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”)
