Audio only:
In this episode Trent exposes one of the largest denominations that teaches a major heresy that you rarely hear about.
All In The Name by Mark McNeil
Transcription:
Trent:
When you think about modern Christian heresies, the two biggest that come to mind are Jehovah’s Witnesses with about 8 million active members and Mormonism with about 17 million adherence. But there’s another huge heresy among self-professed Christians you rarely hear about, even though it’s just as detrimental to the soul, and that is oneness Theology often found among oneness Pentecostals, there are about 17 million oneness Pentecostals worldwide making them on par with Mormonism, but the number could be even higher if you count those who belong to regular Pentecostal denominations, which are one of the fastest growing denominations in the world. So what makes oneness Pentecostals more like Mormons and Jehovah’s witnesses than like Methodist Evangelicals or other Protestants? The answer is they’re Trinitarian heresy, which invalidates the baptism they claim to celebrate. Jesus said to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, but oneness, Pentecostals believe that the name of God just is Jesus. According to them, the terms Father, son, and Holy Spirit do not refer to three distinct persons, but to three manifestations of God or three roles that God plays in our salvation. That’s why oneness Pentecostals have an invalid baptism that only uses Jesus’ name.
CLIP:
I now baptize you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of all your sins.
Trent:
The denomination in this clip is probably oneness Pentecostal because their website says We believe in one God who has revealed himself in different ways throughout history as the Father in creation, as the Son in redemption and as the Holy Spirit in renewing believers’ hearts. Here’s David Bernard, a leading defender of oneness theology summarizing their view.
CLIP:
The oneness of God essentially has two propositions. First of all, there is one God with no distinctions. In his eternal essence, no persons or centers of consciousness manifestations works. Yes, we believe in the Father, son and Holy Spirit, but at the end of the day we believe in one personal God with one personality, one center of consciousness.
Trent:
This is very similar to the ancient Modalist heresy associated with Sebelius and praxia in the third century. Modalist say God is one divine person who acts at various times as the Father who created the world, the Son who redeemed us, and the Holy Spirit who sanctifies us. They claim the only way there can be one God who is Father, son and Holy Spirit is if everything we know to be God, including the titles of Father, son, and Holy Spirit belong only to one divine person who is made known in the flesh as Jesus Christ. Now we have to be careful not to identify ancient modalism and modern oneness as if they were exactly the same belief systems. For example, some people think that ancient modalist believe that God becomes Father at one point. Then he becomes the Son at another point in time and then he becomes the Holy Spirit at Yet other times, ancient modalist may or may not have believed this since there were different people advocating for modalism at that time. But here’s Bernard saying modern oneness theologians do not hold that view, but they at least have some things in common with the ancient motorists.
CLIP:
It seems what they did hold in common, they did believe in the absolute deity of Jesus Christ. So they weren’t S, they weren’t Unitarians. They believed that Jesus was truly God. That’s the first point and we would agree with that. Second point, they did not believe God was three persons, but they believe somehow that Jesus Christ was the fullness of God that one of them quoted. The Father is not the Son, the Father is in the Son one God everywhere.
Trent:
The main point for oneness advocates is that God is not three distinct eternal persons, father, son and Holy Spirit who relate to each other. Instead, Bernard says that God is only Father in relation to us his creatures, but one of the essential elements of the dogma of the Trinity is that not only are the Father, son and Holy Spirit equal in divinity to one another, they’re also distinct in identity from one another. Here’s what the catechism says. The divine persons are really distinct from one another. God is one, but not solitary. Father, son, holy Spirit are not simply names designating modalities of the divine being for they are really distinct from one another. He is not the Father who is the Son, nor is the Son. He who is the Father, nor is the Holy Spirit. He who is the Father or the Son, they are distinct from one another in their relations of origin. It is the Father who generates the Son who is begotten and the Holy Spirit who proceeds the divine unity is triune. One bad analogy for the Trinity compares it to how water can exist in three forms, solid, liquid and gas, while still being the same molecular substance. Here’s Lutheran satire showing what would’ve happened if St. Patrick tried to evangelize pagans with this bad analogy.
CLIP:
Could you use an analogy
Patrick? Sure. The Trinity is like water and how you can find water in three different forms, liquid and ice and vapor.
That’s modalism. Patrick what modalism? An ancient heresy confessed by teachers such as Nous and Sebelius, which espouses that God is not three distinct persons, but that he merely reveals himself in three different forms. This heresy was clearly condemned in Canon one at the first Council of Constantinople in 3 80, 180, and those who confess it cannot rightly be considered a part of the church Catholic. Come on Patrick. Yeah, get it together Patrick.
