The Bible is Unitarian

 

 

We now come to the sixth section which deals with the sheer clarity of the Bible as regards the Unity of God. Most of the following material is not mine, it is drawn from William Channing’s address at an ordination in 1819. Since it is in public domain and expresses the point clearly, I have taken the liberty to include it here with minor changes.

 

God is infinitely wise and loving, and he will not fool around with the understandings of his creatures. A wise teacher adapts himself to the capacities of his pupils, and does not confuse them with unintelligible stuff or apparent contradictions. An infinitely wise and loving teacher, who knows the precise extent of our minds and the best method of enlightening them, will surpass all other instructors in bringing down truth to our apprehension, and in showing its loveliness and harmony. Indeed such a teacher would communicate in a manner in which the simplest, most uneducated people can understand easily. That is the mark of a great teacher – that he brings home the greatest points to the simplest and most uneducated minds with great simplicity and clarity; as Jesus himself did. That is precisely what we would accept from God. The Bible was given by God so that man would understand Him, His nature, and His ways. And seek Him and get into a relationship with Him and enjoy His presence. There may be occasional obscurity in the Bible since it was written in different times and circumstances than what we are used to. But as regards the essentials, God is too good and too wise a teacher to leave them to obscurity. God's wisdom guarantees us, that whatever is necessary for us, and necessary for our salvation, is revealed too plainly to be mistaken, and too consistently to be questioned, by a sound and upright mind. It is not the mark of wisdom to use unintelligible phraseology, to communicate what is above our capacities, to confuse and unsettle the intellect by appearances of contradiction. We honor our Heavenly Teacher too much to ascribe to him such a revelation. Revelation is a gift of light. It cannot increase our darkness, and multiply our perplexities!

With this in mind, what are the things most clearly taught in the Bible from the first to the last? In the first place, it is God's UNITY, or that there is one God, and one only. This is the truth of utmost importance, clearly taught through the Bible, from beginning to end. Jesus himself, when asked as to which of the commandments was the most important one (Mark 12:28), replied, "The most important one, is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength," quoting Deuteronomy 6:4 and 5. We have got to take care and not allow any man spoil this simple truth by vain philosophy. The proposition, that there is one God, is exceedingly plain. It means that there is one being, one mind, one person, one intelligent agent, and one only, to whom underived and infinite perfection and dominion belong. The words about the Unity of God could have conveyed no other meaning to the simple and uncultivated people who were set apart to be the depositaries of this great truth, and who were utterly incapable of understanding those hair-splitting distinctions between being and person, which the philosophical minds of later ages discovered. The people to whom this great central truth was given had been uneducated slaves all their lives, eking out a miserable existence from day to day, slogging from sunrise to sundown, being worked helplessly and ruthlessly by pitiless task-masters. They were not armchair philosophers, well-versed in Greek theology, funded by the church and secure in the knowledge that the emperor’s power was on their side to bulldoze over any opposition. There is no intimation that the language used to describe the Unity of God was to be taken in an unusual sense, or that God's unity was a quite different thing from the oneness of other intelligent beings. The doctrine of the Trinity, while acknowledging in words, subverts in effect, this great central truth, the unity of God. According to this doctrine, there are three infinite and equal persons, possessing supreme divinity, called the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each of these persons, as described by theologians, has his own particular consciousness, will, and perceptions. They love each other, converse with each other, and delight in each other's society. They perform different parts in man's redemption, each having his appropriate office, and neither doing the work of the other. The Son is mediator and not the Father. The Father sends the Son, and is not himself sent; nor is he conscious, like the Son, of taking flesh. Thus there are three intelligent agents, possessed of different consciousness, different wills, and different perceptions, performing different acts, and sustaining different relations. If these things do not imply and constitute three minds or beings, one is utterly at a loss to know how three minds or beings are to be understood. It is difference of properties, consciousness and actions, which leads to the belief of different intelligent beings. If it is not so, how else are two persons to be distinguished? Why not then say along with the pantheists, that all the agents and persons in the universe are one and the same mind? How are the multitude of gods in a religion like Hinduism conceived and understood? They are represented as different agents, distinguished from each other by similar marks and peculiarities to those which separate the persons of the Trinity. When common people hear these persons spoken of as conversing with each other, loving each other, and performing different acts, how can they help regarding them as different beings with different minds and wills?

