Oneness Pentecostals and Church History — Part I

[Dr. Bernard:] Welcome to a discussion of Oneness Pentecostals and church history. I'm David Bernard, the General Superintendent of the United Pentecostal Church International, and we're in our studio here at World Headquarters in the St. Louis area. With me is Dr. David Norris, who is professor of biblical theology at Urshan Graduate School of Theology, and he also teaches at Urshan College. And he and I team-teach in some of the classes there. And so we want to talk a little bit about church history.

So we, as Oneness Pentecostals, are known for our belief in the oneness of God, which we've discussed in another session. We believe there's one true God; Jesus is the one God manifest in the flesh. We do believe that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but we do not believe that those three titles represent three different persons. So we don't teach the doctrine of the Trinity, as it's so-called. However, that immediately raises a question, because we know that the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Protestant churches — they all say God is Trinity. So here we are saying there's only one God, there's not a Trinity, and we get that from the Bible; but yet other groups say there is a Trinity. So somewhere in church history something happened. So that's one of the things we want to talk about today. We want to talk about: where do we come from, as Oneness Pentecostals and as the United Pentecostal Church International? But it seems like the first question is a doctrinal one: where do we come from, doctrinally or theologically?

And by the way, I'll just mention this: if you're interested in further study, I've written a series of three books — it's also available in a one-volume abridgement — it's called A History of Christian Doctrine. That's available from pentecostalpublishing.com: History of Christian Doctrine, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, and then the abridged one. And then also, on the doctrine of God, I wrote two more detailed books: Oneness and Trinity, A.D. 100 to 300, and then The Trinitarian Controversy in the Fourth Century — that's a small book dealing more specifically with the Council of Nicaea, the Council of Constantinople. So if you're interested in more research or more study, I mention those books, available digitally or hard copy from pentecostalpublishing.com.

But let's dig into this question then: where did the doctrine of the Trinity originate, or how do we relate? I'll let you decide how you want to deal with that, but Dr. Norris, help us get started here.

[Dr. Norris:] Thanks so much, and I'm so glad to be with you in this broadcast. The doctrine of the Trinity is something that I studied in doing my master's thesis — how it came to be. And the books I used to study were the standard academic resources, the standard history books — nothing mysterious about any of them. And they all agreed, academically, with the same premise: that the doctrine of the Trinity evolved over the course of a number of centuries, and that there were specific turning points where it evolved this way, and that way, and this other way. And so it could get very complex, but I want to try to make it simple. I might not succeed, but I'm going to try to make it simple.

In the first century, the first church was largely Jewish Christian. And then when the Apostle Paul went on his missionary journeys, he reached people around the Mediterranean world — Gentiles — but a lot of those Gentiles actually had a Jewish background as well. And so we sometimes call the era from 33 to 100 A.D. the apostolic era. I remember reading a book in 1998 by a guy by the name of Bauckham — Richard Bauckham — and it was cutting edge at the time. Now people have agreed with it after a course of time, but when he first said it, it was very radical. He basically said this: that the first century had a Jewish Christian faith, and then in the second century something happened — when the apostles died off, and when the leadership went to the Gentiles and so on, there was a shift. And he calls it an epistemological shift — that is to say, a different starting place. So instead of starting with "Shema Israel: Yahweh Eloheinu" — instead of starting with "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one" — they started with their own notions of God, and then they read that — that was the lens with which they came to the Christian faith. Not everyone, of course, but some of the main people.

Now, this is where it gets technical, and I'll try not to get too technical. From 80 B.C. to 220 A.D., there was a period called Middle Platonism, and it's after the guy named Plato. Plato is one of the classic philosophers, and he wasn't altogether original in everything. In fact, a sort of general Greek mindset about God is that God is a construct, and God is remote, and God is in this ideal realm. And for Plato, God was an unmoved mover: if God did anything, it meant something moved God; and if something moved God, then He couldn't be God. So by definition — again, I'm trying not to be too technical — the big idea here, a Greek definition of God, is that God cannot be a part of the cosmos. And this is the reason everything developed.

[Dr. Bernard:] Yes — okay, so let me just kind of insert here. So the first century was a Hebraic concept of God coming from the Old Testament: that God is personal, He created us, He wants to have relationship with us, we're in covenant with Him, He loves us, He hates evil because it is destructive to us, He's jealous — in the sense of a godly jealousy — if we follow false gods, because He knows that destroys us. So here you get this God who's very passionate, very involved. He interacts, He moves in individual lives, He answers prayer, He's grieved by sin, He rejoices when we do well, He expresses His love. So all of this. And then the Greek concept is: God is the supreme idea; He's impassible — He can't have feelings, because then He would be somehow lessened; He can't interact directly with this world, because then He would be sort of getting Himself dirty, He would be diminishing Himself. So He's remote, unapproachable, unassailable, incapable of feeling, incapable of suffering. He can't really love or hate, because He's more or less an abstract philosophical concept.

