Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Greg Stafford on How Trinitarian Apologists Often Make the "Being" of God into a Fourth Person of the Trinity


Many Trinitarian apologists, when speaking of the “being” of the Trinity, often speaks of such as a person, using personal pronouns (Him; He; His) and even using “person” to describe this “being,” notwithstanding, as James White et al., claim, the Trinity states that God is one what in three whos. See Another Trinitarian Apologist Sounding Like a Unitarian in Discussing (the Being of) "God" and More Unitarian Statements from a Trinitarian Apologist for examples from James White himself.

Many critics of (Latin/Creedal) Trinitarian formulations have noted this, including Greg Stafford, who noted the following:

White’s terminology is not universally accepted among Trinitarians, though there has been little to no recent, explicit dispute of such language by other Trinitarian scholars. In conversation with some Trinitarians, they have instead expressed a view that speaks of “God” as a personal being. But when pressed to explain whether this personal being in a given instance in the Bible is the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, or the triune God as such, no clear answer has been given which would eliminate the problem of having a fourth person in addition to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, namely, the Trinity. (Greg Stafford, Three Dissertations on the Teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses [Murrieta, Calif.: Elihu Books, 2002], 213 n. 3)