trinities

Been reading this, by this gentleman (upper right), who teaches at my alma mater Biola University. This is an apologetics article, addressed (mainly) to other evangelicals, which explains and refutes the theology of Oneness Pentecostalism, as is found in the United Pentecostal Church. I recommend Sanders’ article. It is well-written, and is sharper and more up to date than other apologetics pieces on this topic that I’ve seen. Here are some interesting bits, and some comments.

First, Sanders on the origin of the Oneness movement:

Oneness Pentecostalism began in 1913 at a Pentecostal camp meeting in Arroyo Seco in southern California. An evangelist named R. E. McAlister preached on the discrepancy between the command in Matthew 28:19 to “baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and the Apostles’ reported practice of baptizing in the name of the Lord, or of Jesus (Acts 2:38 et al). The sermon provoked at least two responses. First, a man named John Scheppe passed the evening meditating on the problem, and first thing in the morning ran through the camp shouting that he had been given a revelation: baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ was the true baptism. The second response was more measured, but ran along similar lines. Frank J. Ewart began pondering McAlister’s sermon and discovered a way to harmonize the two baptisms: the name “Jesus” must be the actual name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the one name into which we are to be baptized. He would later summarize this in the words, “I believe that the Apostles knew how to interpret Matthew 28:19,” adding that “if one single, isolated example of Christian baptism could be found in the Bible to fit the trinitarian interpretation of the Great Commission there would be some excuse for intelligent people adopting it.”

Wow – Ewart’s insult seems particularly out of place! Why? It seems that the whole idea rests on a grammatical mistake about the famous great commission passage. Consider this fictional exchange:

Sherrif Sam: Dan, I deputize you in the name of the President, the Governor, and the Mayor.

Deputy Dan: What is that guy’s name? I’d like to congratulate him on winning three elections.

Get it? The phrase “in the name of” just means “in the authority of” or “on behalf of”. If you ask what that name is, that just shows that you don’t understand the sentence. Why isn’t this more widely acknowledged? My guess is that some want to mine the passage for a trinitarian argument – i.e. since it says “name” and not “names”, this shows that the three “are” the one God. But that argument also misreads the passage, and is thus worthless. The passage is neutral about whether or not the three are in various senses “one”.
In this piece Sanders uses the term “modalism” for the UPC doctrine, by which he means what I would call either partially overlapping FS modalism - the idea is that God exists as Father, and at the Incarnation, he starts also existing as Son – or just non-eternal S modalism, if they want to simply identify God and the Father, rather than saying that the Father is a mode of God. I’m not to clear about which the (most clear headed) UPC theologians want to say, but I’m guessing the former. Sanders says,

“The Son of God,” for Oneness Pentecostalism, is the new mode of existence that the one God entered into in the incarnation. This brings up the most obvious question that trinitarians want to ask Oneness Pentecostals:
Who Was Jesus Praying To?

The short answer, for Oneness Pentecostalism, must surely be “to himself.” In fact, many Oneness teachers have said something like this, specifying that the human nature of Christ was praying to his divine nature. That is widely recognized as an unacceptable answer, since it makes Jesus into two distinct persons, a human self and a divine self. This is the heresy of Nestorianism, and while several Oneness teachers fall into it, more thoughtful teachers do not. Instead, they describe the incarnation as bringing about a real personal distinction between the Father and the Son, a kind of distancing between God’s existence in the mode of his eternal being, and God’s existence in the new mode of his incarnate self.

Why not say that in prayer, Jesus’ human nature prays to his divine nature? If a nature is a property had by a thing – say, the complex property of all its essential properties – then the suggestion is nonsense. Properties don’t act at all, much less pray. If it is going to pray, then a “nature” has to be a personal substance – a self. Then there are two selves or persons within the body of Jesus. I don’t find this plausible, but I think more needs to be said than that it is the heresy of Nestorianism. Sanders, though, tries to show that the Oneness people are hoist with their own petard. After noting the emphasis in the Gospel of John on the personal relationship between Jesus and his Father, he argues:

[Oneness theologians] have only two choices: they can ignore all of the personal distinction, paraphrasing the texts into poetic metaphors useful for teaching us how to act toward God, or they can admit that real interpersonal communication is going on here between Father and Son, but claim that this personal distinction first came into being when Jesus Christ was born among us. This latter option, taking personal interaction seriously even though they are committed to a uni-personal God, leaves them in the position of having to say that the uni-personal God became bi-personal in the incarnation. In other words, they can either ignore the interpersonal dialogue of Jesus with the Father, or they can say that God split himself into two persons for a period of time, but will return to unity with himself when the project is complete.

Oneness people want to say that there’s only one person “in God”. But if they posit a genuine personal relationship between Jesus and his Father, they’ve got two “in there”, contrary to their aims. So whether or not Nestorianism is plausible, Oneness theology won’t fly. This seems well-argued, and has the added benefit that the non-Oneness objector doesn’t have to say what’s wrong with Nestorianism.