[Dr. Norris:] Yes. So in the second century you have Christian theologians — well, Christian philosophers. You've got a lot of people converted from philosophy, and we call the sort of general title for these people apologists, because they were creating a defense for the faith, but they were kind of making it up as they went along. So their motives are probably good, in this sense: they're working with Greek culture, so they're trying to think, okay, what's a palatable way to talk about — I know what this Greek guy thinks about God, so how can I try to convince him the Christian God will fit into his scheme of things? Right. So Tatian, Aristides, Justin — that's probably the most famous one, Justin Martyr. So let me talk about Justin, because a number of these actually learned under Justin. Justin is converted as a philosopher; he wears his philosopher clothes to teach; he says Christianity is the best philosophy. So already you can see where this is going. It's not going to be good.

So when you read Justin, he's working it out, so he's not even always consistent with himself. But his scholars will tell you that in the main this is probably the way he thought: he could use "firstborn" or "first begotten," but there was a time when there wasn't a Son. But then somehow there was the Logos. And this is what's called Logos Christology. Logos Christology, which is this: that God didn't come Himself, but He sent another. And so when Justin thought of this — you can't have God interacting with the world — he couldn't make Jesus very God-like. He was pretty low on the totem pole. It was the emanation from the Son — the supreme God couldn't come. No, no, no — by definition of philosophy. And you couldn't have a very supreme God coming either. You had to have sort of a secondary being who's clearly lesser than the supreme — oh, he was way less, because the Logos was like: here's the angels, and there's the emanations from God. But it's not simply that it was emanations from God; it's the number he used, the fact that there is God, and then there's another God — in Greek, deuteros — I mean, essentially "second god." He's not even monotheist here. He's got God, and he's got like a second god.

Well, he's the starting place, and there are others who try to clean up what he did — like, well, he doesn't have it quite right here: he's got a beginning; we'll get rid of the beginning. Let's jump here. And so the next centuries are attempts to fix what he got wrong. But let's say we want to go to New York from St. Louis, but instead of heading east, we head west. And so when you start out going the wrong direction, when people say, well, which church father do you like better on this road — do you like this one or that one? — you're on the wrong road. You'll never get there. You can't get there from here.

[Dr. Bernard:] So I agree with you. So what we have in the second century is a Greek philosophical concept of God. So Jesus couldn't be the supreme God coming in the world — because God couldn't do that — so Jesus had to be a second emanation from God, the Logos, which is — as in John 1, they used the word: "In the beginning was the Word." Of course, that really didn't come from that. It came from a sort of common — I mean, they tagged that. That's how we sort of like — yeah, that's where we got it. But that's not where they got it.

[Dr. Norris:] No, no. You're right. They imported a Greek concept back into the Bible, instead of reading the Bible from its Hebraic background.

[Dr. Bernard:] Exactly. So in the second century, then, we have these two persons, but the second person is clearly inferior. But obviously that doesn't square very well with the Scripture. So without going into great detail: what you find starting in, say, around 200 — now you're getting into the third century — you have people like Tertullian, who really, more than any one person, would be considered the father of the doctrine of the Trinity. And then a little bit later than him would be Origen. So those two men probably together would have constructed this idea of three persons. But they came from the starting point you just mentioned, so they still had the Father as supreme, the Son and the Spirit as lesser — but now they're talking about three persons.

[Dr. Norris:] Okay. So what's important to know is that in different ways, both Tertullian and Origen are playing against the majority of Christians. The general view — they call it "simple." And when they say "simple," they mean they don't understand Greek philosophy. When they say "simple," when they say "uneducated," they mean they don't understand these things. Now, all the church fathers didn't think the same way, and Origen was different than Tertullian. And Tertullian thought himself of pulling back from philosophy. But the interesting thing about Tertullian is, his main argument against who he deemed to be the majority of Christians — who believed what we believe, essentially — is that, oh no, they believe that somehow God could become passible, that He could actually suffer. And he's bringing a Greek concept as his main argument against the people.