Trent:
Another analogy for the Trinity compares it to how a man can be three different relatives at the same time. But here’s oneness Pentecostal, Gino Jennings using this analogy to defend the oneness view. He explains how God is Father, son and Holy Spirit in the same way that he is a father, son and husband at the same time.
CLIP:
I’m certainly as a father because me and my wife got 70 youngins, but what is the name of this son, husband and Father Jennings is my name. Son, husband and father are just different titles pertaining to this one. Jens, I don’t have three different personalities, but it was three different functions. As this one individual, I function as son at birth, function as husband, marriage function as father because we got children. I don’t have multi personality.
Alright, I’ll try again. The Trinity is like how the same man can be a husband and a father and an employer moralism again.
Trent:
By the way, Gino Jennings has a hilarious over the top style complete with backup members of his posse chiming in when he makes a point. If you want to see more of it, check out the episode I did a while back with Joe Heme critiquing Jennings arguments against Mary being the mother of God where he ends up using the heretical oneness view to make his argument against Mary being theotokos. Now in response, oneness, Pentecostals say their explanation of the Godhead is better than an illogical trinity, but the Trinity is the most logical answer to common objections to Christianity like this one. If Jesus was God, then when Jesus was praying in the Bible, was he praying to himself? You can see this attitude in this meme that describes Jesus as a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father or this woman’s objection to the deity of Christ.
CLIP:
In Luke six 12, Jesus prays all night to God, but if Jesus is God, why would he pray all night to himself? How does that work?
Trent:
It works if you don’t assume that God must be a single person. Jesus was praying to the Father. The Father is God, the Son is God. The Father is not the son. Therefore God must be more than one person. God is not a being like you or me whose most rational ability manifests in being a single person. God isn’t even a being at all. God is the infinite act of being who exists as three divine persons that have relations with one another. At the very least, this makes more sense than saying the Father and are the same divine person or that the Father is merely some part of the person of Jesus. Here’s David Bernard trying to explain how Jesus could pray to the Father. If God is only one person under the oneness, view the person Jesus Christ.
CLIP:
So if you still say, well, it sounds like Jesus is praying to himself, well that’s because you’re trying to force the incarnation onto a template of our experience of being only human. So that’s the wrong way to say it. Here’s the right way to say it. Jesus prayed as an authentic human being who do he prayed to be? Prayed to God at the same time realizing God was in Christ, God was in him not as a separate person. So the answer is, Jesus prayed to God. Do we say Jesus prayed to himself? No, that’s confusing His identity as human and his identity as God and so that would be a wrong way to say it, but we should simply say Jesus prayed to God as all humans should pray to God just at the same time realizing that God was incarnate in Christ in a unique way different from any other human. So God was in Christ.
Trent:
Notice that Bernard can’t say Jesus was praying to the Father because that would compromise oneness theology. Instead, Bernard has to equivocate on the word God. By God, Christians mean the holy Trinity or a divine person depending on the context. But Bernard has to always mean a single divine person or a best and aspect of that single divine person. One is Pentecostals like him, try to avoid the problem of Jesus praying to himself by turning Christ’s human and divine natures into quasi persons that communicate with each other. But just as my father and my sons cannot speak to one another, Jesus’s human nature, what some oneness proponents call the son and his divine nature, what they call the Father cannot speak and have relationships with each other. But scripture is full of cases where the son not only communicates with the father through prayer, but the Father answers Jesus as an objectively distinct person.
For example, John 1228 describes Jesus praying to the Father saying, father glorify thy name. John then tells us that a voice came from heaven saying I have glorified it and I will glorify it again. Likewise, at both Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration, the father speaks in a voice. Other people can hear declaring that Jesus is his beloved son. If one his pentecostalism were true and God is just one person with three titles or three roles, then how could these conversations between divine persons be happening? One, his advocates also believe that God did not become the Son until the incarnation. But what about scripture verses that distinguish the Father and the son before anything was created. Jesus said He come down from heaven not to do my will, but the will of him who sent me one. This advocate say Jesus existed before the creation as a concept or a plan in God’s mind he would later send, but this contradicts what St.
Paul tells us in the great kenosis or emptying him in his letter to the Philippians after describing self-serving preachers that Paul had to deal with, Paul encourages the Philippians to be humble and act with one another’s best interests at heart. He writes, have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant being born in the likeness of men. Two points here. First, we should not be seeking after greatness. We should imitate Christ and we should be humble. So I humbly ask you if you really like this content, if it’s helped your faith, if it’s helped other people come to the Catholic faith or come to know who Jesus is, then please support us by clicking the subscribe button or going to trent horn podcast.com to help us create more edifying content to build other people up.