Furthermore, the doctrine of the Trinity is irrational and unscriptural. "For us," Paul wrote to the primitive Christians, "there is one God, the Father." (1 Cor 8:6). The same thought is implied in Ephesians 4:6, where he says, "one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all." To Timothy he writes, "there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim 2:5). What do all these statements mean in their raw, simple meaning? They mean that the Father is the only living and true God. "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent," said Jesus (John 17:3). It is astonishing that any man can read the New Testament and avoid the conviction, that the Father alone is God. We hear Jesus continually appropriating this character to the Father. We find the Father continually distinguished from Jesus by words of the effect, "God sent his Son" (Gal 4:4), "God anointed Jesus" etc. Such language, which fills the New Testament, is inexplicable if the title of "God" belongs equally to Jesus. If a principal object of the Bible is to reveal him as God, as partaking equally with the Father in supreme divinity, the writers seem to have worked precisely in the opposite direction! There is not one passage in the New Testament, where the word "God" means three persons, where it is not limited to one person, and where, unless turned from its usual sense by beliefs formed otherwise, it does not mean the Father.

If the doctrine of the Trinity was true, then because of its difficulty, singularity, and importance, God would have laid down with great clearness, guarded with great care, and stated with all possible precision in the Bible from the beginning to the end. But where does it appear? From the many passages which talk of God, where is even one, in which we are told that he is a threefold being, or that he is three persons, or that he is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not only in the Old Testament, but even in the New Testament, where at least we might expect many express assertions of this nature, God is declared to be one, without the least attempt to prevent the understanding and acceptance of the words in their common sense. He is always spoken of and addressed in the singular number, that is, in language which is universally understood to intend a single person. So entirely do the Scriptures abstain from stating the Trinity, that when it was inserted in creeds and doxologies, the Bible had to be kept aside, and forms of words invented which are altogether unsanctioned by Scriptural phraseology. That a doctrine so strange, so liable to misapprehension, so supposedly fundamental as this, and requiring such careful exposition, should be left so undefined and unprotected, to be made out by inference, and to be hunted through distant and detached parts of Scripture, this is a difficulty which no ingenuity can explain.

 

The next problem of this doctrine is its practical influence. It is unfavorable to true devotion to the true God – it divides and distracts the mind in its communion with God. The doctrine of God's unity offers us ONE OBJECT of supreme homage, adoration, and love, One Infinite Father, one Being of beings, one original and fountain, to whom we may refer all good, in whom all our powers and affections may be concentrated, and whose lovely and venerable nature may pervade all our thoughts. The Trinity sets before us three distinct objects of supreme adoration; three infinite persons, having equal claims on our hearts; three divine agents, performing different offices, and to be acknowledged and worshipped in different relations. Is it possible that the weak and limited mind of man can attach itself to these with the same power and joy, as to One Infinite Father, the only First Cause, in whom all the blessings meet as their center and source? Devotion is definitely distracted by the equal and rival claims of three equal persons.

The doctrine of the Trinity injures devotion not only by joining to the Father other objects of worship, but by taking from the Father the supreme affection, which is his due, and transferring it to the Son. That Jesus Christ, if exalted into the infinite Divinity, should be more interesting than the Father, is precisely what might be expected from history, and from human nature. Men want an object of worship like themselves, and the great secret of idolatry lies in this desire and inclination. In fact, this is the reason given by religions such as Hinduism – that all people are not equal, that most people are weak and need a "visible" form to be worshipped. A God, clothed in our form and feeling our wants and sorrows, speaks to our weak nature more strongly, than a Father in heaven, a pure spirit, invisible and unapproachable, except by the reflecting and purified mind. Also, the peculiar offices ascribed to Jesus by popular theology, make him the most attractive person in the Godhead (just count the relative number of songs addressed to Jesus and to the Father in any hymn book). The Father is the depositary of justice, the vindicator of the rights, the avenger of the laws of the Divinity. On the other hand, the Son stands between the incensed Deity and guilty humanity, exposes his meek head to the storms, and his compassionate breast to the sword of the divine justice, bears our whole load of punishment, and purchases with his blood every blessing which descends from heaven. Is it necessary to state the effect of these representations, especially on common minds, whom it seeks to bring to the Father as the loveliest being? The worship of a bleeding, suffering God, tends strongly to absorb the mind and to draw it from other objects, just as the human tenderness of the Virgin Mary has given her such an important place in the devotions of the Church of Rome. Such worship, though attractive and pleasing to the emotions, is not most fitted to spiritualize the mind, since it is based on human emotions, rather than truth and the deep veneration of the moral perfections of God.