[Dr. Bernard:] Well, I like — I don't have it memorized, but his writings against Praxeas, what you're referring to — he said, "the simple — I will not call them unlearned — who always constitute the majority of believers." And so he's basically given — like us — he's slamming the vast majority of Christians of his day. He admits the vast majority of Christians don't agree with him, because they're simple, because they're probably unlearned. And then he said, they don't understand our teaching of the economy — the three-in-one, how God could be three and one — because they simply believe, according to their rule of faith, that He is simply one. So it's interesting, because what it shows is: even as late as the third century, the vast majority of Christians held to a more what we would call a biblical concept: there's one God, and Jesus is truly God.

[Dr. Norris:] Now, there were some teachers, but their works have all been destroyed, so we don't really know exactly what they believed. What you get is, you get the evidence of what the enemies say, so it's going to be a little distorted. History belongs to the winners and all that. But what you do is, you find footprints of all of this in various literature — in the apocryphal acts, and the various very strong statements of the deity of Christ and the oneness of God in the popular literature of the time. Yes. Tertullian is the one who makes — talk about making stuff up. Of course, he's working in Latin, and so he has to create — but he's the one who creates all the language. He creates all the — "three persons." That comes out — that's the Tertullian — "Trinity." That comes from — it's actually not in the Bible. It comes from Tertullian. And he's making an effort to work it, and he's working it out. Scholars will tell you his other writings are more organized; this one is a bit more jumbled, because he's trying to figure things out as he goes.

[Dr. Norris:] So let's kind of fast forward. So we come to the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. That seemed to be a key time. And so here you have these various leaders, and of course now we're talking about several centuries after Christ. We're talking about a time when the church is being widely accepted. Constantine the emperor now favors Christianity, and so now it's the thing to do. Pagans are rushing into the church. We don't have the vast majority of people receiving the Holy Ghost anymore, as we would think of it. So we're really not speaking of a Spirit-filled church; we're speaking more of a secular church.

[Dr. Bernard:] So what happened? What caused what happened at the Council of Nicaea? What did they decide?

[Dr. Norris:] Well, when church and government get together, it can never be good. And so the emperor, who has no doctrinal bias but only wants to retain his political clout, tries to make everything patched together — it can never be good. So it was Justin who basically said that the Logos had a beginning. And then we talked about different evolution things — well, we can't have that: if you have a beginning, it can't really truly be the Logos. And so it got changed. And then eventually you have some that are going back to that original confession of Justin. And so there's this big tumult. So there's a clash between Arius, I think, who said that you have only one God, like the Bible says, but then Jesus is a secondary being, like Justin. Yes. And then Athanasius was saying, no, no, no — they're equal; God and Jesus are equal. Yeah. But now, this is not a Oneness-Trinity discussion. We have to go back a century before that — what's called the modalistic controversy, from 180 to 230 A.D. That's when the last time the Oneness has any kind of authority whatsoever. So it's kind of like when people say, who do you like, Arius or Athanasius? Well, I guess I like Athanasius; it's better. But we're not really part of that. We're not part of that conference. It'd be like the Trinitarians versus the Jehovah's Witnesses. Yes. So I think I would probably lean more towards the Trinitarians: I'm going to uphold the deity of Christ, but I don't really agree with their explanation of the deity of Christ either.

[Dr. Bernard:] So what you're saying is, in the 200s the real fight over the Oneness concept of God — which later historians have tried to identify different people, called them the modalists — there were still some people at the Council of Nicaea and later, such as Marcellus, who did have a basic Oneness concept. And they have what they call heresiology lists. And so they keep going with heretics. And so among those you'll find Oneness people stretching out into the centuries. But what you're saying is that by the time of the Council of Nicaea, the main battle was no longer over Oneness versus other concepts; but now you actually had two different concepts that had gone against Oneness: Justin's view of two persons, with one superior, one inferior — which has now evolved into the doctrine of Arius — and then you had the concept of three persons, as Tertullian began, but now that's evolved into three co-equal persons. That's Athanasius. And that's really, in some ways, original stuff with him. Yes.

So basically, the Council of Nicaea decided — and as you alluded to, Constantine the emperor, he actually didn't get baptized as a Christian until just before his death, because he had this idea: I can send the sins of my whole life — get rid of this right before I do that, I'll be — that's the best way to get forgiveness. So you can decide from that how sincere you think his Christianity was, and if he received the Holy Ghost or not. But the point is, as the emperor, he did not like these controversies between Christians, because he felt like they would split the empire. So he had decided that Christianity was going to be the favored position — the religion that would unify the empire — because the old Roman religion was dead and dying, and people were laughing at it. But he had this problem: if he's going to use Christianity to unite everybody, well then the Christians had to be united; otherwise that would split his empire. So he said, we're going to have a solution: we're going to meet, and we're going to solve this problem. And so, as we find out, Athanasius came out on top with this doctrine of three persons, of the Trinity. So Jesus is not an inferior second person; Jesus is a co-equal second person.