That’s the first point. The second point is that Paul could not be referring here to the pre-existent Jesus merely being a plan or wisdom in the father’s mind that would later be sent to earth. He’s clearly speaking of the preexistent Christ, the Son as a person who did not clinging to divinity but voluntarily relinquished his divine glory for our sake in order to become man plans and wisdom cannot be models of humility. For us to imitate only persons can be that. Finally the very first verse of John’s gospel declares in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. The Greek word translated with in this verse is prose which has a personal connotation, it usually refers to facing towards someone else. The Greek grammarian att Robertson writes, prose with the accusative case presents a plane of equality and intimacy face to face with each other.
This means the word was not a plan in the father’s mind, but a person who as Jesus tells us, was sent by the Father and shared glory with him before the creation of the world. This can be seen when Jesus petitioned the Father in this prayer, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made. John 17 five, Mark McNeil, who converted to Catholicism from oneness. Pentecostalism provides a really good summary of how the plain meaning of this scripture first refutes the idea that God is only one person or that the Father and the Son were not persons who share glory together before the creation of the world. He writes, the Greek preposition translated with in John 17, five is Parra. The word simply means one is alongside another since the son is addressing the Father and refers to the glory he shared the Father before creation, it is most natural to draw the conclusion that the personal relationship expressed in that moment of time refers to a relationship that is eternal. Now, in response, David Bernard says this about John 17, five,
CLIP:
It’s not talking about eternal glory of the second person that God did. If that’s what he’s talking about, you’ve got multiple problems. Number one, if Jesus is the second eternal person, could he lose glory? Can God lose his glory? Did the second person of Trinity get rid of his glory? How could God not have glory and still be God? So if it’s talking about, well first person, give me my glory back, well, did he lose it? The second problem is Isaiah 43 says, I will not give my glory to another. So if Jesus is another person, if the Father is the only true God, if God says I will not give my glory to anyone else, and then the clincher, if you keep reading this prayer, Jesus proceeds to pray for his disciples who are there and then if you keep on reading down, he says, the glory that you’ve given me, verse 22, I have given them so this same glory he’s now giving to his disciples or if it’s glory of God as the second person of the trinity, does that mean now the disciples are also members of the Godhead, but I thought God doesn’t give his divine glory to other people, but here Jesus is saying, well, the glory you gave me, the glory of the second person of the Trinity.
Now I’m going to give to Peter, James and John, they’re going to have the same glory. They’re going to be 3, 4, 5, 12 more members of the Trinity.
Trent:
These aren’t good objections. First the context of Isaiah 42 is that Yahweh does not share his glory with any other God. He is the only God and so his creatures should only give glory and praise to him as the creator of the world. Isaiah 42, 8 says, I am the Lord that is my name, my glory I give to no other nor my praise to graven images, but that doesn’t prevent God from sharing his glory with other persons even if he doesn’t share his glory with other false gods. In Colossians one 16 through 17, Paul says of Christ that all things were created through him and for him he is before all things and in him all things hold together. If the son shared in the father’s glory as creator of the world, then that means Yahweh is not a single person but a trinity of persons, each of whom was involved in the creation of the world and rightfully deserves glory as the one creator, even the agnostic scholar Bart Erman who has no side in the Trinitarian versus oneness debate says of John 17 five that in this gospel of John, Jesus talks about existing in a glorious state with God the Father before he became human.
But if that’s true, how could Jesus not have the glory of Yahweh during his incarnation? The answer is that Jesus voluntarily set his glory aside when he became man. Though glimpses of it could be seen in things like Jesus’s transfiguration. Hebrews two seven says of Christ that during the incarnation he was quote for a little while lower than the angels and then he returned to glory as we see later in Philippians chapter two. Finally, as I noted the passage from Isaiah is talking about glory being given to false gods. It does not preclude God from sharing his glory or aspects of it in other ways. This means that Jesus can share with his disciples an aspect of the glory he received from the Father before the world was made. One plausible candidate for the kind of glory being shared is the Holy Spirit which the Son received from the Father because in John 1722, Jesus talks about giving his disciples the Holy Spirit.
In John 7 38, Christ says, he who believes in me as the scripture has said out of his heart, shall flow rivers of living water. In the next verse, John tells us now this he said about the spirit which those who believed in him were to receive. For as yet the Spirit had not been given because Jesus was not yet glorified one as Pentecostals also say that their beliefs are apostolic and that Trinitarian doctrine was a later corruption, but even by the early second century, Justin Martyr was teaching that the son and the father are distinct persons. He cites Genesis 1 26, let us make man in our image to show that quote. We can indisputably learn that God conversed with someone who is numerically distinct from himself and also a rational being. Justin also says He who is said to have appeared to Abraham and to Jacob and to Moses and who is called God is distinct from him, who made all things numerically, I mean not distinct.
