It
is always interesting to see apologists for the Trinity slip in and out of
Unitarianism, describing “God” (not the Father, merely, but the being of God) as a “person” and using
singular personal pronouns to describe God (He; Him; His), and, often in the same
paragraph, switching to speaking of God as a “being” and being tri-personal(!)
The
following are examples of this from two works of James R. White: one work,
focused on critiquing (often, his straw-man caricature) of Latter-day Saint
theology and another focused more on defending his (Creedal/Latin) Trinitarian
theology.
The
following quotes come from:
James
R. White, Is the Mormon My Brother? Discerning
the Differences between Mormonism and Christianity (2d ed.; Birmingham,
Ala.: Solid Ground Christian Books, 2008)
Any person evaluating the
claims of the LDS faith must consider a basic fact. Truth is truth no matter
when it is given. When God reveals truth “X” about His nature and attributes,
“X” will not become “false” tomorrow. While God’s means of dealing with His people over time may change, His
revelation about who He is will not. That is the nature of divine truth. For
example, God first revealed to His people the fact that He alone is God, the
Creator of all things. His later revelation of His triune nature (Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit) is not a contradiction of this earlier truth but an expansion
upon it. God’s truth will always be God’s truth. (p. 41)
The creeds of the first
few centuries came out of the Scriptures,
and their authority is based upon their
fidelity to the Scriptures. Hence, even on issues regarding the highest
level of God’s revelation, His triune nature . . . (p. 44)
Briefly expressed, the
doctrine [of the Trinity] states that within the one Being that is God, there
exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely, the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit. (p. 46)
What do the LDS scriptures
and the current living Prophet teach concerning the nature of God? What God is
proclaimed in the Mormon scriptures? Is there a harmony between the Christian
Scriptures (the Bible) and the Mormon scriptures (the Standard Works) when it
comes to who God is, how He exists, and how He is related to His creation? (p.
49)
. . . the historical Christian
belief that God did not create the universe out of preexisting matter but
solely by His creative power and will. (p. 73)
The most fundamental truth
of the Christian faith is this: There is one God. Everything else—who He is,
what He has done in Christ, how we will spend eternity—flows from this
fundamental statement of absolute monotheism . . .I worship a God who does not
change, who has eternally been what he is today, and will be tomorrow and into
eternity to come. (p. 127)
As a Christian, I approach
God as my Maker, the one who sustains me at every moment. He is the Potter and
I am the clay. He has formed me and made me. I have no ability or right to sit
in judgment on Him, and, in fact, unless He deigned to stoop down to
communicate with me and reveal himself in His creation and His Word, I would
have no ability to know anything about Him. (pp. 128-29)
[Commenting
on the Shema/Deut 6:4]
The LORD, Yahweh, is
the God of Israel. Yahweh is not a “committee” of gods, so to speak. Yahweh is
one. As the one God of Israel, He is to be loved with all the heart, soul, and
might. Jesus said this is the greatest commandments . . . If God’s dealing with
His people Israel teaches us anything, it is that Go has to repeat the same
truths to us over and over again. Even though He taught His people from the
start that He alone is God, the people of Israel were constantly falling into
idolatry. Centuries after Moses, Isaiah was the mouthpiece God used to make
some of His highest statements about himself and His relationship to our world
. . . one of the claims God makes is that He is the only true God because He is
the Creator of all things. His claim
of creatorship is never limited to a
particular area or time period . . . He also claims to know why things happened the way they did. (pp.
129, 130, 131)
[On
Isa 43:10-11]
Here Yahweh (the LORD), in
His suit against the false gods, calls as a witness His own people, Israel. He
chose Israel for a purpose that they might know and believe Him. He showed
great patience in continually revealing this truth to His people. What is the
central aspect of His revelation of himself to Israel? “Before Me there was no
God formed, and there will be none after Me.” It is as if God is saying,
“Israel, I alone am God. There are no true gods beside me. There were none
before Me, for I am eternal. And there will be none after Me, for I do not age
and will not pass away. There is no room for other gods, for I alone am God,
the Creator” . . . Yahweh says He is God, and there is no other. (pp. 131, 135)
[On
Isa 44:4-6]
Again, Yahweh speaks to
His people and reminds them (note the
phrase, “have I not long since announced it to you and declared it?”) what they
should already know about Him. He is the first and the last. (p. 132)
One of the greatest truth
about God . . . is God’s uniqueness .
. .The Christian . . . boldly proclaims the absolute uniqueness of God. God is unique in His being. That is, there is nothing or no one like God. He
alone is God. We cannot compare Him to anything, for everything else is created
and finite, while He is uncreated and infinite. (p. 135)
[On
Isa 40:21-28; 45:5-7; 46:9-10]
This is the only God
worthy of worship and adoration. And God expects us to know this truth—He
upbraids those who have forgotten, by asking, “Do you not know? Have you not
heard?” . . . None but the true God can say, “My purpose will be established.”
(pp. 136-37)
[On
Jer 10:6-7; Psa 113:4-6]
. . . the true God humbles
himself to even look upon creation itself, so high above that creation is He in
His essence and being. We can do little more than ow in reverence, awe, and
fear before our Creator. (p. 138)
Unique
in His Spirituality
God is unique in the fact
that He does not have creaturely existence; that is, He does not exists in the
same mode or way that we do. He is utterly unique unlike us in many ways, far
beyond our creaturely categories, and, most important, He is not limited by
time and space. Theologians have referred to this as His spirituality, not in
the sense of His being one spirit among many, but that He exists as spirit and is therefore “omnipresent.”