 

But it is not just the Unity of God that is put into problems by the concept of the Trinity, the unity of the person of Jesus is also put into problems! Jesus was one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God. The doctrine of the Trinity, not only makes God three beings, it makes Jesus two beings, and thus introduces great confusion into our conceptions of his character. According to this doctrine, Jesus Christ, instead of being one mind and one conscious intelligent principle whom we can understand, consists of two souls, two minds - one divine and the other human, one weak and the other almighty, one ignorant and the other omniscient. In the words of one church father, he was "fully God and fully man." This is simply to make Jesus two beings. To call him one person, one being, and yet to suppose him made up of two minds, infinitely different from each other, is to abuse and confound language, and to throw darkness over all our conceptions of intelligent natures. According to the common doctrine, each of these two minds in Christ has its own consciousness, its own will, its own perceptions. They have, in fact, no common properties. The divine mind feels none of the wants and sorrows of the human, and the human is infinitely removed from the perfection and happiness of the divine. Two beings are not more distinct! One person is constituted and distinguished by one consciousness. The doctrine, that one and the same person should have two consciousness, two wills, two souls, infinitely different from each other, is an enormous tax on human credulity. If a doctrine, so strange, so difficult, so remote from all the previous conceptions of men, was indeed a part and an essential part of revelation, it must be taught with great distinctness throughout the Bible. One is hard-pressed to show even one direct passage, where Christ is said to be composed of two minds infinitely different, yet constituting one person. There are none. One argument used by Trinitarians is that this doctrine is necessary to the harmony of the Scriptures, that some texts ascribe to Jesus Christ human, and others divine properties, and that to reconcile these, we must suppose two minds, to which these properties may be referred. In other words, for the purpose of reconciling certain difficult passages which can be explained to a large extent by just criticism, a hypothesis vastly more difficult and involving gross absurdity is invented. We are to find our way out of a labyrinth, by a clue which conducts us into mazes infinitely more inextricable. Surely, if Jesus Christ felt that he consisted of two minds, and that this was a leading feature of his self-understanding, his phraseology respecting himself would have been colored by this understanding. But he always spoke as an integral man, never as a split personality. The universal language of men is framed upon the idea that one person is one person, one mind and one soul; and when people heard such language from the lips of Jesus, they must have taken it in its usual sense, and must have referred to a single soul all which he spoke, unless expressly instructed to interpret it differently. But where do we find this instruction? Where do you meet, in the New Testament, the phraseology which abounds in Trinitarian books, and which necessarily grows from the doctrine of two natures in Jesus? Where do we find in the Epistles a trace of this strange phraseology? Nowhere. It was not needed in that day. It was demanded by the errors of a later age.

Jesus had one mind, was one being, and was a being distinct from the one God. Jesus, in his preaching, continually spoke of God. The word "God" was always in his mouth. Did he, by this word, ever mean himself? Never. On the contrary, he most plainly distinguishes between God and himself, and so do his disciples. How this is to be reconciled with the idea, that the manifestation of Christ as God, was a primary object of Christianity, the Trinitarians need to answer.

If we examine the passages in which Jesus is distinguished from God, we see that they not only speak of him as another being, but also express his inferiority. He is continually spoken of as the Son of God, sent of God, receiving all his powers from God, working miracles because God was with him, judging justly because God taught him, having claims on our belief, because he was anointed and sealed by God, and as able of himself to do nothing. The New Testament is filled with this language as we have seen from the long list of quotations given before. Now what impression this language was fitted and intended to make? Could any, who heard it, have imagined that Jesus was the very God to whom he was so industriously declared to be inferior; the very Being by whom he was sent, and from whom he professed to have received his message and power? The human birth, bodily form, humble circumstances, and mortal sufferings of Jesus, must all have prepared men to interpret, in the most unqualified manner, the language in which his inferiority to God was declared. Why, then, was this language used so continually, and without limitation, if Jesus were the Supreme Deity, and if this truth were an essential part of his religion? The human condition and sufferings of Christ would have strongly excluded from men's minds the idea of his being God. If he was God, we should expect to find in the New Testament perpetual care and effort to counteract the natural tendency of his hearers to consider him merely human. We should expect to find the phraseology of Scripture cast into the mould of this doctrine, to hear familiarly of God the Son, of our Lord God Jesus, and to be told, that to us there is one God, even Jesus. But, instead of this, the inferiority of Christ to God, the Father, pervades the New Testament. It is not only implied in the general phraseology, but repeatedly and clearly expressed, unaccompanied with any admonition to prevent its application to his whole nature. Could it then, have been the great design of the Biblical writers to exhibit Jesus as the Supreme God?