In will. Not only did the first Christians believe in the Trinity and not a espouse one oneness theology, they explicitly rejected the oneness heresy in the third century, heretics like Praxia and Sebelius advocated for modalism. Though praxia later recanted of this heresy, Pope EU and several regional councils condemned their errors and Tertullian said of the Trinity, this rule of faith has come down to us from the beginning of the gospel. Even before any of the older heretics, much more before Praxia, a pretender of yesterday in the early fifth century, St. Augustine plainly said that quote, he who is the son is not the father and the Holy Spirit is neither the father nor the son. Some oneness Pentecostals cite John 10 30 as evidence that Jesus and the Father are the same person because Jesus said I and the Father are one. But the verb in this verse, Esman is in first person plural case.
So the text literally says, I and the Father, we are one similar language elsewhere in scripture also argues against the oneness interpretation of God. When Genesis 2 24 says a husband and wife become one flesh in marriage, that doesn’t mean the husband and wife become the same person. It means a special unity exists in their bodies through the marital act. In John 1721, Jesus prays that all believers may be one even as thou father. Art in me and I in thee just as Jesus is not praying for all believers to become one person, he’s not declaring the father and himself to be one person either. In John 10 30, Jesus speaks of the special unity of love, purpose, and divine nature that only exists between him and the Father. Tertullian said this verse does not imply singularity of number, but unity of essence, likeness, conjunction, affection on the father’s part who loves the Son and submission on the sons who obeys the father’s will.
In other words, Jesus is proclaiming that he is just as divine as the Father, not that he is the Father. Oneness advocates also try to use John 14, nine to make this point because Philip says to Jesus, Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied. And then Jesus said to him, have I been with you so long and yet you do not know me? Philip, he who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, show us the Father? Nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus say that he is the Father and just a few verses earlier, Jesus says He’s the only way to the Father, not that he is the Father. In this context, Jesus is acting as Paul says in Colossians one 15 as the image in Greek, the icon of the invisible God and the next verses, Jesus says, do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?
The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. The Father dwells in Jesus not as another name for Christ’s divine nature, but as part of the unbroken relationship they have had for all eternity. Finally, the early church’s rejection of one oneness theology is evident in its use of the Trinitarian baptismal formula oneness. Pentecostals reject this formula by claiming that in the Book of Acts, no one is baptized with it and that several verses command baptism to be done in the name of the Lord or in the name of Jesus Christ. But this refers to a baptism under Christ’s authority. Like if I were to say stop in the name of the law, the evidence from history shows that the early church understood the baptismal formula as referring to three distinct persons of the Trinity In the second century, Justin Martyr noted that converts are baptized, quote in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe and of our savior, Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit.
A first century catechism called the Diday also contains instructions for baptism that contradict the in Jesus name, formula of oneness, Pentecostals, and it contradicts the oneness, Pentecostal belief that baptism is only valid when it’s done through full immersion. The Diday says, and concerning baptism baptized this way, having first said all these things baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the spirit in living water, running water. But if you have not living water, baptize into other water, and if you cannot, in cold, in warm, but if you have not either pour out water th thrive upon the head into the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Finally, some oneness advocates may ask, what’s the big deal? What does it matter? If we believe God is three in one or one in three, what does it matter? In whose name we baptize people?
It matters because the Trinity and the incarnation are not abstract. Peripheral issues of theology, the sacraments are not just trivial rituals. These truths and commands were given to us from the Almighty God for the good of our souls to save us from sin and only a fool would casually ignore them. The catechism says The Trinity is the central mystery of our faith, and the incarnation is the distinctive sign of Christian faith, A person who misunderstands either risks placing their salvation in a false Christ who is incapable of saving anyone. For example, David Bernard says, one way to explain the human and divine in Christ is to say he was God living in a human house. If Jesus were just a divine person wearing a human costume, then we couldn’t say Jesus is the word, become flesh who dwelt among us. Christ’s death on the cross would just be the Father being released from a human body, not a sacrifice of love from the Son to the Father as an act of love between persons for the forgiveness of our sins.
That’s why Oleum bluntly told his modalist opponents that they were contending against the definite purpose of the gospel. For these things certainly are not written that you may believe that Jesus Christ is the Father, but the Son, the foundational proclamation that God loved the world and gave his son to save it in John three 16 cannot be reconciled. The oneness theology, such a distortion of the faith would undermine the glorious truth that God is love and that this eternal love is fully revealed by the love that is shared between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If you like to learn more about this subject, I recommend Mark McNeil’s book All in the name available from Catholic Answers Press. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.