We can think of omnipresence as a “lack of spatial limitations,” just as His
eternal existence means He is not limited by time. (p. 139)
[On
Jer 23:24]
“I fill” = אֲנִי מָלֵא. This does not say “My influence fills,” but I fill. (p. 245 n. 16)
[On
2 Chron 6:18]
“Contain you” = יְכַלְכְּלוּ, using the second persona
masculine suffix, “you.” The text does not say, “Your influence.” (p. 245 n. 17
[note that there is a typo in White’s note. The Hebrew reads יְכַלְכְּלוּךָ])
God’s omnipresence flows
logically and necessarily from the act that He created all things. How could
His creation be greater than He is? How could there be any place in His creation
beyond His presence? (p. 140)
. . .God, as to His
absolute being, is not visible to human eyes . . . as to God’s nature, we are told that He is invisible
and must choose to reveal himself in forms sensible to us . . . He is invisible
and infinite and therefore incapable of comparison with anything else in the
created order, which must be, by nature, finite. This brings us to the very
nature of idolatry, for to represent God in any way that is untrue is, at its
root, an act of idolatry. God forbade His people from making any kind of
likeness that was meant to represent His being. (pp. 140-41)
This is not to say that
God has not used human terminology to express himself and His existence—surely
He has. (p. 142)
God will not allow man to
continue long in his rebellion. God will make His case, and demonstrate beyond
all doubt His deity and providence. (p. 143)
[On
Rom 9:20]
. . . answering back to
God is sheer folly, for He is unique and utterly unlike us. (p. 143)
. . . as God He has existed eternally (p. 144)
One of the results of
existing eternally is that God is therefore unchanging. He is not growing,
progressing, evolving, or in any way moving from a state of imperfection to a
state of perfection . . .Indeed, the very act that God is unchangingly faithful to His promises to Israel is based upon the
understanding that Yahweh himself does not change with time:
For I, the LORD, do not
change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed. (Mal. 3:6)
If many is anything, he is
changeable. Yet God says He does not change . . . Our very salvation is dependent upon God’s unchanging nature, for His
faithfulness is based upon His being the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
(p. 145)
[On
Hos 11:9]
Hebrews: אֵל אָנֹכִי וְלֹא־אִישׁ, literally,
“God I am, and not ish, man.” (p. 247
n. 31)
The Scriptures claim that God’s creative activity is prima facie evidence of His absolute and sole deity. (p. 146)
[On
Isa 41:4]
Yahweh created all things, including “the generation.”
The eternal One, Yahweh, the first and the last, is the Lord of time itself.
Later in the same chapter God mocks the idols who are not “supratemporal,” existing beyond the realm of time. He
challenges them to do two things that the only true God can do to perfection.
One is easy to see: Tell us the future. This is a common challenge, one God can
fulfill because He create time and is
not limited to it. But we often miss the second challenge. God asks the idols
to tell us what has taken place in the past and, even more important, the purpose of what happened in the past.
It is one thing to recount past events, but to know why they happened—only the Sovereign Lord of eternity can do that.
Hear His challenge to all would-be gods:
Let them bring forth and
declare to us what is going to take place; for as the former events, declare
what they were that we may consider them and know their outcome. Or announce to
us what is coming; declare the things that are going to come afterward, that we
may know that ye are gods; indeed, do good or evil, that we may anxiously look
about us and fear together. Behold, you are of no account, and your work
amounts to nothing; he who chooses you is an abomination. (Isa. 41:22-24)
The Christian worships the
Lord of time itself and trusts in His unchanging nature. His promises are sure
and everlasting because He is sure
and everlasting. (pp. 146-47)
[On
Jer 10:10-11]
Yahweh is the true God—all
others are pretenders. He reigns supreme over His creation. And listen to the
judgment He pronounces to all “gods that did not make the heavens and the
earth” he declares the death sentence: they will perish from the earth and from
under the heavens. (pp. 147-48)
[On
Isa 44:24]
Yahweh speaks. He claims
to be the Maker, the one who formed man. Indeed, He claims to be the Maker of all things. Yahweh . . . says that He
stretches out the heavens “by Myself” and the earth “all alone” . . . He alone is the Creator. (p. 148)
Not only did God create
all the material universe but Yahweh himself created the spirits of men . . .
He formed the spirit of man within man. He is the personal Creator, the one who
made man himself. (pp. 148, 149)
We have seen that the united and consistent testimony of Scripture is that there is one eternal God,
unchangeable, and that man is His creation. (p. 155)
[On
John 10:30]
We should note that this
passage is not teaching that the Father is the Son. The doctrine of the Trinity
expressly denies the identification of the Father and the Son as one person. The verb used in this passage is
plural; hence, it can literally be translated “I and the Father, we are one.” LDS often assume that
Christians are modalists, who believe the Father and the Son are one person, when this is untrue. The issue is
always one Being shared by three persons. (p. 248 n. 1)
The true God takes His
sole rights to worship very seriously . . . [idolatry makes] God something that
he is not and lowers Him to the level of His creation. (p. 170)
. . . I have to regularly
engage in the corporate worship of God by His people . . . Our worship will be
life-changing if, in fact, it is focused upon God and His Word. Do we revel in
His being the Creator of all things? Do we rejoice that He is unchanging and
ever faithful? Are these realities that truly warm our hearts and drive us, out
of love for Him, to service in His name? (pp. 170, 171)
My God has always been God
in this or any other eternity you might wish to propose. If it exists, be it
matter or time itself, my God made it. He has always been God and will always
be God. He did not become a God at some time in the past, in this or any other
eternity. He is not what He is today because some other “god” exalted Him to
that position by grace, works, or a combination thereof. (p. 180)
