Friday, March 9, 2018

Yet Another Example of Trinitarian Mental Gymnastics


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)