the apostolic faith. The breadth of the rejection suggests something more than a Trinitarian conspiracy.
"The Trinity Wasn't Defined Until Nicaea, So It Was Invented Then"
Bernard's summary argument across the whole book is that the Trinity as a formal doctrine wasn't defined until the fourth century. The Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381 were the moments when Trinitarianism became official teaching. Before those councils, there were only tentative and contradictory explorations, many of which would be considered heretical by Nicene standards. Therefore, the Trinity was not recovered or preserved by the church but invented.
This argument confuses the articulation of a doctrine with the origin of its content. The fact that precise language for something takes time to develop doesn't mean the underlying reality wasn't already there. The church took centuries to work out precisely how to describe the relationship between Christ's divine and human natures. That question wasn't settled until the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Nobody argues that Jesus therefore was not fully God and fully human until 451. The council didn't invent the Incarnation; it expressed what was already true more precisely, in response to teachers who were getting it wrong.
The same applies to the Trinity. From the very beginning, Christians prayed to Jesus as God, addressed the Father and the Spirit as distinct from Jesus, inherited Old Testament monotheism, and did all of this at once. They did not have a developed philosophical vocabulary for explaining how those things hold together. The controversies of the third and fourth centuries forced them to articulate what they had already been doing. Nicaea didn't introduce three persons; it insisted that the three persons Christians had always worshiped were genuinely equal and genuinely divine, against Arius's argument that the Son was a subordinate created being. The Arian controversy, which prompted Nicaea, wasn't a new debate. It was the old Apologists' problem of a subordinate Logos pushed to its logical conclusion by a sharp theologian. The church's answer at Nicaea was grounded in what Christians had always said about Jesus, not in new philosophical invention.
Bernard ends his book by arguing that Trinitarianism won because Constantine's conversion opened the church to masses of pagan converts who brought polytheistic instincts with them. This is an assertion, not an argument. Constantine's conversion made Christianity socially safe, but it didn't force anyone to a particular view of God. The Arian controversy raged after Constantine, with many powerful bishops on the Arian side. The outcome at Nicaea was not a capitulation to pagan culture; it was the result of Athanasius arguing from Scripture and from the reality of what Christians had always worshiped, against a view that reduced the Son to something less than the true God.
Reading the Evidence Honestly
Reading this book carefully reveals a significant gap between what Bernard proves and what he claims to prove. What he does prove is this: the first three centuries were messy. Writers used imprecise language. The vocabulary of Trinitarian theology wasn't fully in place until the fourth century. Baptism invoking Jesus' name was practiced alongside the threefold formula for many decades. Modalistic views were widespread among ordinary believers. All of that is true, and Trinitarian Christians should engage those facts honestly rather than pretending the early church record is tidier than it actually was.
What Bernard does not prove is that the early church was Oneness in the sense that modern Oneness Pentecostalism means that term. He does not prove that the distinct identity of Father, Son, and Spirit was invented by Tertullian or imported from Greek philosophy. He does not prove that the threefold baptismal formula was a late interpolation into the Didache. He does not prove that Ignatius, even in his accepted authentic letters, supports a Oneness reading. He does not prove that modalism and modern Oneness are the same movement with a continuous history. And he does not prove that Nicaea invented the Trinity rather than clarifying what Christians had always believed and practiced.
The deeper shape of the argument, underneath all the historical evidence, is circular: the original church was Oneness, therefore texts that sound Trinitarian were interpolated, therefore the remaining texts confirm that the original church was Oneness. Every piece of evidence that doesn't fit is explained away by the very theory it is supposed to support.
What the first three centuries actually show, when you read them without having to reach a predetermined conclusion, is a church that consistently affirmed one God, consistently treated Jesus as that one God made flesh, consistently distinguished Father and Son in its prayers and theological reflections, and consistently struggled to find adequate language for all of that at once. Making sense of all those things together is exactly what Trinitarian theology set out to do. The struggle to articulate it was real. The fumbling was real. But the reality that required the articulation was there from the beginning, in Scripture and in the life of the church, pressing for expression in every generation that read the New Testament seriously enough to try.
This article responds to David K. Bernard, Oneness and Trinity A.D. 100-300 (Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1991). Primary counter-sources: Gregory A. Boyd, Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992); Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology; Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology.*
Footnotes