Wednesday, May 13, 2020

More Unitarian Statements from a Trinitarian Apologist


In my blog post Another Trinitarian Apologist Sounding Like a Unitarian in Discussing (the Being of) "God", I document how James White, in his book, Is the Mormon My Brother? (2d ed.; 2008) often speaks of the "being" of God as a single person, God as a "He," and other Unitarian concepts, and often calling the "being" of God a "person."

His The Forgotten Trinity is the same. Note the following from the opening pages where this pattern is repeated:

. . . the Trinity is the highest revelation God has made of himself to His people . . .God revealed the truth about himself most clearly, and most irrefutably, in the Incarnation itself, when Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, took on human flesh and walked among us. That one act revealed the Trinity to us in a way that no amount of verbal revelation could ever communicate. God has been pleased to reveal to us that He exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (James R. White, The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief [2d ed; Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 2019], 10-11)

The deepest feelings and emotions evoked by the Spirit of God are not directed toward unclear, nebulous, fuzzy concepts, but towards the clear revealed truths of God concerning His love, the work of Christ, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit . . . The idea that there is some kind of contradiction between the in-depth study of God’s Word, so as to know what God has revealed about himself, and a living vital faith is inherently self-contradictory. (Ibid., 12)

The term [“mystery” of the Trinity] has never meant that the Trinity is an inherently irrational thing. Instead, it simply means that we realize that God is completely unique in the way He exists, and there are elements of His being that are simply beyond our meagre mental capacity to comprehend. The fact that God is eternal is another facet of His being that is beyond us . . . One attitude of the heart struggles against an eternal God, desiring to make Him “more like us” . . . The more exhaustive our knowledge of God’s revelation, the deeper our love for Him will be. So we must delve into God’s revelation, “put our waders on,” so to speak, and explore the Scriptures so that we can properly understand the pinnacle of God’s revelation about himself the Trinity. (Ibid., 17, 18, 19)

Within the one Bring that is God there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . . When speaking of the Trinity, we are talking about one what and three who’s. The one what is the Being or essence of God; the three who’s are the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We dare not mix up the what and the who’s regarding the Trinity. (Ibid ,23, 24; compare the warning on p. 28: “Most often people confuse modalism, the belief that God exists in three “modes” [Father, Son, and Spirit], but is only one person, with the real doctrine of the Trinity”)