{"id":41174,"date":"2019-03-19T21:59:19","date_gmt":"2019-03-20T01:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=41174"},"modified":"2019-03-19T22:01:32","modified_gmt":"2019-03-20T02:01:32","slug":"another-whistleblower-nick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/another-whistleblower-nick\/","title":{"rendered":"another whistleblower: Nick"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’m delighted to share that my former (excellent) student Nick Hlifka has just, as we say, “come out” as a Biblical Unitarian. Nick was born again several years ago and has fellowshiped in a couple of evangelical churches. He writes, in part:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I would like to let you all know here that I am now a recommitted Biblical Unitarian<\/strong>.  I have committed myself to a great deal of thought, study of the Scriptures, and prayer leading up to this decision.  I believe that this is what the Bible teaches<\/strong>.  There are a lot of good reasons to believe in the Trinity, but none can be stronger than the force of Biblical teaching.  When any view comes in conflict with the Bible, I want to side with the latter every time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

When I previously classified myself in the Unitarian camp, I never made that announcement \u201cofficially public.\u201d I told those that I had to tell, and I\u2019m well aware that word got around.  But it wasn\u2019t something I shared about more than I felt was necessary.  I\u2019m doing it differently this time, primarily because I feel that it is disingenuous to hide my theological positions under a bushel<\/strong>.  It makes no sense to do so.  I\u2019m not ashamed of my theology.  I\u2019m well aware that many of you will not agree with me, and that\u2019s totally fine. But facing those who hold opposing views doesn\u2019t scare me.  After all, politically<\/strong> I\u2019m a conservative libertarian, which seems to be a minority these days.  I\u2019m not ashamed of that.  So why should I be timid to share my theology? I know there may be a social cost to this decision to go public.  I\u2019m prepared for that too.  I would rather be bold and stand in the truth than be untrue to myself and other<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Check out the rest of his post here.<\/strong><\/a>

Nick had decided for awhile that he was a trinitarian (I’m not clear on why – we didn’t really discuss it then), and for a good portion of 2018, Nick was seriously considering converting to Roman Catholicism<\/strong>. In fact, I wrote this blog post to him<\/a>, using a fake name to preserve his anonymity. But I don’t think he’d mind my sharing with you that it was addressed to him. I don’t know whether or not my arguments there had any impact.

I know that at least a part of his thought process was reflecting on the terrible recent sexual abuse scandals in which we have seen the Catholic Church in many places systematically covering up abuse. But also at some point he decided he needed to turn to face theological questions <\/strong>seriously again. And I’m delighted to say that my debate with Michael Brown<\/a> did play a role in helping him to reconsider the strength of a Biblical Unitarian perspective on the New Testament, as did as the four excellent follow-up podcasts<\/a> by Sean Finnegan and Jerry Wierwille. Don’t say that debates have never convinced anyone! <\/strong>They can serve a serious enquirer well.

My friend Nick is an excellent writer, a delightful person, a hard worker, and a real thinking Christian. I look forward to his upcoming posts.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another trinitarian sees the biblical light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21,54,76,43,90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible","category-debates","category-roman-catholicism","category-unitarianism","category-whistleblower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41174"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41179,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41174\/revisions\/41179"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}