Two critics
of the Creedal Trinity wrote the following, revealing the linguistic and
exegetical gymnastics many Trinitarians are forced into to defend the
impossible:
Some have been driven to the extreme of
maintaining that the word “Father” in the New Testament may describe not one
person of the Trinity, but all three, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”:
Sometimes “Father” is used not of One who is
distinct from the Son and the Holy Spirit—a distinct Person of the Godhead—but
of the Godhead Himself. Let us give some examples of this . . . [Paul says
that] there is only one God who has real existence, and it is the One that
Christians worship. So he writes, “But to us there is but one God, the Father”
(1 Cor. 8:6). Here the word “Father” equals the words “one God.” Paul is saying
that there is but one God, and is not thinking of the Persons of the Godhead at
all. It is in this sense that he uses the word “Father,” just as he does in
Ephesians 4:6, where he writes of “One God and Father of all” (Stuart Olyott, The Three are One [Evangelical Press,
1979], 28, 29)
The writer struggles with Paul’s plainly
unitarian definition of God as “One God, the Father.” The strength of Olyott’s
own conviction that God is really three forces him to imagine that “the Father”
actually means three persons. The theory is imaginary. The writer cannot allow
himself to think that Paul might not have been a Trinitarian. (Anthony F.
Buzzard and Charles F. Hunting, The
Doctrine of the Trinity: Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound [Lanham, Md.:
International Scholars Press, 1998], 274)