[Dr. Norris:] I will add to that, though: the actual canons of Nicaea didn't really adopt the Trinity. It was really more narrow, of saying Jesus is equal to God. And so there it does seem there were some people called modalists, or some people that we might term as Oneness, who said, well, if we're going to vote, I will vote that Jesus is truly God. So it wasn't actually the doctrine of the Trinity itself. Looking back on it, we say, where was the turning point? Nicaea. So if you just read a book, you might say, well, the Trinity was established at Nicaea. Well, that's not really true. That was the turning point. It'd be like saying, you know, we look at the Revolutionary War: Lexington decided the war. It was the start, and in retrospect it was a turning point where the American colonies broke — but that wasn't the whole story. You had years of war to determine the whole story. So actually, Council of Nicaea, 325 — it took most of the century, actually to the Council of Constantinople in 381, which actually established what we might think of as the modern doctrine of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three co-equal, co-eternal persons.

I would go further. I would say, at least in the Western view of a Trinity, it wasn't until a couple decades later that Augustine formulates it in such a way that after Augustine, anyone else who writes or thinks about the Trinity — whether they vary this way or that — are going to have to go back and look at his writings. And the main thing about Augustine that I think is interesting, which kind of hails back to what I said before: Augustine not only allowed for the philosophers, he celebrated mixing philosophical understandings with the biblical text. And he would say, well, you know, just like they spoiled the plunder of Egypt, so we can do that. And he deemed philosophers to have had certain truths. And of course he wasn't the first to do that. But when you start mixing philosophy and theology, and codifying that, that's kind of what set the church on a certain course, remote from the thought of the Bible, for thousands — you know.

[Dr. Bernard:] I — to try to be as sympathetic as possible, here's what I think you could say charitably what happened with the Council of Nicaea, the Council of Constantinople: they're already in a non-biblical context; they're already immersed in Greek philosophy. So they're struggling to find a way to affirm the deity of Christ. So if you're given, as the absolute, God is incapable of coming down into this world — the supreme God is incapable of interacting — but yet you want to honor the biblical evidence that Jesus really is our Savior, how would you figure this out? So they came up with the doctrine of the Trinity, which is kind of a compromise between: here's what Greek philosophy demands, here's what our culture demands, and here's what the Bible says. So how can we bridge the gap? And so they were trying to uphold the deity of Christ, but I would argue in a flawed way. If only they had gone back to the biblical text and the Hebraic concept of who God is — one personal God — then they could have affirmed the deity of Christ without having to resort to all these philosophical categories. So what they ended up is saying God is one in substance, but three in person. So there's a certain sense in which He is one, and there's a certain sense in which He's three. Well, that is a philosophical thing. And that ends up saying that when you look at God in the abstract, He's an abstract, impersonal substance; but when you want to look at Him personally, He's three different persons. And of course for some, that collapses more back into emphasizing one God; for others, they emphasize three, and they end up with tritheism, or actually three gods. And of course, classical Trinitarianism denies that they believe in three gods, but yet their language is equivocal.

[Dr. Norris:] Like some of the famous fathers, so to speak — particularly the Greek fathers from Cappadocia — they actually said: here's an analogy. You have Peter, James, and John: there are three persons, but they're all human. Well, you have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: there are three persons, but they're all God. When you think about that, that is very tritheistic — because if God can be represented like three different human persons, then for all practical purposes you have three gods. So that's been the tension throughout the struggle of Christianity since that time.

[Dr. Bernard:] So just to summarize it, I think we can say that the doctrine of the Trinity, as we know it today, was not solidly established until the end of the fourth century — and you might be suggesting even a few decades later. So around 400, you have this full idea that God is a Trinity: one God in three persons; the three persons are co-equal, co-eternal, and consubstantial — of the same substance. And of course that's very removed from the thought of the Bible. But notice it took — you know, if you think of the Christian church as being started in the A.D. 30s, you're talking about, what, three centuries of development — 300 years, or 400 years actually, close to 400 years of development of doctrine — to get to the doctrine of the Trinity.

[Dr. Norris:] And just to reiterate — I don't want to overemphasize this — scholars agree what happened; they just don't agree whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Everybody agrees with this story of development. But some would say, from a secular point of view, oh, well, see how Greek philosophy just distorted the original teaching — which is, we would say amen. But others would say, look how God used history to develop doctrine. And what's amazing to me — I was just reading something from a theologian at Dallas Theological Seminary, which is conservative evangelical Baptist, and he's describing Matthew 28:19. And he's having to agree — and this is Daniel Wallace, by the way — he's having to agree that, you know, everybody knows the original church invoked the name of Jesus. So why didn't they do what Jesus said in Matthew 28:19? And here's his conclusion: he said either they were so consumed with the idea of Christ that they weren't really thinking more, or the concept of Father, Son, the Holy Spirit was too mysterious for them, too difficult. He said, in short, they probably had a rather fuzzy view of what Jesus was trying to say. So here you have this crazy stuff: that Protestants, who say the Bible is supreme — they would say, you know, the apostles were really — like, wait a minute, wait a minute: isn't it ironic that the people who knew Jesus best had a fuzzy view, and the people 400 years later, schooled in philosophy — but that's what they have to say.

[Dr. Bernard:] So the Catholics, of course — they believe, and the Orthodox, that tradition is equal in authority with Scripture. So they would pretty much agree with everything we've said, only they would say: look how the Holy Spirit led the church fathers and the councils and the creeds to get to the truth. "Great — yeah, the Bible doesn't have all the truth; no, the apostles don't have all the truth; but church history brings us to the truth, and we should celebrate that." Protestants want to say the Bible is our sole authority, but they end up having to say, well, the apostles weren't very — they were not very good theologians. But that's the problem, because you have the Reformation. Because the question is: all right, how could the church be wrong for all these years? That's what Luther had to ask and answer. That's what Calvin had to answer. And so they came in different ways, but they basically said: sola scriptura — so we must base our faith on what the Scripture [says]. So the Reformers said their church was wrong for a thousand years. So they allowed that church history could be wrong. But they didn't go so far as to investigate the doctrine of the Trinity. Well, they weren't consistent in sola scriptura, if you want my opinion.

[Dr. Norris:] Yes. They really meant sola Augustin — that's pretty much what it is.

[Dr. Bernard:] Okay, so we've got to fast forward, so we don't really have time to discuss it. But we do know there are Oneness-type beliefs in the early centuries — in fact, it was the majority. Even the early Trinitarians admitted — and we quoted from Tertullian, but that's not by any means the only one; I could give you half a dozen writers that said the majority don't agree with this, or the majority believe this. So in the early centuries, we know that what we would describe as a Oneness view of God, in some form or another, was predominant. And we do find examples throughout history. Even at the time of the Reformation: Michael Servetus, 22 years old, writes his devastating critique of the doctrine of the Trinity, and upholds the full deity of Jesus Christ in the process. His book On the Errors of the Trinity — it's an amazing book for a 23-year-old, just coming out of nowhere, not from any tradition, but going back to Scripture and arriving at some points that are very close and agree with us. He was burned at the stake by Calvin, by the way. But anyway. So we do find different people throughout church history who actually baptized in Jesus' name, or who received the Holy Ghost speaking in tongues, or who expressed various Oneness concepts of God.

So in summary, we can say that somewhere around 400 A.D., the modern doctrine of the Trinity was in place. The majority of believers in the second century still believed what we would think of as the biblical concept of God. But over the centuries, there was gradually this shift. And so around A.D. 400 or so, you have this Trinitarian doctrine, which prevailed until modern times. Now, throughout the centuries we do find different people who baptized in Jesus' name, who taught concepts of God that we could easily identify as Oneness. The time of the Reformation, as we mentioned: Michael Servetus. But the great revival of the oneness of God came in the early 1900s, and we're part of that today. But of course, that's another subject. And it's very interesting to see how all these doctrines evolve. But the bottom line is: we always say, let's go back to the Bible, and let's go back to the first-century apostolic church as we see in the New Testament. Here's where we get our doctrine.

[Dr. Norris:] When I was in Kyrgyzstan, there were a number of evangelical groups we were teaching, and they were from various traditions. So I asked the question — I said: "The Methodists say the first 300 years is good church tradition, but the rest of it was bad. And then the Anglican Church says the first 500 years is good, and the rest is not as good — it's not as bad. And then the Orthodox Church says that the first thousand years is good; the rest is bad." And then I said, "Who is right?" And they looked at me, supposing I would tell them. And then I said what you said all along: the safest thing to do is ask the question, what is it that the apostles believed — and to believe and practice what they taught. So the bottom line is: every generation needs to go back to the Bible, and to the apostolic church of the New Testament.